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'That's VC up there,' said Cobra One. He pointed to a series of ridges that grew, off in the distance, into hills. 'You could say 80 per cent of the country is controlled by the VC, but that doesn't mean anything because they only have 10 per cent of the population.'
'I was up there,' said Dial. I kept forgetting that Dial had been a Marine. 'We were on patrol for about three weeks. Christ, we were cold! But now and then we'd luck out and get to a village. The people would see us coming and run away, and we'd use their huts – sleep in their beds. I remember a couple of times – it really killed me – we had to burn all their furniture to keep warm. We couldn't find any firewood.'
The mountains had begun to rise, acquiring the shape of amphitheatres with a prospect of the China Sea; eerie and bare and blue, their summits smothered in mist, they trailed smoke from slash-and-burn fires. We were on the narrow coastal strip, moving south on the patchy shoreline that still belonged to the Saigon government, between the mountains and the sea. The weather had changed, or perhaps we had finally been dragged free of the drizzle that was constant in Hue. Now it was su
'God, this is such a beautiful country,' said Cobra Two. She was snapping pictures out the window, but no picture could duplicate the complexity of the beauty: over there, the sun lighted a bomb scar in the forest, and next to it smoke filled the bowl of a valley; a column of rain from one fugitive cloud slanted on another slope, and the blue gave way to black green, to rice green on the flat fields of shoots, which became, after a strip of sand, an immensity of blue ocean. The distances were enormous and the landscape was so large it had to be studied in parts, like a mural seen by a child.
'I had no idea,' I said. Of all the places the railway had taken me since London, this was the loveliest.
'No one knows it,' said Cobra Two. 'No one in the States has the slightest idea how beautiful it is. Look at that – God, look at that!'
We were at the fringes of a bay that was green and sparkling in bright sunlight. Beyond the leaping jade plates of the sea was an overhang of cliffs and the sight of a valley so large it contained sun, smoke, rain, and cloud – all at once – independent quantities of colour. I had been unprepared for this beauty; it surprised and humbled me in the same degree the emptiness had in rural India. Who has mentioned the simple fact that the heights of Vietnam are places of unimaginable grandeur? Though we can hardly blame a frightened draftee for not noticing this magnificence, we should have known all along that the French would not have colonized it, nor would the Americans have fought so long, if such ripeness did not invite the eye to take it.
'That's the Ashau Valley,' said Cobra One, who until then had been doing an amusing imitation of Walter Bre
Dazzled by the scenery, I walked through the train and saw a blind man feeling his way to the door -1 could hear his lungs working like a bellows; wrinkled old ladies with black teeth and black pyjamas clutched wicker bales of spring onions; and soldiers – one ashen-faced in a wheelchair, one on crutches, others with new bandages on their hands and heads, and all of them in the American uniforms that suggested travesty in its true sense. An official moved through the coaches checking the ID cards of civilian males, looking for draft evaders. This official got tangled in the piece of string held by a blind man and attached to the waist of a child leading him. There were many armed soldiers on the train, but none looked like escorts. The train was defended by concentrations of soldiers at those bridge emplacements, and this is perhaps why it is so easy to blow up the line with command-detonated mines. These mines are slipped under the rails at night; when the train goes over one of them, a hidden man – who might be a Viet Cong or a bomber hired by a trucker in Danang – explodes the charge.
Twice during that trip, at small station sidings, children were offered to me by old ladies; they were like the pale-ski
The train was under the gigantic Hai Van Pass ('The Pass of Clouds'), a natural division on the north side of Danang, like a Roman wall. If the Viet Cong got past it, the way would be clear to Danang, and already the Viet Cong were bivouacked on the far slopes, waiting. Like the other stretches between Hue and Danang, the most scenically dramatic mountains and valleys were – and are still – the most terrible battlefields. Beyond the Hai Van Pass we entered a long tu
'The Street without Joy' was above us as we raced across a treeless promontory to the Nam Ho Bridge, five dark spans secured against underwater sappers by great rusting wreaths of barbed wire. These were the outer wastes of Danang, a grim district of supply bases that has been taken over by ARVN forces and squatters; shelters – huts and lean-tos – made exclusively with war materials, sandbags, plastic sheeting, corrugated iron stamped U.S. army, and food wrappers marked with the initials of charitable agencies. Danang was pushed next to the sea and all the land around it had been stripped of trees. If ever a place looked poisoned, it was Danang.
Raiding and looting were skills the war had required the Vietnamese to learn. We got out at Danang Station and after lunch drove with an American official to the south side of the city, where GIs had been housed in several large camps. Once there had been thousands of American soldiers; now there were none. But the barracks were filled to bursting with refugees; because there had been no maintenance, the camps were in a sorry condition and looked as if they had been shelled. Laundry flew from the flagpoles; windows were broken or boarded-up; there were cooking fires in the roads. The less lucky refugees had set up house in wheelless trucks and the sewage stink was terrible – the camps could be smelled two hundred yards away.