Page 106 of Cry Havoc

“A clinic, run by Catholics. My father donates vast sums to keep it running along with the facility next door for old men and women who, before the war, used to be cared for by their families.”

An Italian doctor met them in what amounted to a lobby. He looked harried and overworked.

“We will not keep you long,” Ella told him.

“Most are orphans now,” the doctor explained, in Italian-accented French. He led them through the ward packed with beds where children lay, Catholic nuns and nurses tending to the gauze wrapped around heads, arms, and amputated limbs, whispering to them and saying prayers. The stale, heavy air smelled of iodine and the putrid odor of gangrene.

“This is the true cost of war,” Ella said.

That evening the car dropped them off just before dark at the Vieux Moulin restaurant. They sat outside, their table situated to give them views of the Da Kao Bridge, which spanned a canal of the old city.

“Why did you take me there?” Tom asked. “What was today really about?”

“The dinners, the drinks, the shopping, I was getting too caught up in it. I wanted to remind us both that there is a world removed from the splendor of Rue Catinat and Place Garnier.”

“Is that all?”

“And I wanted to gauge your reaction to what you saw today. I wanted to know who I am sleeping with.”

“Did I pass?”

“It was not pass or fail.”

“Sure it was. Do you blame me?”

“Blame you?”

“For those kids. For what is happening in Vietnam.”

“I can separate the man from the policies of his government. Myfather taught me to survive. Perhaps yours did the same? I do not blame you, Tom. If I did, I would certainly not be spending every possible moment with you.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“When I got back from university in Paris, I volunteered at a hospital here in Saigon. It is not lost on me that I come from privilege. I live with a guilt that I hide very well. There was a section of the hospital for people with mental disorders. I heard screaming from that wing on my rounds, so I followed the sounds into what was more of a prison than a hospital. The screams were coming from a boy chained to a bed. He was eight. A nurse told me that he had been there for six years. At two years old, he was in his mother’s arms when she was shot running from her village by a helicopter gunship. He survived. No one claimed him in the hospital, and he slowly went insane. Every time he heard a helicopter fly over, which was often, he would scream. The nurse told me they think he screamed to drown out the sound of the machine that killed his mother. Imagine the horrors we don’t know about.”

“I am truly sorry for what is happening here.”

“I know. There is another reason my father is a benefactor to the clinic and orphanage you saw today. He knows how close he was to being raised in one. He was the result of a not so discreet liaison between his French father and one of his Vietnamese maids. He could easily have been cast out, but he was instead sent to school in France, all paid for by the generational wealth created off the backs of the cheap labor working the rubber plantation. They made it possible. That is why he treats his workers with such respect. The history of the rubber plantations here is a dark one.”

“I’m sorry.”

“My father also knows that one day the plantations will revert to the Vietnamese, which was why he started the import/export business. He can move his rubber out of Vietnam and be prepared for thenext phase in whatever you call this century for Indochina. War and exploitation are all we have known. Everything moves in cycles. This one can’t last forever.”

“I suppose not.”

Tom leaned across the table and lit Ella’s cigarette before lighting a Marlboro for himself.

“When you are in the jungle what does it smell like?” she asked.

Tom took a moment to answer.

“Depends. Decay mostly.”

“That’s what I smell here, in Saigon. The alleys are black markets, the hotels are dens of ill repute, whorehouses, and in the clubs, you will find anything you need to numb you to the death of the killing fields—pot, opium, heroin. Our women can be purchased for the price of a beer. I smell the decay. It gives me the sense of impending death.”

She shook her head.

“America is going to destroy this country in order to save it. Saigon is for sale, Tom. It won’t go to the side offering the highest price. It will go to the side willing to make the greatest sacrifice in the form of lives, of bodies. Ho Chi Minh is willing to sacrifice a generation. Is America?”