Saigon: A Novel Part 29

13.

On the morning of the first Friday in July, Joseph sat down to breakfast in the paved inner courtyard of the Continental Palace Hotel in Saigon, trying hard not to look at his wrist.w.a.tch. Normally he found the fragrant flowering shrubs and the elegant statues amidst which the tables were set soothing and refres.h.i.+ng, but after a restless night in one of the high-ceilinged Continental bedrooms, he had fallen asleep properly for the first time only at dawn, and as a result had woken unaccustomedly late, feeling anxious and on edge. When the waiter approached his table, he ordered strawberries with his rolls and coffee as usual, but as soon as the little dish of crimson Dalat fruit was set before him, a mental picture of the neatly tilled terraces of the Lang-Biang plateau, where the berries had been grown, flashed in his mind, and he found he couldn't eat even one of them.

Suddenly it seemed. much longer than three months since he and Lan had spent those few poignant hours together in Dalat, and because the agonizing weeks of waiting were almost over, he wondered for the first time, with a stab of alarm, how he would come to terms with life without her if, against all his expectations, she decided not to marry him. By mutual agreement they had decided to avoid meeting again while the battle raged at Dien Bien Phu, and Joseph had let a whole month go by before contacting her after the news came out that Paul had been killed on the day that Dien Bien Phu had fallen. He knew that she would have to observe the proper Vietnamese interval of mourning if she were to marry again, but she had told him that she would give him her decision at least at the beginning of July. He had flown into Tan Son Nhut from Hong Kong the previous evening, leaving Tempe white-faced but determinedly calm, making preparations to pack her belongings and return to Baltimore; although visibly shaken by his abrupt request that she give him a divorce, Tempe had won the battle to retain her self-control, and her very calmness, instead of making it easier to leave, had somehow heightened the feelings of guilt and anguish that had haunted him constantly since his last departure from Dien Bien Phu. During the many sleepless nights that followed his last visit to the crumbling valley fortress, he had been unable to dismiss from his mind the memory of Paul standing outside his bunker as the last. Red Cross Dakota lifted him into the monsoon clouds, and when a few days after the garrison fell, Paul's name appeared on the Red Cross list of those who had died, the intensity of the grief Joseph felt had made him physically ill for a day or two. During the next few weeks he drank frequently and with unaccustomed heaviness and didn't allow himself to think of the future. But when his grief began to lessen, the Conviction that perhaps fate all along had determined that he should marry Lan had revived in him. Somehow at last it all seemed to have been destined and he became convinced that taking Lan and Tuyet away from Saigon was the only way of putting the terrible tragedies of the past behind them. On his arrival at the Continental Palace the night before, he'd found a note from Lan awaiting him, promising that she would meet him on the hotel terrace next morning at eleven o'clock, and as soon as he awoke he'd begun peering impatiently at the hands of his watch every few minutes.

As a result time hung heavy on him, and in an effort to calm himself Joseph picked up from beside his plate the French language Journal de Saigon, which every visiting foreign correspondent turned to on arrival to catch up on events in Vietnam. The main story on its front page purported to give details of the sweeping land redistribution program being carried out all over the northern half of Vietnam by the Communist cadres of President Ho Chi Minh's renamed Lao Dong Party - the Workers' Party; according to the newspaper, a.s.sa.s.sination and terror tactics were already being employed on a ma.s.sive scale against members of the landowning cla.s.ses, and tens of thousands of deaths had already been reported. Although the Geneva Conference of world leaders on Indochina had still not produced any formal agreement after two months of discussions, General Giap's victory at Dien Bien Phu had virtually forced France to begin seeking an armistice the day after its garrison was defeated, and in the north particularly, unashamedly Communist policies were rapidly being put into force in the vast areas under Viet Minh control. A separate story on the Journal's front page also related how even in the Mekong delta in the south, the Viet Minh were becoming daily more confident of their strength; a clandestine radio broadcast the previous night had announced that a stage-by-stage campaign was being launched immediately to eradicate big landholders there too, although the Geneva Conference seemed likely to end with Vietnam being divided into two zones, with the Communists holding the north and non-Communists the south.

Joseph ran his eye over all these news items, but found himself unable to concentrate on the details; he'd come to Saigon ostensibly to prepare a dispatch on the mood of the colonists in the wake of the humiliation suffered at Dien Bien Phu, but because of his inner preoccupations, he rose distractedly from his breakfast table after a few minutes' scrutiny of the newspaper and strolled out into the Rue Catinat, promising himself that he'd get down to work properly that afternoon.

For half an hour he wandered aimlessly, lost most of that time in his own thoughts, but even in his abstracted mood he couldn't help noticing how palpably the city he'd known for nearly thirty years was changing before his eyes. During the long eight-year war the thirty thousand French colons who had reestablished themselves in the city after the Second World War had affected a pose of studied unconcern; it came to be regarded as "bad form" to peer about nervously searching for bombs or grenades while sipping an aperitif on a cafe terrace, and discussion of the Viet Minh had always to be light, dismissive and degage, as though the anti-French movement were a trifling irrelevance to life in the city. But with the advent of Dien Bien Phu, all that had changed. Some ten thousand colons had already left the city, and now the usually genial. and flamboyant proprietor of the Continental Palace no longer greeted coffee hour guests on his terra.s.se with his customary flourishes; instead Joseph saw him frowning deeply as he bent close to a grim-faced French financier Joseph knew by sight. In the PaG.o.da Tea Room, the Cafe de Ia Paix, where the veteran colons gathered, and in the Bodega, patrons and waiters who were normally expansive and relaxed conversed now in small anxious groups, their eyes furtive and alert. Usually the Surete Generale headquarters with its heavily barred windows at the top of the Rue Catinat was aswarm with activity, but as Joseph pa.s.sed, it seemed to stand unnaturally quiet; few French or Vietnamese were entering, and this uncharacteristic calm gave Joseph the impression that the dark and secret struggles it had for so long conducted were on the point of being abandoned. In the bearing of every Frenchman he pa.s.sed there was at least a hint of apprehension, and Joseph realized that the increasingly visible groups of Americans from the U.S. Emba.s.sy and other government agencies walked by contrast with an easy, free-swinging confidence; without being aware of it, by their relaxed laughter and their self-a.s.sured smiles they betrayed their smug belief that the French h2d only themselves to blame for their failure in a backward country like Vietnam. If they, the Americans, had been fighting the war, their att.i.tudes seemed to say, the result would have been vastly different.

As he strolled on through the growing heat of the day, Joseph began to wonder how far this dangerously simple line of reasoning might be taken by his own country. Although the French Union Forces were still holding in place in the Red River delta, the central highlands and the south while the Geneva Conference dragged on, it was clear that the will of France to continue the war had been broken psychologically at Dien Bien Phu. Not only had more than five thousand men been killed or wounded there, but the Russian news film of ten thousand more mud-covered skeletons being marched off to prison camps by their Viet Minh guards had shocked France and the world. The French people at home had always been indifferent to the faraway war in Indochina, and popular revulsion at the outcome of the battle in the valley in northwestern Tongking had ensured that France would at long last be forced to give up the remnants of its colonial rule there. But although the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union, Britain, China and France were discussing Indochina's future at Geneva, the fervently anti-Communist American secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had pointedly absented himself from the proceedings early on, leaving a deputy holding a watching brief; by this gesture he had given notice that the United States would not willingly acquiesce in the concession of territory to the Communists in Indochina and by means of a growing presence of Americans in Saigon, Joseph realized, he was already signaling Was.h.i.+ngton's intention to continue the battle where France left off.

Often while the French defenders were battling heroically at Dien Bien Phu to hold off the ma.s.sed Viet Minh divisions, Joseph had recalled how he and a handful of OSS men had trained the nucleus of ragged guerrillas from which that ma.s.sive force had sprung. He had often wondered, too, how differently things might have turned out if the American government had responded to the seemingly sincere overtures made by Ho Chi Minh then; perhaps the goodwill won by the OSS could have been expanded and built upon. What if President Truman had replied to any of the half dozen or SO letters Ho had written seeking support against French attempts to destroy his revolution - wouldn't some kind of friends.h.i.+p have been possible? And when China fell to Communism in 1949, might it not have been possible to woo Ho Chi Minh and his followers away from the Russians and the Chinese as t.i.to had been in Europe? Conjecture was obviously futile because now there was a strong chance that Joseph's own government was about to compound these earlier mistakes by seeking a more direct confrontation with Ho Chi Minh. President Ho had convinced Joseph during their brief friends.h.i.+p that he and the people he led were determined to right the very real injustices they'd suffered under the French; he had understood very clearly that their deep sense of historical grievance was the powerful engine of their strength, and to plunge heedlessly into such a complex political whirlpool in order to confront Russia and China, as the American secretary of state seemed determined to do, seemed to Joseph a venture doomed to failure. These gloomy memories that swirled through his mind as he walked only served to reaffirm his conviction that he must remove Lan and Tuyet as quickly as possible from the evident dangers that lay ahead, and oppressed suddenly by these reflections, he stopped in mid-stride and turned back towards the Continental.

But when he got there, although it was already eleven o'clock, there was still no sign of Lan on the terrace, and after waiting impatiently for a quarter of an hour, he slipped into the hotel foyer and persuaded the concierge to let him use the telephone behind her guichet. He listened anxiously to the ringing tone for more than a minute before the receiver at Lan's home was lifted; but to his intense disappointment, one of her house servants answered.

Speaking sibilant, heavily accented French, the servant explained that Madam Devraux had left some time before to pay an urgent visit to her father; she offered her apologies but had said that if he called, he was to be told she hoped to arrive at the Continental within half an hour.

Unable to face another long wait on the terrace, Joseph stepped out into the Rue Catinat and began walking once more, this time towards the docks and the Saigon River. At the foot of the boulevard he hurried past the garish little Corsican-run bars where loud music spilled out onto the pavements and crossed to the concrete quays beside the river. Hoping the activity of the waterfront would soothe him, he leaned against a bollard and watched the crowds of sampans working back and forth among the oceangoing freighters. But the seething bustle of the waterborne craft, instead of relaxing him, reminded him of Hong Kong, and against his will the image of Tempe's strained, white face staring back at him against the backdrop of the harbor forced itself once more into his thoughts.

She had been standing with her back to the window in their house on the Peak when he had dropped his bombsh.e.l.l. For a long time she had said absolutely nothing, but had let him stumble on until he had exhausted every flimsy justification he could think of for what he knew in his heart was shoddy recompense for the loyalty and love she had always shown him. When at last she spoke there had been more pity in her voice than anger.

"So the wide-eyed boy in Khai Dinh's throne room is still searching for another jeweled bonnet, is he. Joseph?" The words had come out in a tremulous whisper, and for a moment her face had threatened to crumple; then she had regained her composure. "You've always been dissatisfied with me, haven't you? I'm too ordinary, aren't I? You've always yearned for the exotic, for the unattainable. Perhaps you can't help it. Perhaps it's in your nature. Most boys give up trying to live out fairy tales long before they become grown men - but maybe your mother forgot to teach you that!"

Because she was close to tears she had laughed then, making a strangled sound in her throat that by a strange coincidence reminded him of the curious noise that she invariably made at the climax of lovemaking; he had always, without fully realizing it, found the sound faintly irritating, and to counter the irrational surge of anger which it suddenly provoked in him he had turned away from her and stared down into the harbor, concentrating hard on the distant turmoil of junks and sampans.

"You lied to me thirteen years ago, didn't you, Joseph?" she said softly, moving up behind him. "On the train coming back from the ceremony in the new wing of the museum, do you remember? I asked if you had made love with your mandarin's daughter, and you said in an outraged tone, 'Oh no, Vietnamese families are very strict about that!' And already she had borne your child, hadn't she? Ever since, you've been living a lie. Maybe if you'd told me the truth then, it might have helped me to understand."

At his shoulder he heard her breathing become ragged as she fought to hold back her tears. "It was nine years before I knew," said Joseph desperately, swinging around to face her. "Can't you understand? I had asked her to marry me; she only decided against it later because of her lather!"

Tempe nodded quickly, biting her lip. "And you came home looking for a comforting haven - I suppose I knew that deep in my heart. But I gave you what you wanted and needed, Joseph- two fine sons! A stronger man might have put his past behind him then for the reality of the present." She shook her, head pityingly. "But not you. You've always. gone on yearning for the magic mysteries of the East that captivated you at fifteen. Now you're middle-aged, but still you can't bear to think that you're not going to find another jeweled palace, can you - even if it's between a Saigon woman's thighs!"

He had closed his eyes then to blot out the unbearable sight of the hurt in her face. "It was just an accident," he had whispered. "Don't you understand? If I hadn't gone back to Saigon quite by chance at the end of the war and discovered Tuyet, I don't suppose anything 'more would have come of it."

"I don't think you went back entirely by chance, Joseph."

He had opened his eyes wide then in amazement. "What do you mean?"

She shook her head in bewilderment. "I don't know. But there's something inevitable about all this. I suppose I've always known you would do something of the kind, If it hadn't been Saigon and the French officer's wife, it would have been someone else, somewhere different."

She had been holding a gla.s.s of French wine in her hand as she spoke, and for an instant he'd thought that she might dash its contents in his face; then she put the gla.s.s down quietly on a table and walked from the room, bending forward slightly and hugging herself in her anguish; at that moment she looked old and vulnerable, and he had wanted desperately to comfort her. By the time he left for the airport an hour later, she had made her face up carefully and she watched him go, tight-lipped and pale but in full possession of herself. Above all else she had been determined not to shed any tears in front of him, and the recollection of her courage shamed him so that he could stand still no longer on the quayside.

When he turned his back on the river he found he was looking again at the first view he'd ever had of Saigon when the Avignon sailed up the river thirty years before. The same trees that had given shelter to the betel-chewing coolies then were still casting their shade on the burning streets, and the twin spires of the cathedral were still visible jutting above the rooftops. Suddenly a wave of terrible compa.s.sion for himself and all humankind swept over him: how could that innocent fifteen-year-old boy who had mistaken exhausted men for ma.s.sacre victims have been expected to know how to deal with all the impossible complexities of life that were to follow? How could anyone prepare a child for all the terrible pitfalls that lay in its path? Wasn't there any way of preventing grown men and women from injuring and wounding one another grievously generation after generation? Using their own sad weaknesses and failings as blunt instruments, they battered away at one another until all that was left was emotional pulp.

He turned these somber thoughts over endlessly in his mind as he walked back to the Continental, and he had almost reached the hotel again when he saw Lan coming towards him beneath the tamarind trees. She wore a pink flowered silken ao dai over billowing white trousers, and as she walked she was talking animatedly to someone at her side - but it was a moment or two before Joseph recognized her father. Portly from years of good living, Tran Van Hieu wore a Western business suit of a pale expensive linen flow instead of his mandarin's gown, and the hair above his moonlike face was stiff and white. His expression remained as shrewd and watchful as ever, but because he was concentrating on what his daughter was saying he hadn't noticed Joseph approaching among the crowds thronging the pavement. The sight of Lan holding her father's arm startled Joseph: he remembered all too clearly how she had sat silently beside him in an att.i.tude of rejection on his return from Hanoi, and seeing them together for the first time since then caused his spirits to sink.

But then he noticed that they were smiling happily at one another and he decided that Lan must after all have made up her mind in his favor. Unable to contain his impatience, Joseph stepped down from the hotel terrace to greet them in the street and almost knocked over a gangling Vietnamese peasant boy running fast along the inside of the sidewalk. The boy stumbled, then recovered himself and the reporter's eye in Joseph automatically registered the loose calico tunic, the dirty white trousers and the scuffed sandals that the youth wore, But then something odd about the way he was running compelled Joseph's full attention; the natural outline of his clothes was broken by the bulge of a lumpy package below the waist, and as he ran, he was supporting it awkwardly with one hand. Remembering the Journal de Saigon's front-page story of that morning, Joseph yelled a frantic warning and began to run, but the crowds outside the hotel did not recognize immediately, as he had done, a trained member of Battalion 905, the Viet Minh suicide squad. The youth was running faster now to carry out the first symbolic a.s.sa.s.sination under the new land reform decree, and Tran Van Hieu, long-time collaborationist, absentee landlord and owner of vast tracts of rice land in the Mekong delta, looked up at h1m for the first time at the moment he flung a fatal arm around his neck.

For a fleeting moment Joseph allowed himself to hope he had been wrong - the boy was merely expressing his grat.i.tude for some favor Tran Van Hieu had done his family in the rice fields. Then Lan s.h.i.+ed away from him, and he saw the smile freeze on her face as the peasant began jerking obscenely at his clothing below the waist with his free hand. Making an incongruous pair, the ragged peasant and one of Vietnam's wealthiest aristocrats swung crazily in the middle of the pavement for a moment in a macabre dance, their arms tight about one another's necks. Then the terrified crowd began scattering, and Joseph saw Lan trying to pull the youth off her father. But he held Tran Van Hieu fast in the crook of his arm as he must have held many practice "victims" in his jungle training camp and the old man's eyes began to bulge with fear, Joseph tried to lunge towards them, but a Vietnamese woman, fleeing in panic, cannoned into him, sending him sprawling in the gutter. When the fragmentation grenade strapped to the youth's thigh exploded, it lifted Tran Van Hieu and the youth bodily off the ground, and they fell back together in a tangled heap. Several other pa.s.sersby collapsed around them under the horrified eyes of the colons taking coffee on the Continental terrace, and their blood mingled with that of the a.s.sa.s.sin and his victim in a spreading pool on the pavement. Because he was lying p.r.o.ne on the ground when the grenade detonated, Joseph escaped injury, but when he rose and walked unsteadily towards the carnage he could see that Lan's body, lying a few feet from her father's, was twisted and broken. He wasn't able to see her face because it was pressed against the pavement, but the pink silks of her dress were quickly turning crimson in the bright sunlight, and there was no sign of movement in her slender limbs.

14.

"I suppose you think I must be cold and unfeeling because you haven't seen me weeping," said Tuyet quietly as she walked beside Joseph through the dappled shadows of the tamarinds lining the Rue Catinat. "You probably think I don't care at all, don't you?"

"No, I don't think that," replied Joseph, uncomfortable under her challenging stare, "I can think of lots of reasons why you might want to keep your feelings to yourself." He glanced down to find her watching him unblinkingly and found he couldn't hold her gaze. She was wearing a plain, unhemmed mourning ao dai of white silk, and a long white scarf trailed down her back, but although the traditional Vietnamese Costume of the bereaved was designed to convey that all thought of adornment was deliberately neglected in a time of grief, he found the natural beauty of her face almost painful to look on. During the funeral ceremonies for Lan and her father he had not dared look in her direction, but afterwards he had asked her to meet him later outside his hotel, and she had arrived promptly at the arranged time.

"Perhaps you ought to remember that I've had a lot of practice at not crying when I'm unhappy. It's something that can become a habit."

"I do realize that," said Joseph miserably. "And of course it'd be quite natural if you didn't feel the same deep sense of shock about your mother's death that I do. But the last time I talked with her alone, she told me how unhappy she was that you'd had to grow up without knowing her very well." Instead of replying, Tuyet tossed her head and looked away quickly across the boulevard, but not. before he'd noticed the hurt look in her eyes. "But. I didn't ask you here to talk about the past and the unhappiness we've all suffered," he continued gently. "I wanted to talk about the future."

"I'm surprised to hear that. I thought after what happened yesterday you'd never want to come back to Saigon again."

"As long as you're here I'll never stay away!" Joseph spoke with such vehemence that she glanced up at him in surprise. "That's what I wanted to discuss with you. Don't you remember the last time we met I tried to ask you something - but you were in too much of a hurry to listen?"

She shook her head stubbornly. "No, I don't remember."

"Well I did try." He stopped and took a deep breath. "I was going to ask you if you'd like to leave Saigon and make your home with me."

He watched anxiously for her reaction, but she kept her gaze fixed on the ground and didn't reply.

"I don't mean in the United States," he added hastily. "We could live in Asia - Singapore perhaps, Hong Kong or even Tokyo. I could persuade my newspaper to base me in any of those places. I want it to be somewhere where you'll be happy."

"Why do you want to help me now when you've never troubled yourself before? Has that awful-explosion left you with a guilty conscience?" Because she asked the question without noticeable rancor, the implication of her words shocked Joseph more deeply than if she'd screamed at him.

"Tuyet. I've always cared - from the very moment I knew of your existence. I've always sent money for you ever since. I thought you knew that."

"Money! Do Americans think- everything can be solved by money? A child that doesn't know its real parents can't love money in a bank account!"

Joseph gazed at the swarms of pa.s.sing cyclo-pousses, feeling a sense of desperation rising within him. "Tuyet, I'm terribly sorry about all the things that went wrong in the past. I've made a lot of bad decisions in my life, but now I want to try to make the right one with you."

"Did you discuss this with my mother before she died?" She asked the question hesitantly, but watched his face with a peculiar intensity as she waited for him to reply.

"Yes I did. We talked about it at Dalat. I wanted both of you to come away with me - both of you, don't you understand? I wanted all of us to be together as we should have been from the start, I wanted us to travel together, really get to know one another properly..

"And what did she say?"

Joseph looked away. "She said we ought to wait ... until we knew what was going to happen at Dien Bien Phu."

"But that was all over two months ago."

"I know. But her husband was fighting there, remember."

"And she never gave you an answer?"

Seeing from her expression how important the question was to her made his heart begin to sink. "I think she might have agreed."

"But she never told you you're not really sure what she wanted to do?"

Joseph shook his head helplessly. "No. She had promised to tell me yesterday - but she never got the chance."

They walked in silence for a minute or two, and Joseph searched his mind desperately for new arguments that might help sway her; beside him he could see she was biting her lower lip in agitation.

"I don't want to leave Vietnam," she said suddenly, blurting the words out in a defiant tone. "I don't know even now whether I can trust you. I know nothing of the way you live. Besides there's someone here who really loves me."

Joseph stared at her in dismay. "I know your uncle Tam's been very kind, but you don't seem to understand Her dark eyes flashed suddenly. "I don't mean Uncle Tam!"

Joseph stopped and looked at her with a puzzled expression. "What do you mean, then?"

For a moment she fiddled with the sun hat she'd been carrying, then placed it carefully on her head and took her time tying the silk ribbons beneath her chin. When she looked up at him, her face in the shadow of its brim reminded him more than ever before of Lan. "I have a friend," she said in a voice that broke a little. "He doesn't love the French or America but he does love me. Perhaps he's the first person who ever has."

She turned away suddenly, and he gazed down helplessly at her, realizing she was close to tears.

"I'm going now. Don't try to contact me anymore. Goodbye... Father!"

She turned and ran quickly away along the boulevard, holding her hat in place with one hand, and she didn't slow to a walk until she was almost out of sight. He stood watching her slender figure until it was finally swallowed up by the late afternoon crowds moving across the Place du Theatre, but she didn't stop or turn her head again to look back at him.

PART SIX.

Pax Americana.

1963.

The Geneva Conference that finally ended the first Indochina war divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel to allow the French Union forces to regroup in the south while the Communists moved their forces to the north. The delegates agreed that the division should be temporary and that elections to unify the country should be held within two years - but because the United States was determined not to concede further ground to Communism in the wake of the Korean war, no American signature was ever placed on the final Geneva agreements, and Was.h.i.+ngton encouraged President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam to dissociate himself from the decisions too. Because it suited their purposes at the time, neither China nor the Soviet Union objected very strongly. As a result, the Saigon government turned the provisional demarcation line at the seventeenth parallel into a national border and refused to cooperate with Hanoi in the holding of elections that would certainly have swept Ho Chi Minh to power after his spectacular defeat of the French. When Ho descended in triumph from the hills of Tongking at the close of the Geneva Conference to set up his government in Hanoi, nearly a million frightened Vietnamese Catholics born in the north followed the French forces south; some ninety thousand southern supporters of Ho meanwhile trekked northward, and these two internal migrations helped polarize the country into opposing Communist and anti-Communist camps. During the next five years the Communists, exhausted after their long war, were content to consolidate their rule in the north, while President Diem did the same in the south. But although the United States poured ma.s.sive amounts of military and economic aid into Saigon, the government of South Vietnam became increasingly oppressive and never won the support of the largely peasant population of the region. Ngo Dinh Diem, an austere Catholic bachelor born of a Hue mandarin family, had been appointed prime minister by Bao Dai before the former emperor abdicated for the last time, and after proclaiming himself president following a dubious referendum, Diem succeeded in restoring order to the chaotic southern areas of Vietnam by breaking the power of the religious sects and dispersing their private armies. But as time pa.s.sed, he resorted increasingly to undemocratic methods to sustain his government; nepotism and corruption became commonplace, and under the influence of his megalomaniac brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, the government security apparatus terrorized their serious opponents and herded even the mildest critics into prison camps. It was in this atmosphere of strife and discontent that Ho Chi Minh turned his attention once more to the task of completing the revolution he had embarked on nearly half a century earlier. In 1959 he began infiltrating the ninety thousand southerners who had gone north in 1954 back to their homelands, and within a year these Communist cadres had fused a dozen disparate political groups and religious sects into a new organization called the Mat Tran Dan Toc Giai Phong - the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. Dedicated to overthrowing "the camouflaged colonial regime of Diem and the United States," the Front armed itself with American weapons captured from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam - popularly known as "ARVN" - and by 1962 it commanded support in four-fifths of all the villages in the south. President Diem's propaganda ministry inaccurately dubbed all members of the Liberation Front Viet Cong - Vietnamese Communists - although the movement was led, like the Viet Minh before it, by only a small core of convinced Communists who employed the same propaganda and terror tactics that had proved so effective in converting uneducated peasants to the anti-French cause In the United States, the real hards.h.i.+ps that the historically downtrodden peasants of South Vietnam were continuing to suffer under President Diem were not seen in their true perspective; to the peasants, Ngo Dinh Diem and his government seemed no different from the corrupt mandarins who had battened on them for a hundred years, except that the white colonial overlords behind them were now Americans, not French. In Was.h.i.+ngton, however, the new Liberation Front was seen only as an artificial cover organization for Communist aggression, directed from Moscow and Peking, and when President John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, determined that his country should "pay any price and bear any burden to ensure the survival of liberty," South Vietnam seemed to be just the place where such lofty idealism should be put into practice. At that time there were only seven hundred Americans attached to the military advisory team that had first been established in Saigon in 1950, but over the next few years President Kennedy constantly increased their strength. By 1963 a million and a half dollars were being spent on the jungle and paddy field war every day, some sixteen thousand American "advisory" troops were involved in the fighting, and the casualty toll was mounting- in 1961 fourteen Americans had died, by the end of 1962 more than a hundred. On the political front American funds were being used to build "Strategic Hamlets" - villages fortified by barbed-wire barricades and palisades of spiked bamboo - and by 1963 ten million of South Vietnam's fifteen million peasants had been herded into these stockades to separate the guerrillas from their main base of support, the people, But although American involvement was increasing in all areas, considerable tension plagued key battlefield relations.h.i.+ps between the American military men and the little Asian soldiers they were trying to advise, President Diem developed an obsession with keeping losses among his own troops to a minimum, and because he demoted officers who allowed their units to suffer more than minimal casualties, the Americans often found themselves going into action with soldiers whose first thought was to avoid contact with the enemy: Despite this drawback, however, the introduction of American helicopters and armed river craft gave the South Vietnamese a dramatic new mobility, and towards the end of 1962 for the first time the Viet Cong began to suffer sizable casualties in swiftly mounted search-and-destroy missions. To counteract these battle successes and the effects of the Strategic Hamlets program, the Communist leaders.h.i.+p in Hanoi began sending to the south high4evel North Vietnamese party cadres who had fought at Dien Bien Phu; this was done secretly to maintain the deception that the insurrection in the south was a purely local affair, but it stiffened the Liberation Front, and in the early months of 1963 the conflict in and around the vital Mekong delta intensified rapidly as the better-organized guerrillas and the American-equipped forces of President Diem threw themselves into a new struggle for supremacy.

1.

Down-drafts - from the rotor blades of a dozen United States Army H-21 helicopters churned a swath of the Mekong delta's muddy surface waters into a trembling wake as the aircraft charged across the rice paddies in formation at treetop height. Like the wings of dragonflies in flight, the whirling twin rotors were almost invisible in the burning air, and the flooded fields beneath them reflected only the swift-moving images of their banana- shaped fuselages. Inside the lead helicopter, a dozen wiry little South Vietnamese soldiers dressed in green combat uniforms gazed out through the open hatches with blank, indifferent expressions on their faces; although they wore field packs and steel helmets and clutched American M-2 automatic carbines in their hands, they squatted listlessly on the studded metal floor of the aircraft like bored bus pa.s.sengers enduring the tedium of an unwanted journey, and only occasionally did they exchange a few desultory words with one another about what they were seeing.

In contrast, the two white American officers crouching among them, wearing steel helmets and mottled combat fatigues, scanned the fast-changing panorama of fields and dikes with intent eyes; giants in comparison with the slightly built Asian troops, they subjected each belt of jungle to the closest scrutiny and paid special attention to the tree clumps that invariably ringed the delta villages. In the front and rear doorways, the eyes of the two American sergeant gunners also roved restlessly back and forth across the paddies, followed by the silent muzzles of their swivel- mounted machine guns as they covered every potential hiding place that might he used by Viet Cong snipers. Occasionally the white Americans and the little Asians, too, turned their attention back inside the aircraft to shoot a quick glance at the pale-skinned English television reporter who sat apart on a webbing seat, her long blond hair tucked out of sight beneath a badgeless combat cap. Sometimes they saw her talking quietly with the two white civilians hunched beside her amid the satchels, bags and cases that contained equipment for recording television film pictures and sound, but otherwise her wide gray eyes remained fixed in the s.h.i.+mmering distance beyond the open doors. Her expression betrayed no hint of fear, only a total absorption with the harsh landscape of the Mekong delta that had remained unchanged since biblical times, and if she was aware that her unflattering green fatigues did not entirely blunt the impact of her s.e.xuality on the crowd of men around her, she gave no sign.

Like everyone else riding inside the racing helicopter, she knew that the timeless serenity of the paddies flas.h.i.+ng past beneath the aircraft was deceptive. The rich delta silts of the Mekong might have been tilled since the dawn of civilization with the same horned animals and crude wooden plows that the peasants of South Vietnam were still using; those peasants might still be living, too, in the same kind of crude bamboo and palm-thatch huts as their ancient ancestors - but now beneath the seemingly tranquil surface much had changed. Although they could see nothing, all the helicopter occupants were aware that guerrilla fighters loyal to Ho Chi Minh and his modern Marxist creeds --might easily be hiding under the muddy waters below them, breathing through hollow bamboo tubes; they might also be concealed in tunnels dug beneath the delta villages, and they would remain hidden all that day if they wished to avoid contact with the soldiers who came to "search and destroy" in the name of freedom, democracy and the West.

If on the other hand they had already decided that they would give battle, they might be waiting in strength among the trees encircling Moc Linh, their target village - and the Americans and the South Vietnamese would only find that out when they jumped from the helicopters into the flooded paddy fields to begin their final advance. The aircraft were being flown fast ten feet above the ground for that very reason - to cloak the dangerous moment of their arrival with surprise. During the journey from My Tho, headquarters of the ARVN Seventh Division situated forty miles south of Saigon, they had flown at three thousand feet, using height as a protection against any Viet Cong guns that might be concealed in the trees and brush; then as the flotilla neared its landing zone close to Moc Linh, the pilots had swooped down to hug the ground contours and use the hostile tree belts as cover.

The nearness of the ground heightened the sense of speed for all those inside the H-21s, and as they closed on their objective the helicopters began leapfrogging dizzily over groves of coconut palms and wild banana trees surrounding neighboring villages. When the English journalist touched her cameraman's shoulder, he began filming their furious approach through the open hatch, and groups of thatched huts appeared abruptly in his viewfinder; startled faces of women and children stared up out of dark doorways, chickens and pigs fled squealing from the din of their pa.s.sage - then on a broad dike two hundred yards short of the first hamlet of Moc Linh, the headlong dash ended abruptly, The H-21s fluttered to the ground and immediately the ARVN troops and their towering American advisers heaved themselves into the murky water of the rice paddy and began wading fast towards the tree line.

As soon as the leading aircraft began to disgorge its troops, the English journalist and her film crew went swiftly into action; she jumped down onto the dike and dropped to one knee twenty yards from the H-21 so that its steel bulk framed the background on one side. Behind her the little South Vietnamese troopers in their overlarge American helmets were trudging away through the flooded field, holding their weapons above their heads, and she waited patiently while her cameraman squinted past her to check that the unfolding drama was contained within the frame of his lens. When he was satisfied, he set a reel of film spinning and at the same moment the soundman thrust a microphone into her hand and stepped aside to switch on a tape machine.

"These sweltering paddy fields that you're looking at in an obscure corner of Southeast Asia have suddenly become the front line in a new hot war between the West and the Communist world," she said, raising her carefully modulated English public school voice to make herself heard above the noise of the other helicopter engines. "But it's not the sort of front line that anybody who fought in the Second World War or in Korea would recognize. These South Vietnamese troops and their American advisers are hoping to catch a concentration of Viet Cong guerrillas unawares in Moc Linh, the village you see behind me - Moc Linh is only one of five thousand such settlements in the region, and because the guerrillas can hide themselves easily in the jungle or among the villagers, on many missions like this no trace of them is ever found. Even if this dash into the heart of the Mekong delta succeeds in taking the Viet Cong by surprise, we still probably won't know just how successful it's been - because the guerrillas invariably melt away into the jungle again after each action, carrying their dead with them A brief burst of gunfire from the direction of the tree line augmented the roar of the helicopter engines suddenly, and the television reporter quickly ducked aside while the H-21 rose into the air again to allow its door gunners to join the action. The leading ARVN soldiers, wading quickly, had almost reached the trees, and the cameraman filmed them on telephoto for a few seconds before turning his lens back towards the reporter.

"That could be a nervous South Vietnamese trooper setting off his trigger-happy companions," she said, speaking calmly towards the camera once more. "That often happens when you're searching for guerrillas who seem to be able to appear and disappear at will. The key question in this trying situation is: Can America with its vastly superior military resources help the South Vietnamese destroy their elusive enemy quickly without getting more deeply involved? Or could this frustrating little war be the beginning of something bigger? That's what we've come here to try and find out As she finished speaking she stepped down the bank into the muddy water of the paddy field and began wading towards the distant tree line. The cameraman continued filming her receding figure for a full minute more until the little grinning Vietnamese sergeant a.s.signed to protect them finally motioned for him to follow. Holding their equipment clear of the water, the cameraman and the soundman slithered into the paddy with looks of extreme distaste on their faces and trudged after her.

2.

The first hamlet was deserted when the troops reached it, A few scrawny chickens were scratching in the shade of one of the huts, but otherwise there was no sound or sign of movement. At a signal from Captain Hoang, their Vietnamese commander, the ARVN soldiers advanced cautiously beyond the trees and began moving slowly from door to door, searching the dwellings. After several minutes they had a.s.sembled in the middle of the clearing only three sullen-looking peasant women dressed in shapeless black trousers and tunics, and Captain Lionel Staudt, the senior American adviser, turned away, cursing softly beneath his breath.

"You see now, lieutenant, no matter how good ARVN intelligence is, Viet Cong intelligence is always better." He loosened his helmet strap and scowled at the fresh-faced young West Point officer standing beside him. "Maybe a battalion of main force guerrillas was here recently - hut it sure as h.e.l.l isn't within five miles of Moc Linh now."

"Aren't we jumping to conclusions too quickly?" asked Lieutenant Gary Sherman earnestly. "There are half-a-dozen hamlets strung out along the ca.n.a.l according to the map."

"There always are, son, there always are. And you won't find no main force VC in any of them. After a year here you get to know their style." The lean, sharp-featured infantry captain, who had seen action in the ranks in Europe and Korea, turned his back on the hamlet and wandered through the trees to the edge of the rice paddy once more to wait for the British television crew; for a moment his eyes lingered on the slender figure of Naomi Boyce-Lewis as she waded towards them, the muddy water lapping halfway up her long thighs. "And if our little friends shooting at shadows and warning off the enemy isn't enough to try our patience today," he said quietly, "we've got ourselves saddled with a spoiled English debutant who wants to play Hemingway games in the rice fields of Asia."

"I don't think she's come here to play any games," said Gary Sherman seriously, following his gaze. "She' been out on a couple of long foot patrols from My Tho - and walked all the way both times. She's a real tough cookie. There's nothing she won't do to get a good story."

"Nothing?" Staudt's features relaxed into a lecherous grin. "Are you sure about that?"

The young officer ignored the innuendo. "I meant, captain, she's very professional and very ambitious. The story going around the mess is that she comes from a wealthy family. Her father was a baronet - until he got himself killed out here at the end of the Second World War. But apparently she's very determined to prove she's got what it takes -without his money."

The captain let out a low whistle. "So there's a whole bunch of money riding OH that cla.s.sy English a.s.s too? We'd better make sure the 'friendlies' take good care of her." He raised his arm and waved to the little sergeant escorting the film crew, indicating that he should hurry up, but the Vietnamese NCO continued trotting obliviously through the water beside the taller Europeans, grin- fling and chattering animatedly in pidgin English, his rifle hanging loose on his shoulder. When the English reporter reached the bank, Staudt jumped down into the water and offered his hand to steady her as she climbed out, but with a little dismissive shake of her head she declined his help and clambered nimbly out of the water on her own. By the time he caught up with her she was entering the hamlet, and they both saw that some idle ARVN soldiers had begun chasing the villagers' chickens, hoping to snare one for lunch. Staudt took in the scene at a glance and nodded towards the cameraman who was preparing to film the apprehensive-looking village women.