Che Guevara in Saigon — 1968

When I saw the first light of day come in through the window I pushed the three paperback books I used for a pillow against the wall and rolled up the reed mat and stood it in the corner of the room. On the bed, Bryant turned onto his side snoring lightly. Bryant’s a Quaker, but he still snores.

I was in the little cement bathroom shaving in cold water when I heard the measured chugging of the fifties start up out in Cholon. It was agreeable to me to know they were still there, that the routine of the battle had not altered. An hour, half an hour later the fifties and even the sound of tank artillery would be lost in the noise of traffic as the city began to go about its business.

Down on the street I walked quickly with my hands in my pockets against the chill while young men in white uniform shirts and billed caps bicycled toward the gates of the National Police compound. They carried their identification cards gripped in their teeth so that the guards could check their photographs. I cut over to Tran Hung Dao and began walking toward Cholon. There was no more money for cabs.

I walked fast along Tran Hung Dao for half an hour then walked through a wide wooden doorway into a courtyard where workers straddling bicycles and wearing pith helmets were eating soup and drinking tea around a green wooden stall. I bought a cheese sandwich on a French roll and a bottle of orange soda pop. While the workers watched me carelessly I stuffed the sandwich inside my shirt, the bottle of soda in one pocket and started walking again.

I walked past the police barricade at Dong Khan Street to the corner of Thong Duc Phoung where one company of the 35th Vietnamese Rangers had its aid station. The medic and the two stretcher-bearers were sitting on the curbing in front of their jeeps. The two blood-spattered stretchers were standing upright against a shop front. Ahead, the pavement was covered with rubble and some of the buildings were smoking. A pagoda had collapsed and I walked around the orange-tiled roof that had settled down intact onto the street. I could hear the AK-47s and M-16s now. I walked past Rangers standing silently in doorways with their weapons and then I saw Captain Thatcher sitting in his jeep with his American driver ready to advise his Vietnamese counterpart if his counterpart asked for advice, which was not very likely. It was good to see Thatcher there. Every morning it was as if I could count on him.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Good morning,” Thatcher said.

“How’s it look today?”

“It looks like shit. The way it always looks with these people.”

“What was the tally yesterday?”

“Three dead, seven wounded. Ours.”

“Not bad for all that shooting.”

“Light casualties, no progress. These people are satisfied with that.”

“They do seem to be.”

I was satisfied myself. I didn’t want to say so. I wasn’t very interested in progress, in victory or in defeat either. I still thought I was interested in the process. I believe I still believed that I was convinced that in the process of risking death something significant could be identified.

It was a very nice morning. The sun was bright but the air was still cool and fresh. I had my sandwich and something to drink. I had my notepad and two ballpoint pens with black ink. I was set for the rest of the day. Up at the next corner there was on-again off-again small arms fire. The tension was there. The possibilities.

I strolled over to the nearest shop front and looked in through the open doorway. It was a stationery store. The inventory was in a real mess. The next shop sold children’s and women’s clothes. Everything was in order there except for the Viet Cong corpse in black pajamas lying on its back in the center aisle. The open eyes were full of a sky blue liquid. I gave the bottom of one of his feet a little kick just to make sure and ripples passed through the blue in his eyes. Out on the street I saw Thatcher watching me.

“What did you think of that one?”

“I don’t know what that was. I can’t figure it out.”

“I can’t figure any of this,” Thatcher said. “You want to see what these people can do when they’re in the mood?”

I followed him into a bicycle repair shop. Small arms fire was rattling in bursts on the streets on either side of our street. As we entered the bicycle shop Thatcher gestured toward some holes that went through the brick wall. Inside to the left there was a row of shattered glass display cases running toward the back about two feet out from the wall.

“Last night Trung set up a fifty on that balcony across the street and waited. He sat there all night and this morning at dawn he shot the shit out of this place.”

Four Viet Cong corpses were strung out in a line in the aisle behind the glass cases, each one on its belly with its head toward the rear of the shop where a crawl hole had been knocked through the side wall into the back of the shop next door. When they were still alive the corpses must have moved to the front of the shop to look for targets where Captain Truong had heard or seen or sensed them and started up his fifty. The corpses that weren’t corpses yet dove frantically behind the display cases and scrabbled one after the other back toward the hole in the wall they had come through. One by one they had been made into corpses until the one in the lead was halfway through the hole where he had been caught with his ass in the air and his head down on the floor on the other side.

“This one’s easy to figure out,” I said.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” Thatcher said.

“The story line is straight as an arrow. It’s so straight it’s eerie.”

“It’s a story with a happy ending. It’s the kind of story we ought to see more of around here. If these people’d show a little imagination we’d see happy stories like this every day.”

“Nothing beats a happy story.”

“That’s what we’re trying to do here, create lots of happy stories.”

At mid-morning one platoon of Rangers formed up and headed single file into a maze of alleys and buildings. I went with them. The idea was to get in behind one of the two thirties the VC had trained on the intersection. We left the alleys and walked through passageways covered with tin roofs and chicken wire screens and came to the rear entrance to a large brick building. The lieutenant signaled us to get down and we sat down, some of the men with their back to the building wall, some of us facing it. I sat facing it. The lieutenant cranked up his telephone and was talking into it quietly when there was a terrific cracking explosion inside the building. There was a moment of frozen fear, then the realization that no one was hurt. A couple of the Rangers grinned. We went on sitting quietly against the walls on either side of the passageway. The lieutenant talked quietly into his telephone. I began making notes on my pad.

There was another sharp crashing explosion. It reverberated wildly under the tin roofs. A moment later I heard a soft human sound and a Ranger sitting across from me fell slowly forward until he was lying on his face. His back was opened up like a great bloody flowering plant. Then one explosion followed another and I understood it was our own tank artillery firing into the building ahead of us and that we were getting it too. Another Ranger fell forward, the noise became catastrophic, then part of a head came skidding across the stone alleyway on its hairy side and we all understood at once we had to get out. It was something like terror. There was yelling and running and yet enough courage to use enough time to carry out two wounded and the corpse with part of its head sliced off. No one bothered with the part.

As we came out of the alley Thatcher was standing at his jeep watching. At that moment thought reminded me that at thirty-eight years I was the oldest man there. I was older than Thatcher. I was holding the ballpoint pen in one hand and the notepad in the other.

“Vietnamese tankers,” Thatcher said.

“I figured.” Then I saw the blood on the front of my shirt and pants, and I felt ashamed.

After lunch the Saigon firemen showed up with their aluminum helmets and the long poles with the hooks on the end and began dragging the corpses out of the smoking shop fronts. Some of the corpses were still fresh and soft and when the firemen threw them up in the back of their flatbed truck little clouds of ash poofed up from them.

In the late afternoon it was decided the Rangers would force the intersection in a company charge and occupy the four-story hotel further up the street. There was a cafe on the corner, behind it a couple one-story shops, then the hotel. There were two Sherman tanks with Vietnamese crews to lead the attack, the two that had killed one of us a couple hours earlier.

At sundown the Ranger Company was still formed in a column of twos along the east side of the street. Overhead the sky was growing dark. On the street the air was humid and thick. The battalion colonel had arrived and was arguing furiously with the tank commander, who was standing half out of his turret yelling down at the colonel, and holding up a bloody thumb. I walked over to Thatcher to ask what was going on. Just then the lead tank fired off a round and I jumped about a foot in the air. When I came back down I was pissed.

“What the hell was that for?” I said.

“The tankers are getting frustrated. They don’t like the plan, and now their leader has hurt his thumb and wants to go home.”

“I don’t blame them for not liking the plan. Why doesn’t Truong send some people over the roofs there and get down on top of that thirty?”

“There’s a lot of things could be done in this situation if these people had any imagination.”

“I’ve never seen an officer refuse an order.” I watched the tanker telling his colonel to shove it along. “This is a first for me.”

“Be sure to write it up that way,” Thatcher said.

“If the Americans are going to train these people, they ought to train them right.”

“You can only do so much with these people.”

“The people up north do pretty well with them.”

Thatcher didn’t say anything.

Suddenly both tanks gunned forward firing their artillery. The lead tank blasted the corner cafe and through the wall behind it while the second fired up into the hotel beyond. Then the Rangers let out a great cry and broke into a run in a column up the sidewalk past the closed shop fronts and there was the noise of a hundred men in full gear, their boots striking the concrete, their equipment thudding and clanking and then they were charging across the street past the cafe and into the cafe and there were Rangers crumpled on the pavement in the intersection and there was the patter of the thirty out of sight around the corner.

Then there was a tremendous explosion and flash of light in front of the hotel and the lead tank didn’t pause but continued right on up the street as if it had someplace else to go. As the second tank started to pass the front of the hotel firing its artillery I saw a figure in black lean out of a second-story window and drop a package that looked like a fat briefcase. There was a terrific explosion and light-flash over the top of the second tank and an instant later the lid of the tank turret opened and a tanker jumped down on the pavement and staggered across the street, the fingers of one hand spurting blood like four or five open faucets.

The charge petered out and Captain Truong yelled and pushed his men up the sidewalk, he pleaded and threatened, but they wouldn’t go out anymore into the intersection where they were being machine-gunned. I had never seen soldiers refuse to follow an order and while I watched something inside me turned around painfully. I watched while individual Rangers who tried to rescue their comrades who had fallen in the intersection were machine-gunned themselves.

When B-40 rockets began exploding inside the corner cafe and a Ranger walked out without his helmet or his rifle and sauntered across the street toward us I noted on my pad the peculiar smile on his face and when he reached us the way his friends embraced him laughing and slapping his back and how the Viet Cong machine gunner had refrained from killing him and I jotted down in my notebook “Why?”

I watched while the Rangers tried to make it back from the cafe one by one as night fell and how they were machine-gunned before they could get even a few steps or how they made it, one shot through the neck but making it, one shot in the hip who made it too, limping and grunting and when he was safe with his comrades how one of them picked him up piggyback and carried him up the street toward the aid station.

I watched one Ranger shot in the stomach very carefully crawling across the pavement toward us whimpering and crying until two of his buddies ran out into the bullet storm and dragged him back over the curbing and how the last Ranger who was quite tall for a Vietnamese made it almost all the way across before he was jerked to a stop in mid pace with a handful of bullets in his chest and how he staggered, caught himself, took two more steps forward and fell into the arms of his comrades.

Of course there were many things I missed seeing. Then the shooting stopped, and it was dark. Buildings were smoking and burning everywhere, for the fighting had taken place on many streets and intersections, not just where we were. Flames illuminated the tops of buildings in eerie, gorgeous ways. One Ranger had been shot in both arms and wouldn’t allow anyone to lift him off the pavement. He moaned in a peculiar way and in the tortured light from the flaming buildings I could see his face turning to stone.

Two Rangers were trying to take a green wooden door off a storefront. I watched them working at the door fastidiously, as if they didn’t want to damage someone’s property. When I realized they wanted to use the door for a stretcher I went over and tore it off its hinges and threw it in the street. I was in a rage. The three of us stood there looking at each other and I still had the notepad and the pen in one hand. I put them in my shirt pocket and we put the wounded, strangely moaning Ranger on the door and another Ranger came over and the four of us picked up the door carefully and started back toward the aid station. We moved slowly in the dark through the rubble. We carried him past the pagoda roof. The wounded Ranger wasn’t moaning, I realized, he was chanting in a low rhythmic voice. It didn’t resemble anything I had ever heard.

At the corner of Tong Duc Phuon it began to rain. We carried the door inside a dark drugstore and set it down. Outside, wounded Rangers lay on the sidewalk in the dark in the heavy rain. Their comrades spread ponchos over them. Rangers who weren’t wounded pressed back with their weapons into doorways. Thatcher was standing in the entrance to the drugstore making entries in his little black notebook. I knew he was doing the tally, one column for wounded, a second for dead. Every evening at sundown Captain Thatcher started his tally. On the other streets all across Cholon at that moment American advisers were standing in doorways out of the rain with their notebooks and ballpoint pens recording the tally.

I moved down the street and stood in a doorway crowded with half a dozen Rangers. It was very dark. No one spoke. The rain poured into the street. A few blocks away fires burned out of the tops of the buildings, beautifully illuminating the great cloud billows of smoke. After a while I heard Captain Thatcher’s driver start up the jeep and a moment later it pulled up at the curbing in front of the doorway where I was standing among the Rangers.

“Time for beddy-bye,” Thatcher said. Every evening at nightfall for ten nights Thatcher had given me a ride toward the room.

“I’m going to hang around for a while.”

“Big plans are one thing,” Thatcher said enigmatically. “Taking care of business is something else.”

“I suppose so,” I said. I didn’t have the least idea what he meant.

“See you tomorrow then.”

“Yeah.”

When the jeep taillights were lost in the rain I started walking in the downpour. I walked through the roadblocks toward Trung Hung Dao. It was after curfew and the streets were deserted. Trung Hung Dao is one of the main thoroughfares in Saigon but there were no streetlights and not a single window had light coming from it. I walked as fast as I could in the rain. I hadn’t thought that part of the city would be so deserted. I went out in the middle of the street and started running to keep warm. That made me think how I could be shot for the wrong reason and I started walking again but I stayed in the middle of the street.

Memory began going over what I had seen during the day. It recalled what I’d seen the day before and the day before that. It played back the scenes from over in the Eighth District, then the ones from First District. It produced pictures of what I saw around Sedec in the Mekong and on the road to Tay Ninh and outside Mee Tah.

There was no particular order of appearance. The pictures just kept coming, one crazy bloody scene after another like those dreams that appear pointless but have an insanely driving persistence.

It took about an hour to walk to the room. It rained hard the whole time and the streets were empty and dark. I was defenseless. Then I was climbing the flight of stairs to the room and when I opened the door Bryant was sitting on the bed in his shorts with his back to wall reading Time magazine and listening to his Beatles recording of The Lonely Hearts Club Band. He looked up as if he was going to ask me a question, but he didn’t say anything.

Then he said: “You look like you’ve been to hell and back,” and he laughed. In the bathroom I looked at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. I was sopping but I looked normal.

Bryant said: “When you opened the door and I saw you there, it was the expression on your face.”

I showered in the cold water and dried off with a clean towel and put on fresh shorts and a clean shirt. I rolled out my mat on the floor and lay down and drew the three paperback books beneath the back of my head. Bryant put another Beatles recording on his machine. Outside I could hear the rainwater rushing off the tiled roof and splashing on the street below. The Beatles music was cheerful.

Bryant said: “Well, how’d it go out there today?”

“Just like the other days. Same, same.”

“I thought maybe something unusual happened.”

“No. It was exactly like the other days.”

Che Guevara

Books and magazines were scattered around the floor as usual. I picked up the magazine closest to me. It was a recent issue of Ramparts, the one with Che Guevara’s portrait on the cover painted in flaming reds and Guevara in a beret looking rakish and heroic. It was the issue where Ramparts published Guevara’s “Letter to the Bolivian People.”

The Letter to the Bolivian People recounted a feat of arms Guevara had directed where his guerrilla group had ambushed a Bolivian army patrol and bushwhacked four of its members. The letter was a sensitive apology to the mothers of the four dead soldiers and an explanation of why it had been necessary that he, Guevara, shoot their sons. It was a touching letter. There was a certain generosity to it.

Guevara empathized with the pain and loss he understood the four mothers were experiencing. He wrote that he had no personal grievance against their sons and had shot them not as individuals but as representatives of the Bolivian State under General Baronets. Guevara then spoke to all the mothers of Bolivia, explaining that he would soon begin shooting their sons too, and it was necessary for all Bolivian mothers to prepare to bear the pain he was going to bring them in order to set them free.

Uncertainly at first, then with the growing understanding of an avalanche, I saw that the revolution Guevara was making in Bolivia belonged to him, not the mothers he was addressing. The mothers hadn’t asked him for it. He hadn’t asked the mothers if they wanted it. Guevara wanted it himself however and he was going to give it to the Bolivian mothers whether they wanted it or not. He was ready to kill every mother’s son in Bolivia who got in his way. That’s how dedicated Guevara was to his imagination. That’s where his revolution began, in his imagination, and for him that would be the only place where it could end. The people he had already killed and all those he planned to kill when he could make the right arrangements for it would be dedicated to the turnings of his imagination.

Inwardly I began arguing with him. Inwardly I shouted: “Why don’t you start at the top, you asshole? Why are you starting at the bottom again? Why don’t you keep it among your own kind, you shit? Those who have a passion to use others for their own ends? Eh? You don’t like the way Bolivia is ruled?” I yelled inwardly. “Kill the ruler, you fucking intellectual. What is it about you people? You always kill the people the tyrant rules, never the tyrant. Kill the generals, not the soldiers. Kill the politicos, not the citizens. When will you ever understand?”

“Bradley?” I heard Bryant say quietly.”

“Yeah?”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

“Are you talking to yourself?”

“I’m okay. Let’s let it go.”

“All right.”

After a moment Bryant said very quietly: “Maybe tomorrow you’ll want to talk about it.”

“Bryant,” I said. “Let’s let it go. Okay?”

“All right.”

“And turn off that fucking music. Will you do that?”

Excerpted from a work-in-progress titled A Personal History of Moral Decay. You can find a working draft here.

http://tinyurl.com/p7jz7eu