and Mr. Vinh was just a couple of metres ahead.
I looked up. We were at the edge of a huge clearing that looked like someone had gone through and cut down all the trees and left a lawn. The grass was a little long for a lawn, but I was so happy to be out of the jungle I wasn’t about to criticize the groundskeeper. It was a space about the size of our school gymnasium, maybe a little bigger.
The old man dropped his duffel bag. Mr. Vinh did the same thing. The old man said some stuff, some English, some Vietnamese, and threw in a few hand signals. I was getting used to their way of communication, and I figured out that the old man and I were going to set up the tents while Mr. Vinh’s job was to get the food out.
“Where are we?” I dropped the canteens and backpack on the ground. Then I set the briefcase down very carefully. I still didn’t know what was in it, but after the effort I’d made to keep the thing dry back there in the swamp, I wasn’t about to let anything happen to it now.
“A clearing. It was an LZ — Landing Zone. Places like this choppers used to set down to drop guys for search-and-destroy missions. Evacuate wounded too.”
That was a big explanation for the old man, so I decided not to push it. I looked around, tried to imagine helicopters coming in, getting shot at from the jungle all around, landing, taking off again. I shivered. Part of it was because my clothes were still soaked, and it was getting cooler. But I don’t think that was all of it.
“We’ll stay right here tonight, push on again in the morning. There’re dry clothes in the duffel bag Mr. Vinh was carrying. Better get changed.”
“Change like right out here?”
“The master bedroom’s occupied. And I don’t recommend you go back into the jungle and start peeling off clothes. No telling what might happen.” This time he didn’t try to keep the grin off his face. Didn’t matter. I wasn’t setting foot into anything that looked like jungle without the old man and Mr. Vinh real close by.
The old man started setting up one of the tents and Mr. Vinh was doing something to do with food. I got some dry gonch and socks and another T-shirt and jeans out of the duffel bag. Then I turned away from them and tried to change. Going for privacy. It wasn’t easy. The clothes I had on were sticky, and the ground was uneven, so I was hopping around trying to get the wet jeans off and the other pair on. It took a lot longer than I wanted it to.
I had one leg in the dry jeans and was trying to get the other leg in without losing my balance when I heard laughing behind me.
“You try it, you think it’s so easy,” I yelled over my shoulder.
I got the other leg into the jeans and whipped around to look at them while I did up the button and the fly. The old man was looking at me, still grinning but not actually laughing. I looked over at Mr.Vinh. He was bent over, and he was killing himself laughing. Making little Vietnamese comments to the old man, who was nodding.
“And just when I thought ol’ Mr. Vinh had no sense of humour at all.” I gave them both my best pissed-off face, but that got Mr. Vinh laughing even harder. “You son of a bitch,” I said.
But the thing is, it was funny. And for the first time since I’d started on this whole stupid summer from hell, my old man and I laughed at the same time. But neither of us was coming close to Mr. Vinh in the laughter department. I thought the old guy would have a heart attack or something.
“Actually, you’re both sons of bitches.” I threw my soggy T-shirt at Mr. Vinh.
It wasn’t long before we had two tents set up, my wet clothes hanging from a tree on the edge of the clearing, and we were eating. Something. Some of it I recognized. There was bread and a can of some kind of meatballs that we passed around, each of us spearing a meatball when it was our turn.
The rest of it I wasn’t sure about and didn’t ask. There was some kind of fish; at least I thought it was fish, raw fish. There were cold noodles (what’s a meal without noodles), and this salad looking stuff that didn’t taste like salad. I drank quite a bit of water with that meal.
7
Dark came in fast and I was real tired, but I didn’t want to go to bed. Not yet. We’d cleaned up from our meal, and the old man was sitting down against one of the folded up sleeping bags and looking up at the darkening sky. Mr. Vinh was sitting cross-legged and smoking a pipe.
I spread out my sleeping bag on the ground and lay down on it, my head propped on one elbow. I watched them. I was trying to figure out what was going on.
“You feel like sleeping, that’s our tent.” The old man pointed.
“I feel like sleeping, but I feel more like talking … that is if anybody wants to talk to me.”
“I can’t speak for Mr. Vinh.” The old man went back to looking at the sky.
“I was thinking more that I’d like it if you talked to me.” I’d noticed that now we were actually out here, the old man seemed a lot calmer, more settled than when we’d been travelling to get here.
“What would you like to talk about, Nathan?”
“Nate.”
“What would you like to talk about, Nate?”
“How about where are we for starters?”
He pointed back over his shoulder. “In that direction is the A Shau Valley. That’s where we’re headed. During the war, this valley was part of something called the Ho Chi Minh Trail. North Vietnamese soldiers used this as their main infiltration route into the south. A lot of battles were fought around here. A hell of a lot of people died in that valley.”
“And this is where the battle you told me about, the one you and Tal were in, this is where that battle happened?”
“Yeah.”
“Why did you want to come back here?”
“Jesus, Nate, you could be one of those interviewers on 60 Minutes or something. These are tough questions.”
“Sorry.”
“A lot of guys come back. Visit the places where shit happened. I don’t know exactly why. I never wanted to experience anything like that ever again. And I didn’t think I’d want to be reminded of what happened here. So I can’t explain exactly why we’re here, except that I guess I changed my mind.”
“It just seems weird to me after all this time.”
“Forty years.”
“Seriously? Forty years?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you remember stuff that happened that long ago?”
“Like it happened this morning.”
“I still don’t get why … after forty years.”
“It’s the right time.”
I shook my head. That didn’t make sense. But I was too tired to try to figure it out.
“What happens tomorrow?”
“We walk. Five miles to a place I want to see. A place I want you to see. After that I don’t know.”
I stopped listening after the five miles part. I hoped there weren’t any more swamps. I picked up the sleeping bag and pushed it into the tent. I fell asleep like somebody had hit me over the head with a brick.
The A Shau Valley
1
I woke up and freaked.
In the pre-dawn semi-light, I was sure of one thing — I’d been carried off to a giant jungle spider’s web. The spider’s webbing was all around me. I tried to move my eyes without moving my head so that whatever it was that had taken me prisoner wouldn’t know I was still alive. Or awake.
I