Travels With Charlie

The man who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself.

--Nietzsche

There is only one sin and that is cowardice.

--Nietzsche

The Viet Cong schoolhouse is a spacious building of handmade yellow bricks and looks like a sunny resort villa in a Tahitian paradise. The roof is red tile. There's a small courtyard off to one side where French colonial officials used to sit and drink fancy drinks and tell jokes beneath canvas canopies.

Today the courtyard is full of laughing children taking their places on reed sleeping mats, which they unroll in perfectly aligned rows along the clean-swept classroom area. The classroom area faces a wall covered by purple bougainvillea and is shaded by a coconut palm.

Kieu Chi Song and I are laying bricks. Song is the Viet Cong schoolteacher for the village of Hoa Binh, a Viet Cong village somewhere west of Khe Sanh, near the Laotian border. Song and I got up at dawn to repair a big bite that an artillery shell took out of the low whitewashed wall that encloses the courtyard.

Enemy cannons at the Rockpile and Camp Carroll crank out fire missions twenty-four hours a day. Three or four times each week big shells pass over our village on their way to hit Viet Cong positions pinpointed by forward observers, Bird Dog spotter planes or Force Recon inserts. One shell in a hundred is a dud. One shell in fifty is a short round. Sometimes short rounds kill Vietnamese civilians in the occupied zones. Sometimes short rounds fall on enemy positions and kill American Marines. This short round took a bit out of our wall.

Song stands on the other side of the wall and mixes cement as I life another broken brick. The brick is heavy and red inside and still cold from the night. It has been broken before and has been repainted many times.

After spreading a layer of cement, Song puts down her wooden trowel and helps me position the brick. Song is careful not to get any cement on her dress. She is wearing a black silk Ao Dai which she has hand-swen with big yellow chrysanthemums. Song has coal-black eyes, high cheekbones, dark eyelashes, perfect white teeth, and shiny black hair. Her hair hangs down her back all the way to her waist.

Song looks at me and smiles. "Bao Chi, my brother, you mend this wall without revolutionary enthusiasm."

I shrug. "Bad night."

"Bao Chi, I think that you miss your home village of Alabama very much."

I pick up another brick. "Yes," I say. You cannot tell a beautiful woman that the reason you can't sleep is because you sometimes still get the Hershey squirts, even though you've been a prisoner of war for over a year and have consumed more than your share of Viet Cong chow. "Sometimes I can't sleep. I sit up all night down by the river and I think about my family."

"Will you fight again with the Black Rifles?"

I pat the brick down until it settles. "I can't fight against the people. Not again." I lie. "This village is my home now."

Song smiles. "Will you be the giant student today?"

I say, "Yes, my sister."

I hop over the wall and Song and I join the students in the courtyard. The children are all in their proper places on their mats, talking and playing. As Song and I come out of the schoolhouse with armloads of books, the kids stop horsing around and giggling and sit up straight and silent like little soldiers.

Song and Le Thi, her teacher's pet, pass out the books while I go back into the schoolhouse to get the notebooks and pencils hidden in the wall. High on the wall hangs a framed photograph of Ho Chi Minh and a flag. The flag is half red and half blue, with a big yellow star in the center.

As I distribute notebooks and pencils to the students one little girl stares at me with terror in her eyes and starts crying. The little girl runs to Song for protection. Song hugs the little girl, dries her tears, kisses her.

This little girl is new to the school, another refugee from the occupied zones. The mothers of Viet Nam tell their children, "Be good or the Black Rifles will get you." The Black Rifles--the Marines, long-nosed white foreigners--like me.

After Song has comforted the girl and talked softly to her the little girl squats down, but watches me, sad-eyed and silent. I'd make a funny face at her and try to make her laugh, but I don't want to scare her.

Song says to the class in English: "This man is our friend. Do you remember? His name is Bao Chi. Why is he here? Does anyone know the answer?"

A boy raises his hand. He is all smiles, the class clown. His head is clean-shaven except for a small topknot of hair. In his raised hand he's holding a small aluminum airplane, a MIG with red stars on its wings.

Song says, "Yes, Tran."

Tran speaks not to Song but turns and plays his act to the class. "Bao Chi orders us speaking big Amercan states English." He grins, his own best audience.

Song nods, smiling. "Bao Chi helps us speak good English."

Song raises her hand and the whole class repeats back in unison: "Bao Chi helps us speak good English."

Song says, "In our country of golden-skinned people live twenty million Vietnamese. Ten percent have been killed fighting for freedom. Two million of our families and neighbors are dead. In the U.S. live two hundred million Americans. If ten percent of the American people are killed by the brave fighters of the liberation forces, how many Americans will die?"

A little girl with pigtails raises her hand. The little girl has chubby cheeks and is missing two of her baby teeth.

Song says, "Yes, Le Thi. Do you know the answer?"

Le Thi blushes. "Twenty million Americans will die," she says. Then in Vietnamese: "I am proud of our people."

Song says, "Thank you, Le Thi. Now, in a battle the gallant Front fighters defeated the American imperialists and their mercenary puppet armymen. Eight hundred enemies were killed. One-fourth of the killed enemies were mercenary puppet armymen and the others were American imperialists. How many American imperialists were killed in the battle?"

One hand goes up.

Song says, "Le Thi."

Le Thi says, "Six hundred imperialists were killed."

Song laughs. "You are very good today, Le Thi."

Le Thi giggles. Blushing, she says, "Yes, I am."

After class Song changes clothes and we lead the class to the rice fields. We all pitch in to help with the harvest.

We cut rice under the hot hammers of the sun all day, every man, woman, and child in the village.

At the end of the long day of cutting rice stalks, Song and I run barefoot along the paddy dike, playing tag. It is important that we get home before twilight so that the paths can be used by the spirits of the ancestors in their daily stroll through the village.

We run past a water buffalo wallowing in a pool of mud. The water bo is really enjoying himself.

We hear the sound of the pounding of rice. We see a woman bathing a baby in a well water bucket. As we pass by, a little boy pisses from a thatch doorway into a mudhole.

The sun is a smudge of orange behind the treeline as the people of the village come in from the fields. The men and women who fish the river are pulling their boats out of the water. Between the boats, black nets are slung on the sand.

The riverbank is lined with tall coconut palms and clumps of bamboo and a few jackfruit trees and flame trees. Palm fronds, nudge by the wind, scrape together softly.

The older women are down in the river, knee-deep in the brown water, slapping laundry on the partly submerged washing rock and rinsing in the swift current.

Life in the Liberated Zone: In the center of the village a dozen little black pigs grunt and paw at the roots of a giant banana tree. The only machine in the village is wedged up against the trunk of the banana tree: the rusted hulk of an old French armored car.

There is no electricity in the village, no billboards, no plumbing, no telephone poles, no restaurants, no ice, no ice cream, no television, no freeways, no pickup trucks, no frozen pizza.

The hooches of the village blend into the brown and green landscape so naturally that they seem to have grown right up out of the soil like large square plants.

When I first came to the village over a year ago I said to myself: These are not reservation Indians. These Viet Cong people are not Asian mutants like the Vietnamese I saw as a Marine, not those sad, pathetic people with a cloned culture and no self-respect, greedy and corrupt, ragged shameless beggars and whores--Tijuana Mexicans. These Viet Cong people are an entirely different race. They are proud, gentle, fearless, ruthless, and painfully polite.

When I woke up that first day I expected a bucktoothed Jap officer wearing bifocals with lenses thicker than Coke bottle glass, a samurai sword in one hand and a bouquet of burning bamboo shoots in the other. But nobody jammed bamboo shoots under my fingernails.

As Song explained, "We do not torture. We criticize."

Centuries of starvation-level poverty and endless war have not made the Vietnamese bitter or without mercy. Their culture is old and was here before the war.

A year ago I looked out of the window of the Woodcutter's hooch and saw a troop of little kids with bamboo guns trying to shoot down a toy bamboo airplane hanging from a tree limb.

"Bat ong my! Bat ong my!" the kids were chanting: "They've caught an American!"

Of course, back then, I could only speak pidgin Vietnamese, so I figured that they were saying something like, "Burn the infidel!"

When Song pushed me back on the sleeping mat and wiped my sweaty face with a damp cloth I blurted out, "Bao Chi, Bao Chi, Bao Chi!" And I added: "I'm not John Wayne, I just eat the cookies!"

The Marine Corps sent me to Viet Nam as a Marine Corps Combat Correspondent. The was before I pissed off a lifer Major in Hue City and got myself shitcanned to the grunts. Correspondents wore Bao Chi patches on our jungle utility jackets and we always said that if we were ever captured we would yell "Bao Chi"--newspaper reporter. Then the NVA gooks would think we were bigshot civillian news reporters from New York City and wouldn't shoot us in the back of the head.

Of course, the Woodcutter knew who I was, because it was the Woodcutter who found me unconscious by the riverbank a mile from the village and carried me home on his back one cold black night, over a year ago.

Nobody knows how I came to be by the riverbank.

For over a year the Woodcutter has been studying me. For over a year the Viet Cong have been trying to convert me to their cause. For over a year I've been pretending that I am being converted.

For the first few months, I'm told, I was a catatonic, a big white zombie. I could walk, but I couldn't talk. They made me wear leg irons. I came out of it while rumping rice to distribute to North Vietnamese soldiers coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The personnel for our rice run resupply detail were mostly children. The children were all wearing thick flak vests made from woven bamboo. The Phantoms came in, laying snake eyes and nape, and I saw kids dying.