Shock of War

Tri finished his call with an emphatic slap against the table. He slid the phone onto the cradle of its field pack, and said something to Nuhn.

Whatever he said made Nuhn feel uncomfortable. The captain started to answer, but Tri cut him off. The two men began arguing. It was one-sided; Nuhn strained to be polite while making his point. Finally, General Tri ended the conversation by picking up his phone.

“What’s up?” Zeus asked his guide.

Nuhn shook his head. General Tri, meanwhile, began a conversation with one of his officers, once more giving orders and making his points with the help of his fingers.

When he was done, Nuhn began speaking to him again. Or trying to — General Tri rose from his seat, pointed his finger at Zeus, and began speaking very sharply.

Zeus imagined he was being called several names at once, none of them flattering.

“General Trung told me to come here,” Zeus said. “It wasn’t my idea. If you don’t want my advice, that’s fine.”

Tri turned to Nuhn and began berating him even more harshly than before.

“Hey, don’t pick on him,” said Zeus. “We’re going. Come on, Captain.”

Nuhn seemed a little shell-shocked.

“Major,” said Nuhn. “General Trung has ordered you to give your advice.”

“General Tri doesn’t want advice. Why waste his time?”

“Major, we must.” Nuhn caught Zeus’s arm as he started to leave. He turned back to Tri and started to talk to him again, this time his voice very soft.

“Khong!” said Tri adamantly. Even Zeus understood this meant no.

The general turned and called to one of the men at the bicycles. Ignoring Nuhn and Zeus, he took a piece of paper and wrote something on it. Folding it, he handed it to the man with a brief set of directions. The man immediately set off on his bike.

The rest of his staff, meanwhile, kept their eyes fixed on their work, steadfastly refusing to look in their direction, let alone get involved.

“Come on, Captain,” said Zeus. “I’m tired.”

He went back down to the field, admiring the bright-green fields and hills in the distance. It was a peaceful, near idyllic scene — one that would shattered soon.

Nuhn followed a few minutes later.

“I apologize deeply for the insult,” said the captain.

“It’s not a problem. He probably wouldn’t have liked what I was going to suggest anyway.”

“He should have listened. It is an insult to you and General Trung.”

That was the real problem, Zeus knew. Nuhn now had to go back and tell the supreme commander that the general he was counting on to hold this sector was insubordinate.

An isolated incident? Or a sign that Trung was losing his grip on his army?

“We will find a ride in Tien Yen,” Nuhn told him. “But we have to walk there.”

“To the city?”

“I guarantee we will find a ride,” said Nuhn. “I am sorry — the helicopter was needed elsewhere.”

* * *

Evening was settling over the hills, but the weather was mild. Though Zeus’s legs were tired, he had no trouble keeping up with Nuhn, whose pace slowed as they went.

In the States, Nuhn would be considered a little overweight, though not portly. By Vietnamese standards he was Falstaffian. Though it was doubtful he had any idea who Shakespeare’s hero-clown was, his swinging arms and cheerful manner amused Zeus, easing some of his fatigue. Nuhn’s smile returned little by little.

“We have a lovely day for a walk,” said Nuhn. “A lovely day.”

Zeus asked the translator where he had learned English. It turned out that Nuhn had two brothers who were born in America, though both had returned to Vietnam just before he was born.

“I am the baby of the family,” he said, detailing a Nuhn family tree that had eight members in the present generation. Originally from the Central Highlands, several members of the clan had left for the U.S. just before the collapse of South Vietnam. These included Nuhn’s father and mother, along with a hodgepodge of uncles and aunts. The family owned two restaurants in Los Angeles, but Nuhn’s mother had been homesick and the family had made its way back to Vietnam clandestinely about a year before Nuhn was born.

“English was always my best subject in school, even better than math,” said Nuhn. “No one knew why.” He laughed.

“I’m sorry the general gave you such a hard time,” said Zeus.

“He’s a fool,” said Nuhn. “But we are stuck with him.”

The road they were walking on had been made from hard-packed gravel coated with oil. It was about three car-widths wide. The sides fell off sharply into fields that seemed fairly wet. If the soil held the Chinese battle tanks at all, it wouldn’t let them move very quickly.

About a mile after they started walking, the road intersected with a highway. This was made of thick asphalt, and was wide enough that two columns of tanks could easily travel down it, with space for other vehicles to pass. A hill rose sharply on the left, but on the right the fields were green and level. Water was channeled across by a pair of deep ditches; tanks would have no trouble getting through here.

You could ambush the Chinese from the hill, come at them from the trees at the far side as well. They’d never expect an ambush from the Vietnamese on the open plain like this, not so close to the city after just having taken it.

If you hit them hard quickly, they might fall back to the city. But ideally you would want them to move even farther south, hopefully along this road where they could be bottled up.

Zeus tried to turn off his brain. There was no sense thinking of this. The commander didn’t want help. He had better things to do.

Give speeches. See the doctor.

Not in that order.

“You know a good restaurant in Hanoi that’s still open?” Zeus asked as they walked.

“A restaurant?”

“I want to thank the doctor who worked on me,” said Zeus. “I thought I would take her someplace nice.”

“Ah, a lady doctor. I understand,” said Nuhn. “You want to impress the lady.”

“Something like that.”

“Then she will fall into your arms,” joked Nuhn.

“That’d be nice.”

“Before the war, there were many places,” said the captain. “Now, you would be best in the hotel area. You will do best finding a place for tourists.”

“My hotel looked deserted.”

“That is not bad for you, is it?”

Zeus nodded. It might not be bad at all.

“We will find you some flowers,” added Nuhn enthusiastically.

“Great idea.”

“I have often impressed women with flowers,” said Nuhn confidentially. “They are like magic.”

He sunk into full Falstaff mode, regaling Zeus with a story of how he had wooed a woman in Saigon some years before. He had found a perfect flower — he couldn’t translate the Vietnamese word, hoa cruc, but the description made it sound like a mum to Zeus. He brought it to her at work just before she was due to take lunch. This scandalized her, as she had been avoiding him for weeks. But her boss insisted on her going to lunch with him, and they ended up having a love affair that lasted for months.

“Lucky for you the boss was on your side,” said Zeus.

Nuhn winked. “Ten dollars American makes many friends.”

* * *

The war had upended Tien Yen, even though the fighting hadn’t reached there yet.