The Village (30 page)

The village is intact. The village has endured.

What happened to the village after Saigon fell in 1975? Over a quarter of a century later, Charlie Benoit, who had been with me on patrol in the village, and I went back to find out. Charlie had gone on to become an old Asian hand, living in Shanghai, speaking four languages, owning property in Thailand and China, and specializing in software consulting. An all-American guard at Yale with a Ph.D. from Harvard, Charlie looked like a former professional football player and it was a continual delight to watch the astonishment of Vietnamese when he flawlessly conversed with them.

My own career had remained in national security, where I went from the RAND Corporation to serve as Assistant to the Secretary of Defense during Saigon's last days. Later, I was appointed Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security in the Reagan administration. I continue to write, my most recent novel being
The Pepperdogs,
published by Simon & Schuster, January 2003. See www.westwrite.com.

Charlie had made over a dozen trips to Vietnam since 1975 and invariably the secret police questioned closely those who spoke with him. He is not CIA, but his fluency is suspect to the Hanoi government. He warned me to be prepared for silence in Binh Nghia, or for denials that Americans had ever lived there. The trip, he said, might be a bust. He reminded me that in 1976 we had traveled throughout China after Mao died and, despite Charlie's fluency in Mandarin, no one on the streets would speak to us. The same might happen in Binh Nghia.

While waiting for our flight up-country, we visited Tu Do Street, Saigon's tiny version of Fifth Avenue, a strip of upscale hotels and shops unfortunately shorn of their old French colonial charm. As we walked, Charlie chatted with the cyclo drivers and street urchins, a network which warned him about the whereabouts of the secret police. Yesterday, Charlie had knocked out a pickpocket and the street people joked that he was a secret policeman. A ten-year-old girl selling last year's Christmas cards offered condolences about “that bad in New York.” There were perhaps a dozen Westerners browsing along Tu Do and the beggars—the cripple, the woman with three children, the orphan boys and girls—were trying only halfheartedly. Business, they complained, was nonexistent. Few foreigners had come this year.

The same iron will which enabled the Lao Dong Party to persevere in war, regardless of cost, has prevented the communists from changing. There are stifling regulations, too many fingers in any investment pie, pervasive corruption. As a woman wanting to restore a two-hundred-year-old antiquities site for tourism put it, the local authorities “won't talk to me about a permit unless I bring cigarettes.”

That afternoon we flew 400 miles north to Da Nang, a city of half a million people and perhaps ten cars. The traffic was a mix of bicycles and motor scooters. On several blocks were Internet cafés, with half a dozen old computers, all in use.

At seven I was awakened by church bells. At the spacious pink-hued church down the block, Mass had begun. The pews were packed and the faithful spilled out the doors. The attendants lining up the bikes and Hondas said the congregation had grown about ten percent a year, since the regime had somewhat loosened its restrictions on Catholic Vietnamese.

The eighty-mile drive to the village down Route 1, Vietnam's main highway, took three harrowing hours. It seemed our small van shared the two-lane, semipaved road with four cars, three thousand trucks, five thousand schoolchildren, and twenty thousand bicycles and scooters. It was a never-ending game of chicken. Will the next truck crush us, or will we run over a little girl on a bicycle? A state trooper from the United States, before having a nervous breakdown, would have issued reckless driving tickets to all drivers, period. The roadside shop signs told the barren economic tale: tire repair, electric coil rewind, ice, cigarettes, beer and soda, insect repellent chemicals, bicycle parts. The signs bore a striking resemblance to photos of rural America during the Depression of the 1930s.

After we passed the abandoned Chulai airport, I tried to get my bearings. The village lay to the east, along a river so swollen by winter monsoons that the paddies were a vast lake, submerging any landmarks. There were no roads to the village, so Charlie and I walked in at a brisk pace on the mud trail, anxious to put distance from the highway before the secret police got on to us and followed us. We took one trail after another, cutting back and forth as the layout of the hamlets came back to me. The smells were the same, the pervasive wood smoke, the pungent benjo ditches, the heavy scents of jungle decay. The palm and banana trees overlaying the trails deflected the sheets of rain which came and went.

After 1975, the village name of Binh Nghia—“Just Cause”—was changed to Binh Chuc—“Just Peace.” The meaning is about the same, but the change showed who was in charge. Many of the thatched huts had been replaced by cinder blocks held in place by a thin layer of cement, with tile roofs. Since the war, many more dwellings had been erected, jammed side by side, separated by thin hedges, each with a small courtyard and a single strand of electric wire running along a set of haphazard poles. We shared the mud trail with water buff spooked by our smell, scraggly cows, and people, people, people.

The schoolchildren swirled around us, exclaiming and following. In the swollen paddies, pant legs rolled up and barefoot in the muck, the farmers were stooped over, planting seedlings underwater. A man stood on a dike throwing fistfuls of manure into a paddy. In each small paddy, marked off by dikes of brilliant green, there was a peasant farmer hunched over. As we passed, each would straighten up, stare for a moment, then stoop and return to the eternal business of farming.

I had forgotten the village was so large, surrounded by a vast array of sand dunes, impossible to irrigate. The squad's area of operations had been five square miles. Walking along, looking at all the people, all the houses, all the trails and alleys and ambush sites, all the cover and concealment, I wondered if our military today would risk plunking down one squad among thousands of Vietnamese and issuing a simple order: Control this area, day and night. Use your rifles but no artillery or air power. It seemed unlikely; today's infantry uses lasers to guide bombs onto targets a thousand meters away.

Charlie stopped an old man to inquire.

“Anh (Older Brother), were there American soldiers here, many years before Liberation?”

“Yes, a few Marines were here. They paid hard sacrifice. They lived right there.” He pointed to a small yellow building with a tile roof grown brown with age and a commanding view of the paddies. It stood a few feet taller than the land around it and the location seemed familiar.

A woman yelled from the paddy, “What do they want?”

“They're from the kindergarten,” he shouted back.

The woman yelled to the next paddy, and as we walked up the trail, we heard the shouts echoing from paddy to paddy. In the grass courtyard in front of the small kindergarten, I found the foundation stones outlining where the fort had once stood. But the stone memorial to the Marines, set in the ground thirty-three years ago, was gone.

An old farmer stepped forward from the crowd.

“We welcome you back,” he said in Vietnamese, as the crowd grinned and called to neighbors. Soon we were surrounded by smiling farmers, each with a comment or query. I had brought pictures from
The Village
and they were passed from hand to hand. The English came creakily, like a gate not opened for thirty years.

“You know Mister Bill?…Marines number one…Where Larry?…You know Monty?…Bob, he throw bomb. VC no get him…. Where Sergeant Mac?…You stay my house tonight?…You old now,
dai uy.”

The
dai uy
—the captain—had returned as the Ancient Mariner. Most in the crowd had been born after I had left. Whatever they had heard about the Marines had been passed down. They were all smiling.

“If the ghosts of those little guys in khaki and pith helmets, covered with leeches after a two-month trip down from Hanoi, are looking down,” Charlie said, “you can bet they're complaining about this reception.”

We avoided asking questions which would jeopardize anyone, knowing that Party cadre were among the crowd. No one was hostile or stone-faced, and the grumbles Charlie heard were directed at those hogging the limelight and not giving others a chance to talk. People tugged at our sleeves, inviting us to their homes. Some village history was gradually filled in.

The village chief, Trao, had drowned in 1972 while fishing in a storm. The village medic and later the police chief, Bac Si Khoi, had moved away when his wife died in the early '70s. He was in failing health and not expected to live much longer. Joe, the ten-year-old orphan who lived with the Marines, had been killed fleeing in a boat when Da Nang fell in 1975. Of the teenage girls who flirted with the Marines, Missy Tinh had married and moved to Quang Ngai City. Missy Top lived in a province farther to the south.

The military leader in the village had been Suong. In 1974, he was on patrol in My Hué hamlet when he tripped a wire attached to a grenade. What Suong liked most about the Marines was their immediate medevacs. There were no Marines to help when he died.

Regular military units—American, Viet Cong, or North Vietnamese—have periods of rest and stand-downs between engagements. For Suong as a village militiaman, there was no rotation, no surcease. Suong completed roughly two thousand patrols. An American soldier with one hundred patrols would be highly respected among his peers. Suong had engaged in the close-in combat of the hamlets for twelve years. In comparison, over a thirty-year career, an American soldier may be in a “combat environment”—near enough to hear shooting—for two or three years. At no time in our history has an American soldier been asked to endure twelve years on the line.

What a tale Suong could have told. The closest parallels are our Indian wars and our Mountain Men of the Old West. Suong died because the war had gone on too long. No man, no matter how skilled and experienced, can survive continuous combat. Sooner or later, the bell will toll.

From the fort we moved down the trail to the central market. We passed five old (my age, about sixty) women who rushed to the bramble fence. We stopped and they giggled and grasped Charlie by his shoulders and asked if he needed a Vietnamese wife. To include me, they reverted to the pidgin English of their youth.

“Me good girl. No go boom-boom…. Marine
dai uy,
you learn how talk, we find you good wife…. You stay long time this time?”

Here they were, grandmothers, their grandchildren gawking as they flirted shamelessly, taken back to their youth when the young Marines walked through the market every day, stopping to talk and joke. They looked at my pictures, trying to sort out the women and the Marines from their teens. Led by a handsome older woman in orange-print pajamas, they clustered together, puzzling as to which of them is smiling shyly at Sergeant White all those years ago. A teenage boy peeked over their shoulders and was soundly smacked on the ear. These weren't his memories.

Before returning the next day, we made a trip to My Lai, four miles to the east, where American soldiers had massacred over one hundred villagers. A place of careful gardens, pitiful statues, and gruesome pictures, the memorial grounds felt like a cemetery. Throughout Vietnam there were instances of Americans killing in the hamlets, driven by anger or fear, terrified and ignorant, believing every villager was a Viet Cong.

“That didn't happen in Binh Nghia,” Charlie said. “The Marines couldn't destroy their own village. What would they say? Sorry, we forgot we live here?”

After leaving My Lai, we had lunch in Binh Nghia with a landowner dispossessed in 1975 of thirty of his thirty-one hectares. His father had been the village chief, assassinated in 1962. Dozens of his extended family clustered around as we sat down to rice, green sprouts, pork, tea, and bootleg rice wine, all grown on his half acre. The family lived in four bare rooms with a dirt floor; a fluorescent bulb—the single change since 1966—dangled from a tattered electric wire we carefully avoided.

He had done two years' “service” after 1975. His friend the police chief had been “sent away” for seven years. Now they were back in the village and we noticed the school-children crossed their arms quickly as they walked by him, a sign of respect for an elder with stature. When he said that he hoped to run for village chief, his wife shook her head, suggesting she had heard that dream before.

After lunch, he walked ahead of us down the village trails, joking that the Americans had taken him prisoner. One villager laughed and shouted in English that “Victor Charlie's (Marine radio slang for Viet Cong) in charge here now. Where you go?”

“I'm taking them to Quat's and Suong's,” he replied, referring to the Communist Party chief and to the widow of the man who fought so fiercely against the Party. That sentence summed up the complex skein of village politics. Marines used to say, “If the VC were on our side, we'd wrap this war up in a week.” Yet the same basic, tough soldier was on both sides. Communism wasn't a better way of life or a better ideology. Rather, in Vietnam it proved to be a better military system, more capable of insisting upon sacrifice without end.