IMET Pete Landon when I was in language school. Pete was a Foreign Service officer, educated at Groton and Harvard, very talented, very accomplished. He already spoke French, German, and Italian, and while everyone else was still rendering Vietnamese as if it were some absurd mutation of English he’d begun learning its poetry. He was athletic and rakish. Other men, myself among them, courted his notice as if he were a beautiful girl; he had that charge of glamour. When he laughed at something I said, I felt lucky. Singled out.
Pete was seven or eight years my senior and showed an avuncular interest in me that I was not above encouraging with stories of near-death experiences during survival training and parachute jumps. He seemed amused by my impersonation of a cocky young warrior, and I played it up.
Pete got to Vietnam before I did and spent some months in the countryside. Then he was posted to Saigon. He sent me his address and offered a bed whenever I needed one, an invitation I put to use several times when I came to town on supply missions. His house was a handsome old villa surrounded by gardens and serviced by a gardener, several cleaning women, and a French-trained cook.
Pete had four roommates, also civilians. I didn’t know what any of them actually did and I had the idea I shouldn’t press them on the subject. They were smart, casually elegant guys from the same world as Pete, and, like him, princely in their hospitality. They always had friends in the house, journalists, visitors from the States, cryptic young officers from up-country wearing Montagnard bracelets. It was like an ultracool fraternity.
We assembled before dinner and put on some music and cracked open the scotch. The music got louder, we got louder. Pete and his friends were close about their work but dedicated gossips with a familial range of common acquaintance. They spoke, it seemed to me, not as snobs but as canny observers of their tribe. What else would they talk about? As they drank and matched stories, the world they conjured up became more real and present than the world outside the house, and they became part of it again. I could see it happen. It happened to me too, through an old trick of longing by which I managed to believe myself one of them.
Dinner was formal. This formality did not extend to dress, but it governed the protocols of speech and conduct. We were young men, after all, flushed with drink, trembling on the edge of riot. It was understood that the night would end orgiastically. The polite forms postponed that conclusion while respecting its inevitability, making every decorum an aspect of the debauchery yet to come.
We sat at a mahogany table lit by two silver candelabra. Pete presided, carving the meat, explaining the wine, conducting us like a choirmaster. He ruled but did not oppress. He managed to get each of us to put something on exhibit, to recite Shakespeare or sing a song or tell a story he knew we told well. When we finished he’d say “Hear, hear!” As the meal went on he pinged his glass and stood to propose toasts so long-winded and mannered that I assumed he must be parodying someone, maybe even parodying toasts themselves, the very idea of toasts, toasts as the ur-liturgy of that exquisite respectability whose restraints we would soon be trashing. Once we’d eaten our fill he did not suffer us to hurry away. He produced cognac and Cuban cigars and leaned back in his chair, thinking deep, inviting us to consider whether the Novel really was dead, and if Napoleon’s Russian campaign had in fact been such a great failure as conventional minds made it out to be. In the best Socratic fashion—“Good point, well taken, but is there perhaps another way of thinking about Borodino?”—he held us to the subject until there was nothing left of it or of our capacity to spout this guff, and then he’d fold his napkin and push back his chair and suggest that perhaps we might get a drink somewhere.
How bizarre, to enter the streets of Saigon after a night at Pete’s table. Everything was newly foreign: the buildings, the look of the trees against the evening sky, the sounds and smells, and most of all the people in their absolute otherness, crowds of them on the sidewalks and roads, under awnings, in doorways and restaurants, so many it seemed they must be out for some purpose. We worked our way among them to the street, flagged cabs, and began our descent into the night.
Given the daunting standards of the time and place, there was nothing remarkable in our dissipation; only, perhaps, in the feeling of superiority that joined us while we pursued it. Back in the house we’d kept the forms of gentility with the understanding that they didn’t really own us. We were renegades; this young gentlemen business was irony. But later, in the dumps where our outlaw trail led us, the irony assumed another form. We were, it seemed, young gentlemen after all, drawn here by anthropological curiosity. This heightened sense of ourselves gave us both license and detachment. We were on the Grand Tour, and this was part of its truth, which we as touristical swells had a duty to eat whole without making faces.
Pete controlled the itinerary. He drank but didn’t show it. His speech never thickened or slurred, his manner became more old-world as the night ran its course. When the rest of us were at the point of collapse Pete caused taxis to appear and carry us back to the villa. At this moment he was at his brightest and most affable. He was ready to scramble up some eggs, brew a pot of coffee, have a serious talk.
The others waved him off and went to bed. But I stayed up with Pete. I liked having his attention; it was worth losing some sleep for. He ransacked the kitchen for sweet rolls and cakes and urged them on me with an open hand, along with his thoughts and advice. I knew he had two kid brothers back home; he treated me pretty much as if I were one of them. And if he condescended, if he gave his advice a little too freely, if he sometimes made me feel too smartly the differences in our ages, our histories and prospects, that was all right. I knew he had my best interests at heart.
NOT LONG AFTER Tet, Pete paid me a visit at my battalion. He had with him in his Land-Rover a man named Shaw. They’d driven down from Saigon, hoping to reach Ben Tre, but the roads were all jammed up and when they found themselves outside My Tho in a hard rain they decided to stop for the night.
Shaw went inside to take a shower but Pete still wasn’t ready to call it a day. He had Sergeant Benet and me put on our ponchos and show him around the battalion. We inspected the gun emplacements, then walked the perimeter, with Pete stopping at every strongpoint to question the guards. They deferred instantly to him, grinning like children at the miracle of his beautiful Vietnamese while he asked them about their weapons and defensive procedures and then about their home villages and families. Sergeant Benet and I waited dumbly, shoulders hunched against the drenching rain, ropy streams of it running off our hoods and past our faces.
It was dark when we got back inside. Shaw had the news on TV. Pete played with Canh Cho awhile, then came over to the kitchen area, where Sergeant Benet was making a salad while I grilled some steaks.
“Quel boeuf!” he said. “Filet mignon … Where in the world did you find those?”
“Friends,” I said.
“You’re doing all right here,” Pete said. “The veritable lap of luxury.” He didn’t make this sound like a compliment.
During dinner it came out that Shaw was also a Foreign Service officer, stationed in Thailand. I liked him. He came quickly to the point and had a brusque, undeceived way of bringing you to yours. He’d traveled to Vietnam for a visit and Pete was taking time off to show him around, put him in the picture. It was a friendly thing to do, but I could see they weren’t really friends. There was constraint in Shaw’s manner toward Pete. He didn’t seem to notice how winning Pete was and refused to be conducted in his presentation of himself, to have his gruff persona managed.
Pete didn’t know how to talk to him. But he wouldn’t give up; he kept bantering on in that gallant mock-courtly way of his. I had never seen Pete at a loss before. I was embarrassed for him and felt somehow disloyal in my embarrassment.
We stayed up and had a beer after Shaw and Sergeant Benet hit the rack.
“So,” Pete said. “You’ve got yourself quite the little nest here.”
“We do what we can.”
“I had a somewhat different idea of your situation.”
“We never really talked about it. There’s not much to say.”
“I mean, good Lord, you’re really set up. Entre nous, where’d you get that TV?”
“A trade,” I said.
“Really. Well. You’ve set yourself up in style here. Nothing left to chance.”
“You’re doing okay yourself,” I said.
“In Saigon, yes. I didn’t live that way in the bush.”
I knew this was true. I had seen the photographs of Pete with his villagers, Pete sinking a well, Pete building a bridge, Pete out on patrol with the local reaction force. Pete in native garb, eating cross-legged on a dirt floor, chopsticks poised above his rice bowl. He had a thick album of these pictures, and still more framed on the walls of his bedroom.
“I would have thought you’d be traveling with a faster crowd,” he said. “Something a little more out on the edge.”
“You go where they send you.”
“I mean, this is just like home, isn’t it?”
“Not exactly.”
“Oh, but it is. Exactly. You get tired of the old filet mignon, you pop into town for a little Chinese.”
I said, “You don’t just pop into My Tho.”
“Well, of course you do! I thought you’d want to be out …”—he waved vaguely—“doing some damage.”
“I’ve been out.” Then I said, “I can’t say I did much damage.”
Pete leaned forward. His expression was kindly. “You know, this isn’t going to last forever. You have to ask yourself: What am I going to have to remember when it’s over? What am I going to have to look back on?”
I didn’t know what to say.
He reached over and slapped my knee. “You’re a razor-edged weapon, remember? Terror from the sky. Death on cat’s feet. Don’t you want to show your stuff?”
“I want to get home.” The words came so fast I almost choked on them.
Pete sat back. He made as if to speak, then shook his head and took a drink. When I said good night he raised the bottle without looking at me.
THE NEXT MORNING Pete announced a change of plan. Instead of going on to Ben Tre, which wasn’t much to look at since Tet, he proposed to drive to a village west of us to meet someone really interesting. This man had held important posts throughout the Delta, and though he was now living in retirement he kept in touch with his old network and knew things about the country no one else knew. He was famous for his grasp of the situation. If he didn’t know about it, it wasn’t worth knowing.
Sergeant Benet said, “It’s not a good road out that way.”
“Nonsense,” Pete said. “It’s a perfectly good road. I’ve driven it many times.”
“The surface is all right,” I said. “It’s just not very secure right now. Nobody uses it much.”
“If nobody’s using it,” Pete said, “then they won’t be expecting anybody, will they?”
“Probably not,” I said.
Shaw was looking from one to the other of us. “How far is this place?”
“Around twenty-five clicks,” I said.
“Twenty at the most.” Pete looked at me. “Please don’t feel obliged to go. I’m sure you have pressing things to do here.”
Until that moment I’d had no thought of making the trip; it hadn’t even crossed my mind. “I was hoping to go,” I said.
“You don’t have to.”
“I want to.”
“Don’t do this on my account,” Shaw said. “There’s no need.”
I shook my head. “Curiosity.”
“Good man,” Pete said.
PETE HAD to make some calls to Saigon. While he was over at the communications center I piled sandbags on the floor of the Land-Rover and fixed us up with weapons. Two M-16s, plenty of ammo, a bunch of frags. Pete had brought his Swedish K, a good-looking, much-sought-after rifle, but only one clip. I asked Shaw if he knew how to use any of this hardware. He said he did, but preferred not to. “I’m planning to stay noncombatant on this trip,” he said.
“You might have to change your plan.”
“I hope not,” he said.
“Are you a Quaker?”
“What a peculiar question. Why do you ask?”
“Something about the way you said ‘noncombatant.’”
“What a place. You say the word noncombatant, you get asked if you’re a Quaker.”
“You’re not, then.”
“Nope.”
“No offense meant.”
“None taken. I can think of worse things to be.”
“Not me,” I said. “Not over here.”
Sergeant Benet pulled me aside before we left. He didn’t think I should be going. I had no orders and no mission to perform.
I said I wanted to go.
“Begging your pardon, sir, you got no business down there.” He waited for my answer, and when I repeated that I wanted to go, he said “Bullshit” and turned away. It was the only time he ever swore at me.
After we’d driven a few kilometers beyond My Tho the countryside changed. The paddies were empty. Nobody tried to sell us anything, the kids didn’t beg and chase after us. There were no military vehicles on the road, only a few mopeds and bicycles. The bridges were unguarded. I sat in back and kept track of our position on the map while Pete drove and pointed things out to Shaw.
Along the way we stopped to look at a brick building that had been all shot up. An acrid smell still clung to the walls. We wandered around inside, looking up at the sky through the holes in the roof. Shaw stood beside a window and began to snap pictures. Still taking pictures, he went into a crouch. I came up behind him and saw what the camera was getting, the pile of spent shells under the window, the blasted window frame, the country outside clear to the horizon, too much of it to hold at bay, though some poor soul had desperately tried. This picture was the story of his desperation.
We reached the village just before noon. Pete sent a boy with a carton of Marlboros to announce our arrival, and not long afterward we were sitting on the floor of a large, dim room with Ong Loan, the man Pete had spoken of. Ong Loan was small even for a Vietnamese, bald, and very old. He didn’t look that old—his face was smooth and round, babyish—but you could hear it in his voice. He spoke in a papery whisper. Conversation must have been painful for him, but he didn’t spare himself. He asked after our health, commented on the season, answered Pete’s questions as to his own well-being. He spoke in his own tongue and occasionally in French; if he knew English he gave no sign of it. As he talked he held a cigarette pinched between thumb and forefinger, drew deeply on it, and with his eyes closed blew smoke toward the ceiling.
A number of people had gathered in the room with us. They stood along the walls, watching, saying nothing. After a time two women came forward with tea and rice cakes. Ong Loan apologized for the plainness of the fare. Pete praised its quality.
Ong Loan asked Pete about Saigon. It had been so long, he said, since his last visit. Years. Pete described how busy it was, how crowded; how overrun with soldiers. I kept expecting them to exhaust the civilities and get down to business, to discuss those important matters of which Ong Loan had such intimate knowledge. But no. They went on in this pleasant humor, Ong Loan whispering the questions, Pete answering in his liquid, idiomatic Vietnamese. I lost them for long stretches, then picked them up again at a familiar word or phrase. Shaw swiveled his head from side to side as he listened. Of course he didn’t understand a word.
And then they began to discuss porcelain—Chinese porcelain. I knew that Pete had some expertise here. The house in Saigon was filled with books on the subject, and he owned a collection of valuable plates and jars he’d picked up cheap from dealers who were out of their depth. Pete described one of his recent acquisitions to Ong Loan, who bent forward and turned his head slightly. He forgot to smoke. It seemed that he too was an enthusiast.
I couldn’t follow them. There was no point in trying. Like Shaw, I could only watch, and mostly I watched Pete. More than ever I was struck by his fluency, not just in the flow of his words but in the motion of his hands and the set of his mouth; the way he ate and took his tea; his elaborate courtesies. He did it all with such a flourish, such evident pleasure—how happy and assured he was in his possession of these people’s admiration, how stylishly at home in this alien place, on this hard floor, surrounded by wonder-struck villagers. Yet I could see that his greatest pleasure came not from mastery of this situation but from our observation of his mastery.
I watched him, and understood why he’d brought us here. He wanted us to see how easily he could take his place among these people, to be one of them and at the same time not one of them, yet not quite one of us. Something more than either. And his demonstration of mastery required that we be stripped of it, made helpless, reduced to the role of spectators.
Not that Pete saw it that way. He probably thought he was exposing Shaw to valuable atmospherics. But whether he knew it or not, that’s what this whole number was about: the perfect Vietnamese, the compulsion to excite native awe, the insouciant gamble of life, the porcelain collection, the Swedish fucking K rifle. It was about cutting a figure.
We drank more tea. My butt was numb, my back hurt, my legs burned with cramp from being crossed so long. I didn’t say anything, though. Shaw had begun to show signs of impatience and I figured he would break first. He kept shifting creakily. When this didn’t get Pete’s attention he simply stood up.
Pete raised his hand in acknowledgment but went on talking.
“I’m ready,” Shaw said.
“We’re almost done,” Pete said.
“I’m ready now,” Shaw said.
Pete made sumptuous apologies for the haste in which he was forced to depart, apologies Ong Loan declined even to hear. He spoke to one of the women behind us, who left the room and returned with a blue-and-white bowl on a wooden base. It was about the size of a rice bowl. Ong Loan presented it to Pete, Pete tried to give it back, and when this was not allowed he closed his eyes and made a deep bow over the bowl and began to speak of Ong Loan’s incomparable largesse. It looked like we were in for a profound experience of mandarin gratitude. I gathered up our weapons and ammunition. Shaw followed me outside into the rain.
“What was all that about?” Shaw said.
“You’ll have to ask Pete,” I told him. “It was too fast for me.”
We sat in the Land-Rover and listened to the rain tap against the canvas top. The wind picked up. The rain fell harder. The sky darkened, and a great blinding sheet of water broke against the windshield. Early afternoon, and the sky was black as night.
Through the blur of rain I saw Pete appear in the doorway. In one hand he held a package. He scanned the sky, then ran for the Land-Rover. Shaw pushed the door open for him and Pete fell inside, laughing, drenched to the skin. He handed the package back to me. “Guard this with your life,” he said. “It’s worth more.”
“We’ve got ourselves one hell of a storm here,” Shaw said.
“Not so bad,” Pete said. “It’ll break.”
He drove fast, bent over the wheel, into the blackness. Our headlights glared back at us from the glassy wall of falling rain. The rain drummed on the rooftop. The air inside the Rover grew rank and steamy; Pete had to keep wiping the glass with his sleeve. I couldn’t see well enough to track us on the map, but it didn’t matter because the radio was useless. Nothing but static.
Pete looked at me in the rearview. “Why so glum?”
“Who’s glum? So what did Ong Loan have to say?”
“Ong Loan,” he said, pensively. “An original. A true original.”
“So what’s the news? Are we winning?”
“I’ve got some news for you,” he said. “Are you ready for it?” When I didn’t answer he reached back and shook my boot. “Come on, boy! Let’s see some enthusiasm! Uncle Pete’s been working for you!”
I waited.
“I talked to General Reed this morning. He’s going to take care of your problem.”
“What problem is that?”
“Missing out on all the fun. Pack your bags, big guy—you’re going to the party.”
I said, “I’m not sure I understand you.”
“Sure you do.”
He was right; I did. I waited a moment, then said, “What, am I getting transferred?”
“Kid’s got a mind like a steel trap,” Pete said to Shaw.
Shaw turned in his seat and looked at him as if he’d never seen him before.
“You should have your orders by the end of the week,” Pete said.
“Where to?”
“Up north. Very interesting slot, just came open. A-team.”
I leaned forward between the seats. “You already set this up? This is definite?”
“A done deal. We’re checking you out of the Plaza.”
“I wish you’d said something to me about it.”
Pete didn’t answer.
I sat back again.
For ten months now I’d been telling myself that whatever luck I enjoyed was no fault of mine. I’d volunteered for the whole nine yards, and they’d chosen to put me here. This fact had allowed me to half absolve myself of the suspicion, held so far only by myself, of malingering. But now the bet was called. This was a chance to offer myself up and put all doubt to rest, and I found I had no heart for it. The knowledge was humiliating. It left me with no protection against myself.
We went through a hamlet. An old man was hunched in a doorway, smoking a cigarette. American voices broke through the fuzz on the radio, then faded again.
“Pete? I’d like to talk to you about this.”
“What’s wrong?” Pete said. “Afraid to leave the big guns?”
Shaw was looking straight ahead. I had the feeling he was trying to efface himself, to grant me privacy, as if I were naked.
I said, “If we could have a word together.”
“Sure. All the words you want. But this is going to happen.”
The rain stopped just after we reached the battalion. I invited them to spend another night, but Pete wanted to press on to Saigon.
“Pete,” I said. “A word?”
Shaw headed toward the hooch. “I’ll be inside,” he said.
Pete watched him go. He had an air of puzzlement and injury, of being insufficiently appreciated. It was clear that he’d expected both of us to admire this trick of being able to yo-yo a man from one end of Vietnam to the other with a single telephone call.
“I wish you’d talked to me before you went ahead with this,” I said.
“We talked last night.”
“I never said I wanted a transfer.”
“But of course you want a transfer! You’re wasted down here.”
“This is where they sent me. I took my chances like everyone else. They could’ve sent me anywhere. They could’ve sent me to this interesting slot of yours.”
“They should have.”
“But they didn’t. That’s the breaks, just the same as if they’d sent me up north. It’s just the way things fell out.”
“It was a mistake. Now we’re fixing it. You’ll thank me someday. This is the chance of a lifetime.”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“You don’t have to like it,” he said. “That’s not the point.”
“I’m lucky I made it this far.”
“It’s all set,” he said.
“Fine. It’s all set. I understand that. I’m just not sure what I’m supposed to accomplish up there in two months. It took me longer than that to get things scoped out down here.”
“Two months? Who said anything about two months?”
“That’s when my tour’s up.”
“Come on.”
“Less than two months”
He stared at me.
“Fifty-four and a wake-up,” I said.
“You’ve been here ten months already?”
“Ten and change.”
“Then why didn’t you say something?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“Well, for Christ’s sake! You can’t go up there for two months, they’ll still be breaking you in and then you’re heading back home. I’ll never hear the end of it. I don’t suppose you’d consider extending.”
I shook my head.
“You know, I used up a very big favor with General Reed getting this spot for you. What’s going to happen the next time I have to ask him for something?”
I had no answer.
“If you had even four months left I’d ram this thing through anyway,” Pete said. “For your own good.”
I WAS undressing to take a shower when I found his package in the pocket of my fatigue jacket. I stashed it, figuring I’d have Sergeant Benet drop it off at Pete’s villa the next time we went up to Saigon. But in the morning a message came over the battalion teletype, instructing me to put extra padding on the package and take it to the My Tho airstrip and send it out in the priority mailbag. The message concluded: DO NOT DELAY REPEAT DO NOT DELAY. This Was followed by Pete’s name and the acronym and postal code of his place of work.
I took the parcel out of my footlocker and weighed it in my hand. When I pinched the puffy wrapping I could feel the outline of the bowl. I didn’t remember exactly what it looked like, its particular marks and patterns, but I still retained an impression of its beauty. Surely it struck everyone with its beauty when it was first brought into the room. No one had spoken; we simply watched as the bowl was handed from the old woman to Ong Loan and then to Pete. That it was ancient I knew at a glance. The blue was soft and watery, the white subtly yellowed like old ivory. To see it cupped in the hand, and then to see it given into another hand, was to understand that it was meant for that purpose; to be passed on. Pete’s bow had been cinematic but I couldn’t blame him for it. That he should bow in his pleasure at so antique and beautiful a thing was only right.
I put the package on the floor and pressed at it with my stockinged foot, for better control and so as not to leave any bootprints. It was tougher than I’d expected, but then of course it was tough. How else could it have lasted all those years? I gave it more and more of my weight until I was almost standing on it. Though I didn’t hear the break, I felt it travel up my leg—a sudden, sad release. I picked up the package and checked to make sure I hadn’t broken just the wooden base. It was the bowl. It had cracked into several pieces. I wrapped the package in some bunched sheets of Stars and Stripes and covered those with a layer of parcel paper. Then I took it to the airstrip. I followed Pete’s orders to the letter, and I did not delay.
REALLY, now. Is the part about the bowl true? Did I do that?
No. Never. I would never deliberately take something precious from a man—the pride of his collection, say, or his own pride—and put it under my foot like that, and twist my foot on it, and break it.
No. Not even for his own good.