Authors: Nelson DeMille
“Okay. So, you just met.” He asked Susan, “Where you from?”
“Lenox, Mass.”
“Yeah? I’m from Chatham, New York, just across the state line. I have a small construction company.” He smiled and said, “I dug so many trenches here and built so many bunkers, when I got home, I wanted to sandbag my house and dig firing trenches around it. My old man got me a job with a bricklayer instead.”
Susan smiled.
Ted asked me, “Where you from, Paul?”
“Boston originally. I live in Virginia now.”
Susan asked Mr. Tram, “And where are you from?”
He smiled and replied, “I am from a small city on the coast called Dong Hoi.” He added, “It is in the former North Vietnam, but there is no border since the reunification, and so I move here to Khe Sanh with my family six years ago.”
Ted asked, “Why?”
He replied, “It is an economic development zone.”
“Yeah? But why
here?”
He thought a moment and replied, “I remember the beautiful green hills and valley when I arrive here, before the battle . . . many Vietnamese are moving away from the coast where there are many people. This is, as you would say, the new frontier.”
Ted replied, “It’s a frontier, all right. Complete with Indians.”
Susan asked Mr. Tram, “And you are a tour guide here?”
Mr. Tram replied, “I instruct English at the high school. It is the Tet holiday now, so I come here to see if I can be of any service to the tourists.” He added, “For veterans only.”
I looked at Mr. Tram. He seemed pleasant enough, and if he was with the Ministry of Public Security, it was probably only part-time. In any case, I’d found him, he hadn’t found me, so he had nothing to do with me. Maybe he and Mr. Loc knew each other.
Mr. Tram asked me, “May I inquire about your profession?”
I replied, “I’m retired.”
“Ah. You retire so young in America.”
Susan said, “He’s older than he looks.”
Mr. Tram and Ted chuckled, and Ted glanced at both of us and decided we were sleeping together.
We all chatted awhile, had another round of beers, and everyone hit the backhouse.
Mr. Tram was not the first North Vietnamese soldier I’d met here, but he was the first I’d had a few beers with, and my curiosity was aroused. I asked him, “What do you think of all these Americans coming back here?”
He replied without hesitation, “I think it is a good thing.”
I don’t like to get into politics, but I asked him, “Do you think what you were fighting for was worth all the death and suffering?”
Again, without hesitation, he replied, “I was fighting for the reunification of my country.”
“Okay. The country is reunified. Why does Hanoi treat the south so badly? Especially the veterans of the South Vietnamese army.”
Someone kicked me under the table, and it wasn’t Mr. Tram or Ted.
Mr. Tram thought about that, then replied, “There were many mistakes made after the victory. The government has admitted this. It is time now to think of the future.”
I asked him, “Do you have any friends who were former South Vietnamese soldiers?”
“No, I do not. With my generation, it is hard to forget.” He added, “When we see each other in the street or on a bus or in a café, we are reminded of the suffering and the death we brought to each other. We look with hatred, and turn away. This is terrible, but I think the next generation will be better.”
We all went back to our beers. Oddly enough, ex-Captain Tram would have a beer with two Americans who’d tried to kill him, not far from here, but he wouldn’t even say hello to a former South Viet soldier. This animosity between the North and South Viets, the victors and the vanquished, went on, and it was a very complex thing, having less to do with the war, I thought, than what came after. War is simple; peace is complex.
Ted said to Susan and me, “The bus leaves in about half an hour. I don’t think they’d mind if you came along.”
I replied, “We have a car and driver. You can come with us now.”
“Yeah? Okay.” He looked at his guide. “Okay?”
“Of course.”
Ted insisted on paying for the beers, and we left the crowded café.
We found Mr. Loc where we’d left him, and he said something to Susan, who replied in Vietnamese. This blew Ted away, and he said, “Hey, you speak gook? I mean, Vietnamese?”
Susan replied, “A little.”
“Jesus, who the hell speaks Vietnamese?”
Susan and I and Mr. Tram squeezed into the rear of the RAV, big Ted got in the front, and off we went.
We headed east on Highway 9, and Mr. Tram, wanting to start earning his pay, said, “If you will look to your right, you will see the remains of the old French Foreign Legion fort.”
We all looked, and Susan snapped a picture and so did Ted.
Mr. Tram continued, “The People’s Army occupied the fort until the arrival of the . . .” He looked at me, sort of smiled, and said, “Until Mr. Paul arrived with hundreds of helicopters.”
This was really a little strange. I mean, here I was sitting ass to ass with this guy who I’d have painted bright red in a heartbeat if I’d seen him here way back when. Or he’d have killed me. Now he was my guide, telling me when I’d air-assaulted in here.
Mr. Tram went on with his tour and said, “This road to your right that intersects here was part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and it travels south to A Luoi in the A Shau Valley, the scene of many terrible battles. On this trail, one kilometer south is the Dakrong Bridge, which was a gift to the Vietnamese people from our socialist Cuban brothers. We can visit the bridge later, if you wish.”
Susan said something to Mr. Tram in Vietnamese, and he nodded as she spoke.
Ted heard this and turned around again. “What’s happening?”
Susan explained. “We just came from the A Shau Valley. Paul was there once.”
Ted said, “Oh, right. You guys went from here to the A Shau. How was it?”
I replied, “It sucked.”
“Couldn’t be worse than Khe Sanh, buddy.”
There are descending circles of hell, even in war, and every soldier is convinced he’s in the worst circle, and there’s no use trying to convince him otherwise. Your hell is your hell, his hell is his hell.
Mr. Tram said, “I had a brother who was in the A Shau Valley.”
No one asked him how his brother was doing now.
Mr. Tram returned to the packaged tour and said, “As you see, the fields on both sides of the road are under cultivation. Coffee and vegetables and pineapples are the main produce. During the war, the valley was uninhabited, except for some hill people who had allied themselves with the Americans. Very few of the original inhabitants have returned, and there are mostly new settlers from the coast. They name their villages after their old villages, so when family or friends from the coast come to visit, they need only ask for such and such a village, and the local people can direct them to the new village, which has the same name as the village from which the settlers have come.”
Ted informed Mr. Tram, “We have the same thing in the States. New York, New Jersey, New London, New whatever. Same thing.”
“Yes? Very interesting,” said Mr. Tram, who hadn’t gotten paid yet. Mr. Tram continued, “You see those many ponds in the area? These are not ponds, but bomb craters. There were once thousands of them, but most have been filled in with earth. The remaining ones are used to raise ducks or to water the animals.”
I remembered this landscape when I flew in, and from the air all you could see was the dead brown defoliation, the gray ash, mile after mile of North Vietnamese trenches, and crater after crater, like the surface of the moon.
I imagined Captain Tram and his comrades sitting in their bunkers or slit trenches at night, smoking and talking, hoping for a quiet evening. Meanwhile, six miles overhead, too high to be seen or heard, a flight of huge, eight-engine B-52 bombers all released their thousand-pound bombs simultaneously. The bombs did not whistle or shriek on the way down— the shrieking came from the people on the ground as the hundreds of bombs hit without warning.
Arc Light Strikes, they were called, and they transformed the earth below into a here-and-now hell, as though the nether regions had surfaced to engulf the world. And there wasn’t a bunker built or a tunnel deep enough to withstand a delay-timed fuse, which let the thousand-pound bomb burrow into the earth before exploding. And if the bomb didn’t actually hit you and vaporize you, the concussion turned your brain to Jell-O, or ruptured your internal organs, burst your eardrums, and threw you into the air like another clod of dirt. Or sometimes you got buried alive when your tunnel, trench, or bunker collapsed.
We’d found hundreds of North Vietnamese here, lying down, staring up at the sky, blood running from their ears, nose, mouth, or wandering around like zombies. They weren’t worth taking as prisoners, they were beyond medical help, and we didn’t know if we should shoot them or not waste the time.
I glanced at Mr. Tram, and knew he’d seen this, from his perspective, and I wondered if he thought about it much, or if it was always there.
We traveled about two kilometers on Highway 9, then Mr. Loc turned left at a sign that said, in English,
Khe Sanh Combat Base
.
We drove up a dirt road that climbed to the plateau. A bus was coming down, and a line of backpackers was climbing up. Within a few minutes, we were in a parking field where about six buses sat, along with a few private cars and motor scooters. Mr. Loc stopped, and we all got out.
The plateau on which the combat base once sat was nothing more than an expanse of windswept grassy field. The misty green hills towered over the plateau, and I could imagine the North Vietnamese artillery, rockets, and mortars up there, firing down onto the open plateau. What military genius
picked this place to defend? Probably the same idiot who set up the base at A Luoi, and since both places had once been French strongholds, I thought also of Dien Bien Phu, which was geographically similar. I said to Ted, “They taught us to take the high ground and hold it. I think they forgot Lesson Number One.”
Ted agreed and said, “Jesus, we were sitting ducks here.” He looked around at the hills. “The fucking gooks would fire, then quick-move the artillery into a cave. We’d return counter”artillery fire from here, and the air force would hit the hills with high explosives and napalm. This game went on for a hundred fucking days, and this camp was hell on earth, buddy. You went out to take a piss, and you got your weenie blown off. We lived like fucking animals in the trenches and bunkers, and the fucking rats were everywhere, and I swear to God it rained every day, and the fucking red mud was so thick it pulled your boots off. In fact, we had a guy stuck up to his knees in the mud, and a Jeep tried to pull him out, and got sucked in up to the windshield, then a deuce-and-a-half truck tried to pull the guy and the Jeep out, and got buried up to the roof, and then two bulldozers came and they both got buried, then we called in a sky crane chopper with cables, and the chopper got sucked right in and disappeared. You know how we got everybody out?”
I smiled and asked, “No, how?”
“The mess sergeant yelled ‘Hot chow!’”
We both laughed. Truly, the marines were full of shit.
Mr. Tram and Ms. Susan smiled politely. Mr. Loc, who ostensibly didn’t speak English and had no sense of humor anyway, stood stone-faced.
Mr. Tram said, “Here we are on the combat base. As you can see, there is nothing left here, except the outline of the runway over there, where nothing seems to grow.”
We all looked at the runway in the distance. Susan and Ted snapped a few pictures of the barren landscape and of us.
Ted said, “I was here in June when the bulldozers buried the whole fucking base. We didn’t leave shit for Charlie.”
Mr. Tram, who had once been Charlie, agreed and said, “When the Americans abandoned the base in June, they did not want to leave anything which could be used in a propaganda film, and so now we see nothing. But you see the holes in the earth where the metal scavengers have mined everything that was buried. They have found even trucks that had been destroyed
by artillery and buried.” He added, “There is talk of reconstructing some parts of this combat base because when the tourists come, they see nothing.”
I said to Ted, “Hey, I got a job for you.”
He laughed. “Yeah. No fucking way I’m filling one more fucking sandbag on this fucking hill.”
Mr. Tram smiled and said, “Many American marines have been helpful in providing information to the local authorities about this base, and now we have maps and drawings of how it may have looked.”
Ted said, “It looked like a shithole. Red mud and sandbags. No grass when I was here.”
Mr. Tram went on a bit about reconstructing hell for the tourists. I looked around and saw that there were maybe fifty people wandering around, trying to figure out what all the fuss was about. I guess you had to have been here.
We walked around awhile, and Mr. Loc stayed with the vehicle. Mr. Tram pointed to the west and said, “You can see the hills there of Laos, twenty-five kilometers. Near that border is the American Special Forces camp of Lang Vei, which my regiment captured in the early days of the siege.” He paused, then said, “They were very brave men, but there were too few of them.”
I said, “Their Montagnard fighters were also very brave.”
Mr. Tram did not reply.
We continued walking across the plateau, and I spotted two middle-aged American men together, who were having a very emotional moment while their wives stood off to the side and looked away.
Ted noticed them, too, and stared at them awhile, then went over and spoke to them. Big Ted didn’t look like the huggy, kissy type, but within a minute, the two guys and Ted were embracing.
A few minutes later, Ted returned, cleared his throat, and said, “They were artillery guys. Both got hurt when the ammo dump exploded in January, and they got medevaced out.” He added, “They missed most of the fun.”
No one commented on this, though Mr. Tram must have remembered when the main ammo dump got hit by a North Vietnamese artillery round. Guys I knew who had been patrolling in the hills near Quang Tri City said they could see and hear it thirty kilometers away. It must have been a big morale booster for the North Viets, and a bad omen for the besieged marines.