War Stories Read online

  You take City Hall, Mike told Ed. Jim and I will go to the Palace. And twenty dollars says we’re right.

  We shook hands on it, and Mike grinned. He still had a little of his old spirit; but he seldom smiled. His mind was always on Ly Keang.

  So he and I went to the Presidential Palace, driving the Mustang again, which had survived the night in the Continental without being stolen.

  It was now eleven-thirty, and the sun was growing hot. The streets were still very quiet, and out by the Palace it was quieter still. The big wrought-iron gates in front were locked as usual, and we drove down a side street to the service entrance, where journalists had always entered in the past. This gate was open, and there was no sign of the guards who used to be posted there. We walked into the grounds and around to the front of the long white building with its flight of marble steps going up to the entrance.

  Here we found an even bigger quiet than the one in the city. The Palace stands in a wide parkland enclosed by iron railways, where spreading tamarinds and other trees stand in open, grassy spaces. These spaces were empty, all the way to the road and the railings a hundred metres or so away, and the quiet here was like sleep. Nothing but bird calls, and the whirring of cicadas. There seemed to be an unusual number of dragonflies in the air, hovering and shimmering, and I wondered what this signified. They must be a sign, I thought. But of what? I guess I’m superstitious; and I was now very keyed up.

  The only people we found at the entrance of the Palace were some South Vietnamese troops: members of the palace guard. They were sitting and lying on the grass near the marble steps in a way that was very unmilitary, their automatic rifles stacked beside them, many of them with their helmets off. It looked almost like a picnic.

  They no longer consider themselves soldiers, I thought. It’s over for them.

  When we went up to them, we spoke to them in Vietnamese. I was concerned they might be hostile to us, like those Ed Carter had encountered, but they smiled back, and were quite friendly. Most of them were young, but there was a sergeant of middle age.

  What are you doing? I asked.

  Waiting to surrender, the sergeant said. Nothing more to do, now.

  I guess that’s right, Mike said, and offered him a cigarette.

  We sat down in the grass, and talked with them. Many ARVN troops had thrown away their uniforms today, they told us; but they thought it better to go on guarding the Palace until they were told to do otherwise. They wanted to do their duty. Then they would surrender their weapons.

  It was very still, and getting much hotter; soon we spoke only in snatches, lying there in the grass. The whirring of the insects began to sound to me like some mechanical alarm system, warning us of what was to come.

  Then I saw the tank.

  I could not believe what I was seeing, at first. I don’t know what I’d expected, but it hadn’t been this; I squinted at it through the shimmer of the heat for a number of seconds, before I called out to Mike. It was a green, Soviet-made tank, and it was moving down the road outside the railings. It flew a huge National Liberation Front flag on a pole – blue and red, with a yellow star – and the number on the side of it was 843. A North Vietnamese trooper was looking out from its turret; others, in their sun helmets and familiar green cotton uniforms, were riding on the front. I glimpsed people running behind it; one of them was a British correspondent, and I recognized some French correspondents and photographers. As we watched, flame shot from the barrel of its cannon and there was a report; then it turned towards the closed Palace gates, and Mike and I stood up. The soldiers were standing up too, and raising their hands.

  The tank smashed into the gates, and one of them came half off its hinges. Mike ran towards it across the lawn, his Leica at the ready. I had my CP16 Commag, a sound-on-film camera: I hoisted it on to my shoulder and started after him.

  The tank stopped, like a big slow animal, and seemed to consider; then it reversed and charged the gates again, and I saw Mike raise his camera. This time the tank smashed straight through the gates and rolled on, lumbering across the lawn. I was still running, the camera slowing me down. I was checking my light meter as I went, my face pouring with sweat, my heart pounding. I knew only one thing: this was film I must get no matter what happened to me.

  Mike was still taking pictures when the tank stopped again. Some of the soldiers were pointing at us, and beginning to climb down, and I became aware that Mike and I were alone in this space of grass; none of the palace guard had followed us. But I was shooting film now; everything else was vague: the drilling of the cicadas inside my head, the dragonflies dancing around me. Looking at the soldiers through the lens, I was seeing their faces clearly, and they suddenly seemed very familiar to me. They were very young, mostly just boys, and they reminded me of Captain Danh’s unit; I almost thought I recognized Doc and Weary and Prince among them, but of course I didn’t. And in that instant, I saw a soldier in a sun helmet running towards us and shouting, his AK-47 cocked. He was telling us to put our hands up.

  He reached Mike first, and Mike raised his hands, his camera held in the right. I did the same: it took all my strength to suspend that heavy Commag. The soldier was standing close to Mike, the AK levelled, shouting in Vietnamese.

  American! he shouted. You are American!

  He had a broad brown country face, and his eyes had a fierce, hard shine: the killing shine.

  Mike answered in Vietnamese, his hands still high. No, he said. Australian. Welcome to Saigon.

  The soldier frowned and looked puzzled; then I saw the shine go out of his eyes. He lowered his gun, and I knew we were going to live.

  Bao Ninh

  THE JUNGLE OF SCREAMING SOULS

  Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War (1991) is one of the first novels about the war written from a Vietnamese point of view. Being part of a team that collects and buries corpses after the war has ended, the novel’s narrator returns to a place where he once took part in a terrible battle – the Jungle of Screaming Souls.

  ON THE BANKS of the Ya Crong Poco River, on the northern flank of the B3 battlefield in the Central Highlands, the Missing In Action body-collecting team awaits the dry season of 1976.

  The mountains and jungles are water-soaked and dull. Wet trees. Quiet jungles. All day and all night the water steams. A sea of greenish vapour over the jungle’s carpet of rotting leaves.

  September and October drag by, then November passes, but still the weather is unpredictable and the night rains are relentless. Sunny days but rainy nights.

  Even into early December, weeks after the end of the normal rainy season, the jungles this year are still as muddy as all hell. They are forgotten by peace, damaged or impassable, all the tracks disappearing, bit by bit, day by day, into the embraces of the coarse undergrowth and wild grasses.

  Travelling in such conditions is brutally tough. To get from Crocodile Lake east of the Sa Thay River, across District 67 to the crossroads of Cross Hill on the west bank of the Poco River – a mere fifty kilometres – the powerful Russian truck has to lumber along all day. And still they fall short of their destination.

  Not until after dusk does the MIA Zil truck reach the Jungle of Screaming Souls, where they park beside a wide creek clogged with rotting branches.

  The driver stays in the cabin and goes straight to sleep. Kien climbs wearily into the rear of the truck to sleep alone in a hammock strung high from cab to tailgate. At midnight the rains start again, this time a smooth drizzle, falling silently.

  The old tarpaulin covering the truck is torn, full of holes, letting the water drip, drip, drip through on to the plastic sheets covering the remains of soldiers laid out in rows below Kien’s hammock.

  The humid atmosphere condenses, its long moist, chilly fingers sliding in and around the hammock where Kien lies shivering, half-awake, half-asleep, as though drifting along on a stream. He is floating, sadly, endlessly, sometimes as if on a lorry driving silently, robot-like, somnambulantly through the lonely ju
ngle tracks. The stream moans, a desperate complaint mixing with distant faint jungle sounds, like an echo from another world. The eerie sounds come from somewhere in a remote past, arriving softly like featherweight leaves falling on the grass of times long, long ago.

  Kien knows the area well. It was here, at the end of the dry season of 1969, that his Battalion 27 was surrounded and almost totally wiped out. Ten men survived from the Unlucky Battalion, after fierce, horrible, barbarous fighting.

  That was the dry season when the sun burned harshly, the wind blew fiercely, and the enemy sent napalm spraying through the jungle and a sea of fire enveloped them, spreading like the fires of hell. Troops in the fragmented companies tried to regroup, only to be blown out of their shelters again as they went mad, became disoriented and threw themselves into nets of bullets, dying in the flaming inferno. Above them the helicopters flew at tree-top height and shot them almost one by one, the blood spreading out, spraying from their backs, flowing like red mud.

  The diamond-shaped grass clearing was piled high with bodies killed by helicopter gunships. Broken bodies, bodies blown apart, bodies vaporised.

  No jungle grew again in this clearing. No grass. No plants.

  ‘Better to die than surrender my brothers! Better to die!’ the Battalion commander yelled insanely; waving his pistol in front of Kien he blew his own brains out through his ear. Kien screamed soundlessly in his throat at the sight, as the Americans attacked with sub-machine-guns, sending bullets buzzing like deadly bees around him. Then Kien lowered his machine-gun, grasped his side and fell, rolling slowly down the bank of a shallow stream, hot blood trailing down the slope after him.

  In the days that followed, crows and eagles darkened the sky. After the Americans withdrew, the rainy season came, flooding the jungle floor, turning the battlefield into a marsh whose surface water turned rust-coloured from the blood. Bloated human corpses, floating alongside the bodies of incinerated jungle animals, mixed with branches and trunks cut down by artillery, all drifting in a stinking marsh. When the flood receded everything dried in the heat of the sun into thick mud and stinking rotting meat. And down the bank and along the stream Kien dragged himself, bleeding from the mouth and from his body wound. The blood was cold and sticky, like blood from a corpse. Snakes and centipedes crawled over him, and he felt Death’s hand on him. After that battle no one mentioned Battalion 27 any more, though numerous souls of ghosts and devils were born in that deadly defeat. They were still loose, wandering in every corner and bush in the jungle, drifting along the stream, refusing to depart for the Other World.

  From then on it was called the Jungle of Screaming Souls. Just hearing the name whispered was enough to send chills down the spine. Perhaps the screaming souls gathered together on special festival days as members of the Lost Battalion, lining up on the little diamond-shaped grass plot, checking their ranks and numbers. The sobbing whispers were heard deep in the jungle at night, the howls carried on the wind. Perhaps they really were the voices of the wandering souls of dead soldiers.

  Kien was told that passing this area at night one could hear birds crying like human beings. They never flew, they only cried among the branches. And nowhere else in these Central Highlands could one find bamboo shoots of such a horrible colour, with infected weals like bleeding pieces of meat. As for the fireflies, they were huge. Some said they’d seen firefly lights rise before them as big as a steel helmet – some said bigger than helmets.

  Here, when it is dark, trees and plants moan in awful harmony. When the ghostly music begins it unhinges the soul and the entire wood looks the same no matter where you are standing. Not a place for the timid. Living here one could go mad or be frightened to death. Which was why in the rainy season of 1974, when the regiment was sent back to this area, Kien and his scout squad established an altar and prayed before it in secret, honouring and recalling the wandering souls from Battalion 27 still in the Jungle of Screaming Souls.

  Sparkling incense sticks glowed night and day at the altar from that day forward.

  ‘Kien, Kien, what the hell makes you cry so loudly?’

  The truckdriver’s beefy hand pushed through the hammock on to Kien’s shoulder, shaking him awake.

  ‘Get up! Get ready! Quick!’

  Kien slowly opened his eyes. The dark rings under them revealed his deep exhaustion. The painful memory of the dream throbbed against his temples. After some minutes he got up, then slowly climbed down from the hammock and dropped from the back of the truck to the ground.

  Seeing how sluggishly Kien ate, the driver sighed and says, ‘It’s because you slept back there, with nearly fifty bodies. You’ll have had nightmares. Right?’

  ‘Yes. Unbelievably horrible. I’ve had nightmares since joining this team, but last night’s was the worst.’

  ‘No doubt,’ the driver said, waving his hand in a wide arc. ‘This is the Jungle of Screaming Souls. It looks empty and innocent, but in fact it’s crowded. There are so many ghosts and devils all over this battleground! I’ve been driving for this corpse-collecting team since early ‘73 but I still can’t get used to the passengers who come out of their graves to talk to me. Not a night goes by without them waking me to have a chat. It terrifies me. All kinds of ghosts, new soldiers, old soldiers, soldiers from Division 10, Division 2, soldiers from the provincial armed forces, the Mobile Forces 320, Corps 559, sometimes women, and every now and again, some southern souls, from Saigon.’ The driver spoke as though it was common knowledge.

  ‘Met any old friends?’ asked Kien.

  ‘Sure! Even some from my own village. Blokes from my first unit. Once I met a cousin who died way back in sixty-five.’

  ‘Do you speak to them?’

  ‘Yes, but . . . well, differently. The way you speak in hell. There are no sounds, no words. It’s hard to describe. It’s like when you’re dreaming – you know what I mean.’

  ‘You can’t actually do anything to help each other?’ asked Kien. ‘Do you talk about interesting things?’

  ‘Not very. Just sad and pitiful things, really. Under the ground in the grave human beings aren’t the same. You can look at each other, understand each other, but you can’t do anything for each other.’

  ‘If we found a way to tell them news of a victory would they be happier?’ Kien asked.

  ‘Come on! Even if we could, what would be the point? People in hell don’t give a damn about wars. They don’t remember killing. Killing is a career for the living, not the dead.’

  ‘Still, wouldn’t peacetime be an ideal moment for the resurrection of all the dead?’

  ‘What? Peace? Damn it, peace is a tree that thrives only on the blood and bones of fallen comrades. The ones left behind in the Screaming Souls battlegrounds were the most honourable people. Without them there would be no peace,’ the driver replied.

  ‘That’s a rotten way to look at it. There are so many good people, so many yet to be born, so many survivors now trying to live decent lives. Otherwise it’s not been worth it. I mean, what’s peace for? Or what’s fighting for?’ Kien asked.

  ‘Okay, I’ll grant you we have to have hope. But we don’t even know if the next generation will get a chance to grow up, or if they do, how they’ll grow up. We do know that many good people have been killed. Those of us who survived have all been trying to make something of ourselves, but not succeeding.

  ‘But look at the chaotic post-war situation in the cities, with their black markets. Life is so frustrating, for all of us. And look at the bodies and the graves of our comrades! The ones who brought the peace. Shameful, my friend, shameful.’

  ‘But isn’t peace better than war?’

  The driver seemed astonished. ‘This kind of peace? In this kind of peace it seems people have unmasked themselves and revealed their true, horrible selves. So much blood, so many lives were sacrificed for what?’

  ‘Damn it, what are you trying to say?’ Kien asked.

  ‘I’m not trying to say anything. I’m simply
a soldier like you who’ll now have to live with broken dreams and with pain. But, my friend, our era is finished. After this hard-won victory fighters like you, Kien, will never be normal again. You won’t even speak with your normal voice, in the normal way again.’

  ‘You’re so damn gloomy. What a doom-laden attitude!’

  ‘I am Tran Son, a soldier. That’s why I’m a bit of a philosopher. You never curse your luck? Never feel elated? What did the dead ones tell you in your dreams last night? Call that normal?’ he asked.

  On the way out the Zil truck moves in slow, jerky movements. The road is bumpy, muddy and potholed. Son stays in first gear, the engine revving loudly as if about to explode. Kien looks out of the window, trying to lighten his mood.

  The rain stops, but the air is dull, the sky lead-grey. Slowly they move away from the Screaming Souls Jungle and the whole forest area itself. Behind them the mountains, the streams, all drop away from view.

  But strangely, Kien now feels another presence, feels someone is watching him. Is the final scene, the unfinished bloody dream of this morning, about to intrude itself in his mind? Will the pictures unfold against his wishes as he sits staring at the road?

  Kien called to Son over the roar of the engine, asking if he’ll be finished with MIA work after this tour of duty.

  ‘Not sure. There’s a lot of paperwork to do. What are your plans?’

  ‘First, finish school. That means evening classes. Then try the university entrance exams. Right now my only skills are firing sub-machine-guns and collecting bodies. What about you, will you keep driving?’

  The truck reached a drier section of road and Son was able to go up a gear, dropping the loud engine revs.

  ‘When we’re demobbed, I’ll stop driving. I’ll carry my guitar everywhere and be a singer. Sing and tell stories. “Gentlemen, brothers and sisters, please listen to my painful story, then I’ll sing you a horror song of our times.”’

  ‘Very funny,’ said Kien. ‘If you ask me we’d do better to tell them to forget about the war altogether.’