Up Country

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

We continued north on Highway One, and the traffic became heavier as the sky lightened. Now and then I got the motorcycle up to one hundred KPH, and I got good at doing the Vietnamese horn-honking weave.

Susan said into my ear, “Before Cu Chi, when was the last time you drove a bike?”

“About twenty years ago.” I added, “You never forget. Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering.”

We passed the turnoff for Quang Tri City, and we saw the abandoned tank and the destroyed Buddhist high school where this all began. A while later, we crossed the bridge where the pillbox sat with my name inscribed inside.

Fifteen minutes later, we slowed down for Dong Ha Junction and passed slowly through the ugly truck stop town. As we came to the intersection of Highway 9, we saw two policemen in a yellow jeep parked on the opposite side of the road. They barely gave us a glance.

Susan said, “Those cops thought we were Montagnards.”

“I don’t know what they thought we were, but this limited edition bike stands out.”

“Only to you. There are so many new imported goods in this country that the Viets barely notice anymore.”

I wasn’t totally buying that. I had another thought and said, “I don’t see any other Montagnards on motorcycles.”

She replied, “I saw two.”

“Point them out to me next time.”

I continued on toward the DMZ. We were north of Highway 9 now, in the old marine area of operations, and I’d been on this stretch of road only once, when I caught a convoy to go see the Boston friend of mine who was stationed at Con Thien. He was in the field on an operation, so I missed him, but I left a note on his cot that he never saw.

There was a string of market stalls along the highway north of Dong Ha, but once I cleared them, I got the bike back up to one hundred KPH. I could see now from this perspective that it wasn’t as dangerous as Susan had made it look on the road to Cu Chi.

Within fifteen minutes, the landscape changed from bleak to dead, and I said to Susan, “I think we just crossed into the DMZ.”

“God… it’s devastated.”

I looked at this no-man’s-land, still uninhabited, pocked with bomb and shell craters, the white soil covered with straggly, stunted vegetation. If the moon had a few inches of rainfall, it would probably look like this.

I saw some barbed wire in the distance, and the wreck of a rusting Jeep, sitting in a posted minefield where even the metal scavengers wouldn’t go.

Up ahead in the mist, I could see the hazy outline of a bridge which I knew must cross the Ben Hai River. I slowed down and said to Susan, “When I was here, the bridge wasn’t.”

I drove onto the middle of the bridge and stopped. I looked at the river that had divided North and South Vietnam for twenty years and said, “This is it. I’m in North Vietnam.”

She said, “I’m still in South Vietnam. Pull up.”

“Walk.”

She got off the motorcycle, opened a saddlebag, and removed the manila envelope that held the photographs from Pyramide Island. With her cigarette lighter, she lit the corner of the envelope. The envelope blazed in her hand, and she held it until the last second, then dropped the flaming photos off the bridge and into the river.

We mounted up and continued on across the bridge.

On this side of the bridge was a statue of a North Vietnamese soldier, complete with pith helmet and an AK-47 rifle. He had the same lifeless eyes of the American statues at the Wall.

We continued on into former enemy territory. The farther we went away from the DMZ, the better the land looked, though there were still a large number of bomb craters and destroyed buildings dotting the landscape.

The road was no better here, and it was slick from the mist and drizzle. I kept wiping my goggles and face with my Montagnard scarf, and my leather jacket was shiny with moisture.

We passed a motorcycle going south, and the riders were dressed like we were. They waved as they passed, and we waved in return.

Susan said, “See? Even Montagnards think we’re Montagnards.”

Within an hour, we approached a good-sized town that had a sign that read Dong Hoi.

We entered the town, and I slowed down and looked around. What struck me was that the place looked more gloomy and run-down than anything I’d seen in the former South Vietnam. The cars and trucks were older, and there were not as many motor scooters or cyclos. Nearly everyone was riding a bicycle or walking, and their clothes looked dirty and worn. Also, there was not nearly as much commercial activity here as south of the DMZ; no bars, no shops, and only a few cafés. It reminded me of the first time I’d crossed from West Germany to East Germany.

Susan said, “This is Mr. Tram’s hometown — our guide at Khe Sanh.”

“I see why he moved.”

Again, we passed a parked yellow police jeep, and again the cop behind the wheel barely looked up from his cigarette. This might actually work.

Up ahead, I could see a convoy of military vehicles: open trucks and jeeps filled with soldiers and a few staff cars. I accelerated and began passing them.

I glanced to my right and saw that the drivers and passengers were all looking at us — actually, they were looking at Susan. Susan’s face was tightly wrapped in scarves, leather cap, and goggles, and for all they knew, she could have looked like their grandmothers, but they recognized a nice ass when they saw one, and they were waving and calling out to her. Susan had her face turned away modestly, which was what a Montagnard woman would do.

I looked at the driver of the open jeep next to me, and we made eye contact. I could see by his expression that he was trying to figure out what tribe I came from. In fact, I didn’t think I was passing for a Montagnard. I gassed the bike, and we accelerated up toward the front of the convoy and passed the lead vehicle.

Highway One was flat and ran near the coast on this stretch of the road, and we made good time, but the road was shared by so many different types of vehicles of varying size and power, along with bicycles, carts and pedestrians, that there was no such thing as cruising; it was an obstacle course, and you needed to keep alert and terrified at all times.

We were about two hundred kilometers from Hue, and it was almost 9 A.M., so we’d covered about 120 miles in two and a half hours. And Highway One was the easy part.

Up ahead, a mountain range to the west ran down to the South China Sea, as they have a habit of doing in this country, creating a high pass right beside the sea. As the road rose, bicyclists were walking their bikes, and the ox carts were getting slower. I moved to the left and accelerated. Within twenty minutes, we approached the crest of the twisting mountain pass. It was cold and windy up here, and I had trouble controlling the bike.

Before we got to the crest, I started noticing people on the road. They were wrapped in layers of filthy rags, their faces barely visible, and they were coming out of the rock formations, walking toward us with their hands out. Susan called into my ear, “Beggars.”

Beggars? They looked like extras in Revenge of the Mummy.

Susan yelled at them as we drove past, but some of them actually got their hands on us as we accelerated up the pass, and I had to weave around a bunch of them in the middle of the road.

I reached the crest of the pass, and we started down to the coastal plains. The bike skidded a few times on the slippery blacktop, and I kept downshifting.

Below, I could see that the flat rice paddies were flooded up to the dikes, and small clusters of peasants’ huts sat on little islands of dry ground. There were more pine trees here than palms and more burial mounds than I’d seen in the south. I recalled that North Vietnam had lost about two million people in the war, nearly ten percent of the population, and thus the countless burial mounds. War sucks.

An hour and a half from the mountain pass, we approached a large town. I turned onto a dirt road and drove until I got the bike out of sight of the highway.

Susan and I dismounted and stretched. We also used the facilities, which consisted of a bush.

I took the map out of the zippered leather pouch and looked at it. I said to her, “That town just ahead is Vinh.”

She informed me, “That’s a tourist town. We can stop there if you want to make that phone call to the Century Riverside.”

“Why is it a tourist town?”

“Just outside Vinh is the birthplace of Ho Chi Minh.”

“And there are Westerners there?”

She replied, “I don’t think many Westerners care about Uncle Ho’s birthplace, but you can be sure Vidotour does, so the place is a must-see. Also, it’s about halfway between Hue and Hanoi, so it’s the overnight stop for the tour buses.”

“Okay. We’ll stop there and get Uncle Ho T-shirts.”

She opened a saddlebag and took out two bananas. “You want a banana, or a banana?”

We ate the bananas standing up and drank some bottled water as I studied the map. I said, “About two hundred klicks from here is a town called Thanh Hoa. When we get there, we need to look for a road that heads west. Take a look. We need to get to Route 6, which takes us to… well, it’s supposed to take us to Dien Bien Phu, but I see that it ends before it gets there… then there’s a smaller road to Dien Bien Phu.”

Susan looked at the map and said, “I don’t think that last stretch qual-ifies as a road.”

I said, “Okay, let’s take off the Montagnard stuff and try to look like Lien Xo on a pilgrimage to Uncle Ho’s birthplace.”

We took off the tribal scarves and the leather hats and stuffed them in a saddlebag.

We mounted up and drove back to Highway One.

Within a few minutes, we were on the outskirts of the town of Vinh. On the right was a painted billboard, and I slowed down so Susan could read it.

She said, “It says… ‘The town of Vinh was totally destroyed by American bombers and naval artillery… between 1965 and 1972… and has been rebuilt by the people of Vinh… with the help of our socialist brothers of the German Democratic Republic…’”

“That’s a real tourist draw.”

As we entered the town, it did indeed look like East Berlin on a bad day; block after block of drab, gray concrete housing, and other concrete buildings of indeterminate function.

A few people on the street glanced at us, and I was having second thoughts about stopping. “Are you sure there are Westerners in this town?”

“Maybe it’s off-season.”

We came to a Y-intersection at a park, and Susan said, “Go left.”

I took the left fork and, as it turned out, this was the street that took us to the center of town, another Le Loi Street, on which we made a right turn. I wondered how she knew that.

There were a number of hotels on the left side of the street, and none of them would be mistaken for the Rex. In fact, I’ve never seen such grim-looking places, not even in East Germany, and I wondered if the East Germans were playing a joke on the Viets. In any case, I saw tour buses and Westerners on the street, which made me feel better.

I said to Susan, “Maybe you can try the call from one of these hotels.”

She replied, “I have a better chance of getting through from the post office. Also, if I can’t get through by phone, the GPO will have a fax and telex.” She added, “You can’t choose your long-distance carrier here.”

We drove around awhile and spotted the post office. Susan got off and walked directly into the building.

A few passersby gave me a glance, but thanks to Uncle Ho, I didn’t attract too much attention. After about ten minutes, a yellow jeep pulled up beside me with two cops in it. The cop in the passenger seat was staring at me.

I ignored him, but he yelled something at me, and I had no choice but to look at him.

He was saying something, and I thought he was motioning for me to dismount, then I realized he was asking me about the motorcycle. Recalling that foreigners were not supposed to drive anything this big, and knowing that the BMW had Hue license plates, I said in French, “Le tour de Hanoi à Hue.”

The cop didn’t seem to understand, and quite frankly I don’t understand my own French half the time. I repeated, “Le tour de Hanoi à Hue,” which didn’t fully explain why I was sitting in front of the post office, but the cop in the passenger seat was now speaking to the cop behind the wheel, and I could tell that the driver understood something.

The cop in the passenger seat gave me a hard, cop look, said something in Vietnamese, and the yellow jeep pulled away.

I took a deep breath, and for the first time in my life, I thanked God that I passed for a Frenchman.

I was going to dismount and go find Susan, but I saw her coming out of the post office. She jumped on, and I drove onto Le Loi Street, which I’d figured out was Highway One, and within five minutes, we were out of Vinh. A sign on the side of the road said in about a dozen languages, Birthplace of Ho Chi Minh; 15 Kilometers. I said to Susan, “Want to see the log cabin where Uncle Ho was born?”

“Drive.”

We continued north on Highway One.

Susan said to me, “I couldn’t get through by phone, so I telexed and faxed. I had to wait for a reply.”

“Bottom line.”

“The book hasn’t arrived, or so Mr. Tin said in his telex.”

I didn’t reply.

She said, “But the book is worth about fifteen bucks to a backpacker or a tourist who doesn’t have a guidebook… and we’re not there… so, it’s possible that Mr. Tin did get it, and it’s now for sale. That’s a lot of bucks here.”

Again, I didn’t reply.

Susan said, “There was a message, however, from Colonel Mang. For me.”

I didn’t ask what it said, but Susan told me. “Colonel Mang wishes me a safe trip and hopes I enjoyed the photographs.”

I didn’t reply.

She added, “He also said he noticed bathing suits in my apartment, and he’s sorry I forgot them.”

We approached the turnoff for Ho Chi Minh’s birthplace, where two mini-buses of Western tourists were turning in. I pulled over and took Susan’s camera out of the backpack and snapped a photo of the sign, in case this film wound up in the hands of the local police. I said to Susan, “I got the once-over from a couple of cops in a jeep. I convinced them I was a Frenchman on a cross-country motorcycle race. My Parisian accent impressed them.”

“The North Viets have some positive feelings for the French.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. But in Hanoi, you’ll see middle-aged men wearing berets, and it’s still très chic to speak a little French among that age group and to affect French manners and read French literature. In Hanoi, they consider the French to be cultured, and the Americans to be uncouth, materialistic, war-mongering capitalists.”

“That doesn’t make us bad people.”

She tried to smile, then got pensive. She said, “I’m upset about those photographs.”

I replied, “I’m upset about the book not showing up.”

She looked at me and nodded. “Sorry.” She asked, “What do we do about the book not showing up?”

I thought about that. Mr. Anh could have spent some time strapped to a table as Colonel Mang clipped electrodes to his testicles and cranked up the juice. If that was the case, Mr. Anh would have said, “Dien Bien Phu! Ban Hin!” and anything else that Colonel Mang wanted to hear.

Susan asked again, “What do you want to do?”

“Well… we could go to Hanoi and try to get out of here on the first flight to anywhere. Or we can go to Dien Bien Phu. For sure, we can’t sit here all day.”

She thought a moment, then said, “Dien Bien Phu.”

I reminded her, “You said my Vietnam luck has run out.”

“It has; you were mistaken for a Frenchman. My luck is still good, notwithstanding my Playboy centerfold. Let’s roll.”

I kicked the BMW into gear and accelerated onto the highway.

Susan leaned forward and looked at the gas gauge. She said, “We need gas. We just passed a station. Turn around.”

“There should be another one up ahead. Some of them give away rice bowls with a fill-up.”

“Paul, turn around.”

I made a sharp U-turn, and we pulled into the gas station and up to a hand crank pump. I shut off the engine, and we dismounted.

The attendant sat in a small open concrete structure and watched us, but didn’t move. Clearly, this was a state-owned facility, and unlike anything I’d seen south of the DMZ. It was still very socialist here, and the good news about capitalist greed and consumer marketing had not reached into Uncle Ho territory yet.

I turned the hand crank, and Susan held the nozzle in the gas fill.

Susan said, “Crank faster.”

“I’m cranking as fast as a European socialist would crank.”

She said to me, “When we pay this guy, we’re French.”

“Bon.”

I squeezed thirty-five liters into the big tank, and I looked at the total. I said, “Twenty-one thousand dong. That’s not bad. About two bucks.”

She said, “It’s in hundreds, Paul. Two hundred and ten thousand dong. Still cheap.”

“Good. You pay.”

The gas station attendant had wandered over, and Susan said to him, “Bonjour, monsieur.”

I added, “Comment ça va?”

He didn’t reply in any language, but looked at the bike as Susan counted out 210,000 dong with Uncle Ho’s picture on the notes. I pointed to Uncle Ho and said, “Numero uno hombre,” which may have been the wrong language. Susan kicked my ankle.

The attendant looked us over, then looked again at the bike. We mounted up, and Susan said to the guy, “Le tour de Hue”Hanoi.”

I accelerated out of there before the guy got wise to us.

We continued north on Highway One, then we pulled over and got into our Montagnard scarves and the fur-trimmed leather hats.

Susan said to me, “Why the hell did you say ‘numero uno hombre’?”

“You know — Uncle Ho is a number one guy.”

“That was Spanish.”

“What difference does it make? You’re French, I’m Spanish.”

“Sometimes your joking around is inappropriate for the situation.”

I thought about that and replied, “It’s an old habit. Infantry guys do that when it gets tense. Cops, too. Maybe it’s a guy thing.”

She informed me, “Sometimes you make the situation worse with your smart-ass remarks — like with Colonel Mang, and you and Bill going to Princeton together.”

Susan was in a bitchy mood, and I hoped it was PMS and not morning sickness.

Highway One was the only major north”south artery in this congested country, and even though traffic was supposed to be light because of the holiday, it seemed like half the population was using the two pathetic lanes of bad blacktop. We never got above sixty KPH, and every inch of the road was a challenge.

It took us nearly two hours to travel the hundred kilometers to the next major town of Thanh Hoa. It was pushing 3 P.M., and it was getting cold. The sky was heavy with gray clouds, and now and then we passed through an area of light rain; crachin, rain dust. My stomach was growling.

I called back to Susan, “This should be Thanh Hoa. This is the first place we can head west and north toward Route 6.”

“Your call.”

I looked at the odometer. We’d come almost 560 kilometers from Hue, and it had taken us over eight hours. It was now 3:16 P.M., and we had less than four hours of daylight left.

I played around with a few options and decided that since it wasn’t raining, I should get on the bad road now, and get as close as I could to Route 6 before the sun set; tomorrow could be raining and the next secondary road to Route 6 could be impassable, which was what Mr. Anh had been trying to tell me in his little briefing. I said to Susan, “We’ll take the road out of Thanh Hoa. If we don’t like it, we can go back and try the next one.”

We entered the town of Thanh Hoa, still wearing our Montagnard scarves and leather hats. The town apparently hadn’t been obliterated in the war, and it had a little charm. In fact, I saw an old gent wearing a beret, and there were a few hotels and cafés that hadn’t been built by the East Germans.

A few people glanced at us, and a few cops in front of the police station gave us the eye.

Susan said, “They don’t see that many Montagnards on the coast, so they’re curious, but not suspicious. It’s like American Indians coming into a Western town.”

“Are you making this up?”

“Yes.”

We got through the town, and I saw a small, blacktopped road to the left. A sign said Dong Son and something in Vietnamese. I slowed down and pointed.

Susan said, “It’s an archaeological site… the Dong Son culture, whatever that is… one thousand years before the common era. Maybe the road is newer.”

I turned into the narrow road and drove about a hundred meters, then stopped.

I pulled the map out of the pouch and looked at it. I said, “This is the road. We take this about fifty klicks to some little village called Bai-what-ever, then head north on Route 15 to Route 6.”

“Let me see that.”

I handed her the map, and she studied it in silence. She put the map in her jacket and said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

I kicked the BMW into gear and off we went. The road passed the archaeological digs, then the blacktop disappeared. The dirt road was rutted from carts and vehicles, and I kept the motorcycle between the ruts, which was a little better.

We were barely bouncing along at forty KPH, a little over twenty miles an hour, less sometimes.

The terrain was still flat, but rising. There were some rice paddies, but these disappeared and vegetable plots took over.

The BMW Paris-Dakar was indeed a good dirt bike, but the dirt wasn’t so good. I had trouble holding on to the grips, and my ass was more off the saddle than on. Susan was holding on to me tight. I said, “We’re going to feel this in the morning.”

“I feel it now.”

It took us nearly two hours to cover the forty kilometers to the end of the road. We entered the little village called Bai-something, and the road ended in a T-junction. I took the road to the right, which was Route 15, and the dirt was in better condition. In fact, there was gravel on the road, and the road was crowned and had drainage ditches on both sides.

According to the map, it was over a hundred kilometers to Route 6, and at this speed, it would take at least four hours to get there. It was now 5:40 P.M., and the sun was going down behind the mountains to my left.

The road rose into the hills ahead, and I could see higher hills with mountains behind them. We didn’t speak much because it was hard to get the words out with all the bouncing.

It was almost dark, and I was looking for a place to stop for the night. We were definitely in the hills now, and the Viets didn’t live much away from the towns, villages, and agricultural areas. Pine trees came up to the sides of the road, and it was getting spooky. I stopped the bike and took a rest. I said to Susan, “Maybe there’s a ski lodge up ahead.”

She took the map out of her jacket and looked at it. “There’s a village up ahead called Lang Chanh, about twenty klicks.”

I thought a moment, then said, “I don’t think I want to go into a North Viet village after dark.”

“Neither do I.”

“Well… I guess this is it.” I looked around. “Let’s find a place to hide us and the bike.”

“Paul, nothing is moving on this road now. You could sleep in the middle of it.”

“Good point.” I wheeled the bike up a few meters and rested it against the trunks of some pine trees.

Susan opened a saddlebag and took out the last two bananas, the last bottle of water, and the two rain ponchos.

We sat near the bike with our backs against two pine trees, and I peeled my banana. I said, “Here’s some good news. No land leeches in the pine forest.”

“Chiggers and ticks.”

We ate the bananas and drank the water and watched the light fade. There was a thick cloud cover, and it was pitch dark around us. We could hear sounds in the pine forest, like small animals scurrying around.

She lit a cigarette and looked at the map by the flame of her cigarette lighter. She said, “Another four hundred kilometers to Dien Bien Phu.”

We sat in silence and listened to the night. I asked her, “Did you camp out as a kid?”

“Not when I could avoid it. Did you?”

“Well, not when I lived in South Boston. But in the army, I camped out a lot. I once figured that I spent over six hundred nights under the stars. Sometimes it’s nice.”

A loud clap of thunder rolled through the hills and a breeze came up. It was either cold here, or I’d been in ’Nam too long. I said, “Sometimes it’s not.”

Susan lit another cigarette and asked me, “Want one? It curbs your appetite.”

“I just had a banana.”

It started to rain, and we put our ponchos over our heads. We moved closer together to conserve body heat and wrapped the ponchos tighter around us. I said, “Crachin. Rain dust.”

“No, this is real fucking rain.”

The rain got heavier, and the wind got stronger.

Susan asked me, “How much are they paying you for this?”

“Just expenses.”

She laughed.

We were both soaked, and we started to shiver. I remembered these cold, wet evenings in the winter of 1968, dug into the mud with nothing more than a rubber poncho, and the sky was filled with pyrotechnics that had a terrible beauty in the black rain.

Susan must have been thinking the same thing, and she asked me, “Is this how it was?”

“Sort of… actually, it was worse because you knew it was going to be the same every night until the winter rains ended in March… and you had the extra problem of people on the prowl who were trying to kill you.” I paused and said, “That’s it for the war, Susan. It’s over. Really.”

“Okay. That’s it for the war. The war is over.”

We wrapped the ponchos around us, and lay down together in the rain under the pine trees.

It rained through the night, and we shivered in the rubber ponchos and got as close as we could to each other.

Tomorrow was Dien Bien Phu, if we made it, then the hamlet of Ban Hin, and the person or grave of Tran Van Vinh.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

A gray dawn filtered through the dripping pine trees.

We unwrapped ourselves from the wet ponchos, yawned and stretched. We were both soaking wet and cold, and a chill had seeped into my bones. Susan didn’t look well.

We shook out our ponchos and rolled them up. We opened the saddlebags and took out dry socks, underwear, and clothes from our backpacks, changed, and threw our wet jeans and shirts into the trees; we didn’t need many more days of clothes. Maybe fewer than we thought.

Susan had more Montagnard scarves in the saddlebags, and we used one to wipe down the bike, then put on the others and changed tribes.

We did a quick map check and got on the BMW. The engine started easily, and off we went, north on Route 15 to Route 6.

The road was mostly red clay and bits of shale that provided some traction if I didn’t gas the engine too quickly.

A kilometer up the road, I spotted a small waterfall cascading from a rock formation into a stream by the side of the road.

I pulled over, and Susan and I washed up with a piece of orange soap she’d brought along, and we drank some cold and hopefully clean water.

We mounted up and continued on. There wasn’t anything moving on the road except us, but I couldn’t get the speed past sixty KPH without losing control. Every bone and muscle in my body ached, and the last real meal I’d eaten had been in the sixteen-sided pavilion restaurant, and that was Sunday, New Year’s Day. Today was Wednesday.

We approached the small village of Lang Chanh, and beyond the village was the beginning of the higher hills, and beyond that, the mountains whose peaks I couldn’t see because of the low clouds and mountain mist.

I slowed down as we entered the squalid village of bamboo huts and ramshackle pine log structures. It was just a little after 7 A.M., and I could smell rice and fish cooking.

There were a few people around and lots of chickens. Susan said, “I need to get something to eat.”

“I thought you had a banana yesterday.”

She put her hands around my throat and playfully squeezed. Then she wrapped her arms around me and laid her head on my shoulder. I noticed her arms weren’t very tight around my chest, and I knew we needed to get some food.

We passed through Lang Chanh and continued on. The road rose more steeply here, but the BMW was an incredible machine, and it ate up the mud as we climbed into the high hills.

Susan said in my ear, “This is actually nice. Almost fun. I like this.”

It was actually fun, in the middle of nowhere, on the way to the end of nowhere.

I had no way of telling how high we were, but the map had shown benchmark elevations of 1,500 to 2,000 meters, over a mile high on the mountain peaks, so we were about half that elevation on this road. It was cold, but there was no wind, and the drizzle had stopped, though the cloud layer had not one break in it.

Now and then I saw huge stands of mountain bamboo surrounded by taller pine trees, and I was reminded of corn fields in Virginia, surrounded by towering forests of white pines. I recalled from last time I was here that when things that don’t look anything like home start to look like things from home, then it’s time to go home.

I glanced at my odometer and saw we’d come forty kilometers from Lang Chanh, so right ahead should be the village of Thuoc. The last forty klicks on Route 15 had taken an hour, but I felt confident I could make up some time when I reached Route 6, which was designated on the map as an improved road, though that’s a relative term.

The road swung sharply to the left and a few minutes later, I slowed down for Thuoc, which looked like Lang Chanh, except there were fewer chickens here.

As we passed through the village, a few people followed us with their eyes. I was fairly sure that they saw dirt bikes now and then, and I was also sure they couldn’t tell what or who we were. I could tell what they were, however, ethnic Vietnamese, so we weren’t yet in hill tribe territory and, in fact, I hadn’t seen any longhouses.

We continued on for another twenty or thirty kilometers, and the hills got higher. The road followed a mountain stream, and up ahead I could see towering peaks. I have a good sense of direction, and though the sun wasn’t visible, I knew we were going the wrong way.

I pulled over, stopped, and looked at the map. I studied it awhile, then scanned the terrain, trying to figure out which way I was heading. I’m a good terrain map reader, but the map wasn’t that good, and there was not one single road marker. “Moss grows on what side of the tree?”

“Are we lost?”

“No, we are, as they say in the army, temporarily disoriented.”

“We’re lost.”

“Whatever.”

We both got off the bike, put our heads together, and looked at the map. I said, “I think we were supposed to turn someplace near Thuoc in order to stay on Route 15, but I didn’t see a sign or a road.”

Susan put her finger on the map and said, “When 15 swung west on that curve before Thuoc, the road continued on as Route 214, which is where we are. We needed to turn hard right to stay north on 15.”

I said, “The Laotian border is just ahead.”

“And that means border guards and soldiers.”

“Right. Let’s get out of here.”

I started to wheel the bike around and noticed on a ridgeline ahead, smoke curling into the air, and the silhouettes of longhouses against the gray sky. I said, “We’re in Montagnard territory.”

She looked around at the hills and asked, “Are there FULRO here?”

“I don’t know. I’m new at this FULRO stuff, despite what Mang thinks.” As I was swinging the bike around, I heard something and looked down the road in the direction we’d come from. Coming toward us was an open dark green army jeep with two men in the front. “Jump on.”

We both jumped on, and I started the engine. The bike was pointed perpendicular to the narrow road, and I had my choice of going toward the jeep and passing them, or heading west toward the Laotian border, where they were going; neither of these were my first choice.

The jeep was less than a hundred meters from me now, and the driver spotted us. He purposely put the jeep in the center of the narrow road so I couldn’t squeeze past him, thereby limiting my choices to one.

I cut the wheel to the right, kicked it into gear, and accelerated toward the Laotian border.

Susan called out, “Paul, we could stop and try to talk our way out of this. We haven’t done anything wrong.”

“We’re dressed as Montagnards, and we’re not Montagnards. We’re Americans, as our passports say, and I don’t want to have to explain what we’re doing here.”

I looked in my rearview mirror, and I saw that the jeep was keeping up with me. I was doing seventy KPH and the bike was handling well, but I had trouble staying in the saddle, and Susan was holding on for dear life.

To make matters worse, I was heading toward the border post where I’d be stopped, or where I could charge right through, ducking AK-47 automatic rifle fire from the Viets, and probably from the Laotian border guards on the other side, who were also Commies and sort of friendly to the Viets now and then. So, this was like hammer and anvil; the guys in the jeep were the hammer, the border post was the anvil, and we were hamburger meat.

I glanced in my rearview mirror again and saw that the jeep was a little farther back; he was just going to follow me until I got to the border, which must be very close now, then we’d have a chat. I looked for a place to try to put the bike in the hills to my left or right, but it didn’t seem possible, and the soldiers behind me knew that.

Susan said, “Paul, if you don’t stop or slow down, they’re going to assume we’re running from them. Please, stop. I can’t hold on. I’m going to fall. Slow down and pull over and see if they just want to pass us. Paul, I’m going to fall off. Please.”

I slowed down and moved the motorcycle to the right and the jeep started to gain on us. I said to Susan, “Okay… we’ll just take it easy here and see what they want.” We pulled off our scarves and leather hats.

I had the strong feeling this was the end of the road.

The jeep was right behind us now, and the soldier in the passenger seat was standing, holding an AK-47 rifle. The jeep drew abreast of us, and the guy with the rifle looked us over. He shouted, “Dung lai! Dung lai!” which used to be my line back in ’68. He motioned with his rifle for me to pull over and stop.

As I started to slow down, I saw a strange expression on the guy’s face, then a loud explosion right beside my head, and the soldier with the rifle did sort of a backflip. The rifle went flying, and he fell in the rear of the open seat. Another gunshot rang out, and the driver’s head exploded. The jeep bucked to a halt and stalled, then rolled slowly backward down the slope until its rear wheels went into the ditch.

I stopped the motorcycle.

I sat there staring straight ahead. I could smell the gunpowder. Without turning, I said to Susan, “You swore you left the gun in Hue.”

She didn’t reply, but dismounted and walked over to the jeep, the Colt .45 still smoking from the barrel.

She paid no attention to the driver, who had half his skull missing, but very expertly she examined the other soldier, who was sprawled half in the back of the jeep. She said, “They’re both dead.” She stuck the .45 under her quilted jacket. “Thank you for slowing down.”

I didn’t reply.

We looked at each other for a few seconds. Finally, she said, “I couldn’t let them stop us.”

I didn’t reply.

She took out a cigarette and lit it. Her hand was steady as a rock. I knew I was in the presence of someone who was no stranger to guns.

She took a few drags, then threw the cigarette in the water and watched it flow downstream. She asked, “What do you think we should do with this mess?”

I said, “Leave it. They’ll think it was the FULRO. But we have to take the rifles to make it look like it was them.”

She nodded and went over to the jeep and collected two AK-47s and a Chicom pistol from the holster of the driver.

I went to the jeep and took the extra magazines and threw them into the woods, then took their wallets, cigarettes, and watches and stuffed everything in my pockets.

I looked at the two dead men covered with blood and gore, but I didn’t get any flashbacks; that was then, this was here and now, and one had nothing to do with the other. Well, maybe a little.

Susan rummaged around the open jeep for a few seconds and found a cellophane bag of dried fruit. She opened the bag and offered it to me.

I shook my head.

She grabbed a handful of the dried fruit, put it in her mouth, chewed and swallowed, then put another handful in her mouth and stuck the bag in her side pocket.

We walked back to the motorcycle, each carrying an AK-47 slung over our shoulders.

I turned the bike around, we mounted up, and started downhill on the muddy road, back toward Thuoc, where I’d missed my turn.

Before we got to Thuoc, I stopped, and we tossed the rifles, the pistol, and the personal effects of the dead men into a thicket of bamboo.

We continued on and reached Thuoc. I saw the turn now, and got back on Route 15.

We rode in silence. We crossed a wooden bridge over a mountain stream, and drove through the village of Quan Hoa. After another twenty kilometers, we intersected with Route 6, and I turned left, west toward Dien Bien Phu.

It was a decent road, two narrow lanes, but wide enough for two trucks to pass in opposite directions if they squeezed hard to their right. The road surface was a sort of oiled gravel, which now and then turned to thin asphalt. I got the BMW up to eighty KPH.

Most of the sparse traffic consisted of logging trucks, a few four-wheel drives, and now and then a motorcycle. I saw no motor scooters or ox carts, and no bicycles or pedestrians; this was, indeed, the road to and from nowhere.

To the left rose the hills and mountains that ran along the Laotian border, and to the right were more hills, and beyond them were the towering peaks of what was called the Tonkinese Alps.

All in all, it was a spectacular road, though now and then the surface deteriorated without warning, and I had to slow down.

The general direction of the road was northwest and uphill. As we got farther west, the few signs of habitation disappeared, except for the smoke from hill tribe settlements, rising out of the forest and into the misty air, the smoke sometimes indistinguishable from the mountain fog.

I drove for two hours, and neither Susan nor I spoke a word. Finally, she said, “Are you going to speak to me?”

I didn’t reply.

“I need to make a pit stop.”

Up ahead, I could see a flat area off to the side where pine trees had been cleared. There was a small culvert in the stream, and I drove over it and stopped among the pine stumps. I shut off the engine.

I sat there for a minute, then dismounted. Susan, too, dismounted, but did not use the facilities. She stretched, lit a cigarette, and put her foot up on a tree stump. She turned to me and said, “Say something, Paul.”

“I have nothing to say.”

“Tell me I did a good job.”

“You did a good job.”

“Thank you.” She said, “I couldn’t let them stop us.”

“So you said.”

“Well… if you hadn’t taken a wrong turn, none of that would have happened.”

“Sorry. Shit happens.”

She watched the smoke curl from her cigarette. After a while, she said, “The part that’s true is that I’m madly in love with you.”

“Is that the good news or the bad news?”

She ignored that and said, “And that’s the part they don’t like… if they believe it.”

I said, “I think that’s the part I wouldn’t like either, if I believed it.”

“Please don’t say that.”

“Do you need to go behind a bush?”

“No. We need to talk.”

“No, we don’t.”

“We do.” She glanced at me and said, “Okay, I do work for the CIA, but I’m also a real civilian employee of American-Asian, so neither of us has any direct government involvement, and they could let us hang if they wanted to. And, no, they really didn’t want you to dump me, they wanted you to trust me, so they told you to dump me. And, yes, I’m supposed to keep an eye on you…” She smiled and said, “I’m your guardian angel.” She continued, “And yes, I was involved with Bill, and yes, he really is the CIA station chief, and they’ll go ballistic if they find out I told you, and no, they didn’t tell me to sleep with you — that was my idea. Made the job easier, but yes, I did fall in love with you… and yes, they really are suspicious of me now because they know or suspect that we’re sexually and romantically involved, and I don’t care.”

She looked at me, then continued, “And no, I don’t know what Tran Van Vinh knows or saw, but yes, I know all about this mission, except for the name of the village, which they didn’t want me carrying around in my head, and at 4 P.M. on Sunday, after you met Mr. Anh, I met with him, and he briefed me about everything I didn’t know except the name of the village, which he could give only to you.” She added, “He says he likes you and trusts you to do the job.” She looked at me and asked, “Did I miss anything?”

“The Pham family.”

She nodded. “Right. That was an arranged meeting in front of the cathedral. This motorcycle was already bought, and you passed your motorcycle driving test on the way to Cu Chi.” She added, “I met Pham Quan Uyen last time I was in Hue. He can be trusted.”

“That’s more than I can say about you.”

She looked upset. “Okay… don’t trust me. But ask me anything you’d like, and I swear I’ll tell you the truth.”

“You swore you were telling me the whole truth back in Saigon, Nha Trang, and Hue. You also swore you didn’t have the gun.”

“I needed the gun. We needed the gun in case something like what happened, happened.”

I said to her, “And you need the gun to blow Tran Van Vinh’s brains out. Correct?”

She didn’t reply.

I asked her, “Why does he need to be killed?”

She replied, “I swear I don’t know. We’re about to find out, though.” She added, “I believe he’s alive.”

“So, you’ve agreed to kill a man without knowing why.”

“You killed people without knowing why.”

“They were trying to kill me.”

She looked at me and said, “How many of them were actually trying to kill you?”

“All of them. Don’t try to turn this back on me, Susan. I may have been a combat soldier, but I was never an assassin.”

“Never?”

I wanted to tell her to go to hell, but then she’d bring up the A Shau Valley, and whatever else I’d been stupid enough to tell her, and I really didn’t want to go there.

She said, “Look, Paul… I know you’re angry, and you have every right to be angry. But this isn’t as cold-blooded and devious as it seems—”

“Fooled me.”

“Let me finish. They told me they picked you because you were good, but also because your boss thinks a lot of you personally. He wanted to resurrect your career, or at least have it end well—”

“Like me being killed? How good is that?”

She continued, “He also thought that if you came back here, it would be good for you, and good for… your relationship with… your girlfriend. So, don’t be so cynical. People care about you.”

“Please. If I’d had lunch, I’d blow it now.”

She moved closer to me and said, “I’d like to think there’s a human element in what we do… I mean, as Americans. We’re not bad people, though we sometimes do bad things. And I think we do them with the hope that we’re doing the bad things for a good reason. In another country, they’d just have sent two assassins to kill this guy, and end of story. But we don’t work that way. We want to be certain that if something has to be done with this man, that’s he’s the guy we’re actually looking for, and that what he knows, if anything, cannot be dealt with in any other way.” She looked at me and said, “I’m not going to walk up to a guy named Tran Van Vinh and blow his brains out.” She added, “We may take him with us to Hanoi.”

“Are you finished?”

“Yes.”

“Can we go now?”

“Not until you tell me that you really believe that I love you. I don’t care about anything else. If you want, we can turn around right here and drive to Hanoi. Tell me what you want to do, or what you want me to do.”

I thought about that and said, “Well, what I really want to do is to push on, find this guy, and find out what the fuck this is all about.” I looked at her and said, “And what I want you to do is to go back to Saigon or to Hanoi or Washington or wherever the hell you came from.”

She stared at me a long time. Then she reached into her jacket and pulled out the Colt .45.

I looked at the gun — you always keep your eye on the weapon — and it looked bigger than a Colt .45 in her small hand.

She turned the butt toward me and handed me the gun. I took it. She pulled two extra magazines out of her pocket and put them in my other hand. She pulled her backpack out of a saddlebag and put it on.

I looked at her face and saw tears streaming from her eyes. She didn’t say anything, but took my head in both her hands, kissed me hard on the lips, turned and walked quickly across the road.

She stood there, not looking at me, but looking at the Hanoi-bound traffic. A four-wheel drive vehicle approached driven by a Viet with two male passengers, and Susan held up her hand. The vehicle slowed down and pulled onto the shoulder.

Well… I could let her go, then I’d regret it down the road and wind up chasing the four-wheel drive halfway to Hanoi. Or I could call out to her and tell her I changed my mind. Or I could let her go for real.

Susan was crouched down and speaking to the two Viets in the front seat. The rear door opened, and she got in without looking at me. The driver pulled back on the road.

I crossed the road and stood in front of the vehicle. The driver turned his head toward Susan, then he stopped. I went around to the rear door and opened it. I said to her, “Let’s go.”

She said something to the three Viet guys, who all smiled.

She got out, and I slammed the door. The vehicle continued on.

Susan and I crossed the road, and she put her backpack in a saddlebag. We mounted the motorcycle. I turned to her, and our eyes met. She was crying again, but silently, which I don’t mind too much. I said to her, “If you’re lying about being in love with me, I swear to God, I’ll blow your brains out. Understand?”

She nodded.

I started the engine, kicked the bike into gear, and we got on the road.

We continued farther into the mountains toward Dien Bien Phu, where an army had met its fate, and where my fate had been waiting patiently.

CHAPTER FORTY

We continued northwest on Route 6. It was just before noon, and the fuel gauge showed less than half a tank. We weren’t going to make it all the way to Dien Bien Phu without refueling. If Susan wasn’t on the motorcycle, I might have been able to reach Dien Bien Phu on this tank of gas. Then again, if Susan wasn’t on the motorcycle, I might be in a military prison answering difficult questions.

But to take it a step further back, to the rooftop restaurant of the Rex Hotel, my life had taken a wrong turn sometime between my second lucky beer and dessert, and so had this mission. I had the perceptive glimpse into the obvious that everyone involved with this mission knew a lot more than I did, and a lot sooner than I did.

Mud slides, caused by overlogging, covered sections of the bad blacktop, but had the advantage of filling in the potholes. I was averaging only about sixty KPH, which was better than most four-wheeled vehicles were doing. In fact, I spotted two four-wheel vehicles at the bottoms of ravines.

Back to Ms. Weber, who was not riding with her arms around me any longer, but who was holding on to the C-strap. The tears had been real, and so had the tears in Apocalypse Now. This was a woman who was as conflicted as I was about life, Vietnam, and about us. But so what? I don’t like being manipulated or lied to any more than anyone else, and when my life is at stake, I like it even less. With a guardian angel like Susan Weber, I didn’t need to worry about meeting the Angel of Death, which led me to the thought that if Susan had been instructed to take care of Tran Van Vinh, then maybe she’d also been instructed to take care of Paul Brenner, if necessary. But I couldn’t come to terms with that, so I put it out of my mind. But not completely.

The road dropped into a highland plain, and I could see Montagnard longhouses in the hills. A wind swept over the open area from the northeast, so I had to keep compensating by leaning into the crosswind. Plus, it was starting to rain, and I slowed down to see what was in front of me.

Another thought on the subject of this very strange mission was, Why me? Surely there were more gung ho individuals in the CID who couldn’t wait to risk their lives and go to Vietnam, and who knew how to follow orders.

But maybe Karl had calculated correctly that Paul Brenner was the guy they needed. My most obvious asset was my status as a non-government employee, thereby giving everyone lots of plausible deniability if things went bad. Susan, too, I was certain, appeared on no government payroll, and she had all the Vietnam stuff necessary to the mission: knowledge of the land, the language, and the culture; Viet knowledge that American intelligence had forgotten over the last quarter century. Plus, she was a female, which was less suspicious to the Viets, who didn’t think much of women.

It all looked good on paper, I guess, but there’s always the problem of agents of the opposite sex getting the hots for each other. It happened to me and Cynthia. Karl, however, had convinced his colleagues that Paul Brenner was in love with Cynthia Sunhill, and Paul was a monogamous guy, who had a good, if not perfect, record of keeping his dick in his pants on the job. Plus, Susan Weber was very involved with Bill Stanley, CIA station chief, Saigon office.

Last thought was that Karl really did care about me and wanted this for me, for career purposes and personal reasons, partly having to do with my strained relationship with Cynthia. And as for Cynthia, I had no idea what she knew, or what she’d been told, but I’d bet half my retirement pay they hadn’t mentioned Ms. Weber to Ms. Sunhill.

We passed through a small agricultural town that was actually signposted and whose name was Yen Chau. There was a big produce market on both sides of the road, and the people seemed to be mostly Montagnards in traditional garb. A lot of vehicles were parked under the roofs of the produce stalls, their drivers talking and watching the rain as they smoked. A dark green military jeep sat on the side of the road facing me, but the canvas top was up, and the two men inside were smoking, not looking at anyone.

I pushed on.

The road made a few thrilling twists and turns, and I had to keep the speed down so we wouldn’t skid out. The ravines were so deep, I’d still be falling past my visa expiration date.

We passed through a small Montagnard village where a steel and wood bridge crossed a rain-swollen gorge.

About an hour later, the rain eased off, and I could see signs of civilization ahead. Susan said to me, “Son La, right ahead. Provincial capital.”

We entered the small town of Son La, which looked like a Wild West town strung along Main Street. There were a few guest houses and cafés on either side of Route 6, which was very narrow here. A faded wooden sign in French pointed to a side road and read Pénitentiaire. The French really knew how to pick some lousy prison locations. I mean, this place made Devil’s Island look like Tahiti.

Many of the inhabitants of Son La appeared to be Montagnards in modern dress, and many of them wore berets. There was an old French concrete kilometer marker on the side of the road which said Dien Bien Phu, 150 KM. I looked at my gas gauge and estimated that I had about another one hundred kilometers of fuel, maybe less.

Susan asked me, “Want to stop for gas?”

“No.”

We pushed on through the outskirts of Son La. The Department of Public Works ran out of dong, and the road became a thin mixture of mud and bitumen. I was skidding and spinning a lot, and the road was all upgrade.

We were going into the high hills again, and the road became steeper and narrower. In front of me was a wall of fog which I entered. It was surreal riding through the mountain fog, and if I let my imagination run away, it was like flying the motorcycle through turbulent air.

Susan said, “This is Pha Din Pass. I need to stop.”

I stopped on the road, and we dismounted. I wheeled the motorcycle to the edge of a shallow creek and kicked down the stand.

Susan and I used the facilities. We were splattered with mud, and we washed up in some frigid water running down the side of the rocks, then drank some of the water.

Susan offered me the cellophane bag of dried fruit, and I shook my head. She ate some of the fruit, then lit a cigarette.

She said to me, “If you’re not going to speak to me, or if you hate me, you should have let me go.”

True enough, but I didn’t reply.

She said, “I gave you the pistol. What more can I do to make you trust me?”

“You have any other guns on you?”

“No.”

I wanted to ask her if she was supposed to whack me if I became a problem, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask, and for sure I wasn’t going to get a straight answer.

She said, “Do you want to talk?”

“We did that.”

“Okay.” She threw her cigarette in the stream, then pushed the cellophane bag at me. She said, “I’m not going any farther until you eat something.”

I don’t like fruit, even dried fruit, but I was getting a little light-headed, maybe because of the altitude. I took the bag and ate some of the fruit. I said, “Let me see the map.”

She handed me the map, and I studied it.

She asked, “How are we doing for gas?”

I replied, “It’s mostly downhill from here.”

She came up beside me and looked at the map. She said, “There should be gas available in Tuan Giao, where Route 6 turns north and this other road heads south to Dien Bien Phu.”

“I figured that out. Ready to go?”

“I need another cigarette.” She lit up again.

I waited.

She said, “If you don’t love me or trust me, I’m going to jump off this cliff.”

I replied, “There is no cliff, and I’m not in the mood for your bewitching charms.”

“Do you hate me?”

“No, but I’m fed up with you.”

“Will you get over it?”

“Let’s go.” I got on the motorcycle.

“Do you love me?”

“Probably.” I started the bike.

“Do you trust me?”

“Not at all.”

She threw her cigarette down and said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

She mounted up, I pushed off, and kicked the motorcycle into gear.

We continued on over the pass, and the visibility in the fog was less than ten feet. At some point, we were on a straight downgrade, and I kicked the bike into neutral to save fuel. Even without being in gear, we were moving too fast, and I had to keep tapping the rear brake.

I saw a pair of oncoming yellow lights, and within a few seconds, an army jeep appeared out of the fog. The only thing that anyone could see of our faces were our round eyes, but even that feature was covered with goggles. The driver, however, was staring at us, and I had the thought that the word was out on the apparent FULRO attack on the army jeep near the Laotian border. Things like that didn’t make the news, but I guessed that it happened more often than the Viets admitted, and the army guys were very alert and wary.

The jeep was slowing down, and the guy in the passenger seat had his AK-47 at the ready. I thought he was going to block the road, so I kept one hand on the brake, and the other ready to go for the pistol tucked in my belt.

The jeep came to almost a complete stop and watched us pass by. I counted to five, then threw the motorcycle into gear and accelerated. I also killed the lights, which actually made the fog easier to see through. I got up to eighty KPH, which was much too fast for the road or the bad visibility. I was basically flying blind, trusting in my nonexistent luck, and my sense of how this road was turning. To her credit, Susan said nothing, showing how much she trusted me, or maybe she had her eyes closed.

I kept looking in the rearview mirror, but I didn’t see any yellow fog lights behind us.

Within half an hour, we drove out of the fog, and I could see a stretch of curving road running through forested hills.

I’d never been in such a godforsaken place, even during the war, and I could see that there wasn’t any room here for misjudgment; one misstep was all it would take to end this trip.

I got into third gear, and we continued on through the forest. I looked at the gas gauge and saw that we were near empty. I had counted on being able to buy some overpriced fuel from a passing car or truck if I ran out, knowing that all vehicles carried gas cans and probably siphons. But I seemed to be the only idiot on the road, except for the army jeep, and I didn’t think he’d sell me gas.

I heard the engine cough, and I switched over to the reserve tank.

Susan heard it, too, and asked, “Are you on reserve?”

I nodded.

She didn’t offer any advice or criticism of my fuel management.

At about the point where the reserve tank should have been empty, I saw some cleared land and a few huts up ahead.

Within a few minutes, we were in the small junction town of Tuan Giao, where Route 6 turned north toward China, and another road headed south toward Dien Bien Phu.

I saw a sign that said Et-xang, and I said to Susan, “We’re French.”

We both took off our Montagnard scarves and leather hats and stuffed them into our jackets as I headed toward the sign.

We ran out of gas before we got to the so-called service station, and Susan and I pushed the motorcycle the last hundred meters.

The et-xang place consisted of a muddy lot and a crumbling stucco building inside of which were bottles and cans of gasoline of all sizes, shapes, and volume.

The proprietor was an old Viet wrapped up like it was snowing, and he smiled when he saw two Westerners pushing the BMW through the mud. This could be Slicky Boy’s father.

Susan said to the old guy, “Bonjour, monsieur.”

He replied, “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” being very kind about her age.

There wasn’t much else to say; the guy had no trouble figuring we were out of gas, and he began funneling fuel into the BMW tank from various containers. He’d hold up a finger or two or three and say in French, “Litres,” as he poured. He reached forty liters by his count, more than the tank held, and I cut him off.

The price was the equivalent of about a buck and a half a liter, which was expensive for Vietnam, but I wasn’t sure where the hell we were anyway, so I paid him in dollars.

It was 6:15 P.M., and the sun was starting to set behind the mountains to the west. The distances in this part of the world weren’t long, but the traveling times were deceptive. We’d come close to a thousand kilometers, which should have taken maybe eight hours on a real road, but had taken us two twelve-hour days, and we weren’t even there yet.

The next day, Thursday, was the official end of the Tet holiday, though in reality it would run through the weekend. But I had this thought that we’d find the village of Ban Hin, and the house of Tran Van Vinh, only to be told, “Oh, sorry, you just missed him. He’s on his way back to Saigon where he lives now. He manages the Rex Hotel,” or something like that.

Susan said to me, “It’s nice to see you smiling again. What are you thinking about?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Whatever makes you happy, makes me happy.”

“If I had anything in my stomach, I’d puke.”

“Don’t be mean to me.”

“Get on.”

We mounted up and headed south. I saw a concrete kilometer post that said Dien Bien Phu, 81 KM.

We were Western tourists now, on our way to see the French equivalent of Khe Sanh and the A Shau Valley, the Viet version of Yorktown, Thermopylae, Armageddon, and dozens of other Last and Final Battlefields that were in reality only a prelude to the opening shots of the next war.

And as for my pistol-packing, cigarette-smoking friend behind me, I needed to figure out if I had a guardian angel back there, or something more dangerous. Guns are like bugs; if you see one, there are more. Or, to be more trusting, maybe Ms. Weber’s last round of true confessions was the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

The road was bad, so she put her arms around me. I was still pretty pissed off, but there’s nothing like hunger and fatigue to take the piss and vinegar out of you. This lady could ride, and she could shoot, and she talked the talk, and I had enough enemies in these parts to worry about, so I patted her hand.

She rubbed my stomach and asked, “Are we friends?”

I replied, “No, but I love you.”

She kissed my neck. I was reminded of a very big cat with very long fangs licking a captured antelope before snapping its neck.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

About forty kilometers from Dien Bien Phu, the road deteriorated instead of getting better as it approached the town. What is wrong with this place? There was not one reflective arrow or reflective anything, the ground mist was getting heavier, and it was diffusing the headbeam, and I was starting to get disoriented.

Susan said, “Paul, let’s stop and sleep here.”

“Where?”

“Here. On the side of the road.”

“I can’t see the side of the road.”

We pushed on, averaging about fifteen KPH, and the bike was wobbling at the lower speeds. About two hours later, pushing 10 P.M., a valley suddenly opened up on both sides of the road. The grade began a downhill descent, and within fifteen minutes, the road came into a wide, open plain. I couldn’t actually see much of the plain, but I could sense it, and I could see lights scattered around. There was a break in the clouds now and the weak moonlight and starlight reflected off what I thought was a lake, but then I recognized it as a series of rice paddies. Back in ’68, there were a lot of valleys in ’Nam nicknamed Happy Valley, meaning that GIs on patrol in the hills were happy to see the valley. This was Happy Valley.

The road curved sharply to the right, and there were huts on both sides. It took me a while to realize I was in the town of Dien Bien Phu. I saw a lighted sign to my left that said Nga Luan Restaurant, and to my right was a place called the Dien Bien Phu Motel. This was all like an apparition, and I thought I’d gone over a cliff and was now in Viet heaven. I said, “The Dien Bien Phu Motel looks like a winner.” We drove up to the motel office in the middle of a long stucco building and dismounted. I stretched and discovered that none of my muscles were connected or working. I actually had trouble walking to the reception office, and I thought I was going to fall on my face. I couldn’t even peel off my leather gloves.

Before we went inside, Susan said to me, “They’ll want our passports and visas, and they don’t take no for an answer in the north, nor will they take ten bucks instead.”

“So, we’re Americans. Doesn’t make us bad guys.”

She said, “Eventually, our names will be sent to the Ministry of Public Security in Hanoi, and there’ll be a record that we were here.”

“I understand. But I think we’ll be in Hanoi before our names are. We’re on the last leg of this journey, but if you want, we can sleep under the stars.”

She thought a moment, and I could see the trained professional now, weighing the risks. She said, “Let’s get a room.”

“Take it for four nights so they think we’re hanging around awhile.”

She replied, “They’ll take our passports until we check out, so when we check out tomorrow, they’ll know we’re gone. This is a police state.”

“Right. But make it four nights anyway, and that’s what will be reported to Hanoi. You go in. They don’t have to see me.”

“They do. Did I mention this was a police state?”

We went inside the small reception area. A middle-aged woman behind the counter was reading a newspaper.

Susan asked for a room in French, and the woman seemed surprised that we were checking in so late. She and Susan exchanged bad French, a little English, and a few words of Vietnamese. We had to produce our passports and visas, which the woman insisted she had to keep.

For ten American bucks a night, we got the key to Unit 7. My lucky number.

We left the reception room, and I wheeled the motorcycle to Unit 7 at the left end of the motel. Susan opened the door and said, “The lady said put the bike in the room, or we’ll never see it again.”

I pushed the motorcycle into a small room and left it near the foot of the twin bed.

The place had a small bathroom and one night stand, one lamp, and a clothes pole hanging on chains from the ceiling that looked like a trapeze for sexually adventurous couples.

We took our backpacks out of the saddlebags and put them on the bed, then Susan went into the bathroom, turned on the electric water heater, and washed her hands and face in cold water. She then went to the door and said, “The lady said she’d get something for us to eat. Be right back.”

She left.

I sat on the bed and took off my running shoes, then peeled off my wet socks. I got my leather jacket and gloves off and put the Colt .45 under the pillow. I looked around. I knew, somewhere deep down inside, that this place was awful, but at this moment, it looked to me like the Ritz-Carlton in Washington.

Susan returned with a bamboo tray on which were bamboo containers that when uncovered revealed soggy meat dumplings. She put the tray on the bed. Also on the tray were bowls of cold rice, chopsticks, and a bottle of water.

We knelt at the side of the bed and ate the meat dumplings and rice with our fingers. It took about thirty seconds to get the stuff down, and we killed the water in less time than that.

Susan commented, “I guess you were hungrier than you thought.” She added, “The meat was porcupine. No joke.”

“I wouldn’t care if it was dog.”

She smiled and put the tray on the floor, then stood and took off her wet, muddy clothes. As she was undressing, she said, “The reception lady was very surprised that we’d come in over the mountains at night on a motorcycle.”

“So was I.”

“She said this is the latest she’d ever checked anyone in, and she was about to turn out the lights and leave. We may have aroused a little suspicion.”

“Whatever we do here seems to arouse suspicion.”

Susan replied, “I think we’re okay now. She said there are some Westerners in town, though most of them come later in the season.”

“This place has a season?”

She put her hands on the clasp of her bra, then looked at me as if to say, “Is it all right if I get naked in front of you? Or are we no longer lovers?”

I stood and unbuttoned my shirt. Susan unclasped her bra and threw it on the motorcycle, then slipped off her panties.

Susan asked me, “You want to kill some time while the water is heating?”

Well, as pissed off as I was, Dickie Johnson was not at all angry. In fact, he was happy, and he and I were about to have an argument. But my big brain was nearly dead with fatigue, and little Dickie’s brain had slept for the whole ride, so I was no match for his insistent demands. I peeled off my shirt, pants, and undershorts as Dickie stretched.

We stood there in the lamplight, and our faces were dirty, except for where the goggles and scarves had been, and our bodies were covered with a damp sweat and who knew what else after two days without a shower.

She turned down the sheets, which had a reddish cast from what must have been heavily iron-oxidized water.

Susan crawled into the bed, rolled on her back, and motioned for me to come to her. I got into bed, Dickie pointing the way.

I got on top of her and slid right in. I mean, I couldn’t even walk or control the movement of my limbs, and my backbone felt as if I’d made a parachute jump with seventy pounds of field gear and tangled shrouds into a concrete pit; but I wanted to get laid. Amazing.

So, Dickie was home where he wanted to be, but I couldn’t get the old in and out going. Susan sensed this and moved her hips up and down.

I think we had simultaneous orgasms, or maybe simultaneous muscle spasms, followed by a brief period of unconsciousness. When I woke up, I was still on top of her. I got out of bed and shook her awake.

I practically carried her into the bathroom and turned on the shower. There was a sliver of soap on the sink, and we got in the small fiberglass stall together. We let the tepid water run over our bodies, then dried off with small hand towels.

We staggered back to the bed and flopped down side by side. Susan yawned and asked me, “Did we have sex?”

“I think so.”

“Good.” She yawned again and said, “Are we friends?”

“Of course.”

She stayed quiet for a while, and I thought she was sleeping. I turned off the lamp.

In the dark, she asked me, “Where’s the gun?”

“Under my pillow. Leave it there.”

She stayed silent for a while, then said, “Everything I told you about my personal life is true.”

“Good night.”

“The other stuff… well, what choice did I have?”

“I don’t know. Sweet dreams.”

She stayed quiet, then said, “I have a photo pack with me, Paul.”

This woke me up. I asked, “A photo pack of the victim?”

“Yes. And of the possible murderer.”

I sat up and turned on the light. “And?”

“And that’s it. They’re both young men, in uniform, and the photos are not captioned.”

“Where are the photos?”

“In my backpack.”

I got out of bed and opened her backpack at the foot of the bed. I completely emptied it out on the bed, finding no second pistol, which made me feel better.

I found the photo pack, a vinyl-bound and plastic-wrapped album that held single shots on each page. I took the album to the lamp and held it under the light. I started flipping through the pages, and the first ten photos, in color and black and white, were all of the same man in various uniforms— khakis, stateside fatigues, green dress uniform, and even one in a blue formal uniform. In some photos, the guy was bareheaded, and in some he wore a helmet or the appropriate headgear for the uniform. I could see from the rank insignia that the guy was a lieutenant, and he wore the crossed rifle insignia of an infantryman. In one photo, he was in jungle fatigues, and I could make out the shoulder patch of the First Cavalry, and the patch of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. He was about twenty-five, maybe a little younger. He had sandy hair, cut short, big innocent eyes, and a nice smile.

I knew, even without the rank, that this guy was not the killer; he was the victim. He looked like a lot of guys I’d known in ’Nam who had something in their smiles and their eyes that told you they wouldn’t be around long. Truly, the good died young, and everyone else had a fifty-fifty chance. I imagined that these photos came from the man’s family.

The second group of about ten photos showed a guy with captain’s bars. He, like the other guy, wore the crossed rifle insignia of the infantry, and in a few photos, he wore jungle fatigues with the same two shoulder patches as the lieutenant.

I studied this man’s face, but my eyes were blurry, and my mind was half asleep. Yet, there was something familiar about his face, though I couldn’t place the face in the proper context, and nothing was jelling — except that I knew the face.

In one photo, the captain was in a green dress uniform, and with the tie on, the face looked more familiar. He was a rugged-looking man, with dark hair, cut military short, dark, piercing eyes, and a smile that was put on, but could pass for sincere.

On his green dress uniform, I could make out two rows of ribbons, and I recognized most of them, including the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, like my own, but also the Silver Star, which showed bravery above and beyond the call and so forth, plus the Vietnamese Service Medal, indicating, like the medals for bravery, that this photo was taken post-Vietnam. This guy also had the Purple Heart, but since he was in uniform, post-’Nam, it was not a disabling wound. Whoever this guy was, he’d come home in honor and glory, and might still be alive, if he hadn’t gone back to ’Nam and run out of luck. Of course he was alive; that’s why I was here.

I stared at the photograph of the captain in his green uniform, and I looked into his eyes, which seemed to be far away, like the eyes of a man whose mind was elsewhere. Whoever this man was, someone in the CID and/or the FBI thought he was a murderer.

I flipped through the photos again, and this time I concentrated on the uniform nametags that were visible in some of the photos. Not one of the nametags was readable, and I had the distinct impression the photos had been retouched to blur the names. Interesting.

Susan asked, “Do either of them look familiar?”

I made eye contact with her and replied, “No. Why should they?”

“Well… I thought we discussed that one of them might now be famous.”

I didn’t respond to that, but said, “Maybe our witness can identify one or both of them, though it’s a long shot.”

I put the photo pack on the night table. I needed to sleep on those photos, and maybe it would come to me. I had the feeling that Susan could put name captions on both those men.

I turned off the light and fell into bed.

Susan was saying something, and I could hear a sentence that began with, “Tomorrow,” and ended with “conclusion,” which was a good place for me to pass out.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

I dreamt of my farmhouse in Virginia; a light snow was falling outside my window. I awoke at dawn to a different reality.

Susan was awake and said to me, “If we went back to the States together, I think we could put all this behind us.”

I said, “Let’s get back to the States.”

She took my hand and said, “And when people ask us how we met, we can say we met on vacation in Vietnam.”

“I hope this is not your idea of a vacation.”

“Or we can say we were secret agents on a dangerous mission, and we’re not allowed to talk about it.”

I sat up. “We have to get moving.”

She squeezed my hand and said, “If something happens to me, and you get out of here, will you visit my family and tell them about this? About… the last few weeks…?”

I didn’t reply. I’d made that promise to three Boston area guys in ’68, and one of them didn’t make it back, so when I’d gotten home, I kept my promise and visited the parents in Roxbury, and it was the longest two hours of my life. I truly would rather have been back in combat than there. Mom, Pop, two younger brothers, and one sister, about four years old, who kept asking me where her brother was.

“Paul?”

I said, “I will. Do the same for me.”

She sat up and kissed me, then got out of bed and went into the bathroom.

I got dressed, then squared away all our gear, and stuck the pistol in the small of my back.

Susan came out of the bathroom. As she got dressed, she asked, “What’s the plan?”

“We’ll be Canadian tourists and take a look around.”

We left the motorcycle in the room and walked out of the motel onto the street, which was the road we’d come in on.

It was cool and partly overcast, and in the daylight, I could see that most of the buildings were French colonial, set among lush vegetation. There were dozens of people walking and bicycling on the dirt road. The men wore pith helmets, like the North Viet soldiers had in ’68, and those helmets still sent a shiver down my spine. The Viet women wore conical straw hats, and the Montagnards, who seemed to make up the majority of the population, wore the traditional garments of at least two distinct tribes.

Judging from the distance of the surrounding mountains, this valley was bigger than Khe Sanh or A Shau.

We walked down the road and passed a small hill on the left, atop which was an old French tank. We continued on and passed an army museum and a big military cemetery, then turned right at a sign that showed crossed swords, the international symbol for battlefield.

As we walked, I saw a bunker with a wooden sign in French, Vietnamese, and good English. The sign read Here is the bunker of Colonel Charles Piruth, commander of the French artillery. On the second evening of the battle, Colonel Piruth, realizing he was surrounded by overwhelming Viet Minh artillery, apologized in person to all of his artillery men, then went into this bunker and killed himself with a hand grenade.

I stared at the bunker, which was open, and I assumed they’d cleaned up the mess.

Susan said to me, “I don’t think I get it.”

I replied, “I guess you had to be here.”

I looked at the hills that ringed this valley, and thought maybe I got it. The French were looking for a set-piece battle, like the Americans at Khe Sanh, and they came here, in the middle of nowhere, to lure the Communists into a fight. They got more than they bargained for. Shit happens.

Susan took a photo, and we continued on. We crossed a bridge over the small river that flowed through the valley. On the other side of the bridge was a monument to the Viet Minh casualties, built on the French stronghold named Eliane.

Small groups of Western tourists were walking around, all of them with guides.

We followed a group, who made a left turn on a rural road. A few rusting tanks and artillery pieces sat in vegetable fields, and there were a few markers in French and Vietnamese.

We came to a big bunker around which a group was standing. The sign near the bunker said Here is the bunker of General Christian de Castries, commander of the French forces, and the site of the French surrender.

A Viet guide was giving a talk in French to ten middle-aged men and a few women. I wondered if any of them had been survivors of this place. One older guy, I noticed, had tears in his eyes, so I guess that answered my question.

A young Vietnamese man came up to us and said something in French. I said, “Je ne parle pas français.”

He seemed surprised, then looked us over and asked, “American?”

I replied, “Canadian,” which I’d been taught is good cover for Americans in certain parts of the world where Americans aren’t fully appreciated. Thank God for Canada.

The guy spoke English and asked, “You come to see battlefield?”

Remembering my many covers, I replied, “Yes. I’m a military historian, a botanist, and a naturalist. I collect butterflies.”

Susan was smiling rather than rolling her eyes. I think she had missed the old Paul Brenner and was happy he was back.

The guide said, “You please give me one dollar, I tell you about battle.”

Susan gave the guy a buck, and it was like putting quarters in a jukebox. He began a rap that was barely comprehensible, and when he was stumped on an English word, he used French, and when French became a problem, he used Vietnamese.

The long and the short of it was that in early 1954, ten thousand soldiers of a French army including Foreign Legionnaires and about three thousand Montagnard and Vietnamese colonial troops set up a string of strongpoints in this valley, all named after women who had been mistresses of General de Castries. There were seven strongpoints, and I was immediately impressed with the French general.

The Viet guide made what was probably a standard joke and said, “Maybe more mistresses, but he no have enough soldiers.”

“Good point.”

The guide went on awhile, and the whole sorry episode sounded like a replay of Khe Sanh, except the French didn’t have the airpower to neutralize the overwhelming force of fifty thousand Viet Minh soldiers led by General Vo Nguyen Giap, the same guy who’d planned the Siege of Khe Sanh, and the ’68 Tet Offensive, and who I was starting to dislike, or maybe admire.

The guide said, “General Giap men carry many hundred cannon through hills and surround Dien Bien Phu. Shoot many thousand cannon shell at French. French colonel kill self when thousand cannon shell fall. He very surprised.”

I looked at the hills I’d driven through the night before. I’d be surprised, too. I’d barely gotten the motorcycle through here; hundreds of artillery pieces would be a real challenge.

There was something about the Vietnamese that made them incredibly patient, plodding, and persevering. I thought of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the Cu Chi tunnels, dragging hundreds of huge artillery pieces over terrain that was barely passable on foot. I asked our guide, “Did they dig tunnels and trenches here?”

“Yes, yes, many, many kilometer — les tranchées. See there? Les trenchées. Viet Minh soldier dig close, attack Eliane, Ann-Marie, Françoise, Dominique, Gabrielle, Beatrice, Claudine.”

I said to Susan, “I’d name a fortress for you. Strongpoint Susan.”

The guide understood and smiled politely. “Yes? You name fort for this lady?”

Susan was back to rolling her eyes and didn’t reply.

The guide informed us that the French dropped another three thousand paratroopers into Dien Bien Phu to try to save the besieged army. In the end, however, after two months, all thirteen thousand French and colonial troops had been killed, wounded, or captured, and the Viet Minh, according to our guide, had lost half their fifty thousand men, but won the war. He said, “French people have enough war. French soldiers go home.”

This story had a familiar ring to it, like it was 1968 instead of 1954, and since no one in Washington had learned anything from Dien Bien Phu, I suppose you could say that the American war in Vietnam started right here.

The guide said, “Two thousand French soldiers lay here—” He made a sweeping motion with his arm to encompass the vegetable fields where water buffalo walked and women worked with hoes. “French people make monument there. See there? Many French come to see here. Some American come, too. I never meet Canada people. You like?”

I thought I’d seen enough battlefields in the last two weeks to last me the rest of my life. Notwithstanding that, I felt a bond with the men who’d fought and died here. I said, “Interesting.”

Today was Thursday, and by Sunday, I should be in Bangkok. I was feeling like most short-timers feel with four days left and counting: paranoid. I recalled what my platoon sergeant was nice enough to say to me a few days before I left the field to go home: “Don’t get your hopes up, Brenner. Charlie still has seventy-two hours to fuck you up.”

Susan gave the guide her camera, and he took a photo of us near General de Castries’s command bunker. The photo album should be titled My Worst Winter Vacation Ever.

The guide asked us, “You want see all battlefield? I take you. One dollar.”

I replied, “Maybe tomorrow. Hey, what do you do for fun in this town?”

“Fun? What is fun?”

I was wondering about how to get Tran Van Vinh to Hanoi on a motorcycle built for two, assuming he was alive and was going to stay alive— and also assuming I actually needed to take him to Hanoi, which I didn’t know, though Susan knew. It occurred to me that maybe Susan would be riding alone, and I didn’t need to worry about this. Nevertheless I asked, “What’s the best way to get to Hanoi?”

“Hanoi? You want go Hanoi?”

“Yeah. Is there a train? Bus? Airplane?”

“Airplane. Bus very dangerous. No train. French people go plane. Plane no go tomorrow, go samedi. But maybe no place for you. Biet?”

“How about car and driver?”

“No. Tet now. No driver go Hanoi. Lundi driver go Hanoi. You want driver?”

“Maybe. Okay, thanks for the history lesson. Viet people very brave.”

He almost smiled, then pointed to himself and said, “Ong die here. You understand? Grand-père.”

“I understand.”

We left the guide and walked up the dirt road, back toward the town. We passed a gutted tank and a few French bunkers overgrown with weeds. I observed, “This is somehow quieter and more dignified than Cong World or DMZ World.”

Susan replied, “The north is more somber and less commercial. Plus, they’re dealing with the French here, who are a little more dignified and solemn than some of our compatriots at Cong World or Apocalypse Now.”

I said, “I’m Canadian.”

She informed me, “I barely understood that guide’s Vietnamese. They speak a different dialect up here.”

I had the suspicious thought that Ms. Weber was setting me up for some juke and jive if we got to speak with my star witness. I said, “The written language is the same. Correct?”

She hesitated, then replied, “Mostly.”

“Good. Bring a pen.”

We kept walking, and she asked me, “What’s the plan now?”

“Our mutual rendezvous person in Hue, Mr. Anh, suggested I go to the market and chat with a few Montagnards. Didn’t he tell you that?”

“Yes, he did.”

“That’s the plan.”

She inquired, “Are you concerned about what may have happened to Mr. Anh?”

“I am.”

“Do you think he’d crack under interrogation?”

“Everyone does.”

She didn’t reply.

We turned onto a street at the edge of the town. There were enough Westerners around so that we didn’t stand out, and they were mostly middle-aged or older people, and no backpackers, which was a treat. I saw the bus station to our left; an old stucco building with two incredibly dilapidated buses in front of it.

She saw me looking at the buses and asked, “Why did you ask the guide about transportation to Hanoi?”

“I might want to take my witness to Hanoi. I can’t take the motorcycle unless you’re willing to stay behind.”

She changed the subject and said, “You need to tell me now the name of the village we’re looking for.”

If I believed her, this was the one thing she didn’t know, and if I told her, then she didn’t need me any longer. But the time had come, and I said to her, “It’s called Ban Hin. It’s about thirty kilometers north of here.” I added, “If something happens to me, you push on.”

She didn’t reply.

We got to the market, which was a partially paved area covered by roofs in long rows.

As we walked through the market, I noticed that no one was badgering us to buy anything. I remarked on this to Susan, and she said, “The merchants in the north are not aggressive or pushy. As a businesswoman, I find the North Viets hopeless.”

I said, “You can drop your cover, Ms. Weber.”

“I have to stay in practice for the next guy I do this with.”

I looked around the market and noticed lots of porcupines hanging, along with weasels, red squirrels, and other tasty wildlife. I asked Susan, “So, what’s our story? We have relatives in Ban Hin? A pen pal? Looking for a retirement spot?”

She said, “I’ll take care of it.”

There was a whole section of the market taken up by Montagnards and their wares, and we walked through this area. Susan said to me, “Meet me in Aisle 8, paper products and light bulbs.”

I looked around to see if the aisles were actually numbered, and she laughed at me. “Go find the tea section. I’ll find you there.”

I kept walking, then glanced back and saw Susan sitting cross-legged on a blanket, talking to some Montagnard women and handling some ladies wear while she smoked a cigarette; the salesladies smoked whatever was in their pipes. Maybe they were less pushy because they were stoned out of their minds.

I found the covered stall where tea leaves lay on the ground in wicker baskets. The vendors were mostly Montagnards of the same tribe, and they were brewing tea, so I got a bowl of hot tea for two hundred dong, about two cents, and sipped it. It was awful, but it was hot and I was cold.

This was a weird place, and I was sure that nearly all the Westerners were with organized groups. Only an idiot would come here alone.

Four soldiers with AK-47s came into the tea area, and they gave me the eye, then ordered bowls of tea.

They stood not ten feet from me, drinking tea, smoking, and talking softly. One of them kept glancing at me. Do I need this shit?

If it weren’t for the Colt .45 stuck in my belt, I wouldn’t be too concerned. Yet, when you’re carrying, and you’re not supposed to be carrying, the fucking gun seems to get bigger and bigger under your clothes, so that in your mind, it’s the size of an artillery piece.

The four soldiers finished before I did and walked away.

I stood there listening to my heart beat.

Susan appeared and put down a large plastic bag filled with brightly colored clothes. She ordered tea, sipped from the bowl, and said, “That feels good.”

“How’d you make out?”

“Pretty good. Ban Hin is about thirty kilometers north of here.”

“I know that. How do we get there?”

She said, “These Montagnards are all Tai and H’mong, and they live in the north hills and walk into Dien Bien Phu with their wares, or sometimes they take a pony, or the once-a-day bus, and the rich ones have scooters or motorcycles.”

“Is that a fact? How do we get to Ban Hin?”

“I’m getting to that. I found a lady who lives near Ban Hin.”

“Good. She draw you a map?”

“No. But I got directions. Problem is, she and her people use a lot of trails and shortcuts, so she wasn’t clear on the road route. Plus, I couldn’t understand half her Vietnamese. The Montagnards have a worse accent than the North Viets.”

“Go back and get the directions written out.”

“They’re illiterate, Paul.”

“Then get her to draw a map.”

“They don’t understand the concept of maps. Maps are abstract.”

“To you and her maybe. Not to me.”

“Take a break. I think I can follow her directions.”

I thought about all of this. Mr. Anh had been very clear about not asking an ethnic Vietnamese anything because they’d run off to the cops if they thought you were up to something. Montagnards were all right because they kept to themselves. But Mr. Anh failed to mention that they spoke differently, took trails instead of roads, were illiterate, and had never seen a map in their lives. Minor problems, but Susan thought she knew the way to Ban Hin.

I asked her, “What did you tell her about why you wanted to go to Ban Hin?”

“I said I’d heard there was beautiful jewelry made there.” Susan added, “It’s a girl thing.”

I rolled my eyes, but I don’t do that well, and Susan missed it.

She said, “She mentioned that Ban Hin was a Vietnamese village, not Montagnard, as we probably knew, and that the Vietnamese made bad jewelry, plus she never heard of jewelry being made in Ban Hin.”

She finished her tea, then went around to other stalls and bought some bottled water, rice cakes, and bananas. I looked for a taco stand.

We left the market carrying plastic bags and walked toward the motel, a hundred meters up the dirt road. We went into Unit 7, packed our stuff in the BMW’s saddlebags, and I wheeled the bike out of the room and down to the reception office.

Inside, we checked out early, and got our passports and visas back. I hoped they hadn’t yet faxed copies to the Ministry of Public Security, but I wasn’t going to ask.

There was a guy behind the desk, and he asked me, “Where you go now?”

I replied, “Paris.”

Susan said to him, “We drive Hanoi.”

“Ah. Big water, Road 6. You go only Son La. You wait Son La. Two day, three day.”

I said, “Thanks for the traffic and weather, sport. See you next season.”

We left the office, and I said to Susan, “Am I to understand that Route 6 is blocked by floods or mud slides?”

“Sounds that way. Mr. Anh said this was common, but they usually get bulldozers and open it up in a day or so.”

“What the hell is wrong with this place?”

“Don’t take it personally.”

“Okay, how do we get to Hanoi from here if Route 6 is closed?”

“There is another route along the Red River. Goes right to Hanoi.”

“What if we have three people?”

She replied, “There’s a train along the Red River at a place called Lao Cai on the Chinese border, about two hundred kilometers north of here.”

“Okay, how do we get to Lao Cai with Tran Van Vinh?”

“Maybe by bus. Let’s worry about that after we get to Ban Hin and see how many people we need to get to Lao Cai. Also, the trains start running again tomorrow morning. It’s about 450 kilometers from Lao Cai to Hanoi, so we should make it in ten to twelve hours.” She looked at me and said, “In case I’m not with you, you know the way.”

I nodded.

She said, “If all else fails, find a Hanoi-bound logging truck. The only questions they ask is if you have ten bucks and if you’d like to buy some opium.”

“Did Mr. Anh tell you all this?”

“Yes, but we could have read it in the guidebook, if you hadn’t given it to Mr. Anh. When you give someone a signal object, you don’t use something you need. Use a bag of peanuts or something. Were you sleeping during that class?”

“I’m retired.” I asked her, “Why didn’t you get the book back when you saw him?”

“I didn’t know he had it.” She added, “Another amateur.”

“And you?”

“Investment banker.”

“Right.” We mounted up, and I pulled onto the road. I headed south, in case anyone was looking, and I was out of Dien Bien Phu in a few minutes. I pulled over near the hill where the tank sat. A sign informed me that this was Dominique. I wondered what happened to all the general’s ladies, and I wondered if any of them had ever come here to see their namesakes.

Susan got off the bike and opened a saddlebag. We put on the fur-lined leather caps and the goggles, and Susan took out two dark blue scarves she’d bought and said, “H’mong tribe.”

“I know that.”

She laughed. “You’re so full of shit.”

We wrapped the scarves around our necks and chins, and she said, “Unfortunately, the tribespeople here don’t know how to set dyes, and you’ll have blue dye on your face.” She showed me her hands, which indeed had blue dye on them. No one in Washington was going to believe this shit.

I studied the map for a few minutes, and I said to her, “Where’s Ban Hin?”

She pointed to a place on the map and said, “Someplace up here in the Na River Valley. It’s not marked, but I can find it.”

We looked at each other, and I said, “This is going to be okay.”

She got on the motorcycle, I twisted the throttle, and we sped off.

I found a dirt trail that ran through the rice paddies and, within a few minutes, we were on the road that ran past General de Castries’s command bunker. I also wondered what happened to him, and if he ever saw his seven mistresses again. If I had seven mistresses, I might decide to stay in a POW camp.

We drove through the vegetable fields, passed the rusting tanks and artillery pieces, and traveled north toward the hills and mountains we’d come out of last night, though by a different road, this one west of the one I’d taken to Dien Bien Phu.

I looked at my watch and saw it was not yet noon. This one-lane road was dirt, but dry, hard-packed, and smooth between the wheel ruts, so I was doing thirty KPH without too much trouble. In about an hour, unless we got lost, I’d be asking someone in Ban Hin if they knew a guy named Tran Van Vinh. I couldn’t even guess at the outcome of this day.

This road that was marked Route 12 on the map ran through the Na Valley, which was not even five hundred meters wide in most places. The river was small, but swift-flowing, and the road was actually a levee that ran along the side of the river.

The hills got higher and towered over the narrow valley, which was no more than a gorge in some places. Wherever the valley widened, there were flooded rice paddies and peasant huts on both sides of the dirt road. The few people we saw looked to be ethnic Vietnamese in traditional black silk pajamas and conical straw hats, working in the rice fields much as they did on the coastal plains, but very far from their ancestors.

The hills were over two thousand meters high now, and a constant headwind blew down from the north, through the tunnel-like valley, and Susan and I had to lean forward or get blown off the bike.

No one was working in the fields, and there was no traffic on the one-lane road. I remembered it was the last day of Tet, and people stayed home, including, I hoped, Tran Van Vinh. The Viets who had traveled to get to their ancestral homes wouldn’t be on the road again until tomorrow or the next day. It occurred to me, of course, that Tran Van Vinh might have an earlier ancestral village on the coast, and he may have gone there for Tet. But if that was the case, I’d catch him on his way back to Ban Hin, though that would be pushing my time frame. I really wanted to be in Bangkok Sunday, or anywhere other than Vietnam. But I knew I’d stay until Mr. Vinh and I had a talk.

In the hills, I could see Montagnard longhouses clinging precariously to cleared ridgelines, and it struck me that two very different civilizations existed in the same space, but vertically to one another.

About an hour after we’d started, I saw on the odometer that we’d come thirty kilometers. “What do your directions say?”

“Ban Hin is right on this road.”

“It is? You made it sound complicated.”

“Sometimes you want to leave me behind, so I need to sound invaluable.”

I didn’t reply to that interesting statement, but said to her, “See that hut there? Go ask about Ban Hin.”

“We speak only to Montagnards. We haven’t come this far to blow it at the last minute.”

We continued on slowly, north on Route 12. About ten minutes later, coming toward us, were three young men, Montagnards, on their ponies.

I stopped the motorcycle and shut it off.

As the Montagnards approached, I could see that the ponies were sad-dleless, which they always were, and there were sacks of something tied over their backs.

Susan and I took off our scarves, hats, and goggles, and Susan dismounted and walked toward the riders. She greeted them with a wave, and they reined up, looking at her.

She spoke to them and they were nodding. They looked at me, who had been a Montagnard myself just two minutes ago, then looked back at Susan. Almost simultaneously, the three of them pointed back over their shoulders. So far, so good.

Susan seemed to be thanking them and was about to walk away when one of them reached into his sack and pulled out something, which he gave to her. She waved and walked back toward me.

The three riders overtook her and chatted again. They obviously liked what they saw. They came abreast of me and the motorcycle, and sort of saluted as they continued south.

Susan walked up to me and said, “They were nice. They gave me this skin.” She held up a two-foot-long animal skin with black fur on it. She said, “I think it’s a wolverine. Unfortunately, it isn’t tanned and it smells.”

“It’s the thought that counts.” I said, “Get rid of it.”

“I’ll hold it awhile.”

“Where’s Ban Hin?”

“Up the road a piece.”

“How far?”

“Well… they apparently don’t measure in time or distance. They travel by landmarks, so it’s the big village after two small villages.”

“Good. Mount up.” I added, “You have blue dye on your face.”

She mounted up, and I started the engine and kicked the bike into gear. We continued on without our Montagnard accessories.

Within five minutes, we passed a small cluster of huts. Village One.

Five minutes later, we passed small Village Two.

Five or six minutes later, we approached a bigger village situated along the right side of the road. In front of the village were four stucco structures set back from the road, and I could tell that one was a modest pagoda, the other a clinic, and the third was a school. The fourth flew a red flag with a yellow star, and had a dark green military jeep parked in front of it. I knew this had been too easy. I stopped the bike.

Susan said, “This is Ban Hin.”

“And that’s a military jeep.”

“I know. What do you want to do?”

I said, “I haven’t come this far to turn around.”

“Me neither.”

I went quickly past the military post, then cut into the landscaped yard in front of the pagoda, and pulled the bike around to the rear, out of sight of the road and hopefully of the military building.

I shut off the engine, and we dismounted.

Susan said, “Okay, how do you want to ask if Tran Van Vinh is alive and at home?”

I replied, “We’re Canadian military historians, who speak some French. We’ll ask about some veterans of the Tet Offensive, then get down to the battle of Quang Tri. Wing it. You’re good at bullshitting people.”

We got our backpacks and cameras out of the saddlebags, and Susan went around to the entrance of the pagoda.

I followed her through the open doors, and there was no one inside. Tet blossoms were stuck in ceramic urns, and there was a small shrine at the far end of the small, windowless structure, and joss sticks burned on the altar.

Susan went up to the altar, took a joss stick, and lit it, then threw a few dong in a bowl. Hey, whatever it takes.

She turned and joined me near the front door. She said, “Today is the last day of the Tet holiday, the fourth day of the Year of the Ox. We have arrived in Ban Hin. Let’s go find Tran Van Vinh, then let’s go home.”

We left the pagoda and walked into the village of Ban Hin.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

The village of Ban Hin was not like the tropical and subtropical villages of the coastal plains; there were no palm trees, for one thing, but lots of pine and huge leafy trees, plus thick clumps of wild rhododendron that were starting to bloom on this cool February afternoon.

The village was hemmed in by the steeply rising mountain to the east, the rice paddies to the north and south, and the one-lane dirt road we’d arrived on.

The peasants’ huts were mostly rough-hewn pine with roofs of thatched bamboo leaves. Each house was surrounded by a vegetable garden, and in some of the gardens I could see the entrances to earthen bomb shelters, remnants of the American bombing.

I wouldn’t have imagined that a valley this remote had been bombed, but I recalled in Tran Van Vinh’s letter to his brother, Lee, that Vinh had mentioned that their cousin, Liem, had written and described trucks filled with wounded soldiers, and columns of fresh troops heading south. I could picture this now, this remote valley road that began at the Chinese border, where much of the war matériel originated, then wound its way to the Laotian border where the Ho Chi Minh Trail network began. I had the feeling that anyone here over thirty years old remembered the United States Air Force.

The village was filled with kids and adults of all ages, and it seemed that most of the residents of Ban Hin were home on this last day of Tet.

In fact, everyone was staring at us, the way people in a small rural American village might stare at two East Asians who were wandering around in black silk pajamas and conical straw hats.

We reached the center of the village, which consisted of a red dirt square, no bigger than a tennis court, surrounded by more houses and an open pavilion that housed a small produce market. I could see some picnic-like tables where people sat, talked, drank, and ate. They stopped what they were doing and looked at us.

I always knew that if we got this far, the biggest problem would be here in this village. The military facility on the road added to the problem.

In the center of the square was a simple concrete slab about ten feet long and six feet high set on another concrete slab on the ground. The vertical slab was painted white, and on the white paint was what appeared to be red lettering. At the base of the slab were Tet blossoms and joss sticks burning in ceramic bowls. We walked over to the monument and stood before it.

The red lettering was, in fact, names, running in rows top to bottom. Across the top were larger letters, and Susan read, “‘In honor of the men and women who fought for the Reunification of the Fatherland in the American War of 1954 to 1975.’” She said, “These are the names of the missing, and there are a lot of them, including Tran Quan Lee.” She pointed.

I saw Tran Quan Lee, and saw, too, that there were many people of the family of Tran listed as missing.

We both read the names, but did not see Tran Van Vinh. So far, so good. I said, “The dead must be on the other side.”

We walked around the monument, whose entire surface was painted with red-lettered names that looked as though they’d been recently touched up.

A crowd of about a hundred had gathered, and they were inching a little closer to us. I noticed that a number of middle-aged men and women had missing arms or legs.

I looked at the names of the dead, which were listed chronologically, like the names on the Wall in Washington. If Tran Van Vinh had been killed in action, we’d have no idea when, but it wasn’t before February 1968, so I started there, while Susan began at the end with April 1975.

I held my breath as I read the names.

Susan said, “I don’t see him yet…”

“Neither do I.” But I didn’t want to see his name, and I may have unconsciously blocked it out, though every time I saw a “Tran,” my heart skipped a beat.

The crowd was right behind us now. It felt a little odd staring at the monument to the dozens of dead and missing of this village, all of whom had been killed by my compatriots, and maybe even by me. On the other hand, I had my own wall to deal with. Also, I was Canadian.

Susan and I kept reading the names, and she said softly to me, “A lot of these names are women and children, and the names are noted as having been killed on the homefront, which I guess means by bombs.”

I didn’t reply.

Susan and I met in the middle of the list and read the last of the names to ourselves. I said, “He’s not here.”

“Not here, either. But is he still alive?”

“I’ll bet everyone behind us can answer that question.”

As I stared at the simple slab of concrete with hand-painted names, I couldn’t help but think of the polished granite wall in Washington. In the end, there was no difference in these two memorials.

I said to Susan, “Canadian. Ready?”

“Oui.”

We turned around and looked at the crowd. In rural South Vietnam, we had aroused passing curiosity; here, we aroused intense interest, and if they discovered we were Americans, they might get hostile. I couldn’t read anything in the faces of the crowd, but they didn’t look like a welcoming committee. I said, “Bonjour.”

There was some murmuring, but no smiles. It occurred to me that with Dien Bien Phu so close, there might be some residual animosity toward the French. Ong die here… grand-père. I said, “Nous sommes Canadiens.”

I thought I saw the crowd relax a bit, or maybe that’s what I wanted to see.

Susan, too, said, “Bonjour.” She then said something about us coming from Dien Bien Phu, and was it okay if we made une photographie of Le Monument?

No one seemed to object, so Susan stood back and made une photographie of the names of the dead.

Finally, someone came forward, a middle-aged gent in black wool pants and an orange sweater. He said something to me in French, but I totally didn’t get it, and I didn’t think he cared if the pen of my aunt was on the desk of my uncle.

Susan said something to him in halting French, and he replied.

The guy’s French was a little better than Susan’s, so she mixed in some halting Vietnamese, which had the effect of startling the crowd and bringing everyone closer.

It couldn’t be long before a few soldiers showed up and asked for our passports and discovered we weren’t actually Canadians.

I was starting to feel less like James Bond and more like Indiana Jones in a movie titled Village of Doom.

Susan was giving this guy the line of crap about l’histoire de la guerre américaine, which he seemed to be half buying.

Finally, she said something to him in more fluent Vietnamese, and I could hear the name Tran Van Vinh.

Asking for someone by name in a small town in Vietnam, or Kansas, or anywhere sort of stops the show.

There was a long silence, then the man looked at both of us, and I held my breath until finally he nodded and said, “Oui. Il suvivre.”

I knew I had not come this far to visit a grave, and here I was in the village of Ban Hin, and the answer to the question of whether or not Tran Van Vinh was alive was, “Yes, he’s alive.”

Susan glanced at me, nodded and smiled. She turned back to the guy and continued in broken Vietnamese, with a little French thrown in, and he replied to her in slow Vietnamese, with lots of French. We were actually getting away with this.

Finally, he spoke the magic word, “Allons.”

And off we went, following him through the crowd, which parted for us.

We passed through the covered market, and the man stopped at a community bulletin board covered with clear plastic. He pointed to two faded black and white photographs of Americans in flight suits with their hands in the air, surrounded by pajama-clad peasants carrying old bolt action rifles. There was some room left for another picture of me and Susan in a similar pose.

The man said, “Les pilotes Americains.” I glanced at Susan, and we made eye contact.

We continued on a narrow tree-shaded path between small houses toward the towering mountain at the end of the village where a group of low hillocks lay at the base of the mountain, which I recognized as burial mounds. Beyond the burial mounds were small wooden houses.

We followed the guy up a winding path toward a house built of hand-hewn pine and thatched with bamboo leaves.

We got to the door of the house, and the guy motioned us to wait. He entered through an open door.

A few seconds later, he came out and motioned us inside. As we entered, he said something to us in French about chez Tran.

We found ourselves in this one-room house whose floor was packed red clay. Glass windows let in some gray light, and I smelled charcoal burning somewhere in the damp air.

As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I could see hammocks folded along the walls with blankets in them, and on the floor were a number of woven bamboo baskets and chests. A low table without chairs sat in the center of the floor on a black rug.

In the far corner was a clay cooking stove, which glowed red from the firebox with burning charcoal. To the right of the clay stove was a simple altar against the wall, and on the altar were burning joss sticks and framed photographs. Hanging on the wall to the right of the altar was a big poster of Ho Chi Minh. Beside that hung a Vietnamese flag and some framed certificates or awards.

I looked around again to confirm that no one was home.

We stood there a moment, then Susan said, “He says this is the house of Tran Van Vinh, and we should wait here.”

I don’t like being boxed in by walls, but it was too late to worry about that now. We had arrived, one way or the other, at the end of our journey. I asked, “Did he say where the liquor cabinet was?”

“No. But he said I could smoke.” She walked to the charcoal stove, took off her backpack, sat on a hearth rug, and lit a cigarette.

I slipped off my backpack and put it next to hers. I saw that the roof was only about six feet high at the far wall, and I went over to it and pulled out the pistol from under my leather jacket. Having learned a thing or two from the Viet Cong, I slipped the .45 and the two extra magazines between two rows of tied thatch.

Susan said, “Good idea. I think if the soldiers arrive, we could talk ourselves out of just about anything but that gun.”

I didn’t reply to that overly optimistic statement, but I asked her, “What did you tell that guy?”

She replied, “His name is Mr. Khiem, and he’s the village schoolteacher. As you suggested, I told him we were Canadian military historians who had been to Dien Bien Phu, and that we were also studying the American War. I also said that we were told in Dien Bien Phu to see the war memorial in the square of Ban Hin. I made that up.”

“You’re good at that.”

“I said I’d heard that many veterans of the American War lived in the Na Valley, and we were especially interested in veterans of the ’68 Tet Offensive, and more specifically the battle of Quang Tri City.” She drew on her cigarette and continued, “But Mr. Khiem wasn’t offering any names, except his own. He was at the battle of Hue. Finally, in frustration, I just said I’d heard the name of Tran Van Vinh come up in Dien Bien Phu. We’d heard that he was a brave soldier who’d been wounded at Quang Tri.” She looked at me and said, “I didn’t want to hang around that square any longer so I went for broke.”

“Did Mr. Khiem buy it?”

“Maybe. He was somewhere between incredulous and proud that they spoke well of Ban Hin in Dien Bien Phu.” Susan added, “Mr. Khiem is also a Tran and is related to Vinh in some way or another.”

I said, “There were lots of dead and missing Trans on that memorial. I’m glad we’re Canadians.”

She tried to smile and said, “I hope he believed that.”

“He didn’t get hostile, so I guess he did. On our next mission to Vietnam, we’ll be Swiss.”

She lit another cigarette. “Send me a postcard.”

I said to her, “You did fine. I’m really proud of you, and if Mr. Khiem went to get the soldiers, it wasn’t your fault.”

“Thank you.”

I asked her, “Does Tran Van Vinh live here, or is he visiting for Tet?”

“Mr. Khiem said Tran Van Vinh lives here in Ban Hin and has lived here all his life.”

“Where is he now?”

“Mr. Khiem said something about seeing his relatives off.”

“That should put him in a good mood. When is he expected back?”

“Whenever the daily bus arrives from Dien Bien Phu.”

I looked at the picture of Uncle Ho and asked, “Do you think this is a setup?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you Canadians have an annoying habit of answering a question with a question.”

She forced a smile and smoked.

I walked over to the family altar and looked at the framed photographs in the dim light. I noticed that all the men and women were young, in their early to mid twenties. I said to Susan, “No one gets too old around here.”

She glanced at the photographs. “They use photos of the deceased when they were in their prime, no matter how old they were when they died.”

“Really? So if I died today and I was Buddhist, they could use one of the photos you just took of me.”

She smiled. “I think they’d call your mother for a slightly less recent photograph.” She added, “The family altar is more ancestor worship than Buddhist. It’s sort of confusing. The Vietnamese who are not Catholic call themselves Buddhist, but they also practice a primitive ancestor worship. Plus, they practice Confucianism and Taoism. They call it Tam Giao — the Triple Religion.”

“I count four.”

“I told you, it’s confusing. You’re Catholic. Don’t worry about it.”

I looked at the small photographs and noticed that many of the young men were in uniform. One of them, I was certain, was Tran Quan Lee, who though not officially dead, could be presumed so after nearly thirty years of not showing up for the holidays.

We still had the option of coming to our senses, and I said to Susan, “If we hustle, we can be on the BMW in about five minutes.”

She didn’t even hesitate before replying, “I don’t know who’s going to come through that door, but we both know we’re not going anywhere until someone does.”

I nodded.

Susan asked me, “How do you want to handle our conversation with Tran Van Vinh?”

“First of all, it’s my conversation, not our conversation, and I’m going to be straight. This is how I’d do it with a witness in the States. You bullshit suspects, but you’re straight with witnesses.”

“Including the fact that we’re Americans sent by our government?”

“Well, not that straight. We’re Americans, but we’ve been sent by the family of the murdered man to seek justice.”

“We don’t know the murdered man’s name.”

“Tran Van Vinh does. He took the dead man’s wallet. Let me do the talking, Susan, and the thinking. You do the translating. Biet?”

We made eye contact, and she nodded.

We waited.

I looked at Susan. We had come a long way, but beyond that, this moment of truth, which had been abstract up to now, was suddenly real and immediate. Tran Van Vinh was alive, and what, if anything, he told us would present a whole new set of problems.

Susan stood and put her arms around me. “I have deceived you, and I may still have to do some things that you don’t like, but no matter what happens, I love you.”

Before I could reply, I heard a noise behind me, and we both turned toward the door. Standing in the open doorway was the dark outline of a man who I hoped was Tran Van Vinh.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Susan walked directly to the man at the door, bowed, and said something to him in Vietnamese.

He bowed in return, said something, then looked at me. We made eye contact, and I had no doubt this was Tran Van Vinh.

He looked to be about sixty, but was probably younger. He was thin, and taller than the average Viet. He had all his hair, which was still jet black and cut short. He wore baggy trousers and a black quilted jacket, and on his feet were socks and sandals.

Susan said to me, “Paul, this is Mr. Vinh.”

I walked directly to him and put out my hand.

He hesitated, then took my hand. I said, “I am Paul Brenner, an American, and I have come a long way to see you.”

He stared at me as Susan translated.

I said to him, “We told your compatriots that we were Canadians because we felt that there may be some unpleasant feelings toward Americans in your village.”

Again, Susan translated, and again Mr. Vinh kept staring at me.

I looked into his eyes, and he looked into mine. The last American he’d seen had probably wanted to kill him, and vice versa, but I saw no hostility in his expression; in fact, I couldn’t see anything.

I took my passport out of my pocket and handed it to him with the front page open.

He took it and looked at it, then closed it and handed it back to me. He said something, which Susan translated as, “What do you want?”

I replied, “First, it is my unpleasant duty to inform you that your brother, Lee, was killed in action in the A Shau Valley in May of 1968. His body was found by an American soldier, who removed personal items that identified him as Tran Quan Lee.”

Mr. Vinh understood A Shau and coupled with his brother’s name, he must have known this wasn’t good news.

Susan translated, and Mr. Vinh listened without emotion. He kept staring at me, then walked over to the family altar, picked up a photograph and looked at it a long time. He put it back, turned, and said something to me.

Susan replied to him directly, then said to me, “He wants to know if you killed his brother. I told him you did not.”

I said, “Tell him I was a soldier with the First Cavalry Division, and that I saw combat in the A Shau Valley in May of 1968, and that it could have been me who killed his brother, but it was not I who found the body.”

Susan hesitated and asked me, “Are you sure you want—”

“Tell him.”

She told him, and he looked at me, then nodded.

I said, “Tell him I was also outside Quang Tri City at the time he was recovering from his wounds in the Buddhist high school, and it was my duty to kill the North Vietnamese soldiers who were trying to escape from the city.”

Susan translated, and Mr. Vinh looked surprised that I knew a little of his war experiences. We made eye contact again, and again I saw no hostility, and I knew I would not. In fact, as we looked at each other, I had no doubt that he was saying to himself, “This poor bastard was there, too.”

I said to Mr. Vinh, “I’m glad I didn’t kill you, and glad you didn’t kill me.”

Susan translated, and I saw a faint smile pass over his lips, but he didn’t reply.

I was getting somewhere with him, but I didn’t know where. I said to him, “Quite frankly, Mr. Vinh, I’m very surprised that you survived seven more years of war.”

Susan translated, and Mr. Vinh stared off into space, nodding to himself as though he, too, were surprised. I thought I saw a slight tremble in his upper lip, but that might have been my imagination. The man was very stoic, which was partly for our benefit, and also an old wartime habit.

I said to Susan, “How we doing with your translating?”

She replied, “He spent a lot of time in the south during the war, and he’s aware of my southern accent. I’m catching most of what he’s saying.”

“Good. We like true and accurate translations.”

She didn’t reply.

I didn’t say anything further to Mr. Vinh, and I let him think if he wanted to say anything to me. Finally, he spoke and Susan listened, then said to me, “Mr. Vinh says he was in the 304^th Infantry Division of the People’s Army of Vietnam.”

Mr. Vinh continued and Susan translated. “He was sent into the south in August 1965 and fought in Quang Tri Province. He says you should know where his division was during the Tet Offensive in the winter of 1968.”

Indeed I did. The 304^th was our main adversary when I got to Quang Tri in January 1968. This guy had already been there two and a half years, with no end in sight and no R&R.

Mr. Vinh was speaking, and Susan said, “In June of 1968, the division returned to the north… there were few men left in the division… the division was rebuilt with new soldiers, and returned to Quang Tri in March 1971, then participated in the Spring Offensive of 1972… the Easter Offensive… and his division captured the province and the city of Quang Tri… and suffered heavy losses from the American bombing and withdrew north again to rebuild the division.” Susan added, “He wants to know if you were there for the Spring Offensive.”

I replied, “I, too, had returned home in 1968, in November, then came back to Vietnam in January 1972, and was stationed at Bien Hoa during the Spring Offensive.”

Susan told him this, and he nodded, then looked at me. I doubted if he’d ever spoken to an American veteran before, and he was obviously curious, but arriving as I had, out of nowhere, he was trying to collect his thoughts; he hadn’t been thinking about this meeting for the last two weeks as I had.

Mr. Vinh spoke, and Susan translated. “He says he returned to the front in 1973, then participated in the final Spring Offensive of 1975, and the 304^th Division captured Hue, then drove down the coast on Highway One on captured tanks. He entered Saigon on April 29 and was present at the surrender of the presidential palace the next day.”

And I thought I had a few war stories. This guy had seen it all, from the alpha to the omega, ten years of slaughter. If my year had seemed like ten, then his ten must have seemed like a hundred. And here he was, home in his native village, getting on with life after having had a decade of his youth taken from him.

I said to him, “You must have received many medals and decorations.”

Susan translated, and without hesitation, he walked to a wicker chest, as I hoped he would, and opened it. I needed to get him into the habit of opening trunks of war memorabilia.

He removed a black silk cloth, which he unfolded on the low table. He knelt and spread out twelve medals of different shapes and sizes, which were all painted with various colors of enamel, and each had multicolored ribbons attached; and there lay the pretty evidence of ten years in hell.

Mr. Vinh named each medal, and Susan translated.

I didn’t want to patronize Mr. Vinh by saying how impressed I was; he seemed to me capable of detecting bullshit, so I just nodded and said, “Thank you for showing me.”

Susan translated, and she and I made eye contact. She nodded, as if to say, “You’re doing pretty good for an insensitive idiot.”

Mr. Vinh replaced his medals, closed the trunk, and stood.

So we all stood there for a few seconds, and I’m sure that Mr. Vinh knew I hadn’t come twelve thousand miles to see his medals.

The moment had arrived, and I said to him, “I’m here to speak to you about what you saw while you lay wounded in the Citadel at Quang Tri City.”

He recognized Quang Tri, and perhaps even Citadel, and his eyes went to Susan, who translated.

He looked back at me, but didn’t respond.

I said to him, “The American soldier who found the body of your brother in the A Shau Valley removed from his body a letter written by you to your brother, as you lay recovering from your wounds at the Buddhist high school. Do you recall that letter?”

As soon as Susan translated, he nodded in understanding of how I knew what I knew.

I lied to him for the first time and said, “I am here on behalf of the family of the lieutenant who was killed by the captain,” which maybe wasn’t a complete lie. I continued, “I have been asked to inquire about this matter and to bring understanding and justice to the family.” I looked at Susan, as if to say, “Get that right.”

She glanced at me and translated.

Mr. Vinh did not reply.

I tried to put myself in his position. He’d seen his generation wiped out and was not impressed or moved by the desire of an American family trying to find justice in that mass slaughter, or to bring closure to the death of one soldier. The Hanoi government, in fact, was always a little incredulous regarding the American government spending millions of dollars to find the remains of a few MIAs. I don’t know if this was a cultural difference, or a matter of practicality; Vietnam didn’t have the time or money to look for a third of a million missing soldiers. We, on the other hand, had become obsessed with the search for our two thousand missing men.

Mr. Vinh remained silent, and so did I. You can’t rush these people, and they don’t get nervous during long periods of silence the way Americans do.

Finally, Mr. Vinh spoke, and Susan translated. “He said he does not want to participate in any inquiry unless ordered to do so by his government.”

I took a deep breath. I wasn’t going to insult this old soldier by offering him money, but I reminded him, “This family has learned of the fate of your brother, Lee, which I have passed on to you freely. Would you be kind enough to tell me the fate of their son, so I may pass that on to them?” I paused, then added, “This is a private family matter, and has no government involvement.”

Susan translated, and there was again a silence in the room, broken by the crackling of the charcoal on the hearth, and the sound of a songbird outside.

Mr. Vinh turned and walked to the door.

Susan and I looked at each other.

Mr. Vinh left, and we could hear him talking to someone outside, then he returned and said something to Susan.

She bowed to him, and I thought we were being asked to leave, or to stick around until the soldiers came, but Susan said to me, “Mr. Vinh has asked his grandson to find a female relative to make tea.”

Why do I doubt myself? I’m good at this. Witnesses love me. Suspects fear me. Also, I’m very lucky.

Mr. Vinh motioned us toward the low table, and we joined him there. He sat cross-legged with the warm stove at his back and indicated a place on the floor for Susan at his left and me across from him.

Susan took out her cigarettes and offered one to Mr. Vinh, who accepted. She offered one to me with a nod, and I took the cigarette. Susan lit all three cigarettes and put her plastic lighter on the table. The ashtray was a scrap of twisted steel that looked like a bomb fragment.

I took a puff on the cigarette and left it in the ashtray. Mr. Vinh seemed to like his Marlboro Light.

I said to him, “May I tell you the story of how I came to read your letter to your brother?”

Susan translated, and he nodded.

I related the story of Victor Ort, and the Vietnam Veterans of America, emphasizing the VVA’s humanitarian program of helping the Hanoi government discover the fate of their missing soldiers. The story changed somewhat, however, and Mr. Ort and I both became members of the Vietnam Veterans of America, and by chance I knew a family whose son, a First Cavalry lieutenant, had been killed in Quang Tri City. Sounded good to me.

I further explained that the family was convinced that this lieutenant who was mentioned in Mr. Vinh’s letter could be their son. I spun a little more stuff, and being Boston Irish, this is my specialty. I did not mention the army Criminal Investigation Division, nor did I mention the name of the deceased lieutenant, because I didn’t know it; but Mr. Vinh did.

Mr. Vinh listened as Susan translated.

A middle-aged woman entered and without a word went to the hearth where a water kettle hung permanently over the charcoal. She put three bowls on the rug and took a pinch of tea leaves from a ceramic canister and sprinkled the leaves in each bowl. Then, with a ladle, she filled each bowl with hot water, put the bowls on a wicker tray, and on her knees walked to the table, where she bowed.

I really liked this country. I looked at Susan and winked. She stuck her tongue out at me.

Anyway, the tea ceremony complete, the lady disappeared.

We sipped our tea. I smiled and said, “This is awful.”

Susan said something else to Mr. Vinh, and he smiled.

Susan and Mr. Vinh smoked, sipped tea, and chatted. Susan said to me, “Mr. Vinh asks if we are lovers. I told him we began as friends when you hired me in Saigon to translate, then we became lovers.”

I looked at Mr. Vinh, who had a faint smile on his face, probably thinking, “Way to go, old man.”

Susan said, “Mr. Vinh is amazed at the number of American veterans who have returned to visit in the south. He sees this in the newspapers and in the schoolhouse where there is a television.”

I nodded and had the thought that Ban Hin was not completely cut off from the world, and this fact might be relevant if my suspicions about the murderer were true.

Susan and Mr. Vinh continued their tea chat and lit up again. This was necessary, I knew, before you got down to business, but I was becoming a little impatient, not to mention concerned about who might show up next.

I said, directly to Mr. Vinh, “May I ask you if that woman was your wife?”

Susan translated, and he nodded.

I asked, “Was that Mai, who you mentioned in your letter?”

Susan hesitated, but then translated.

Mr. Vinh put down his bowl of tea and looked straight ahead. He said something to no one in particular.

Susan said to me, “Mai was killed in a bombing of Hanoi in 1972. They had been married when he returned from the front in 1971, and they had no children.”

“I’m sorry.”

He understood and nodded.

Susan and he exchanged a few more words, and she said to me, “He has remarried and has seven children, and many grandchildren. He wants to know if you have children.”

“Not that I know of.”

Susan gave him a one-word answer that was probably “No.” The pleasantries over, Mr. Vinh asked me something, and Susan translated, “He would like to know if you have the letter which he wrote to his brother.”

I replied, “I had a photocopy of it, but lost it in my travels. I will send him the original, if he tells us how to do that.”

Susan passed this on to him, and he replied. She said, “He has a cousin in Dien Bien Phu, and you can send it there.”

I nodded.

I wished I had the letter, of course, to see if what he’d written was what had been translated and what I’d read. But, hopefully, I’d find that out soon.

There were no refills on the tea, thank God, and Mr. Vinh and Susan were keeping the mosquitoes away with cigarette smoke.

I asked Mr. Vinh, “Do your wounds bother you?”

Susan translated, and his reply was, “Sometimes. I have more wounds after Quang Tri, but none so serious as to keep me from my duties for more than a month.”

He pointed to me.

I replied, “I had no wounds.”

Susan translated, and he nodded.

I asked him, “How did you escape from Quang Tri City?”

He replied and Susan translated, “I was able to walk, and all the walking wounded were told to try to escape at night. I left in the early morning, and I walked alone, through a rainstorm in the moonless night. I passed within ten meters of an American position and escaped into the hills to the west.”

I hoped he took the dead lieutenant’s stuff with him.

He said something else, and Susan said to me, “Mr. Vinh says he may have walked right past you.”

“He did.”

That got a smile from everyone, but no belly laughs.

Okay, down to business. I said to Mr. Vinh, “May I show you some photographs so that we may discover if the lieutenant whose family has sent me here is the same lieutenant you saw in the bombed building in Quang Tri City?”

Susan translated, and he nodded.

Susan stood, went to her backpack, and returned with the photographs. She placed the small album on the table and opened it to the first page.

Mr. Vinh stared at the photo, then stood and went to a wicker trunk. He returned with something wrapped in cloth, and produced a canvas wallet. He opened the wallet and removed the plastic photo holder, which he laid next to the photo on the table.

Susan looked at both photos, withdrew the one from the album, and passed both photographs to me.

I looked at the photo from the wallet, which was of a young couple. The woman was good-looking, and the man was the same one in the photo pack.

We now had the victim, and what we needed next was the victim’s name, though of course the CID already knew that; but I didn’t.

I said to Mr. Vinh, “May I see the wallet?”

Susan asked, and Mr. Vinh pushed the wallet across the table.

I opened it and went through it. There were some military payment certificates — what we used for money instead of dollars — and a few more family photos — Mom and Pop, two teenage girls who looked like his sisters, and an infant who could be the child of the deceased.

There were a few other plasticized odds and ends in the wallet: the Geneva Convention card, the card that listed the Rules of Land Warfare, and another card with the Rules of Engagement. Lots of rules in war. Most of them didn’t mean shit except Rule One, which was, “Kill him before he kills you.”

This young officer, however, had the required cards, and I got a sense of a young man who did the right thing. This was reinforced somewhat by his PX liquor ration card, which only officers had access to. The card had only two punch holes in it, indicating two liquor purchases. If I’d had this card in ’Nam, it would have looked like Swiss cheese hit by shrapnel.

The final card was the man’s military identification.

I looked at the ID and saw that the name of the dead man was William Hines, and he was a first lieutenant in the infantry.

I looked at Mr. Vinh and said to him, “May I return this wallet to Lieutenant Hines’s family?”

Mr. Vinh understood without translation and without hesitation he nodded.

I pushed the wallet aside. If nothing else came out of this, the Hines family was going to get this wallet returned after nearly thirty years, assuming that Paul Brenner returned from Vietnam.

I said to Mr. Vinh, “In your letter, you said to your brother that an American captain killed this man.”

Susan translated, and Mr. Vinh nodded.

I continued, “We have some photographs of a man who we believe to be this captain. Perhaps you can recognize this man.”

Susan spoke to him and opened the photo pack to the last ten photos and showed them, one by one, to Mr. Vinh. I watched his face as he looked intently at the photographs.

When Susan came to the last one, Mr. Vinh stared at it and said something, then went back and looked through the photos again, and again he spoke. I had the feeling he was unsure, or unwilling to commit to an identification, and I didn’t blame him.

Susan said to me, “He says the light was not good. The captain’s face was covered with dirt, and he wore a helmet, and from where Mr. Vinh lay on the second floor, he could not see the face clearly, and in any case, he could not remember after all these years.”

I nodded. I was close, but approaching a dead end. I asked Mr. Vinh, “Can you tell me what you saw that day?”

Susan asked him, he replied, and she translated directly. “What was in the letter is what I saw.”

I didn’t want to tell him that his letter and my letter might not be the same. So, putting my detective hat on, I said to him, “In your letter, you said to your brother that you could attach no meaning to the murder of the lieutenant by this captain. But you said they argued. Is it possible that the lieutenant threatened the captain? Or was the lieutenant showing insubordination or cowardice? It seems unusual that an officer would draw his pistol and shoot another officer over an argument. Could you think about what you saw, and perhaps another thought will come to you.”

Susan translated, and Mr. Vinh stared at me, though I couldn’t tell why. Finally, he said something, and Susan said to me, “He says he can still attach no meaning to it.”

I wasn’t going to give up that easily, especially after we’d risked our lives to get here and killed four men in the process. I said to Mr. Vinh, “Perhaps my memory of the letter is not good, and perhaps the translation of the letter was not accurate. Could you please re-tell the story as you remember it?”

Susan translated.

Mr. Vinh took a deep breath, as though he didn’t want to tell a war story, and didn’t reply.

I said, “Mr. Vinh, no one likes to re-live that time, but since I’ve been here, I’ve visited the sites of my old battles, including Quang Tri, and also the A Shau Valley. I have re-lived those times in my mind, and I’ve told these stories of war to this lady, and I believe this has been good for me. I ask you now to re-live this time, only so that some good may come of it.”

Susan translated, and Mr. Vinh said something, which she translated as, “He does not want to speak of it.”

Something was wrong here, and I said to Susan, “Are you translating accurately?”

She didn’t reply.

“Susan, what the fuck is going on here?”

She looked at me and said, “You really don’t want to know, Paul.”

I felt a shiver run down my spine. I said, “Yeah, I really fucking want to know.”

“Paul, we’ve come a long way, and we’ve found Mr. Vinh alive. Now we need to see if he has more souvenirs, then go back to Hanoi and make a report.”

I glanced at Mr. Vinh and saw that he understood that his guests were having an argument.

I took the wallet and held it up. I said to Mr. Vinh, “Souvenir?” a word that most Viets understood. “Souvenir de guerre? Dai-uy souvenir? Captain’s souvenir? Trung-uy souvenir? Lieutenant’s souvenir?” I pointed to the wicker chest. “Beaucoup souvenir? Biet?”

He nodded, stood, and went to his war chest.

I looked at Susan and asked, “Do you know what this is about?”

“I do.”

“You saw the true translation of the letter?”

“I did.”

“You’re a lying bitch.”

“I am.”

Mr. Vinh returned with a few items in his hands, which he put on the table.

I looked at them. There was an American military watch, whose second hand had stopped long ago, a plastic army canteen that would still be in use by Mr. Vinh, except it had shrapnel tears in it from some other battle, a gold wedding ring, a set of dog tags, and some papers in a canvas pouch.

I picked up the dog tags and they said Hines, William H., followed by his serial number, then his blood type, and his religion, which was Methodist.

I looked at the ring and inside was inscribed Bill & Fran, 1/15/67, about a year before he was killed.

I opened the canvas pouch and found a bundle of letters from Fran, from Mom and Pop, and other people. I put the letters aside and found an unfinished letter that he’d been writing, dated February 3, 1968. It said:

And there it stopped. I put the letter down.

Also in the canvas pouch was a small notebook, and I opened it. It was a typical officer’s log, showing radio frequencies and call signs, codes, names of South Vietnamese army contacts, and so forth. Plus Lieutenant Hines had used the pages as a diary, and I flipped through it and read a few dated entries. It was mostly stuff about the weather, staff meetings, thoughts on the war, and other random notes.

One entry, dated 15 January, caught my eye. It read, “Capt. B. much beloved by sr. officers, but not by me or others. Spends too much time wheeling & dealing on black market & every nite in whorehouse.”

I closed the diary. It sounded like Capt. B. was enjoying his war, until Tet.

I looked at Mr. Vinh and pointed to the stuff on the table, then to myself.

He nodded.

I looked at Susan and said, “The Hines family will want this. They’ll also want to know how Lieutenant William Hines died.”

Susan said to me, “You know how he died. In battle.”

“Sorry. He was murdered.”

“They don’t need to know that.”

“Well, I can’t speak for the Hines family, but I was sent here to find out who killed Lieutenant Hines.”

“No, that’s not why you were sent here. You were sent here to see if the witness to this murder is still alive. He is. And does he have any souvenirs? He does. And can we get those souvenirs? We have. The people in Washington already figured out the name of the murderer — the other guy in these photos, obviously — and neither you nor I need to know that name. You don’t want to know.”

“Wrong.” I looked at a folded sheet of yellowed paper on the table, the last souvenir from Mr. Vinh’s trunk. I’d recognized it as a unit roster, and I pulled it toward me. It had been typed on an old ditto stencil, and the names were hard to read, but not illegible. The paper was headed U.S. Army, MACV, Quang Tri City, RVN. It was dated 3 January 1968.

I scanned the names and saw that there were sixteen Americans in the advisory group, all officers and senior sergeants. It wasn’t a particularly dangerous job, until something went wrong, as it had during the Tet Offensive.

The commander of the group was a lieutenant colonel named Walter Jenkins, and his executive officer was a Major Stuart Billings. The third in command was a captain, the only captain listed above a string of lieutenants, which included William H. Hines. The captain’s name was Edward F. Blake.

I stared at the name awhile, then pulled the photo pack toward me, and looked at one of the pictures, the one where the captain was wearing a tie. I looked at Susan and said, “Vice President of the United States Edward Blake.”

She lit a cigarette and said nothing.

I took a deep breath. If I’d had a Scotch and soda, I would have downed it. Edward F. Blake. Capt. B.

Vice President Edward Blake, one heartbeat and one election away from becoming the next president of the United States. Except he had a problem: He murdered someone.

I glanced at Tran Van Vinh, who sat patiently, though perhaps he was getting bad vibes now. I tried to look cool and calm so as not to upset Mr. Vinh. In a normal tone of voice, I asked Susan, “What are the chances of our host here recognizing Vice President Edward Blake?”

She drew on her cigarette and replied, “That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. I mean, TV reception is not real good out here.”

She said, “We discussed all of that in Washington. They asked me my opinion.”

“What’s your opinion?”

“Well, my opinion is that almost every Viet in the country can recognize the president and maybe even the vice president of the United States from pictures in the newspapers. Newspapers here, as in most Communist countries, are universal, cheap, and available to the masses, who are almost all literate. That’s what I told them in Washington.”

She added, “Also, the news is heavily political and focuses on Washington. The Viets are not badly informed, even in Ban Hin. Plus, we have the television set down at the schoolhouse. And as you might know, Vice President Blake, when he was a senator, was on the Foreign Relations Committee and the MIA Committee, and he has made numerous trips to Vietnam. You may recall that he’s a close personal friend of our ambassador to Hanoi, Patrick Quinn.” Susan glanced at Mr. Vinh and said, “There could be a potential problem, especially if Edward Blake becomes president.” She looked at me and asked, “What do you think?”

I pictured Tran Van Vinh sitting in the marketplace downtown, smoking and reading the local Pravda, and he’s staring at a photo of Edward Blake, and a little bell goes off in his head, and he says to himself, “No… can’t be. Well, maybe. Hey, Nguyen, this guy who’s president of the Imperialist States of America is the guy I told you about — the guy who blew away that lieutenant in Quang Tri.”

But then what? Would he report this interesting coincidence to the local authorities? And if he did, what would come of it? That was the question.

Susan asked again, “What do you think, Paul?”

I looked at her and said, “I can see why some people in Washington could be nervous, and why Edward Blake may be losing some sleep, assuming he knows about all of this, including Paul Brenner’s mission to Vietnam. In any case, the chance of our host here making the ID and reporting it is very slim.”

“Better safe than sorry.” She added, “I feel a little better now that we’ve got all these war souvenirs.”

“And if you kill this guy, you’ll feel even better.”

She didn’t reply to that, but said, “He sort of recognized the photo. I mean, he’s not going to put a name to it right away, but someday he may. Like when he reads about a visit from Edward Blake in one of the national newspapers. In fact, Vice President Blake is right now in Hanoi on an official visit.”

I replied, “What a coincidence.” I asked, “Does Blake know that he’s got a problem? Is that why he’s here?”

“I really don’t know… I think if he doesn’t know now, he’s going to find out from his aides, if and when we get to Hanoi. That’s my guess.”

“So, we don’t know if the people who sent us on this mission are trying to cover for Blake, or blackmail him?”

She didn’t respond to that and continued, “The rural newspapers are weekly, so the next one will have something about Blake’s visit, with accompanying photos. The Viets often show wartime photos with a current photo, and they always mention wartime duty, so they’ll say that Edward Blake fought at the battle of Quang Tri in 1968, but has since become a friend of Vietnam. They love that.” She looked at me. “What do you think? Would our friend here put it together if he saw side-by-side photos of Captain Blake and Vice President Blake?”

“Am I defending this guy’s life?”

She didn’t reply.

I said, “This man did not go through ten years of hell to be whacked by you in his own home because he may remember something someday.”

Mr. Vinh continued to smoke as his guests spoke in English. He probably thought we were very rude, but he was polite enough not to mention it. I wondered, too, if he could recognize the name Edward Blake whenever Susan and I said it. I asked Susan, “Can he understand the name?”

Susan replied, “No. It would be read and pronounced differently. Not so Anglo-Saxon as we pronounce it. Without accent marks, it reads differently to him. But we need to take that roster so he can’t match the name in a newspaper… plus, our presence here will be recalled by him, and so will that photo pack.”

I stared at Susan and thought about all of this. Time to take a Susan reading: Did I still love her? Yes, but I’d get over it. Did I trust her? Never did. Was I pissed? Yes, but impressed. She was very good. And, finally, Was she about to do something rash and violent? She was thinking about it.

She puffed thoughtfully on her cigarette, then said to me, “I really wish you hadn’t been so damned nosy.”

“Hey, that’s what I get paid for. That’s why they call me a detective.”

She smiled, then realizing we’d been ignoring our host, she chatted with him awhile about God knows what. Maybe she was asking him where he’d gotten his dirt floor. She gave him another cigarette, then she found the bill from the Dien Bien Phu Motel in her pocket, and wrote something on the back as she spoke to Mr. Vinh. Maybe they were exchanging pho recipes, but then she said to me, “I’m getting Mr. Vinh’s cousin’s address in Dien Bien Phu so we can mail Mr. Vinh’s letter back to him.”

“Why? You or someone else is going to kill Mr. Vinh.”

Susan didn’t reply.

Mr. Vinh smiled at me.

I said to Susan, “Let’s get out of here before the fuzz shows up.”

Susan said to me, “We’re okay. You’re not going to believe this, but Mr. Vinh is the district Party chief.” She nodded toward the poster of Uncle Ho on the wall. “The soldiers won’t come unless Mr. Vinh summons them.”

I looked at Mr. Vinh. My luck, I’m in the house of the top Commie in the county. That aside, he seemed cooperative, and if Susan had translated my questions about what transpired on that day he’d seen Captain Blake shoot Lieutenant Hines, Mr. Vinh would have answered. I asked Mr. Vinh, “Parlez-vous français?”

He shook his head.

“Not even a little? Un peu?”

He didn’t respond.

Susan said, “Okay, maybe we should go, Paul, before Mr. Vinh starts to smell a rat.”

“I’m not finished.”

“Leave it alone.”

“Tell me, Susan, why it’s important that Edward Blake be covered.”

“You should read the papers more, and I told you, Edward Blake is well connected here. He’s made lots of friends in the Hanoi government — the new people who want to be our friends. Edward Blake is close to a deal on Cam Ranh Bay, as well as a trade deal and an oil deal. Plus, he’ll stand up to China.”

“Who cares? It looks to me like he committed a murder.”

“Who cares about that? He’s going to be the next president. The people like him, the military likes him, the intelligence community likes him, and the business community likes him. I’ll bet even you liked him ten minutes ago.”

In fact, I did. War hero and all that. Even my mother liked him. He was handsome. I said, “Okay, let’s give Edward Blake the benefit of the doubt and assume that he killed Lieutenant Hines for a good military reason. Now you ask Mr. Vinh, without any bullshit, what he saw that day. Now.”

Susan replied, “We’ll never know the reason, and it’s irrelevant, and Mr. Vinh doesn’t know.” She stood. “Let’s go.”

I said to her, “You know. Tell me.”

She moved toward the back wall near the roofline, and she was much closer to the gun than I was. She said to me, “I don’t want you to know. You know too much already.”

Mr. Vinh was trying to figure this all out and looked from me to Susan.

I stood and kept my eyes on Susan.

She knew that I knew where she was heading, and she said to me, “Paul… I love you. I do. That’s why I don’t want you to know any more than you already know. In fact, I’m not going to even mention that you discovered the name of Edward Blake.”

I said, “I’ll mention it. Now you ask him what I want to know, or you tell me what you know.”

“Neither.” She hesitated, then said, “Give me the keys.”

I took the keys out of my pocket and threw them to her.

She caught them, looked at me, and said something to Mr. Vinh. Whatever she said caused Mr. Vinh to look back at me and start talking.

I saw Susan reach into the thatch and take the pistol. She held it behind her back. I wondered if a shot could be heard in the village. Or two shots.

I said to her, “I killed people for my country and did all kinds of nasty things for my country. You ever hear that old saying, ‘I’d rather betray my country than my friend?’ There was a time when I didn’t believe that. Now I’m not so sure. When you get to be my age, Susan, and you look back on this, you might understand.”

We looked at each other, and I could see she was near tears, which was not a good sign in regard to my health or Mr. Vinh’s health.

Mr. Vinh was standing now and looking back and forth at us.

Susan said something to Mr. Vinh, and he began gathering up the stuff on the table.

I wanted to stop him, but I didn’t think that was a good idea for several reasons, not the least of which was the gun.

Mr. Vinh gave the photo pack to Susan, which she put in the side pocket of her quilted jacket, then the canvas pack with the letters and the MACV roster, the dog tags, the wallet, the wedding ring, and the watch, which she also stuffed in her pockets.

Mr. Vinh by now realized that Susan and I were not agreeing on something, but polite chap that he was, he didn’t want to get in the middle of a tiff between two Westerners of the opposite sex.

Meanwhile, Ms. Weber was contemplating her next move, which might be a clean exit or a messy one. She’d have to muffle the sound of the gun, and she might be thinking about that. I had trouble picturing Susan Weber killing Tran Van Vinh, or her new lover, but then I remembered her blowing away those two soldiers without blinking an eye. She moved toward her backpack and removed the pelt that the Montagnards had given her. That’s how I would muffle the gunshot. I looked at her, but she wouldn’t make eye contact with me, which was not a good sign.

She hesitated a long time, then made her decision and stuck the gun in the small of her back without Mr. Vinh being aware of what just transpired.

She presented the pelt to Mr. Vinh with a bow, which he returned. She looked at me and asked, “Are you coming with me?”

“If I come with you, I’m taking your gun and the evidence. You know that.”

She took a deep breath and said, “I’m sorry,” and left.

So, there I was in the middle of nowhere in the house of the local Commie chief who didn’t even speak French, let alone English, and my new girlfriend takes a powder with the bike keys and the gun. Well, it could have been worse.

I put my finger to the side of my head and said to Mr. Vinh, “Co-dep dien cai dau. Crazy.”

He smiled and nodded.

“So, any more buses out of here today?”

“Eh?”

I looked at my watch. It was almost 3 P.M. Dien Bien Phu was thirty kilometers. On a forced march, I could make six or seven kilometers an hour over flat terrain. That should get me into town at about 8 P.M.; or maybe I could hitch a ride.

I said to Mr. Vinh, “Cam un… whatever. Thanks. Merci beaucoup. Great tea.” I put out my hand and we shook. I looked into his eyes. This old veteran had survived hell times ten, and he was now basically a poor peasant, an agrarian Communist of the old school, totally uncorrupted and totally irrelevant. If Washington didn’t whack him, maybe the new people in Hanoi would. Mr. Vinh and I had a few things in common.

I took off my watch, a nice Swiss army brand, and handed it to him. He took it reluctantly and bowed.

I picked up my backpack and left the house of Tran. I walked down through the foothills, through the burial mounds, and back into the village of Ban Hin.

I didn’t attract as much attention as last time, or if I did, I didn’t notice.

Bottom line, despite my bravado and my sarcasm, I was still in love with Ms. Bitch. In fact, I felt my stomach turning and my heart ached. I thought back to Saigon, to the roof of the Rex, the train to Nha Trang, the Grand Hotel, Pyramide Island, Highway One to Hue, Tet Eve, and A Shau and Khe Sanh and Quang Tri, and if I had it all to do over again, I’d do it with her.

Then there was the Edward Blake thing. I still couldn’t get it all straight, and I wasn’t ready to analyze it. What I knew for certain was that some power circle or the other had gotten wind of this letter and intruded themselves into it, or maybe it was the other way around; the letter had come to the attention of the CIA first, or the FBI, and the army CID was only the front. And Paul Brenner was Don Quixote, running around the countryside on knightly errands with Ms. Sancho Panza, who was the real power and the real brains. Of course, I’d figured some of this out a while ago, but I hadn’t done much about it.

In any case, some people in Washington had talked themselves into a deep paranoia, which they’re good at. And Edward Blake was a winner, according to the polls; handsome war hero, beautiful wife and kids, money, friends in high places, so anyone or anything who threatened his coming presidency was dead meat.

That aside, I didn’t think the guy was in trouble, especially if someone whacked Mr. Vinh, and whacked me. Susan, in the final analysis, couldn’t pull the trigger, so maybe I should send her a thank-you note.

I passed through the village square and glanced at the monument to the dead. This war, this Vietnam War, this American War, just went on killing.

I came to Route 12 and looked around for a lift, but it was the last day of the holiday, and I supposed everyone was stretching it out to the weekend, and no one was going anywhere for a while.

I began walking south toward Dien Bien Phu. I passed the military post and noticed that the jeep was gone.

About a half-kilometer down the road, I heard a big motorcycle behind me, but I kept walking.

She pulled up beside me, and we looked at each other.

She asked, “Why are you going to Dien Bien Phu? I told you how to get to Hanoi. You don’t listen to me. You should be hitching a ride to Lao Cai. I’m going that way. Jump on.”

“Thanks, but I’d rather crawl, and I’d rather go where I want to go.” I kept walking.

I heard her call out to me, “I’m not going to follow you, or beg you. This is it. Come with me, or you’ll never see me again.”

We’d already done this routine on Highway 6, but this time I was hanging tough. I acknowledged that I’d heard her with a wave of my hand and continued on.

I heard the motorcycle rev, then listened to the engine growing fainter as she drove off.

About ten minutes later, the motorcycle engine was behind me again. She pulled up to me and said, “Last chance, Paul.”

“Promise?”

“I was afraid you’d gotten a ride, then I’d lose you.”

I kept walking, and she kept up with me by accelerating and downshifting the bike. She said, “You can drive.”

I didn’t reply.

She said, “You have to get to Hanoi, then fly out of here Sunday. I need to get you to Hanoi or I’m in trouble.”

“I thought you were supposed to kill me.”

“That’s ridiculous. Come on. Time to go home.”

“I’ll find my own way home, thank you. Did it twice.”

“Please.”

“Susan, go to hell.”

“Don’t say that. Please come with me.”

We both stood there on the dirt road and looked at each other. I said, “I really don’t want you with me.”

“Yes, you do.”

“It’s over.”

“Is this the thanks I get for not killing you and Mr. Vinh?”

“You’re all heart.”

“Mind if I smoke?”

“I don’t care if you burn.”

She lit up and said, “Okay, here’s what happened. In Tran Van Vinh’s letter, he said that he was in the Treasury Building in the Citadel of Quang Tri City, wounded, on the second floor, looking down. He saw two men and a woman enter, and they opened a wall safe and began taking out bags. They were civilians, and Mr. Vinh, then Sergeant Vinh, speculated that they were either looting the treasury, or they were on official business and were taking the loot to a safe place. Mr. Vinh said in his letter that these people opened some of the bags, and he could see gold coins, American currency, and some jewelry.” She drew on her cigarette. “You see where this is going. Do you want to go there?”

“This is why I’m here. You don’t listen to me.”

She smiled and continued, “This story comports with the fact that the treasury at Quang Tri was looted during the battle. It’s in the history books. I looked it up.”

“Finish the story.”

She continued, “Sergeant Vinh in his letter says that he had run out of ammunition several hours before, so he just watched. A few minutes later, the lieutenant — Hines — came into the building, and he spoke to the three civilians, as though he might be on a mission with them to save the contents of the safe. But all of a sudden, Lieutenant Hines raises his rifle and kills the two men. The woman was pleading for her life, but he killed her with a rifle shot to the head. Captain Blake enters, sees what happened, and he and Lieutenant Hines have an argument, and Lieutenant Hines starts to raise his rifle, but Captain Blake fires his pistol and kills Lieutenant Hines. Then, Captain Blake secures the cash and gold by putting it back in the safe and locking it shut. Then he leaves.” She added, “The loot disappeared afterward.”

She threw away her cigarette and said, “So that’s what happened, and that’s what Tran Van Vinh saw and wrote to his brother in the letter.”

I looked at her for a while, then said, “I think you got the two Americans reversed.”

She sort of smiled. “You may be right. But I think it sounds better that way.”

I said, “So Edward Blake actually killed four people in cold blood and is also a thief. And this is the guy you want to be president?”

“We all make mistakes, Paul. Especially in war. Actually, I wouldn’t vote for Edward Blake myself, but he’d be good for the country.”

“Not for my country. See you around.” I turned and walked away.

She stayed abreast of me and said, “I like a man who stands up for what’s right.”

I didn’t reply.

She said, “So now you know the secret. Can you keep it?”

“No.”

“You can’t prove it.”

“I’ll try.”

“That’s not a good idea.”

I stopped and looked around. There wasn’t a soul in sight. I said to her, “Hey, this would be a good place for you to kill me.”

“It would be.” She drew the .45 automatic out of her belt and very expertly twirled it by the trigger guard and handed it to me, butt first. “Or, you can get rid of me.” I took the gun and flung it as far as I could into a flooded rice paddy.

She said, “I have another gun. Two more, in fact.”

“Susan, you’re not well.”

“I told you, my family is crazy.”

“You’re crazy.”

“So what? It makes me interesting. Do you think you’re completely well?”

“Look, I don’t want to argue with you out here—”

“Do you love me?”

“Sure.”

“You want my help in blowing Edward Blake out of office?”

“He’s good for the country,” I reminded her.

“Not my country. Come on. I’m running out of gas, and you’re too old to walk.”

“I was an infantryman.”

“Which war? Civil or Spanish-American? Get on. You can deal with me in Hanoi. I need a spanking.”

I smiled.

She made a U-turn around me and reached for my hand. I took it, and she pulled me toward the bike.

I got on.

We headed north, past Ban Hin, toward Lao Cai and on to Hanoi.

This would have been a pleasant outcome if I truly believed even half of what she told me.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

We continued north on Route 12, which remained a single-lane dirt road that ran along the Na River to our left.

The sky was heavy with low, dark clouds, which looked like they were going to hang around until spring. I hadn’t seen a sunny day since we’d gone over the Hai Van Pass on the road to Hue.

To the extent that weather affects the culture, there really were two distinct Vietnams: sunny, noisy, and smiley in the south; gray, quiet, and somber up here. Guess who won the war?

Susan and I hardly said a word to each other, which was fine with me. I hate these lovers’ quarrels where one person wants to kill someone and the other doesn’t.

I tried to figure this all out, and I guess I understood most of it, at least the political, economic, and global strategy part of it. And as usual, it made about as much sense as how we got involved here in the first place. In the final analysis, it only had to make sense to the people in Washington, who thought differently than normal people.

Regarding Washington’s motivations, this was a mixture of legitimate concern about China, an unhealthy obsession with Vietnam in general, and the deeply held belief that power was like a big dick that God gave you to use and have fun with.

Aside from these profound thoughts were the human elements. For starters, Edward Blake needed to go to jail for murder. Someone else could be president.

Then there was Karl. Colonel Hellmann needed a general’s star or he’d be forced to retire, and a senior colonel trying to get a star was like a high school girl trying to get a date the night before the prom; blow jobs were not out of the question. I didn’t blame him, really, but he didn’t need to drag me into it.

And then there were the bit players, like Bill Stanley, Doug Conway, and who knew who else, who were reading from a script titled, “God Bless America,” which the producers and directors were actually going to present as, “Mr. Blake Goes to Washington,” in which President Blake fucks the Russians out of Cam Ranh Bay, makes Vietnam into an American oil company, thereby redeeming the past, and in the last act, the Seventh Fleet sails out of Cam Ranh Bay toward Red China and scares the shit out of everyone.

Maybe these people should take up tennis.

And there was Cynthia, who was manipulated by Karl Hellmann to suggest to Paul Brenner that Paul needed a mission; that this was the best way to save the relationship. Cynthia’s motives may have been pure, but if she really understood me, she would have been totally honest instead of pretending that she and Karl were not in cahoots. God save me from women who have only my best interests at heart.

And then there was Susan, my furry little kitten with the big fangs. The really scary thing was that she was truly in love with me. I seem to attract intelligent women with mental health problems. Or, to look at it another way, the problem might be me. I can usually blame Dickie Johnson for most of my lady problems, but I think, this time, it was my heart.

There was a big town ahead, according to the map, Lai Chau, which unfortunately was not Lao Cai, and not even close.

We had the Montagnard wrappings on so that out on the road, the military wouldn’t spot us for Westerners and pull us over for fun. But as we approached Lai Chau, we took off the scarves, the fur-trimmed leather hats, and goggles, and pulled into a gas station in the middle of the town, which looked like a less prosperous Dien Bien Phu.

Susan used the facility while I pumped gas with a hand crank. Is it slower if you’re pumping liters instead of gallons? Or faster?

Susan returned, sans blue dye on her face and hands, and said, “I’ll pump. You can go use the bucket.”

“I like pumping.”

She smiled and said, “Can I hold your nozzle?”

Totally nuts. But a great lay.

“Are you angry at me?”

“Of course not.”

“Do you trust me?”

“I think we did this.”

“Okay, do you believe that I’m on your side? That I believe as you do that Edward Blake needs to give a public accounting of how William Hines died?”

“Absolutely.” I finished pumping and asked her, “You got any dong?”

She paid the attendant, who was standing near us, looking us over, and checking out the BMW. Why don’t these guys pump the gas? Things will be different here when all the gas stations are American-owned and — operated. That’ll show these bastards who really won the war.

I wanted to drive, so I mounted up. Susan came up beside me and said, “Look at me, Paul.”

I looked at her.

She said, “I could not have killed that man. You have to believe that.”

I looked into her eyes and said, “I do believe that.”

She smiled and said, “You, however, piss me off.”

I smiled, but said, “It’s not a joke.”

“I know. Sorry. I make bad jokes when I’m tense.”

“Jump on.”

She got on the back and put her arms around me.

I started the engine and off we went, up Route 12, which was mostly uphill as the Na Valley rose higher.

Susan was hungry, as usual, and we pulled over and had a picnic lunch beside a foul-smelling rice paddy. Bananas and rice cakes, and a liter of water. The last good protein I’d had was the porcupine last night.

Susan lit a post-prandial cigarette and said, “If you’re wondering why they picked you, one reason was because they wanted a combat veteran. There’s this sort of bond between old soldiers, even if they fought on different sides, and I could see that immediately between you and Mr. Vinh.”

I thought about that and replied, “There’s no bond between me and Colonel Mang.”

“Actually, there is.”

I ignored that and said, “So, I was picked by a computer? Handsome, bilingual in French and Vietnamese, extensive knowledge of the country, loves native food, motorcycle license, and people skills.”

She smiled. “Don’t forget good lay.”

“Right. Tell you what — they miscalculated.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

I let that one go, and we mounted up.

About sixty kilometers and two hours out of Lai Chau, the road forked and there was actually a sign: to the left was the Laotian border, ten kilometers, and to the right was Lao Cai, sixty-seven kilometers. I took the right fork, not wanting to go to Laos on this trip, and definitely not wanting to run into any more border guards or military.

In my rearview mirror, however, I saw a military jeep kicking up dust behind me. I said to Susan, “Soldiers.”

She didn’t look back, but bent over and found the jeep in the mirror. “You can easily outrun them on a rutted dirt road.”

What she meant was that the tire ruts were very bumpy, whereas the crown in the middle was smoother. I twisted the throttle and got the bike up to sixty KPH, and I saw that the cloud of dust behind me was getting farther away.

We kept up that speed for half an hour, and I figured if the jeep was going half our speed, then he was fifteen kilometers behind us.

She said to me, “I told you a motorcycle was better.”

A lot of this trip had been thought out ahead of time, and what seemed to me random or serendipitous had been calculated. I’d made the mistake of underestimating my friends in Washington, who I knew couldn’t be as stupid as they seemed.

This was a totally desolate stretch of road, called, according to the map, 4D, which obviously meant desolate. It was getting cold and dark. I took Susan’s hand and looked at her watch. It was about 7 P.M. The sun sinks fast in these latitudes, as I found out in ’68, and you can get caught in the dark by surprise.

Route 4D was starting to climb into high mountains, and I could see towering peaks to our front. To make matters worse, a ground fog was developing. We were not going to make it to Lao Cai.

Once again, I started looking around for a place to pull over where we could spend the night. I could actually see my breath, and I guessed the temperature was close to freezing.

Just as I was about to pull over on a small patch of ground near a mountain stream, I saw a sign that said Sa Pa, and in English, Scenic Beauty. Good Hotels. I stopped and stared at the sign. Maybe it was a backpacker joke. I said, “Is that for real?”

Susan informed me, “There’s a hill station town up here called Sa Pa. Old French summer resort. Someone in my Hanoi office went there. Let’s see the map.”

I took out the map, and we both looked at it in the fading light. Sure enough, there was a little dot called Sa Pa, but no indication on the map that this was anything other than another two-chicken town. The map elevation showed 1,800 meters, which explained why I could see my breath and not feel my nose. I said, “It’s another thirty kilometers or so from Sa Pa to Lao Cai. We’ll stop in Sa Pa.”

I accelerated up the sharply rising road. The fog was thick now, but I left my headlight off and stayed in the middle of the dirt road.

Within fifteen minutes, we could see the glow of lights, and a few minutes later, we were in Sa Pa.

It was a pleasant little place, and in the dark, I could imagine I was in a French alpine village.

We drove around awhile, and the town was dead in the winter. There were lots of small hotels and guest houses in Sa Pa, and every one of them would report our check-in to the Immigration Police.

I saw few people on the streets, and most of them were Montagnards. I spotted a Viet on a motor scooter ahead of me, and I said to Susan, “Ask that guy what’s the best hotel in town.” I accelerated and came up beside him. Susan spoke to him, and he gave her directions. She said to me, “Make a U-turn.”

I made a U-turn on the quiet street, and Susan directed me to a road that climbed above the town.

At the very end of the road, like a mirage, was a huge, modern hotel called the Victoria Sa Pa.

We gave the bike to a doorman, took our backpacks, and entered the big, luxurious lobby.

She said to me, “Nothing but the best for my hero. Use your American Express. I think I’m not being reimbursed anymore.”

“Let’s have a drink first.”

There was a lounge off the lobby, and I took Susan’s arm and led her into this modern lounge with a panoramic view of the misty mountains. We put our backpacks down and sat at a cocktail table. A waitress took our orders for two beers. I looked around and saw about a dozen Westerners in the big place, so we didn’t stand out, which was why I wanted the best place in town.

Susan said to me, “I have the feeling we’re not checking in here.”

“No, we’re not.” I added, “By now, Colonel Mang may know we stayed at the Dien Bien Phu Motel, so he knows we’re in northwest Vietnam. He’d like to know exactly where, but I’m not sure what he’d do with that information. In any case, I don’t want him or the local goons joining us for cocktails. So we’ll push on.”

She replied, “I agree we shouldn’t check into a hotel or guest house, but maybe we should find a place to sleep in town, like a church, or that park we saw. Lao Cai is about two hours of dangerous driving through the mountain fog. If a military jeep came up behind us, we wouldn’t hear him over the motorcycle, and we might not be able to outrun him. If he came toward us on a narrow mountain road, we’d have to turn around, and we might not be able to outrun him.” She looked at me and said, “And you threw away my gun.”

“I thought you had two more.”

She smiled.

I said, “Well, I have an infantryman’s solution to escape and evasion at night. We walk.”

She didn’t reply.

The beers came, and Susan raised her glass to me. “To the worst three days I’ve ever spent in Vietnam, with the best man I’ve ever spent them with.”

We touched glasses. I said, “You wanted a little adventure.”

“I also wanted a hot shower and a soft bed tonight. Not to mention a good dinner.”

“You wouldn’t get any of that in jail.” I looked at her and said, “We’ve come too far to make a mistake now.”

“I know. You’re the expert on getting out of here with only hours left before the flight leaves.”

“Did it twice.”

Susan called the cocktail waitress over and in French made her understand we wanted something to eat.

Susan smiled at me and said, “Maybe we’ll come back here in the summer.”

“Send me a postcard.”

She sipped her beer thoughtfully, then said, “They’ll have a fax machine here.” She looked around at the dozen or so people in the lounge. “We can ask one of these Westerners to send a fax for us. Just to say we’ve made it this far.”

I replied, “If we don’t make it all the way to Hanoi with a mission report, they won’t care how far we got.”

“Well… we should at least tell them that we met TVV, and he’s given us some souvenirs.”

“Susan, the less they know in Saigon, Washington, and the American embassy in Hanoi, the better. I don’t owe them anything after the bullshit they — and you — have been feeding me for two weeks.”

The waitress brought a bowl of peanuts and two plates of satay on skewers, covered with what smelled like peanut butter sauce.

“What is this meat?” I asked.

“Don’t obsess on the meat. You have a long walk ahead of you.” Susan stood. “I saw some tourist brochures in the lobby. I’ll be right back.”

I sat there with my beer and mystery meat. Jealous men don’t like their women out of their sight. I’m not a jealous man, but I’ve learned that I shouldn’t let Susan out of my sight.

She returned a few minutes later with a few brochures in her hand, sat, and scanned one of them. She said, “Okay, here’s a little map of Sa Pa, and I see the road to Lao Cai. You want to hear about the road?”

“Sure.”

“All right… surrounding us are the Hoang Lien Mountains, which the French called the Tonkinese Alps… the area is home to an abundance of wildlife, including mountain goats and monkeys—”

“I hate monkeys.”

“It’s very cold in the winter. If we’re hiking, and I guess we are, there are no mountain huts or shelters, and we’ll need rain gear and a heating stove—”

“Susan, it’s only thirty-five kilometers. I can do that in my underwear. Do we have to go through any villages?”

“I don’t think so… doesn’t say… but there are Red Zao tribesmen in the mountains, and it says here they’re very shy and don’t like visitors.”

“Good.”

“Okay… twelve kilometers from Sa Pa is the Dinh Deo Pass, the highest mountain pass in Vietnam at 2,500 meters. On this side of the pass, the weather is cold, wet and foggy. After we cross the pass, it will often be sunny.”

“Even at night?”

“Paul, shut up. Okay… there are strong winds over the pass, but only a few hundred meters down, the weather starts to get warmer. Sa Pa is the coldest place in Vietnam, and Lao Cai is the warmest. That’s good… the Dinh Deo Pass is the dividing line between two large weather systems.”

“Can I speak?”

“No. About ten kilometers out of Sa Pa is the Silver Waterfall where we can ditch the motorcycle.”

“It says that in the brochure?”

She looked up from the brochure and said to me, “They told me in Saigon that this guy Paul Brenner had a reputation of being a difficult-to-work-with wiseass. They didn’t know the half of it.”

I informed her, “They told me in Washington you were a businessper-son who was doing a favor for Uncle. They didn’t tell me one percent of it.”

“You lucked out.”

I said, “Let’s get out of here before we have company.”

We paid the bill, walked outside, tipped the doorman, and got the motorcycle.

Susan said, “It’s cold out here.”

“It’s sunny on the other side of the pass.”

We put on our gloves, leather hats, and Montagnard scarves, mounted up and drove off. We went back into the town, and Susan directed me to the road leading north to Lao Cai.

The dark, foggy road climbed higher into the mountains. The road was paved, but the visibility was so bad I had to keep the speed down to between ten and fifteen KPH.

About forty-five minutes out of Sa Pa, I could hear the crashing of a waterfall ahead, and a minute later we saw the falls cascading from a high mountain off to our left front. There was a drop-off on the side of the road, and I dismounted. I couldn’t see down through the fog, so I picked up a big rock and threw it. A few seconds later, I heard it strike another rock, then another, until the echoes died away. I said to Susan, “Well, as the brochure said, this is where we ditch the bike.”

We left the engine running, and we both pushed the BMW Paris-Dakar off the edge of the road. About two seconds later, we heard it hit, then hit again and again, until we couldn’t hear it any longer. I said, “Good motorcycle. I think I’ll buy one.”

We continued on foot, up the steeply rising road. It was bitter cold, and the north wind was blowing in our faces.

It took us almost an hour to cover the two or three kilometers to the Dinh Deo Pass. As we approached the crest of the pass, the wind began to howl, and we leaned into it and trudged on in silence.

At the top of the pass, the wind was so strong we had to stop and take a break on the leeward side of a boulder. We sat there and caught our breath.

Susan spent a few minutes getting her cigarette lit in the wind. She said, “I need to stop smoking. I’m winded.”

“It should be better on the downslope. Are you okay?”

“Yeah… just need a break.”

“You want my jacket?”

“No. This is a tropical country.”

I looked at her in the dim light, and our eyes met. I said, “I like you.”

She smiled. “I like you, too. We could have a hell of a life together.”

“We could.”

She put out her cigarette, and we both started to stand, then she froze and said, “Get down!”

We both dropped to the ground and lay flat.

I heard the engine of a vehicle over the noise of the wind, and I could see yellow lights refracted in the fog. We lay there, and the lights got brighter as the vehicle approached from the direction we’d come from. I caught a glimpse of a big military truck as it passed.

We lay there for a full minute, then Susan said, “Do you think he’s looking for us?”

“I have no idea, but if he is, he’s looking for two people on a motorcycle.”

I let another minute pass. Then we stood, came around the boulder, and walked on into the wind. I pushed the scarf down to my neck and raised the flaps on my leather hat so I could hear better. Now and then, I looked over my shoulder for lights. The chance of anyone in a vehicle spotting us on foot before we heard or saw them was slim. But we needed to keep alert.

We crossed the crest of the pass, and the wind picked up, but it was downhill now, and we made good time.

About five hundred meters from the top of the pass, the wind became a breeze, and I could actually feel the air get warmer.

Five minutes later, I saw yellow fog lights coming at us and heard the sound of the engine, carried toward us on the wind.

There was a drop-off to our left, and to our right was a narrow stream between the road and the wall of the mountain. We hesitated half a second, then fell into the ice cold stream.

The vehicle approached slowly, and the engine got louder and the yellow lights got brighter.

We lay there, motionless.

Finally, the vehicle passed, but I didn’t get a glimpse of it.

I gave it thirty seconds, then got up on one knee and looked south. I could see the lights climbing up toward the pass. I stood. “Okay. Let’s move.”

Susan stood, we got back on the road and continued on. We were soaked and cold, but as long as we were moving, we wouldn’t freeze to death.

There was not a single sign of habitation along the route, not even a Montagnard house. If the Viets and hill people thought Dien Bien Phu was cold, they definitely wouldn’t live up here.

Two hours after we crossed the pass, the fog lifted, and the air was warmer. We were almost dried off, and I removed my gloves, scarves, and leather hat and put them in my backpack. Susan kept hers on.

Within half an hour, we could see the lights of a town down in what appeared to be a deep valley that I guessed was the Red River Valley, though I couldn’t actually see the river.

We stopped and sat on a rock. Susan took out one of the tourist brochures, which was soggy, and read the brochure by the flame of her lighter. She said, “That must be Lao Cai, and on the northwest side of the river is China. It says Lao Cai was destroyed during the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979, but the border is open again, if we want to visit the People’s Republic of China.”

“Next time. What’s it say about transportation to Hanoi?”

She flicked on the lighter again and said, “Two trains run daily. First one is at 7:40 A.M., arrives in Hanoi at 6:30 P.M.”

I looked at my watch, but it wasn’t there. I asked Susan, “What time is it?”

She looked at her watch and said, “Almost one A.M. Where’s your watch?”

“I gave it to Mr. Vinh.”

“That was nice of you.”

“I’ll send him a new battery next year.”

She asked me, “What do you want to do for the next six hours?”

“Have my head examined.”

“I can do that. You want to hear it?”

“No. Let’s get down to a warmer elevation, closer to Lao Cai, then find a place to hide out until dawn.” I stood. “Ready?”

She stood and off we went, down the road.

The mountains became foothills, and we saw huts and small villages now, but no lights on. The road dropped steeply toward the valley, and I could now make out the Red River and the scattered lights of two towns on both sides of the river; this side was Lao Cai, and the town on the other side, up river about a kilometer, must be in China.

I only vaguely remembered the 1979 border war between China and Vietnam, but I clearly recalled that the Viets kicked some Red Chinese ass. These people were tough, and as I said to Mr. Loc on the way to the A Shau Valley, I wanted them on our side in the next war. And I guess, in a way, that was partly what this mission was about.

I mean, I didn’t want to be accused of upsetting the global balance of power; the military and political geniuses in Washington were obviously working hard to forge a new Viet-American alliance against Red China. Somehow, Vice President Blake was important to this alliance, and he needed to become president. All I had to do was forget what I’d seen and heard in Ban Hin, and with luck, we’d have Cam Ranh Bay again, and the sailors of the Seventh Fleet could get laid a lot in Vietnam, plus we’d have some new oil resources, and we’d have a big Vietnamese Army poised on that border right ahead of me, and we could all kick some Chinese butt— or at least threaten to if they didn’t stop acting like assholes. Sounded good.

Even better, I could blackmail President Blake into making me Secretary of the Army so I could fire Colonel Karl Hellmann, or bust him to PFC and put him on permanent latrine duty.

Obviously, lots of good things could happen if I just shut my mouth— or maybe I’d get it shut for me.

I didn’t know, nor would I ever know, if Susan Weber was supposed to terminate my career and turn my pension into a death benefit for Mom and Pop. The stakes were high enough for her to be motivated into such a course of action — I mean, if Washington had threatened to kill Mr. Anh’s whole family if he turned rat, then certainly the stakes were high enough to add Chief Warrant Officer Paul Brenner to the hit list.

During the war, the Phoenix Program had assassinated over 25,000 Vietnamese who were suspected of collaborating with the Viet Cong. Add to that number a few Americans in Vietnam who had VC sympathies, and some local Frenchmen who were outright VC collaborators, and other Europeans who lived in Vietnam and leaned too far left. It was an amazing number—25,000 men and women — the largest assassination and liquidation program ever carried out by the United States of America. And I could assume that some of those Americans, who had been involved with the program and who were my contemporaries, were ready, willing, and able to whack a few malcontents and troublemakers like me at the drop of a hat.

On a happier note, I had found the girl of my dreams. Right here in Vietnam. A guy shouldn’t be so lucky.

As we walked toward Lao Cai, I said to Susan, “You understand that I’m going to blow the whistle on Edward Blake.”

She didn’t reply for a while, then said, “Think about it.” She added, “Sometimes, Paul, truth and justice are not what anyone wants or needs.”

“Well, when that day comes — if it hasn’t already arrived — then I’ll move to someplace like Saigon or Hanoi, where at least no one pretends that truth and justice are important.”

She lit a cigarette and said, “Underneath it all, you’re a Boy Scout.”

I didn’t reply.

She said, “Whatever you decide to do, I’m with you.”

Again, I didn’t reply.

We found a thicket of bamboo and made our way into it, then unrolled our ponchos and lay on the ground. I’m not a big fan of bamboo vipers, and I hoped it was cold enough to keep them snoozing until the sun warmed them. That’s what it said in the escape and evasion manual.

Susan slept, but I couldn’t. The sky was clearing, and I could see stars through the broken cloud cover. Some hours later, the sky began to lighten, and I could hear birds that sounded like parrots or macaws squawking. I also heard the stupid chattering of monkeys somewhere in the distance.

We needed to get moving before the bamboo vipers did, and I shook Susan awake. She sat up, yawned and stood.

We got back on the road and continued on.

To our right was a wide stream, flowing swiftly out of the mountains to the Red River. There were clusters of huts near the road, but it was too early for people or vehicles to be out and moving.

The road flattened, and we were on the valley floor now. Within thirty minutes, we entered the incredibly ugly town of Lao Cai.

I could tell that all of these buildings were relatively new and that the entire town must have been destroyed in the 1979 war. At least this was one destroyed Vietnamese city that no one could blame on the United States Army, Marines, Navy, or Air Force.

There were a few people around, but no one took any note of us. I saw a group of about fifteen young backpackers sitting and lying in a group in the marketplace, as though they’d spent the night there.

I said to Susan, “With our backpacks, we can pass for college kids.”

“Me maybe.”

Susan stopped a Vietnamese lady and asked, “Ga xe lua?”

The woman pointed, pantomimed something, and spoke.

Susan thanked the woman in French and I thanked her in Spanish, and off we went.

Susan said, “We have to cross the river.”

We crossed the Red River on a new bridge, and I could see pylons of two destroyed bridges further upstream. Also up the river, where it split into two branches, I could see buildings with Chinese characters painted on them.

Susan saw them, too, and said, “China.”

I looked around as we came off the bridge and saw a few ruined buildings on the Vietnamese side that hadn’t been rebuilt. It had been an odd war, and I couldn’t even remember what it was that got the Chinese and Vietnamese at each other’s throats so soon after the Chinese had given aid to the Viets during the American War. Basically, they didn’t like each other, and hadn’t for about a thousand years. It probably wouldn’t take much to get them at each other’s throats again.

We followed a road that paralleled the train tracks, which I noticed were narrow-gauge. I could see the station ahead, and it, too, was a new concrete slab structure, the original station being probably the first casualty of the war.

We entered the station house and saw hundreds of people at two ticket windows, and hundreds more camped on the Hanoi-bound platform. There were a few people on the westbound platform for the train to China, which was only about 1,500 meters up the line.

The station clock said 6:40, and it looked like we’d be waiting in line for an hour and might not get a seat. The next train, according to the posted schedule, left at 6:30 P.M. and got to Hanoi at 5:30 Saturday morning.

I didn’t need to be in Hanoi until Saturday, but I didn’t want to hang around Lao Cai for twelve hours. Plus, it’s sometimes nice to show up early and surprise people.

I said to Susan, “Why don’t you use your charm and your American bucks and jump the line?”

“I was about to do that.” She went to the front of one of the lines and spoke to a young man. Money changed hands and within ten minutes, she returned with two tickets to Hanoi. She said, “I got us each a soft seat for ten bucks, plus I bought the kid a sleeper bunk for seventeen bucks, and gave him another five. Are you keeping track of our expenses?”

“I’ll just put in for combat pay. Actually, since you’re with me, I can also put in for hazardous duty pay.”

“You’re funny.”

Not a joke.

We moved out to the platform where hundreds of people stood, sat, and lay on the cold concrete. The narrow-gauge train was on a siding, and it looked like the Toonerville Trolley.

The sky was light, but overcast, and the temperature was in the mid-fifties. There were a number of young backpackers and middle-aged Western tourists, and many of them wore recently purchased articles of Montagnard clothing from different tribes, probably mixing tribes as well as genders. The real Montagnards on the platform thought this was funny and were pointing and snickering.

Susan lit a cigarette and asked me, “How much money was combat pay?”

“Fifty-five bucks a month. Six hundred and sixty dollars a year. Not that good a deal. Meanwhile, guys like Edward Blake, who weren’t out in the jungle getting their asses shot off, did things like black market, currency dealing, and outright looting. Some people here got rich off the war, most got killed, wounded, or fucked up, plus, of course, fifty-five bucks a month for their troubles.”

Susan thought a moment and then said, “I can see why you’d take this personally.”

I didn’t reply.

She asked me, “I wonder if Blake got that loot home.”

“We may never know, but it wasn’t that difficult. Before you went home, you got checked out here to make sure you weren’t bringing home drugs or military ordnance. Other than that, they didn’t care what you brought home in your duffel bag. At the U.S. end, Customs just waved you through because they knew you’d been checked for drugs and explosives at this end. Also, officers, like Captain Blake, were on the honor system.”

She nodded and said, “Behind every great fortune, there is a crime.”

Because this was a border town, there were too many uniformed guys around, mostly border patrol types, but also a lot of heavily armed soldiers, as though they were expecting another war momentarily. This place was a little creepy, but there were enough adventure travelers from Europe, Australia, and America to provide us some cover.

Border cops began patrolling the platform, asking people for ID and soliciting contributions for the widows and orphans fund. I noticed that they gave the ethnic Chinese a really hard time, and also they were picking on Westerners who were alone or in small groups without a guide.

Susan, too, noticed this and said to me, “See that group over there? I think they’re Americans. Let’s mingle.”

I knew they were Americans because two of the guys were wearing shorts in fifty-degree weather, and the women had bought and put on enough Montagnard jewelry to look like radar antennas.

We walked over to the tour group of about twenty Americans who had a male Viet guide with them.

Susan, who’s more sociable than I am, struck up a conversation with a few of the ladies. They talked jewelry and fabrics.

The cops kept their distance from us.

At about 7 A.M., the Toonerville Trolley started to move off the siding and ran onto the main single-line track and stopped at the platform. Susan said good-bye to her new friends, and we went to our car in the short eight-car train. We boarded car Number 2 and found our seats.

The coach was narrow, with only two seats on the left, and the aisle running along the windows to the right.

We put our backpacks overhead, and Susan said, “You take the aisle so you can stretch a little. This is really cramped.” We sat.

Neither of us spoke, and I think we both realized that we’d had more than our share of good luck, and we shouldn’t comment on it. Of course, skill, brains, and experience had a lot to do with it, too. As it turned out, Susan Weber was a good traveling companion. I wondered if I’d have made it on my own, and I knew that I’d be wondering about that for the rest of my life.

At 7:40, the train pulled out of the station, and we were on our way to Hanoi.

The tracks ran along the north bank of the Red River, and on both sides of the river, the Tonkinese Alps stretched along the valley. With a little imagination, I could picture myself in Europe going someplace nice.

The coach was filled with Viets and Westerners, and there were people standing in the vestibule, but no squatters in the narrow aisle beside us.

We sat in silence awhile, watching the scenery, which was actually quite spectacular. The train made a lot of noise over the tracks, and I realized the coach wasn’t heated. I also assumed there was no bar car.

Susan turned away from the window and looked at me. She said, “So far, so good.”

“So far, so good.”

She asked, “So, was I a good buddy?”

“Am I home in one piece yet?”

She lit a cigarette and looked out the window for a few minutes, then asked me, “What are your instructions regarding Hanoi?”

“What are yours?”

She didn’t reply for a while, then said, “I was told to go to the embassy for a debriefing.”

I asked her, “Are there Viet police guards around the embassy?”

She replied, “Well, I’ve only been there once… but yes, there’s a Vietnamese police post. Plus I was told there were undercover embassy watchers, checking out everyone who goes in or out, and even taking photos, and sometimes they stop people.”

“What were you doing in the embassy?”

“Just visiting.”

“Right.”

She asked me again, “What are your instructions?”

I replied, “I was told to go to the Metropole and await further instructions. I may or may not be contacted. I may or may not be wanted in the embassy. I’m to leave for another city tomorrow—”

“Bangkok. I saw your tickets, and so did Colonel Mang.”

“Right. The Metropole is out, Hanoi airport is out, and the embassy is watched.”

“So? What are we going to do?”

“Is the Hanoi Hilton still open?”

“This is not a joke.”

“I make jokes when I’m tense. Anyway, am I to understand from you that Vice President Blake is visiting Hanoi?”

“He’s here to see his old friend, Ambassador Patrick Quinn, and to participate in a conference on MIAs, and I’m sure a few other less publicized meetings with the Vietnamese government.”

I nodded. “He should also have an unscheduled meeting. With us.”

Susan didn’t reply for a while, then said, “That might be a good idea, or a very bad idea.”

“If he knows about this problem, he wants to be in Hanoi where he can have some hands-on control of the situation where and when the mission ends. We can help him with that.”

Susan replied, “I honestly don’t know if he’s aware that he has a problem. But other people do, and I think Mr. Blake will be made aware of it in Hanoi. The bad news, Mr. Vice President, is that we know you murdered three Viets and an American officer in Vietnam. The good news, sir, is that we have the situation under control.”

“It’s not under control,” I pointed out.

“It was supposed to be.”

The train continued east toward Hanoi. Susan and I discussed a few ideas and options and tried to come up with a game plan. I made believe I trusted her completely. She made believe, too.

I kept getting the feeling that I wasn’t supposed to have gotten this far, and that Susan was making adjustments for my living presence. But that might be too paranoid. Maybe I was supposed to make it as far as Bangkok, then be evaluated as to how much I found out, and, as Mr. Conway said, how I would be dealt with. Maybe Susan was supposed to be a witness for or against me. And maybe my friend, Karl, who cared about me, was to be my judge. I asked Susan, “Are you supposed to go to Bangkok?”

She didn’t reply.

“Hello? Susan?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” I pointed out to her, “If there exists a possibility that I might need to be… let’s say, given a full military funeral before I was ready for one, has it occurred to you that you, too, might be in a similar predicament?”

“It has occurred to me.”

“Good.” I left it at that.

We moved into the rising sun, toward Hanoi, toward the end of the mission, and toward the end of my third, and definitely last, tour of duty in Vietnam.

The train from Lao Cai moved slowly through the northern outskirts of Hanoi, and at 6:34 P.M., we pulled into Long Bien Station.

The journey from sultry, sinful Saigon had taken me to the battlefields of South Vietnam and into the heart of my own darkness, and up country on a journey of discovery and hopefully self-awareness.

I had finally come to terms with this place, as had a lot of men who’d been here, and as had a lot of my generation, men and women, who hadn’t been to Vietnam, but who had lived through Vietnam so many years ago.

And yet, at unexpected moments, the war still had the power to haunt our dreams and intrude into our waking hours. And for Edward Blake, this was one of those times.