The Phantom Blooper (13 page)

Her bearing is a full-fledged dress parade strut and her hurried pace is the badge of her many important duties. According to Song, all of the Broom-Maker's five sons were killed in the war against the French, and three of her grandsons have died fighting the Marines at Khe Sanh. The Broom-Maker is chairman of the Soldiers' Foster Mother Organization and holds the important office of village midwife, the only person allowed to cut the umbilical cords of newborn babies and bury them in local soil. Her husband was killed at Dien Bien Phu and her brother was once in prison with Ho Chi Minh. The Broom-Maker is the most powerful woman in Hoa Binh.

As soon as the Broom-Maker is within spitting range she fires off a flying bomb of red betel-nut juice in my general direction and follows it up with the word
Phalang!
--"white foreigner."

The Broom-Maker sniffs at Song and says, "
Truong Thi My
"--Miss America.

As the Broom-Maker marches by like Napolean at the head of his army she lashes out with the only English sentence she knows: "Get out of Viet Nam, Long Nose, or I will kill your ass."

"Yes, ma'am.
Chao Ba
." I say, very loud, because I know that she is deaf in one ear from a B-52 attack. I tip my rice paper hat. "You have a real nice day, now, you hear?"

Song does not wish to be impolite, but she has a hard time keeping a straight face as the Broom-Maker shakes her dragon's-head walking stick at me menacingly and repeats, "Get out of Viet Nam, Long Nose, or I will kill your ass."

Ba Can Bo's Better Water for the Village Project is so important that even the critically vital rice harvest will be delayed until after lunch.

Almost every man, woman, and child in the village has brought a digging tool. We stand in two rows six feet apart, facing each other. The lines of workers start at the rice paddies and stretch through the jungle to the river. Little kids cling to their mothers' legs. Babies are slung on their mothers' backs. Children over the age of'six hold hoes, shovels, and pickaxes.

In a gesture of cruel teasing Song and I take places in a row on opposite sides of the Broom-Maker. She scowls. Facing us in the other row are Commander Be Dan and Bo Doi Bac Si.

Walking very erect between the rows, inspecting, Ba Can Bo, the lady cadre, the National Liberation Front's political liaison with the village of Hoa Binh, looks very stern and unpleasant. She is about forty-five years old, an old maid married to her job. She is tall for a Vietnamese. She prefers khaki trousers to shorts and wears her graying hair in a tight bun without decorative clips or ribbons. Over her shoulder hangs a blue dispatch pouch, her badge of office. On the pocket of her immaculate green shirt hangs a Ho Chi Minh of red enamel and gold.

I ask Song why everyone is so respectful to such a sour old lifer, a red-tape soldier.

Song says, "Each comrade gives what he has to give, Bao Chi. Our last cadre was a young man with a happy spirit. He was a very good man, very energetic. He told jokes, was popular with everyone. He was a good cadre. Ba Can Bo is not a warm woman, but she is a good cadre. A smile is not a brain, and a friendly handshake does not chop wood for the fire."

Ba Can Bo orders us to watch carefully for buried bombs. Then she blows a whistle and we dig. Ba Can Bo picks up a shovel and joins in.

In six hours we cut a canal one hundred yards long, four feet wide, and four feet deep. We stop digging a few yards from the river.

We eat lunch. Song has packed a picnic basket for three. Johnny Be Cool has been assigned to guard duty, so Song invites her best friend to join us.

We sit on the riverbank under the shade of a flame tree with Duong Ngoc Mai. Song tells me about her friend. Mai is eight months pregnant. She's a Fighter-Widow. Her husband was killed six months ago by the
Den Sung Truongs
, the Black Rifles -- the American Marines. He was the village potter. Mai is a staff sergeant in a Viet Cong Main Force battalion, and is home on a medical furlough. For her brave deeds in battle, Mai's name has been inscribed on the roll of honor of the
Dung Si Quoc
My--the "heroic American killers."

Mai, the Fighter-Widow, her belly big under her black pajama blouse, talks to Song but refuses to say a single word to me. She stares at me without expression, no hatred, no recognition that I exist at all.

Swatting recklessly at the sudden attack of a dragonfly causes me to choke on my pickle juice. The dragonfly is fearlessly aggressive, but a flurry of karate chops cutting the air discourages it. Chromed in blue metal, the dragonfly buzzes away, powered by a tiny engine.

After lunch we build a fieldstone foundation for mounting the paddle wheel. Thirty people grunt and sweat and lift the big wooden wheel up and muscle it into position.

Johnny Be Cool comes in off guard duty and watches while the paddle wheel is hammered into place.

Between the paddle wheel and the river a crew of workers digs out the final few yards of earth, allowing river water to flow into the new irrigation ditch.

Commander Be Dan lifts Johnny Be Cool up onto the bicycle seat attached to the paddle wheel. The wheel is powered by bicycle pedals. Johnny Be Cool waits until Ba Can Bo gives the signal, then peddles as hard and as fast as he can.

Straining, then moving, then faster and faster, the heavy wheel turns, pushing the water forward. The broad wooden blades lift river water a bit at a time and deposit it over the paddy dike and into the next paddy.

The people cheer: "HO! HO! HO!"

Ba Can Bo leads us in a patriotic song:

We are peasants in soldier's clothing

Waging a struggle for farmers oppressed a thousand years

Our suffering is the suffering of the people.

After an unusually hard day of setting up the water wheel and then going on with the harvest, we enjoy coming together after the evening meal to watch the initiation of three apprentice Viet Cong into the ranks of armed fighters.

When I was with the Marines there was a persistent myth, a story often told by some guy who'd heard it sworn to--no shit--by some other guy, about Marines finding dead Viet Cong children, chained to machine guns. The point of the story was how desperately short of recruits the enemy was, how unwilling to fight, how cruel.

Now I am the the Woodcutter's experiment, his theory that victory requires knowledge of the enemy, along with an unflinching acceptance of any unendurable truths. The Viet Cong see us more clearly than we see ourselves, but we can't see them at all.

As a Marine it took me two years in the field to stop underestimating the Viet Cong. It was just like learning about sex--everything anybody had ever told me about the subject was bullshit. I picked up the real facts on the streets.

As a Combat Correspondent I was part of the vast gray machine that does not dispense clean information. The American weakness is that we try to rule the world with public relations, then end up believing our own con jobs. We are adrift in a mythical ship which no longer touches land.

Americans can't fight the Viet Cong because the Viet Cong are too real, too close to the earth, and through American eyes what is real can only be a shadow without substance.

Sitting with Song up front, next to the Phuong twins, suddenly I feel in control. I feel that I know who I am and I know what I'm doing. I am not a statistic. Here we are not helpless, faceless masses. There are no masses in a Viet Cong village. In our village we are not victims to forces beyond our control. We have large wings with which to fly into the future.

Commander Be Dan appears, followed by Mot, Hai, and Ba, the Nguyen brothers.

The Phuong twins are beaming, because the Phuong twins and the Nguyen brothers are all desperately and passionately in love, despite the fact that there's one too many Nguyen brothers and the perhaps more interesting fact that none of the Nguyen brothers can tell the Phuong twins apart.

The Nguyen brothers are fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen years old. Mot is loud, a whiner and a jerk. Hai is the quiet, studious type. Ba is the biggest, oldest, and strongest, a good-natured mindless jock.

In front of the assembled villagers Commander Be Dan inducts the Nguyen brothers into the Liberation Army. The brothers try to look serious, but they're too proud not to preen. They alternate between horseplay, giggling and pinching, and attempts to maintain a military hearing.

The Broom-Maker presents each brother with a red armband made from red stripes torn from Saigon puppet flags. The brothers bow and put on the armbands.

The Woodcutter reminds the new fighters that a lost rifle is harder to replace than the man who lost it. He tells them the old story about the Front fighter who lost his rifle during a difficult river crossing. Out of shame the fighter asked to be placed in the front ranks of his unit's next attack, where he died gloriously.

"Tomorrow," says the Woodcutter, "you will go on a combat mission far from the village. You will fight the Long-Nose Elephants. Fight bravely, with fierce determination. I beg you to carry out your duties cleverly."

The recruits brace themselves rigidly to attention as Commander Be Dan presents each new fighter with an AK-47 assault rifle and a web belt hung with canvas pouches heavy with banana clips full of bullets.

Commander Be Dan repeats a Viet Cong slogan: "Brass legs. Iron shoulders. Shoot straight."

While the Nguyen brothers examine their new weapons, the people of Hoa Binh cheer: "HO! HO! HO!"

The Phuong twins are the first to congratulate the newly eligible bachelors.

As the festivities continue, Song and I double-time to our hooch, along the way surprising young lovers cuddling in the shadows. Light from a growing bonfire flickers across smiling faces and casts friendly giants and patterns of movement across the deck and onto palm tree trunks.

Outside of our hooch the Woodcutter and Commander Be Dan are having a nasty argument.

"No," says Commander Be Dan. "I do not trust the American, the surrenderer. He is a Black Rifle. He is an enemy of the people."

"I must criticize you!" savs the Woodcutter. "Cmmander Be Dan, I must criticize you!"

Commander Be Dan walks away.

The Woodcutter follows close behind. His voice reaches a higher pitch and his gestures become more enthusiastic.

Minutes later, as Song is helping me into my bulky costume, the Woodcutter enters the hooch and calmly announces that Commander Be Dan has agreed to take me along on a combat mission, a particularly important operation ordered by Tiger Eye, the Commander of the Western Region. The Woodcutter presents me with Cowboy's old peace-buttoned Stetson--lost the night the Phantom Blooper captured me--and a bull horn. I am to carry the bull horn and make propaganda.

I bow. I say, "Thank you, most honored sir." And I'm thinking,
This is it. This is what I've been waiting for. Under fire, there is confusion. In the confusion, I can escape.

By the time Song and I return to the bonfire, Ba Can Bo is finishing up one of her painfully boring speeches against the "foreign imperialist aggressors" and her punch line is
Da Dao Quoc My
, a slogan that means "Down with the lackey clique! Long live the glorious resistance!"

The villagers respond with a polite cheer, "HO! HO! HO!"

When they see me in my costume, they start laughing.

Ba Can Bo, annoyed at being upstaged, throws me a look with criticism in it, then sits down on a log.

I'm wearing a rice-paper costume Song has painted gray. I'm a B-52 bomber. On my grav paper wings U.S. is painted in overly large letters.

I am surrounded by the children of the village. The children are all wearing little conical paper hats and are armed with toy guns carved from bamboo.

I circle around the common between the rusting hulk of the French armored car and the audience of villagers, making menacing dives at the children, who giggle and shoot at me with their bamboo rifles. I make loud
boom-boom-boom
noises. A few of the kids grab their stomachs and fall down dead, exaggerating and prolonging their death agonies.

The remaining kids shoot at me faster. I cough a few times, make a few more sloppy dives. Finally I come in for a big crash, falling down flat on the ground.

The kids suddenly decide that they are crashing too and everybody piles on top of me. Even the dead kids come back to life and crash onto the pile, howling and squealing as though in pain.

An hour before dawn we file out past the village defense perimeter, invigorated by the cold morning air.

A little after first light we meet up with twenty fighters from the Viet Cong Regional Forces, peasant boys and girls in broad-brimmed floppy bush hats, hand grenades in net bags, rubber balls full of water, mismatched web gear, and ragged civilian clothes. Slung on their backs, hammocks full of rice which we call "elephant's intestines."

The fighters from the Hoa Binh Self-Defense Militia include Deputy Commander Song, Master Sergeant Xuan, Bo Doi Bac Si, the Nguyen brothers, the Phuong twins, Battle Mouth, and me, the Phantom Blooper. Together we are almost a section, which is what the French called a platoon. With Commander Be Dan in charge.

Our little army looks pretty hodgepodge and put together with spit and baling wire, and we're armed only with rifles and grenades, but our fighting spirit is high and our determination strong, and we're ready to travel fast and light.

I'm wearing black pajamas that are way too small for me, plus my cowboy hat, and a gift that Song insisted upon tying across my chest after our hasty breakfast: a red silk sash, to match the red armbands worn by the attacking force.

The sash is of a color which can only be called "screaming red," with a gold-stitched border and a row of gold stars down the center. Pogues in downtown Da Nang will be able to see me.

I'm armed with an olive-drab megaphone. My assignment as the Phantom Blooper is to beat the big drums of propaganda and do a head trip on the enemy, the Elephants, the United States Army. My assignment as a United States Marine is to escape.