Finding Moon

Afternoon, the Twentieth Day

RETRACING ONE’S STEPS IS EASY. Moon simply spun the APC around and headed it down the mountainside following the tracks the treads had made coming up. No problem. He peered downward through the driver’s viewing slot: a little pressure on the right steering bar when needed, then a little pressure on the left. Just think about that. No reason to think about strike three and you’re out. No niece, no bones, no brother.

Nguyen was perched in the hatch above. Osa slumped on the troopers’ bench. When he turned to glance at her, he’d see only the top of her head, looking at the rice sacks. What was she seeing in the burlap? What was she thinking of? He hoped she had been conscious of the probable time of Damon’s execution. From what the man had told them, his body had been found and buried about the day they’d slipped out of Puerto Princesa. Even if he had been the super-Moon that Ricky had fantasized, he couldn’t have kept that from happening. Or perhaps Osa would be remembering Damon had realized his dream to be a martyr. He hoped that would give her some comfort.

The man had described it as he had heard it from survivors at the village. He told it proudly, with a fair command of English vocabulary but a pronunciation that Moon guessed must be a mixture of Montagnard inflections and Damon’s own Dutch-based distortions. The Khmer Rouge had come at dawn, about twenty of them: two young men, a young woman, and the rest just boys. Some barely in their teens, barely big enough to carry their assault rifles. Everyone had been ordered out into the clearing where the villagers prepared their charcoal and joss sticks to be sold.

Then they burned the house that Damon used as his hospital. They untied Damon’s arms and the young woman told him to point to the villagers he had made into Christians. But Damon would not tell them.

Here the man had stopped. He had looked at Osa-obviously not wanting someone who had loved Damon to hear this. Go ahead, Osa had said. It was what Damon wanted. And so the man had continued. He said the Khmers would push someone out of the crowd and the question would be repeated, and Damon would say that only the person they were holding there would know whether or not they believed the words of Jesus. Then “they would hurt Brother Damon,” the man said, and ask the question again, and hurt him again. Finally one of the women of the village stepped out of the crowd and said she was a Christian. And then others stepped out, men, women, and children. The Khmers bound their arms and tied them all together and ordered the other villagers to kill them with clubs. But nobody would do it, so the woman shot two of those who refused. And one of the Khmer boys shot another one. Then the villagers would beat the Christians a little, but not hard. So another one was shot. Then the woman ordered it stopped. They left the Christians all tied together. The other young men they herded into a group. The woman said these men would be trained to help liberate their homeland from the capitalist oppressors. She hadn’t said what would be done with the Christians.

“She didn’t tell us, but we found out,” the man said. He walked to the edge of the clearing, pointed down into the valley, and said, “We found their bodies down there.”

That had ended it. Except the man had embraced Osa, and she had embraced him hard and for quite a while. The man told her something, speaking too low for Moon to overhear even if he had wanted to.

It was a hard climb up the final ridge before Vin Ba’s valley. Moon stopped where the trees were thin at the top to let the engine cool and to give everyone what he had been calling a “comfort break.” Nguyen stayed inside, fiddling with the radio, telling them something about the U.S. Embassy. About helicopters. “Americans gone home now,” he said sadly. “Congs coming in Saigon now.” Osa listened a moment, then came down the ramp, wandered into the trees, and sat on a fallen tree trunk. Moon stood beside the APC looking through the binoculars.

From here, too, you could see the Mekong- barely visible through the gap where the valley opened into its narrower Cambodian flood plain. There was just a flash of reflected sunlight through the haze, but it could only be the river. It was a dramatic view and Moon stared at it a long time-though he hated the humid haze and the heat and everything that dirty river represented to him. if he didn’t look at it, he would have to look at Osa, sitting on a fallen tree behind the APC. He’d have to try to think of something to say to her. Something sympathetic and consoling but not stupid. Not something that would make her cry. Or maybe that would be better. They said one shouldn’t hold grief in.

He turned away from the river and stood beside her, looking down. She looked up, the question in her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Moon said.

She looked down, shook her head. “It’s okay.”

“Sorry I was too late.”

“It has nothing to do with late,” she said. “Or early.”

What do you say to that? He didn’t think of anything.

“I just didn’t believe him,” she said, looking up at Moon to see if he understood. “My brother, you know. He was always talking big. He was always full of his dreams.” She looked down again, studying her hands. “He told me when he went off to the seminary. I thought he was just being silly. Being romantic. We went on a kind of picnic, the day before he caught the plane. I said, ‘Damie, you’re being silly going off to be a minister. They’ll find out about you in a minute and toss you out. You’ll be right back here again and all of those girls who’ve been chasing after you, they’ll all be married and gone.’ And he said, ‘Oh, no. Not Damie. That was the Damie you used to know. Now-’” She stopped, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “He’d been reading a biography of Francis of Assisi, I think it was. One of the great medieval saints. He said he was done with chasing after girls. From now on, he would chase after God.”

She glanced up at Moon.

“Well,” Moon said.

She smiled. “I remember it so well. I punched him on the shoulder. I said, ‘Come on, Damie. Snap out of it. You’re dreaming.’ And he said-all excited-‘Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I’m dreaming, Osa. I’m going to be one of God’s saints. If I am man enough.’”

She looked up at him, waiting.

“Well,” Moon said, “he was man enough. And the way I remember what they tried to teach us in our religion class, he made it in as a saint.”

“I loved him,” Osa said. “He was a crazy little brother, but I loved him.”

Just as he had feared, he had started her really crying. He sat on the tree trunk beside her and hugged her against him and let her weep.

On the long roll down the final hillside into Via Ba, Nguyen Nung’s fear of ambush kicked in again. High in the hills he had become relatively relaxed.

Osa had stood in the hatch, watching, while Nguyen sat on the bench fiddling with the radio. The news he was hearing seemed overwhelmingly bad-serious enough for Nguyen to tap Moon on the shoulder and try to explain things. First it was more about the Americans being “all gone home.” They’d been hearing that the previous evening, that helicopters were flying in and flying out loaded with refugees from the U.S. Embassy. Not much new there. Nguyen’s next burst of excitement brought Osa down from the hatch to join him in listening.

“What’s happening now?” Moon shouted.

“I guess it’s all over,” Osa said. “The war. I think Nguyen is saying that North Vietnamese tanks broke into the presidential palace and captured everybody. He thinks the man talking now is the new president, announcing the war is over. They seem to be broadcasting orders to South Vietnamese units, telling them to quit fighting and surrender.”

Moon digested that. The Communists had won, then. No more South Vietnam. But from their point of view, maybe the best possible news. He tried to imagine what would be happening. Wild celebrations by the winners. Confusion. Despair. People fleeing the country. Who would notice an M-l 13 APC rolling across the delta flying a Vietcong flag? Who would care?

The trail they were following leveled. The trees thinned as they reached the edge of the valley. Moon stopped the APC. Nguyen remained in the hatch above him, methodically studying the houses through the binoculars.

“Ho!” he shouted suddenly. “People!”

Moon reached up for the binoculars, but Nguyen had already handed them to Osa, standing in the other hatch. Moon waited, nervous. What now? What would they do about Mr. Lee?

“I see Mr. Lee,” Osa said. “And a woman is with him.” She ducked out of the hatch and handed Moon the glasses.

The woman looked to Moon more like a girl. A teenager, perhaps. She sat in the shade of a hut beside one of the houses with Lee sitting across from her. No one else was in sight. A peaceful scene. Moon remembered the pigs. Of course, someone would still be there. The owner of the tethered pigs would have heard their APC approaching this morning. Time enough to hide, but not to hide the pigs.

“Let’s go,” Moon said. He didn’t want to allow hope to revive. It was still impossible. But hope revived without permission.

Through the driver’s slit he could see Mr. Lee waiting beside the irrigation ditch, the girl standing at his side. Lee shouted something. Nguyen shouted an answer. They exchanged more shouts. Moon cut the ignition, stretched, forced himself to be patient for a dignified moment. Then he followed Osa and Nguyen out the rear ramp. Mr. Lee was expressing condolences and ‘Osa was accepting them with her usual grace.

“And you,” she said. “Did you find your kam taap?”

Mr. Lee’s tired old face developed a smile of such luminous joy that no other answer was necessary. But he said, “Yes! Yes!” And pressed his hands in front of his chest, and said “Yes!” again.

“And even more wonderful,” he said, turning toward Moon, “we have good news for Mr. Mathias too. I think we have found the child.”

But not quite yet.

The girl with Mr. Lee was Ta Le Vinh, who was twelve and a second cousin of Eleth Vinh. As Mr. Lee described her presence, a villager cleaning the ditch had seen the Khmer Rouge coming and had come running with the warning. A dozen people had headed for the woods without stopping for anything. Others had waited to collect food, or clothing, or valuables. They had been caught and marched away. Five of the villagers who made it to the woods had kept going, intending to cross the mountains and find refuge with relatives until the territory was safe again. Seven stayed behind, including Ta Le, her parents, and Daje Vinh, who was the mother of Eleth Vinh. And with Daje Vinh was Lila Vinh, the baby.

Mr. Lee was explaining this, with Ta Le listening intently. “After you drove away this morning, I went out there.” And Mr. Lee indicated a high meadow across the irrigation ditch. “I noticed how the arms of the hill enclosed it, giving it the proper slope. An excellent feng shui site. So I walked up there and found several shrines and several kam taap. Many of these, too, had been desecrated by the Khmers. They had shot them with their automatic rifles, breaking them to pieces. And one of them was the kam taap we have been seeking.”

“Wonderful,” Osa said. “They hadn’t broken it up?”

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Lee said, his smile undiminished. “Broken it up. But it doesn’t matter. I got a sack and picked everything up and brought it here.” He pointed to the house. “Another kam taap will be made. It is the bones that are important.” He looked at Moon for agreement. “There is where the spirit lives.”

“Right,” Moon said.

“Even then the good luck was already working. Miss Vinh and her family were watching me. They saw from what I was doing that I was a religious man. One who follows the teachings of the Lord Buddha could not be a Khmer Rouge. So Miss Vinh came out to learn who I was. She went back and told her family. But her parents said they would wait until the brother of Ricky Mathias came back in the vehicle so they could see him for themselves and be sure it was not a trick before they would come out of the woods.”

“That was sensible,” Moon said.

So Moon, Mr. Lee, and the Miss Vinh who was a second cousin of Eleth Vinh walked up into the meadow. Moon stood there in the hot afternoon sun, feeling foolish, sweat dripping from his nose, his eyebrows, trickling below his shoulder blades, feeling foolish and praying without words. Miss Vinh was pointing at him, shouting something toward the screen of trees. From the trees emerged a man, and just behind him a woman.

The woman carried a baby.

Moon realized he had not been breathing. He whooshed out a huge breath, inhaled another, and looked up at the sky. What is it that Muslims say? It came to him. God is good. God is good.

The adults proved to be the parents of Ta Le Vinh. The required courteous formalities of introduction were handled in an unusual hurry by Mr. Lee. The elder Vinhs were obviously nervous-not happy to be standing here in the open. It was said, they explained, that the Khmer Rouge followed a tactic of raiding a village, leaving just long enough for those who had escaped them to return, and then raiding it again. In another two days, they would return to their homes. Perhaps it would be safe then, and they had no place else to go.

Moon was shown the infant. He looked, hoping to see a family resemblance, perhaps to Victoria Mathias. He saw just another baby. Between one and two, he guessed, but small. Perhaps Ricky’s eyes.

The baby examined Moon with the same results, showing no sign she was particularly impressed.

“Ask them if the child’s grandmother is here,” Moon said to Mr. Lee. “The mother of Eleth Vinh. Is she here?”

Mr. Lee asked a short question. The answer was long and involved pointing. When translated it said that the elder Mrs. Vinh had been one of two refugees shot as they ran into the woods. Mrs. Vinh had been hit twice in the back. She had died last night.

The transaction was completed. Moon was handed the baby, who resisted the transfer by kicking and crying. Mr. Lee was handed a bundle of the supplies that go with babies. The Vinhs were told that the sacks of rice used as mine protection in the APC would be left behind for them. Farewells were said. The Vinhs disappeared into the woods. Moon and Mr. Lee plodded across the meadow, heading for the APC, with Nguyen Nung perched behind its.50, waiting for trouble, with Osa leaning against it, watching them.

Zero for three had turned into two for three.

Now he could go home. If he could get there. But where was the joy he should be feeling?

CAMBODIAN REDS ARE UPROOTING MILLIONS AS THEY IMPOSE A “PEASANT REVOLUTION”

– New York Times, MAY 9, 1975