The Phantom Blooper (10 page)

Song looks at me, surprised. "But I
am
a soldier at the school, Bao Chi. The sword is my child. The gun is my husband. I will never release the gun until we drive away the invaders and save the people, if it takes all my life. The puppets in Saigon want to put us into barbed-wire cities and make us into beggars. We choose to walk through the gates of blood, to fight with the resistance. We fight to stay on the land where we can work and be free and have dignity. I will fight forever for the dignity of my people."

Song picks up the paperback Hemingway book. "Until
Gia Phong
, liberation, the children must be made strong with books, strong and beautiful like tigers in the jungle. Future generations must be given large wings with which to fly into the future."

Song looks up at me with tears glittering in her dark eyelashes. "Bao Chi, I am so sorry that the war has killed your family by taking them away from you."

I don't know what to say.

"My first memory," Song says, "is of my mother smiling at me and then leaning her rifle against a coconut tree. Uncle says that my mother would nurse me in the dark before going off to ambush French soldiers. One night they killed her."

Song reaches out and takes my hand. "When I was eight years old the steel crows came. The ground bounced up and down and then my father and my little brother Chanh were killed. I am so proud of my family."

Song looks into my eyes, holding on to my hand with a fierce intensity. She says, "We stand on oppostie banks of the river, our tears mingling, Bao Chi, my brother, but you must never think that you are alone. We are your family now." She smiles through her tears. "In hell, people starve because their hands are chained to six-foot chopsticks, too long to bring rice to their mouths. Heaven is the same, only there people feed each other."

When I first came to Hoa Binh, I called Song "Fish Breath." She called me "
Vat luy
," which means "Angry Fortress."

I kiss Song's forehead quickly and turn away. "Thank you," I say. Then I say in Vietnamese: "You've saved my life here, Song. I was a dying man when I came here. The spirit hardens in war, and the body is nothing without courage. You've been very patient with me."

Song's voice is lighter when she says, "Then you will leave the bad road you are on, my brother?"

I say, "Yes, my sister."

Song kisses me on the cheek, stands up, and goes across the room to her sleeping mat. She sits down, removes an oil-cloth from her tiny antique typewriter, rolls in a gray sheet of paper. She types in French, writing her Viet Cong war novel, which she calls
Days without Sunlight, Nights without Fire.

I watch her in silence. After a few minutes she stops typing and smiles at me. "Someday, Bao Chi, our hearts will burst into flame and we will become strong and beautiful like tigers in the jungle. Then, together, we will beat the big drums of propaganda. We will shake the brass and steel of the White House."

Johnny Be Cool comes in, carrying his shoeshine kit, and he is in a bad mood. Johnny Be Cool is about ten years old, lean, tall for his age, a half-breed black kid with the walk, talk, and bearing of a deposed prince.

Johnny Be Cool does not greet us, but goes directly to his corner of the hooch and lies down on his sleeping mat. In a one-room hooch privacy is at a premium, so Song and I do not question Johnny Be Cool. Song types her novel and I watch her work.

There's a
clunk
out back in the woodpile. We know that it's only the Woodcutter unstrapping his harness from his back and dropping what sounds like half a ton of cut wood.

We line up in the center of the room, me, Song, and Johnny Be Cool.

The Woodcutter comes in and we bow.

Siletnly, the Woodcutter bows. Then he leans his ax, his rifle, and his bamboo walking stick against the fireplace, sits down, and waits for his supper. The Woodcutter is a funny little old man with a black turban on his head, a white wisp of beard, a twinkle in his eye, and a stainless steel backbone.

"
Ong an com chua?
" asks the Woodcutter as he does every day--"Have you eaten yet?"

"No, Honorable Uncle," says Song, as she says every day. "Of course not."

Johnny Be Cool is first to the table. Food is his answer to every problem in life.

The Woodcutter and I sit down at the Western-style table of polished bamboo, on bamboo benches.

Song dishes out boiled rice and big red shrimp. She gives me the teapot and I pour hot green tea into bamboo cups.

After Song sits down, the Woodcutter bows his head and says, "
Cach mang muon Nam
"--"Long live the revolution."

Song, Johnny Be Cool, and I say in unison: "
Cach mang muon Nam.
"

We wait until the Woodcutter picks up his chopsticks, brings his bowl up close to his mouth, and starts to eat. Only then do Song and Johnny Be Cool pick up their chopsticks. I pick up my white plastic spoon.

The Woodcutter stops chewing, then says, right on cue, "The rice is burned again, niece."

As she does every day, Song says solemnly, "I'm sorry, Uncle. The spirit of the kitchen must be angry."

The Woodcutter grunt and resumes eating. "Yes, that must be what it is."

Song giggles, leans over, hugs the Woodcutter, and kisses him, saying, "Misfortune hones us into jade."

The Woodcutter says to me in Vietnamese, "Bao Chi, did you perform your work at the harvest today with revolutionary enthusiasm?" The Woodcutter speaks English well enough, but has always refused to speak a single word of English to me.

I speak basic Vietnamese now, so I reply in English: "I am trying to improve my revolutionary enthusiasm, most honored sir."

The Woodcutter grunts, says to Johnny Be Cool, "How much did you earn today?"

Johnny Be Cool looks at his food. He's an orphan that the Woodcutter press-ganged into the family by force. He's a shoeshine boy for the Green Berets who operate high in the mountains and he's a Viet Cong spy. He can't sign his name--Song has had no luck at all trying to get him to go to school--but he knows the latest black-market rates down the last dong, frac, and dollar.

On his head Johnny Be Cool wears a torn and faded Marine Corps utility cover with a black eagle, globe, and anchor stenciled on the front. He does not look Vietnamese. The only thing Vietnamese about Johnny Be Cool is his language. All day long he forces American soldiers to submit to shoeshines and questions every black Marine he can find, telling them that his father's name is Lance Corporal John Henry, a steel drivin' man, and asking them if they know how to find his father's village of Chicago.

Johnny Be Cool says to the Woodcutter in English: "Be cool, man. Be loose."

Song says softly, "
Newy Bac Viet?
"--"Are you Vietnamese?"

Johnny Be Cool shrugs, nods, keeps his eyes on his half-eaten rice. He swats away a black blowfly. Very often children ask Johnny Be Cool why he, a black foreigner, speaks Vietnamese. "Hey, don't sweat it, mama. Be cool. Be cool. What it is."

I say, "Want to play baseball after dinner?"

Johnny Be Cool shrugs. "Later for that. Cut me some slack, Jack. Let's chow down. Be cool."

After the meal the Woodcutter puts a pinch of black opium from Laos into the bowl of his long bamboo water pipe. He rotates the opium over a candle flame until it is a big black bubble. Soon he is puffing away happily, making sucking sounds with the pipe and then exhaling sweet acrid smoke.

Song says to the Woodcutter, "Venerable Uncle, how was your day?"

Without hesitation the Woodcutter begins to complain in detail about how he is forced to climb higher and higher into the Dong Tri Mountains to find trees that are not so full of shrapnel that they ruin his ax.

Every day, the Woodcutter says, another whole forest dies from the smoke sprayed by American pirate planes. The smoke kills every tree, every vien. Birds fall out of the trees and cover the ground. Fish in the mountain streams float belly up. The future of the profession of woodcutting is very uncertain.

As Song and I clear the table, Song slips Johnny Be Cool some strips of sugar cane and hugs him. He goes outside to feed his water buffalo.

The Woodcutter and I set up the Ping-Pong table and play a few fast games by kerosene light.

As we play, the Woodcutter chain-smokes Salems and tells me, once again, about
La Sale guerre
--the "dirty war" against the French--about the mountain fighters who never ate in a clean hut in their whole lives, about his landlord who taxed the people even for leaves collected in the forest, about how as a young man he was press-ganged into the Viet Minh.

More and more, the Woodcutter seems to be living in the past; his mind is always back in the old days when he was young and hungry and hunted by the French. "Against the great wealth and firepower of the French we had only our convictions."

When the Americans first came to Hoa Binh the Woodcutter was seventy years old and had never been more than fifty miles from the village. The first time a helicopter landed in the village the people thought it was a big metal bird. They gathered around the chopper and patted it and tried to feed it yams.

But the Woodcutter was afraid of the strange invader and fired a crossbow at it. For this crime, puppet troops bruned the village of Hoa Binh to the ground and the Woodcutter was locked up in prison for six years.

In prison, the Woodcutter heard the word "Communism" for the first time. His puppet jailors talked about Communism so much that, by the time of his release, he was thoroughly converted.

The Woodcutter says, remembering: "Even in prison we were more free than our jailers."

It's the Woodcutter's outstanding war record that has kept me in this village and out of the Hanoi Hilton. It was a very hot day a little over a year ago when the village council, presided over by the Woodcutter as First Notable, met to decide my fate.

Ba Can Bo, the lady Front cadre, a stern by-the-book lifer, demanded that I be sent--in chains--straight to Hanoi. She was seconded by Battle Mouth, her pompous junior cadre. Battle Mouth called me a
Binh Van
and a "long-nosed surrenderer" and some other things I didn't understand. He said I should be shot on the spot. Then he drew his revolver, put the barrel against my neck, and volunteered to do the job himself.

The Woodcutter laughed and called Battle Mouth a "red-tape soldier." and a "revolutionary-come- lately" and the village elders laughed.

I stood on front of a long canopy-shaded table, facing the village elders, while Ba Can Bo aimed a finger at my head and proclaimed her authority over my bandaged carcass in the name of the National Liberation Front. She said a lot of stuff about running dog imperialists and said I was one. I couldn't speak much Vietnamese back then, so I probably missed a lot of Ba Can Bo's material. It was easy to see that the village elders were buying her case against me.

As Ba Can Bo continued to rant and rave, the Woodcutter interrupted her by pounding the tabletop with his old Viet Minh hero of the Revolution medal, which looked like a frontier marshal's badge. Ba Can Bo tried to go on with her patriotic speech, but the Woodcutter persisted. The Woodcutter pounded his medal hard on the table like a judge's gavel and when Ba Can Bo tried talking louder he pounded harder.

The Woodcutter insisted that I was his prisoner, his own persoanl prisoner, and he promised the village elders that he would be responsible for me. "To win many battles," he said, "we must see into the hearts of our enemy. Why do the Americans fight? The Amercians are a mystery to us. They are phantoms without faces. This Black Rifle, this Marine, has secrets that I would know."

When Ba Can Bo objected, the Woodcutter cut her short by saying, not quite shouting, "
Phep vua thua le lang
." Then, suddenly, the Woodcutter repeated, fiercely, like John Brown at Harper's Ferry or like Moses throwing down the tablets of the Ten Commandments, the ancient Vietnamese proverb, "
Phep vua thua le lang
"--"The laws of the emperor stop at the village gate!"

The Woodcutter and I play cutthroat Ping-Pong. He slashes at the flying white ball and tries to drive it into my brain. I hack at the incoming ball clumsily, always off balance, always on the defensive.

Once, a long time ago, I jokingly suggested that I might try to escape. The Woodcutter just about did himself an injury, he was laughing so hard. The Woodcutter stands less than five feet tall. His shoulders are slightly hunched from time and a life of hard labor. His chest is bony and his legs are scarred and sturdy. His graying hair is receding from a high, broad forehead. Piercing black eyes are set in deep over high cheekbones. The Woodcutter's face is a shrewd and open face with a wispy white chin beard, and his laughter shows strong white teeth.

The Woodcutter loves to tell war stories about his exploits against the French, but the one gung ho sea story that the Woodcutter never tells is about how he won his medal and became a Hero of the Revolution.

One hot day, back about the time I was busy being born, a big green French armored car attacked the village. The armored car was destroying the rice crop and was killing the people.

The village Self-Defense Militia had two Chinese mortar shells, but no mortar. And there were no grenades, because the people had not yet learned how to make grenades.

The Woodcutter filled a gourd with kerosene from lamps, and added a strip of oilcloth to make the gourd into a primitive Molotov cocktail.

As the Woodcutter attacked, pausing to dip the oilcloth into a cooking fire, the armored car was moving past the giant banana tree and was maching-gunning everything that moved. The French gunners were astounded to see a man in a loincloth charging across the village common, gourd in hand. They fired. The Woodcutter was hit. Once. Twice. Again. And then a fourth time.

The French gunners stared in disbelief at this supernatural being. He threw the gourd. They tried to abandon their vehicle. But the gourd exploded and the French soldiers died in fire, screaming.