Right after he first arrived in Vietnam. Before the Big Offensive. Before he’d learned to wear his sweat. The older, red-haired major on the team, whom the others called “Mama Pryce,” sat him down.
“You notice there’s graves all over the place? The Vietnamese have this thing about graves,” Pryce said. “And they have these lunar holidays when they go fix up their graves. Well, we are in the middle of one of those lunar holidays and I want you to take the Jeep and drive Colonel Trin, the commander of the regiment, over to the old Dong Ha combat base. There’s still some American units stationed there and some of our guys live in the house where he was born. You know, sorta go in and smooth it and help him dress up the family cemetery.”
In a more optimistic time the combat base had looked like primitive Rome. A legion of U.S. Marines had built it on seven hills that overlooked a muddy river. Now it had reverted to the South Vietnamese and resembled a military slum transplanted from Mars. Nothing but rusty barbed wire, collapsed barracks, and clouds of gritty red dust blowing over the gummy red hills.
Broker found Colonel Trin to be the most foreign presence he had ever known. With his flat face, his cold, brown wraparound Asian eyes and scars lumped on his high, wide cheeks, he could have been a bronze Sphinx. Broker also noted that he smelled strongly of onions and garlic. And the Sphinx did not speak. And Broker had no Vietnamese language skills. Considering the late hour, the army had canceled the course. So he just drove the Jeep. Trin sat stiffly in the passenger seat and pointed. Two shovels, a mattock, a hoe, and a rake clattered in the back.
Trin directed Broker down a maze of dusty roads until they came to a very old and roomy country home of masonry and tile that was misplaced in the military debris. Garden terraces were choked with weeds and blurred out in the adobe-colored dirt. An outbuilding had taken a direct artillery hit. A dusty Jeep and a three-quarter-ton truck were parked haphazardly on the patio.
Trin jerked his hand toward the house. Broker picked his way up the path, past boles of orange, rust-fused barbed wire, soggy heaps of C-ration cardboard and an ornate, stone-carved griffin that was toppled on its side. As he neared the door he had to detour around an upright, ornamental stone slab that barred direct entrance.
Broker stepped around the screen and yelled, “Anybody home?” No answer. He went in. The damp walls dripped with marijuana fatigue and, in the central room, he found three U.S. army enlisted men sprawled on cots. Their gear lay heaped in mildewed piles, their rifles were dirty. Pin-ups from Playboy and Cavalier made a solid tit- heavy collage of the walls. A can of C-Ration ham and mother fuckers-lima beans-heated on a small kerosene stove. The smell of bubbling beans mingled with the albumin stench of urine. Somebody was taking a piss in the next room.
It was 1972. Nobody saluted second lieutenants. “What?” said one of the Gls. Two others ignored Broker. A fourth came through the door buttoning his fatigue trousers.
Base rats. Attached to some signal outfit.
Broker had been taught in officer candidate school never to lay a hand on an enlisted man. So he turned to the one who had spoken and booted him to the floor, overturning his cot.
“Outside,” said Broker.
They formed a huddle. “What’s going on?” demanded the black one. Broker squinted at them. They thought it was a democracy. They were like the kids back home, sucking down dope, going to concerts, and thinking life was supposed to be fair. Broker, young and dumb, still thought it was the army at war.
But in deference to the times, which were bad, he didn’t push it. They measured him and saw that he was made out of piano wire and ax handles and that he wore the flap to his holstered.45 unsnapped. And that was enough. They whispered among themselves. One of them offered a sloppy salute.
Broker ignored the salute and explained. “A Vietnamese colonel, whose house you’re pissing in, wants to look after some things. So take your asses down the road for a few hours.”
As they filed out, one of them said, “Fuckin’ gooks.”
When they were gone, Colonel Trin walked stiffly into the building carrying a small green canvas satchel. His face remained a graven image as he visited each room. Then he went out the back door and through the brush toward a gentle, overgrown hillock that the Gls used for their garbage dump. Broker went back to the Jeep and grabbed the tools.
When he returned, Colonel Trin had stripped off his tunic and had stooped to work, graceful with muscle and scar tissue. He kicked at rusty cans and cardboard and worse, he yanked handfuls of tall weeds. A pendant swinging from a chain around his neck caught a flash of sun. It got in the way and Trin snatched it off and put it in his pocket. He looked up and saw that Broker was staring at the thick raised scars on his back and chest. Broker lowered his eyes and pulled off his fatigue shirt and stood, barechested, hefting the mattock, looking for a way into the job.
Trin narrowed his hooded eyes for a brief second and then took Broker by the arm and put him to work clearing brush away from a low, round cement wall that surrounded a weed-choked earthen mound. The round wall did not go full circle. There was an entrance and it was ceremonially blocked by an upright cement slab that was smaller than but similar to the one in front of the main house’s front door. Another dozen mounds were spread through the brush.
Broker swung the mattock. He hoped to make up for his goof-off countrymen tossing their garbage on other people’s graves.
They worked side by side through the siesta hour as the red earth fought them like a bed of coals. Broker was getting a sense of the Vietnamese colonel: He was a worker. And he hardly sweated drop one. Broker put out fluids like a hunk of fatback pork in a skillet, but he was determined to keep up. Soon he became dizzy in the heat and had to go to the Jeep for the water can. He brought the container back with him and offered a canteen cup to the short, indefatigable Asian.
Trin straightened up, took one sip, and returned the cup. When their shadows were longer than they were tall, they’d cleared the hill of brush and weeds. Broker had raked the garbage into a pile closer to the house. As Trin expertly used a shovel and a hoe to shape the grave mounds, Broker smoothed the ground between them.
Then the warlike colonel kneeled and took a fistful of incense from his small satchel. He lit the joss sticks and jammed them in the soft dirt of the nearest grave mound.
Buddha stuff. Broker looked around the barbed-wire skirted hills. He saw piles of tin and plywood, the collapsed housing of departed Americans. And then he began picking out the subtle, neglected earthen mounds. Ancestor worship. They were everywhere and some of them were probably there and looking old when Jesus Christ was just learning to swing a hammer.
And Broker, who had an N, for “none,” stamped on his dog tags in the space reserved for a religious affiliation, was stumped at what to do next. So he gathered up the tools and walked back to the Jeep.
Colonel Trin returned with his tunic buttoned and his stern eyes shaded by the brim of his military cap. He pointed the way back to Dong Ha. Except he had Broker turn off short of the compound and down a side street dense with twittering, smiling people. Trin pointed one last time. A restaurant.
When they were seated, Trin removed his cap and ran his hand through his thick black hair. His smile came sudden and disarming and warm, like his previous face had been a mask that had dropped off. He withdrew a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and offered one to Broker.
Broker declined. He didn’t smoke-yet. He was two weeks away from laying on the ground all night next to dead bodies that had swelled all day in the sun.
Trin tapped the pack. “Bastos,” he said. “Algerian. The French paratroopers used to smoke them.” He spoke impeccable English in a deep voice.
And he talked like a storybook. “Now we will have a real Vietnamese meal and I’ll explain why foreign garbage has an affinity for Vietnamese graves. I will tell you the history of my country. You will learn about sorrow.”
They talked all night.
He jerked alert and checked his watch. She’d been gone for almost an hour. He was starting to worry when there was a knock on the door.
The face of Mama Pryce’s daughter was distorted in the fish-eye security peephole. He opened the door and she came in and…Hmmm. She’d had her hair fixed-no longer a wash-and-wear mop, now it was swept around in a subtle way that showcased the sparse lines of her neck and chin and cheeks. Her eyes were bigger, grayer. And she wore earrings. Long silver jobs with dangling jade half moons.
“Give me an hour,” she said. “Now beat it. I’ll meet you in the bar by the restaurant.”
