Beyond Survival. Gerald Coffee

in neighboring countries made the domino theory worth heeding.

      Gradually our advisors began taking casualties and we were slowly drawn in deeper, with greater commitments. After Kennedy’s assassination in late ’63, President Johnson held sacred his predecessor’s pledge to the people of South Vietnam. Johnson didn’t want to box the North Vietnamese into a corner with no option but to fight, so he escalated the bombing very slowly and offered to negotiate at the same time.”

      With the thought of escalated bombing, my mind drifted to reports I had heard of the first to be shot down in the bombing, Lieutenant JG Everett Alvarez. I had seen newspaper articles about his shootdown and capture. The columns had usually been accompanied by the soulful, gaunt-faced picture of him as a prisoner. His loss in August ’64 had been big news, and the North Vietnamese had milked it for all the propaganda the Western media would provide.

      Bea and I had been on leave from Florida visiting my parents in central California when we saw the news. I had been reading the Sunday paper in bed and sipping my morning coffee. Alvarez’s picture was in the world section, and there was some statement from his wife about a controversial letter she had received from him. Bea was brushing her hair in the bathroom a few feet away.

      “Honey, if I go to Vietnam and get shot down and become a POW, when I write to you I’ll put little dots under certain letters so they spell out my secret message to you.”

      Bea said something like, “That’s nice, dear. Do you want biscuits or scones for breakfast?”

      Hell, what am I saying, I thought at the time. She’s right. Vietnam will be history by the time I ever get back on sea duty.

      The old man continued his intense scrutiny of me. For the first time I noticed his scraggly beard, a few dozen wavy white threads hanging down from his chin and from the outer edges of his upper lip, just like the beard I had seen on Ho Chi Minh in news magazines. He would be one of Ho’s contemporaries. Maybe he had even worked with him personally . . . . He obviously enjoyed some status, or the cadre wouldn’t have left him alone with me.

      “Why you come Vietnam?”

      He had apparently noticed that I was back in the present with him.

      I knew why I had “come Vietnam,” but how could I tell him? Even if his English hadn’t been limited, I felt helpless to explain. He no doubt had his own historical version of the Intel briefing I had just reviewed in my mind. I wanted desperately to explain to him that I and my countrymen were involved in the affairs of his country for a good and worthy purpose. How could I explain we had been asked to come by Vietnamese who didn’t want to live under a repressive and tyrannical Communist regime? How could I tell him I believed they had the right to determine their own destiny, independent of their neighbors in the North? With his historical perspective, he probably would have fathomed my reasons far better than most of the younger generation of his country who had learned a distorted view of that same history.

      I stared back at him dumbly, matching his gaze blink for blink. I felt the frustration of trying to help someone and having the effort go awry to make the situation worse somehow; of having my good intentions misperceived, and yet being unable to explain. Finally, the old man shrugged his thin shoulders and shook his head sadly as he added his final cigarette butt to the five already scattered near his right sandal. I heard his knees creak as he hoisted himself upright, then he turned and walked out into the ebbing twilight. I shook my own head sadly as I watched him become one of the shadows.

      Later that evening, I was visited by a man and woman. They hesitated in the doorway and surveyed my situation, the woman speaking softly. By now the lengthening shadows had blended into darkness, and I could barely distinguish their forms in the opening of my shelter. Soon the man disappeared in the direction from which they had appeared. His companion stood quietly and waited. When the man returned he had a small oil lamp, the flame hardly bigger than that of a birthday cake candle. They approached together and squatted down very close to me. Only then could I see that they were a boy and a girl, probably in their late teens. The girl appeared to be the elder and was truly beautiful. They exchanged a few words in Vietnamese before the boy set the lamp on a cross-piece of the rickety little fence that separated my stall from the next one. Then he looked at me thoughtfully. After a moment, he spoke: “Her brother and her mother are killed by U.S. napalm. She hate you very much.” The young interpreter shaped his words carefully, his boyish face overacting the emotions he felt appropriate for the statement. It was clear that he had practiced this opener. “She herself call Lan,” he said more casually. “Lan . . . nurse! Different village. It call self Son My.” His inverted sentence structure belied the French background of his English teacher.

      The two of them sat low and side by side, their eyes slightly above the level of my own. The boy, like the old man, squatted squarely on flat feet; the girl knelt symmetrically on her knees, her hands pressed palms down against her thighs. But for the simplicity of her clothing, she exuded the elegant grace of a Tonkinese courtesan.

      Lan! Even in the dim light I could see that her face was almost a perfect heart shape, with a delicate chin and cheeks curving gracefully up and around to the top of her forehead and the distinct widow’s peak. Her jet-black hair was pulled to the back of her head in a bun, but the wisps that escaped here and there arched down over her delicate ears and forehead, adding to the weariness in her young face. A thin gold chain around her neck hinted at the femininity otherwise obscured by the coarse gray cotton blouse that buttoned down the front and was gathered into the small waistband of her classic black pajama pants. A webbed military belt cinched her waist even more trimly.

      “She hate you very much! Nevertheless, her heart is in the right place.” My eyes flicked to the boy’s expectant face, then back to Lan’s eyes. His well-rehearsed speech couldn’t have seemed more incongruous.

      Lan returned my stare with her enormous dark eyes, more round than almond-shaped. It’s likely there had been a Frenchman in her ancestry, I thought. From the depths of her eyes I could sense her confusion; some hatred, yes, but more than that, searching and curiosity. She uttered a quick phrase to her interpreter without breaking our eye contact. “You must remove shirt,” he said. While I did so—very painfully and laboriously working the sleeve down and off my swollen arm—she began methodically removing the small first-aid kit attached to her belt. I was struck by its resemblance to the play-nurse kit that my daughter Kimmie had received for Christmas less than two months ago. And Lan herself—dark hair and eyes and diminutive frame—caused me to recall for a trembling instant the bright effervescence of my little first grader now so far away in space and context. Lan’s touch upon my arms and face belied whatever hatred she might have harbored. Her gentleness seemed to be the most natural part of her, both as Lan the nurse and Lan the girl.

      From her touches and terse commentary I deduced my situation before it was interpreted to me—mostly by signs and motions—by the boy. My right forearm was broken; my right elbow was badly dislocated, probably shattered as well. There was a gash there—now crusted over— that had probably been caused by striking some part of my jettisoning canopy or ejection seat. My entire arm and shoulder were swollen to twice their normal size and were completely immobile, just as if in a cast. Lan applied Mercurochrome to the numerous cuts on my face and gently spread some kind of ointment on the burns there and on my neck and arms. As she finished knotting the gauze-strip sling around my neck and arm, she sat back in her best courtesan pose. She shook her head slowly from side to side, her huge eyes fixed upon mine, and then, like the old Viet Minh soldier who had visited me earlier, shrugged her tiny shoulders in helpless commentary. “Lan say you must wait more for doctors. You hurt very bad but you OK. She say you have very good fortune.”

      “Why does she say that?” She turned toward him to catch the gist of my question. “Because the brave army men of Tan Loc show they courageous. They shoot down your American piratical airplane on the spot.” The airplane motions with his hands ended in a squirming tangle of fingers and flip-flopping palms. “It blow up over the water. Everybody think you must be killed, but I don’t think so.” He smiled as if happy for me.

      “But there were two of us. What about the other man who was in the airplane with me?” Lan knew my question