Page 26 of Cry Havoc

“I don’t have much time tonight,” Allister admitted.

“Well then,” Clara said, leaning seductively forward in her chair. “We’d best get upstairs.”

CHAPTER 5

FOB 1, Phu Bai

South Vietnam

January 28, 1968

AMIUH SAT IN THEdirt, squatting opposite the commanding officer’s hooch at Phu Bai waiting for his two American teammates to emerge. Amiuh had never been inside.

He wore his tiger stripe camouflage pants and a brown T-shirt given to him by the Americans. Rubber sandals made from worn-out tires were on his feet and a bracelet crafted from spent brass casings was on his wrist. It was engraved with etchings that resembled bamboo.

At irregular intervals, green Army jeeps, motorcycles, mopeds, bicycles, and soldiers on foot would pass between him and the hastily constructed plywood building with its small front deck. All seemed extremely out of place in Vietnam.

He made the sign of the cross with his rosary. He had carried the wood beads and brass Cross of Lorraine crucifix since he was a child. It was pressed into his small hand by a French Catholic missionary as Amiuh sat crying in the smoldering ruins of his village, burned to the ground by soldiers who came from the north. The priest was familiar to eight-year-old Amiuh. He had been in their village for months and was often visited by the Americanswith their strange green hats, headgear that could neither protect from the sun nor shield from the rain. He had heard his father say that it made them look French. The priest’s light blue eyes were streaked with blood vessels. He had been crying too. His normally pale face was dark with soot.

Amiuh remembered looking down at the cross in his bloodstained hands. The crucifix was not like the ones he had seen in the parish. Instead of the traditional cross, this one had an additional and longer horizontal bar below the shorter one.

All these years later the cross never failed to bring him back to the night of fire and death.

“I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, Our Lord…”

The Vietnamese soldiers had come to the village before, had beaten the men and done things that Amiuh did not understand to the women.

They had threatened to destroy the village if the tribe continued to welcome the Americans, and if they continued to follow the teachings of Christ. The soldiers from the north did not like Catholics. Amiuh could not fully comprehend why.

Amiuh moved his hand from the cross to the first large dark wood rosary bead, made from the wood of a banyan tree, his eyes never leaving the hooch across the dirt road.

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name…”

His father had told him to run when the carnage began, so that is what Amiuh did. Other mothers and fathers had done the same. He stopped in the thicket at the edge of the village. That’s when he saw the longhouse begin to burn. His father rushed forward only to be struck down with the butt of a soldier’s rifle. Amiuh continued to watch as his mother and two sisters were pulled from his family’s thatch hut by their hair, flailing in the dirt, backlit by the growing flames. Young Amiuh could feel the heat on his face. Even at this distance, he could hear the soldiers laughing. Other men from the village were kicked and beaten as their wives and daughters were dragged from huts thatsoon also began to burn. Then came gunshots. His sisters’ screams, rising over the laugher and shouting of the soldiers, anchored Amiuh in place.

Amiuh moved to the next three small beads, contemplatively rolling them one at a time between his fingers.

“Hail Mary, full of grace…”

He watched as a baby was torn from his mother’s arms and impaled on the sharp bayonet attached to the end of a soldier’s rifle. The man held the baby aloft as the others cheered, their ovations rising to a zenith as the soldier pitched the child into the thatch of a burning hut.

“Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was, is now, and ever shall be…”

Amiuh’s breath was coming more rapidly as one of the soldiers turned from the melee in the village’s center and began walking toward him. Amiuh could not move his feet. It was as if the vines and roots of the jungle had taken hold, as if they had decided to make him a witness to the carnage. The man stopped walking, leveled his rifle at his hip, and held back the trigger, spraying the tree line with bullets.

Amiuh heard the crack as one passed by his head. He would never forget that sound.

He watched the soldier fumble with his rifle. Young Amiuh knew another barrage of bullets would follow and that this volley would surely find him.

He squinted his eyes against the intense heat of the burning longhouse, toward his family. His father lay unmoving on the ground. It looked like some of the soldiers were on top of his mother and sisters.

The soldier had finished reloading his rifle and leveled it at the tree line again. Now, instead of keeping him anchored in place, the screams of his mother and sisters merging with those of the other villagers caused him to trip backward, breaking away from the grip of the rainforest. Amiuh got to his feet and followed his father’s orders. He turned and ran.

He moved to a large bead and began to meditate on the Sorrowful mysteries.

“Our Father…”

The bullets flew past as Amiuh propelled himself deeper into the jungle. He ran until exhaustion set in, until he was far enough away that he could not hear the screams of his mother and sisters or the laughter of the soldiers, until he could not hear the gunshots. He found a rotting log, lay down next to it, and closed his eyes, willing away the images of his burning village. Alone.