The Language of Men (3 page)

Vanessa and I stood on the curb. My father held her wrist and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. He handed me my backpack, then pulled me in for a hug: Winstons and gasoline. He stepped back and rubbed my shoulder, grinning.

"Gonna be hot over there, boy. I can tell you that much."

SIX A.M. Ho Chi Minh City is a steaming engine. Though I can hear motorbikes toot their horns or a bus grind its gears, the city is dominated by an electrical hum, an audible heat, as if a swarm of cicadas hovers over the restaurants and apartment complexes, the green lakes and street vendors. Conversations break through the din and sound angry, even aggressive, and I wonder what there is to fight about at six a.m.

Last night, I spoke with the owner of our hotel, and as he poured me another shot of rice wine from a plastic water bottle, he said the language only sounds hostile. "Sounds and meanings are very different." He took a sip. I asked him what he hears when we talk—Americans, I meant. Another sip and his smile grew. "I hear R's. All the time R's." He stood up and began to bark, or maybe cheer. "Ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra. Very much." He sat back down and shrugged, as if to say it wasn't my fault.

Vanessa and I gather our things and meet our guide in the lobby. He is a thin man in a short-sleeved dress shirt and black jeans, a braided leather belt and white sneakers. He sits in a large, intricately-carved chair, holding a steaming bowl of
pho
inches from his face. The lobby is filled with other travelers, white men and women with enormous backpacks—Australians, Germans, Swedes, my fellow Americans, some French. The hotel staff in matching mint-green Polo shirts, rush out like a pit crew and surround the new arrivals. They reach up to help the travelers remove their backpacks; the travelers turn and bend down to tip them.

As Vanessa and I walk through the lobby, our footsteps rattle the glass cabinets filled with ceramic Buddhas and lacquer paintings. Our guide stands and bows and reaches for my hand. To him, we are "An-tun-nee" and "Ba-nessa." To me, his name sounds like three coins dropping into a glass of water, and I can't imagine what it sounds like to him when I say, "Pleased to meet you, Anh Dung Nguyen." He nods several times, then pulls a map from his back pocket.

"So. You want to see Long Binh, yes?"

"Yes," I say. "And also Bien Hoa."

He nods. "Because you father?"

"Yes."

"He still alive, you father?"

"Yes."

A big smile. "Why he no come?" He opens his arms wide as if offering a hug.

Vanessa and I look at each other and laugh. "I'm not sure," I say. "Too far away, I guess." I realize after I've said this that it's the only reason I can think of. I never asked my father to come and he didn't offer. He hates long flights, can't sit in one place for too long. My father seemed satisfied with his memories:
If I had to live my life over again, I'd go back.

I packed his voice. His stories live inside the recorder in my pocket, and sometimes during our trip, I'd plug in my headphones and press
Play.

Anh nods. "Lots of men come back. Lots." He leans forward and slurps down the rest of his breakfast. "First we go here"—taps the map—"then here"—tap—"then we stop here for you to buy"—tap, tap, tap.

"Oh," I say. "That's okay. We don't have to stop."

"Okay, we stop for bathroom only. And maybe you buy," he says, quickly refolding the map.

Ho Chi Minh City's paved veins bleed into one main artery, Highway 1, which runs the length of Vietnam. Motorbikes piled with bamboo or chickens or friends or relatives flow through massive eight-way intersections, head-on, and zoom around a rotary, the driver's feet grazing the curb or the muffler of another motorbike. We do not merge as much as we are absorbed into traffic. An opening reveals itself only after our driver pulls out, and suddenly our car is surrounded. Our driver hits the horn—not a honk, but a rapid chirping, like a robotic cricket.

In minutes, the city is gone, and the country opens to infinite green. Farms and rice paddies spread for miles, eventually growing into the mossy mountains painted on the horizon. In the fields are tombs the color of Easter candy. They rise like an exotic crop scattered across the land. A little boy sits shirtless atop a water buffalo, whipping the animal's slick haunches, trying to motivate him around one of the pink and purple stones. "We keep the dead close," Anh says. I try to imagine burying not my hamster but my grandfather, my aunt or uncle behind our pool, beside my mother's flower bed—a colorful stone rising against the seasons, jutting up through leaves and through snow.

Up Highway 1 to Bien Hoa. Behind tinted glass, within air conditioning. Our driver is silent; he doesn't seem to speak English. He hits the funny-sounding horn each time he passes a vehicle, which is often, and as it trails off it sounds as if the car is laughing. The radio quietly plays a Muzak version of the
Titanic
soundtrack. Anh sits in the passenger seat, holding an unlit cigarette in his mouth. When he turns and talks to us, the cigarette jumps like a needle picking up an unstable frequency.

"Platoon."
He points to the squat cement buildings capped with corrugated metal, an old movie house, and a dry fountain that form Bien Hoa's center. He holds his hand out straight and sweeps it across the windshield, fingertips grazing the glass. "All
Platoon."

Anh knows me. He has never seen me before, but he knows me well. He's driven me up Highway 1 since the late 1980s, when I traveled to Vietnam from New York or Boston or Idaho or Kentucky, when I sat in the back of his car beside a father or a grandfather, a brother, an uncle. He takes us north from Ho Chi Minh City, to small towns whose names we know well, have been to or heard stories of. Anh studies the movies, listens to the music, points to a square of cement where Charlie Sheen once stood or patches of jungle that inspired CCR's "Fortunate Son." He drives us through the towns, and they all look the same, and perhaps none of us in the car would recognize a thing if Anh didn't mention a movie title or song lyric or speak the name of the town written on the back of the photograph in my pocket, my father standing in front of the old movie house:
Bien Hoa, '71.

"Many men came here for a woman."

We stand on the cement pier in Bien Hoa, Anh's cigarette now lit, the driver watching us from the road. Anh looks around, paying close attention to the locals walking by, staring. I can tell by the slow pulls he takes on his cigarette, his calm tone, that he is not nervous, just careful. He tells us most tourists don't come here, and many of the locals have not seen a white person since the war.

"Very few women left in Bien Hoa," he says, almost under his breath.

"How come?" I ask.

"Marry soldiers. Soldiers take them home."

I think about the souvenirs we had bought earlier in the trip, the black chopsticks and their ceramic holders, wrapped tightly in tissue paper.

"Did the women want to leave?" Vanessa asks.

Anh purses his lips and stares down the street. "Perhaps some," he says. "Others, maybe not."

We stand on the pier for another minute or so as Anh finishes his cigarette. The stores across the street are different from the shops in Ho Chi Minh City. Instead of pizza and hamburgers, pirated copies of
Dispatches
or
The Things They Carried,
these stores sell scrap metal and lumber and copper piping. One man sits in the only empty space in his shop, as if at the helm of a small ship made of tires and hubcaps. Men laugh on the corner, drinking coffee, playing cards. Men crouch on the pier, pointing into the dark water. Men watch Anh flick his cigarette into the canal, clap his hands together, and their eyes follow us back across the street, into the car, as we disappear behind tinted glass.

The highway is less congested once we leave Bien Hoa and head toward Long Binh. Long Binh is where my father spent his twentieth birthday. This is where he spent most of his nineteen months in Vietnam. This is where he worked as a cook, mixing vats of oatmeal and mashed potatoes, brewing oceans of coffee, baking mountains of donuts. This is where he and the other
spoons
spent one-hundred-degree days preparing soup or baking apple pie. This is where the jokes start:
How long you been in Long Binh? Been too long in Long Binh.
This is where he cleaned and polished his rifle, hung posters of Jimi Hendrix and Playboy centerfolds, drank weak, government-issued Budweiser. One of the sixty-thousand soldiers living within this militarized metropolis, he constructed a hooch out of scrap wood and empty crates. This is where he sunbathed on a lawn chair, somewhere in the dusty divide between two of the U.S. Army's largest structures in South Vietnam: a hospital and a prison. This is where he bought a television and a stereo, tapped off a buddy's extension cord that was tapped off a buddy's extension cord. This is where Vietnamese women went hooch to hooch, waving white rags, speaking the only English necessary.

And this is where a giant supermarket now stands.

"Not many stores like this in Vietnam," Anh says, standing up tall and nodding as he looks around the parking lot. I snap a picture and the driver glances at me. Anh smiles. "Come."

Vanessa and I follow him across the street. He tells us to stay close. A few hundred feet from the store is a long, wide dirt road, which leads to a Vietnamese Army base. Two soldiers in tight uniforms stand in front of the gate. From this distance, they seem fake, like a pair of plastic figures.

"Here," Anh says. "We stop here."

I take a few pictures. Anh looks at his watch. Cars and trucks zip by, their horns laughing. I imagine Anh traveling to the United States, to New York, to Long Island, to Northport, my hometown, where he would pay me to drive him to a place
his
father once lived. I could take him to the loading dock behind Walmart, and point into the long grass beside the dumpsters.

Here,
I'd say.
Right here.

"The government own all this," Anh says. "The soldiers down there, their guns are from United States. After the war, U.S. leave everything." He takes a long pull on his cigarette, exhales. "Leave everything."

The distant figures pace in front of the gate, the barrels of their tiny guns extending above their helmets. I try to picture the exchange of weapons. The Vietnamese soldiers at the gate—did they once open boxes of shiny U.S. guns, or did they pick the dusty weapons off the ground, after the last American troops were in the air? Or was there a day when American soldiers ceased firing, flicked the safety switch, and gave their guns away?

I think of film footage from late in the war. American soldiers on an aircraft carrier, shoving helicopters into the South China Sea. For a moment, they clung to the edge of the deck like cicada shells, then splashed into the water. My father described to me acres and acres of broken tanks and trucks and jeeps.
If it had anything wrong with it, flat tire, anything, we left it.
I found a picture of my father standing in front of a giant lot of tanks. On the back, he wrote:
Mr. Cheapo's Used Car Lot.

"Okay," Anh says, looking at his watch. "We go."

There was this one, I tell ya, boy. Big friggin' tits. I don't even know if they had silicone back then, but they had to be fake. Had to be fake. She was young, too, maybe seventeen, eighteen. Came in from town to clean the hooches. Every mornin', workin' every hooch. Some days she'd start at this end, other days she'd start on the other side. She knew what she was doin'. Gave every guy a shot. First dude looked out for the rest of us. First dude always stuck, his fingers in her, checkin' for razor blades.
What you do, GI?
Don't worry what I'm doin', honey. Guys with half the tip of their dicks sliced, off. Ain't no purple medal gonna fix that.

Anh whispers to the driver. The driver nods. We begin our trip back to Ho Chi Minh City.

"That's it?" I ask Vanessa, quietly. "Tour's over?"

She shrugs, mouthing her answer. "I guess so."

Jeep-fulls of Vietnamese soldiers swerve around us. One Jeep pulls alongside and a soldier hanging offthe back stares at us. He smiles, perhaps at me, perhaps not. I don't think he can see me through the tinted glass, but he continues to stare. He shifts his rifle from the left side of his body to the right. A slow oscillation of his hand as if he were Miss America. Then the driver hits the Jeep's horn, laughing through traffic.

I feel sick. I've always been prone to motion sickness, particularly in cars. There is a looping video in my head of a young boy chugging two cherry slushies, then puking them up cold on the leather seats of his friend's mother's Jaguar. There are other stories. The heat, the driving, and Anh's perpetual smoke after tiptoeing around a Vietnamese Army base with a stomach full of beef-soup breakfast is my perfect storm. Vanessa hands me a bottle of warm water. I begin to sweat.

"No McDonald's in Vietnam," Anh says, staring out the window.

"Excuse me?" I say.

"McDonald's. No here. KFC, yes. McDonald's, no."

I open the window—the door to a convection oven—and shut it.

"How come?" Vanessa asks.

Anh leans over to the driver, and the driver's response makes Anh laugh. A few moments later, Vanessa asks Anh what he said. "He say the burgers are too big for our mouths."

We all laugh.

"They're too big for our mouths, too," I say.

Anh takes a long pull on his cigarette. "Perhaps."

We take a different route back to Ho Chi Minh City. Within city limits, we turn left, then right, another left, accelerate into a small parking lot. I don't recognize any of the street names. Vanessa and I flip through our
Lonely Planet.
The car squeals to a halt.

"So," Anh says. "We stop."

"That's okay," I say, repeating the conversation we had in the lobby. "We can wait in the car."

Anh tosses his cigarette out the window. Lights another. "Maybe you need bathroom."

Vanessa and I look at each other.