- •Travels With Charlie
- •I saved a lot of kids that day, with crude tourniquets and Boy Scout first aid.
- •I don't know what to say.
- •I speak basic Vietnamese now, so I reply in English: "I am trying to improve my revolutionary enthusiasm, most honored sir."
- •I say, "Want to play baseball after dinner?"
- •I go outside to find Johnny Be Cool.
- •I wave too, and I hunch down beneath my white conical rice-paper hat as I squat on the paddy dike.
- •In a bombed-out clearing the order comes back to pick up the pace. "Tien! Tien!"
- •I touch it too.
- •I nod. I say, "There it is."
- •I wonder why we don't throw away our guns and file claims to homestead and stay up here forever. Let them fight like fools in the lowlands. We'll stay up here and be mountain men.
- •It's Victor Charlie's Big px.
- •I don't know what to say.
- •I lie back on a submerged rock. Only my face is out of the water. The sun is warm on my face. I close my eyes and relax. The soothing roar of the waterfall makes me sleepy.
- •In normal times, there is no love lost between the Montagnards and the Vietnamese.
- •I try to stay close to Master Sergeant Xuan, as ordered, but my leg has started bleeding again and I lag a few yards behind.
- •I help Song to her feet and we listen. When we bear calls of "Hoa Binh!" we rejoin Commander Be Dan and the Hoa Binh fighters.
- •I think about making a run for it, but where would I go? a chopper is down. The angry choppers coming in are going to kill anybody on the ground on sight at five hundred yards.
- •It's a short round of Willy Peter--white phosphorus. The stink of white phosphorus is distinctive and not easy to forget.
- •It's all over, just that fast. I feel sick.
- •I say, touching Song's shoulder, "Coso khong?"--"Are you afraid?" Song looks up at me, smiles, nods.
- •I rejoin the Woodcutter and Commander Be Dan, who have been watching me with interest.
- •I am introduced to the confused women as Bao Chi, the American Front fighter.
- •In the black-market section of the village people materialize out of the darkness, an army of ghosts in white paper hats.
- •In the village, somebody is banging a shell casing with a bayonet.
- •I find an enemy kia and I take his weapon, an m-79 grenade launcher. I stumble on, looking for a target.
I wonder why we don't throw away our guns and file claims to homestead and stay up here forever. Let them fight like fools in the lowlands. We'll stay up here and be mountain men.
But the peace is a false peace and the silence is only another form of military camouflage. Bo Doi scouts greet us on the trail. The Bo Doi guide us past sentries, antiaircraft guns, artillery pieces, and bunker complexes manned by rifle companies of elite North Vietnamese troops.
The Bo Doi open a tree trunk, revealing a tunnel entrance so ingeniously concealed that you could sit down next to it and never see it. We step into the tree and climb down into the tunnel. As usual, I'm a problem, because my shoulders are too big to fit through the frequent trapdoors connecting the various tunnels. When I get stuck, the fighters ahead of me pull and the fighters behind me push. I feel like a fat lady trying to get down into a submarine.
Down under the ground the tunnels expand until they are big enough to drive a truck through. We hump into a tunnel complex that is vast and well equipped, a city of people buried in a mountain.
As we go deeper, the tunnels become cleaner and more squared away. The cave walls are no longer damp and spider-webbed. We are no longer attacked by black clouds of screeching bats. We see green canvas tents pitched in perfect alignment, mounds of wooden crates neatly stacked, electric lights running on generators, a hospital with clean white sheets and staffed by white-gowned doctors and nurses.
It's Victor Charlie's Big px.
We are assigned a bivouac next to a printing press. The fighters sling their hammocks on hitching posts conveniently provided.
We try to sleep. The printing press goes ka-chunk ka-chunk all night--if it is night--and never stops.
When I wake up there are a dozen Bo Doi troopers standing over me, staring at me. I am The Thing that just arrived from outer space aboard a UFO.
The Bo Doi are in full uniform and look like schoolboys. As I sit up they giggle, embarrassed, and hurry away.
Someone has removed the battle dressing from my thigh and has replaced it with a clean white hospital bandage.
Commander Be Dan squats down next to me and hands me some tin-skinned food. The food is a Chinese version of C-rations. We cut open the cans with Commander Be Dan's homemade knife.
The food is mostly vegetables and noodles, with mystery meat, and smells like dead fish. I'm trying to decide how to decline gracefully when Commander Be Dan spits out a mouthful of food and throws a half-eaten can of beans into a trash pit. I'm stunned to hear him say in English: "Chinese food is shit."
After chow, I walk over and watch the printing press cough out freshly printed sheets of pulpy yellow paper.
The printing press is very old, a heavy block of steel and chipped black enamel, manufactured back when things were made to last forever. Every mechanical part in the press is badly worn, yet clean and well oiled. Obviously the printing press is well cared for or it would not work at all. It's like the old John Deere tractor we had on the farm back in Alabama. My dad would always say, "It's held together with spit and baling wire. Don't look at it the wrong way or it will fall apart."
The printer comes over and greets me with a smile. He is a fat little man with a jolly Buddha-face, wearing an ink-splattered white shirt. He tells me in English how proud he is of his press, how it was smuggled out of Saigon and transported in hundreds of pieces by hundreds of people and then reassembled one piece at a time in the tunnel.
After asking me if I would like to have some tea, the printer says, "Do you know Jane Fonda?" He hands me a big piece of type as heavy as shrapnel. He smells of ink and has ink under his fingernails. "She's an American too."
"No. Sorry," I say. The printer looks disappointed.
"Do you know the writings of Mister Mark Twain?"
"Sure. I've read a few of his books."
The printer nods, satisfied. As I examine the strangely accented letter on the piece of type, the printer takes out a pocket notebook and a fountain pen and says, "Chien Si My, why do your armymen go ten thousand miles from home to live a helluva life and to die on this land? This country is not yours. We do no harm to your homeland. Why have you come here to kill our men and women and destroy our homeland?"