A River in May Read online

  Praise for A River in May

  ‘Once I started it of course I couldn’t stop. A reader is really privileged at coming across something like this – excellence of the highest, never a note wrong… by far the best. The novel fills in all the black holes of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’ – Alan Sillitoe

  ‘A superb, surrealistic novel of killing and not wanting to kill. Just wonderful. One of my books of the year’ – Brian Case, Time Out

  ‘In Wilson’s vivid debut novel the protagonist is a GI in Vietnam who not only feels the war is wrong, but ends up taking the side of the Viet Cong. His tale, addressing the suffering of the Vietnamese, has integrity and evocative details, making this a worthwhile addition to the huge body of war novels’ – Metro

  ‘One of the most painful and insightful accounts of the war that you will read. The scope of his realisations give this novel of profound moral force and relevance to any modern interventionist conflict from Vietnam to Iraq’ – Chris Searle, Morning Star

  ‘Lavish praise for A River in May, which tells the story of the war from the viewpoint of Vietnamese fighters – as well as that of US soldiers. Wilson made it to the early stages of the Booker Prize with his novel based on his own harrowing experiences in the Vietnam War. His commander was Robert Realt, who partly inspired Colonel Kurtz, the character played by Marlon Brando in the film Apocalypse Now, who was hunted down by the US army’ – East Anglian Daily Times

  ‘Embodies in one character the issues and dilemmas of an entire era. Wilson’s Vietnam is a sordid and disturbing place. He gives us vignettes of scarred and wounded men – both mentally and physically – who live from body-count to blow-job, with morphine for chasers. In the tradition of Sassoon, or Graves’s Goodbye to All That’ – Listener NZ

  ‘A profoundly shocking read, which stays with the reader long after the last page is turned’ – Historical Novels Review

  ‘Disturbing … Edward Wilson, an American Special Forces officer during Vietnam, is a new name to watch’ – Maris Ross, Publishing News

  Contents

  Title Page

  Praise for A River in May

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  Prolog

  A River in May

  Epilog

  About the Author

  Copyright

  I want to thank Roger Bloomfield and Eric Bloomfield for stimulating and confirming my memories. I want to give a special thanks to Mary Sandys, my editor, for her sensitivity and advice in shaping and checking the manuscript. I am grateful to my agent, Maggie Hanbury, for keeping faith with me down the years. I want to thank Gary Pulsifer for his appreciation of this novel. Finally, thanks to Daniela de Groote and Richard Bates for grace under pressure.

  I also found the following books useful for reference and checking facts: Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie (New York, Random House, Inc., 1988); Ronald J. Glasser, 365 Days (New York, George Braziller Publishers, 1980); Barbara Cohen, The Vietnam Guidebook (Boston, Houghton Miflin Company, 1991); Gareth Porter (ed.), Vietnam: The Definitive Documentation of Human Decisions, (New York, Earl M. Coleman Enterprises, Inc. Publishers, 1979).

  Real places and real events are described in this book. A few real names are used, but no real people are portrayed. This is a work of fiction.

  When I have used titles of rank and official positions, I do not suggest that the persons who held these positions in the past are the same persons portrayed in the novel or that they have spoken, thought or behaved in the way I have imagined.

  Edward Wilson

  Suffolk, England

  In memory of my mother, Agnes Wilson, who deserved so much more.

  Prolog

  HO CUC WAS ON HIS WAY BACK from an ambush patrol when he heard the American planes begin their attack. He knew the bunkers of Son Loi were deep and well timbered, but there was something about these bombs that sounded like fracturing bones. Cuc broke into a cold sweat and started to run; the path was overgrown, but he was oblivious of the thorns tearing his skin. When he reached the open paddy bordering the village he could see that the familiar silhouette of bamboo and palm trees was now broken and distorted, as if there had been a great wind.

  Ho Cuc sprinted across the paddy dyke, hardly bothering to sidestep the defensive land mines. There was an acrid scent of explosive and burnt earth. He pushed through a tangle of broken palm trees. The first thing he saw, as he emerged on the other side sweating and bleeding, was an outer circle of flattened huts and a line of deep overlapping craters. Trees were burning and the earth itself was steaming.

  One of the 750-pound bombs had made a direct hit on the bunker where Ho Cuc’s wife and two-year-old daughter were sheltering and, fused to burrow deep, had killed Cuc’s family and eighteen other civilians. He flung himself at the earth and began to claw the erupted soil with bare hands, screaming his wife’s name like a madman. He found an arm – but when he pulled, it came away attached to nothing. It took three men to drag him away.

  Cuc’s wife had been seven months pregnant when the bomb blew her apart. The last night that he had slept beside her she had woken him in the middle of the night, taken his hand and placed it on her womb. ‘Can you feel the kicking?’ she asked. ‘This is such a strong restless baby.’ He felt the child thud a secret message against the palm of his hand. Cuc placed his face against his wife’s womb so that he could be closer to their baby, and kissed the child through the taut rounded flesh.

  One of those who dragged Ho Cuc away from the collapsed bunker was Nguyen Ton, the cadre chief. Ton made Cuc sit on a log under the banana trees and tried to comfort him. Cuc was aware of a voice, but could not make out the actual words – it was like a muffled voice sounding through the walls of a tunnel. He wondered where he was. This was no longer Son Loi: the ripe bananas hanging from the trees had become festering bodies. Overcome by nausea, he turned away and vomited. When it was dark the cadre chief embraced Cuc, told him to sleep and gave him a packet containing dried aromatic cassia bark. ‘Chew this,’ said Ton. ‘It will help.’

  Cuc returned to his empty house. He chewed a mouthful of cassia bark; the narcotic juice invaded his weary body, and he fell into deep dreamless sleep. When he woke up it was one in the morning. For the rest of the night he lay awake sweating and groaning; sometimes he sat up and howled the names of his wife and his daughter into the dark.

  In the hour before dawn, the village began to stir: voices, cooking noises, people padding on bare feet to the night soil heap to squat and defecate. It all meant nothing to Cuc: nothing connected to nothing. The woven partitions and the bamboo beams above his head were only meaningless patterns. The dawn twilight was a sickly pale nothingness. Later, as the sun dispersed the morning mist and the southern wind dried his tears, Cuc discovered hate – a hate that was blind, undirected and anarchic. Hate would nourish him and he would nourish it. Hate would become his foster child.

  Cuc knew that he could not spend another night sleeping on the rush mat that still bore the musky scent of his dead wife. His home, the life they had lived there, had turned into a gangrenous limb that needed lopping off. He remembered the leaflets dropped by American planes like millions of paper blossoms, which offered bribes to Hoi Chanhs, deserters. Few people even bothered to read them. Cuc himself had no desire to desert his unit, only a need to leave. He couldn’t even breathe: the air of Son Loi was poisoned by the death of his own flesh.

  The leaflets also offered money for surrendered weapons. Cuc knew this was a stupid idea – anyone approaching an American compound carrying an AK-47 rifle would be shot before he had a chance to shout, ‘Chieu hoi! – I surrender!’ Nonetheless, he didn’t want to walk the twelve miles to An Hoa, the district capital, without a weapon. He remembered a
Chinese 9mm automatic pistol in one of the village arms caches – it had belonged to a North Vietnamese major who suffered an attack of recurrent malaria while passing through Son Loi and died. As soon as night fell, Cuc went to the cache and made the pistol his own.

  Later that night, when his neighbors were either sound asleep or portering supplies of rice to the NVA division in the mountains, Cuc prepared for departure. He spread out his wife’s best blouse to use as a satchel. He laid out a water bottle, a ball of cooked rice and a tin of Russian mackerel; then photographs of his wife and child bound between layers of oilcloth. He slowly picked up a gold hair clip that had been his wife’s dowry, closed his eyes and kissed it before tying it to the photograph parcel. Finally, an extra magazine of 9mm cartridges, and he had finished packing. Cuc tied the arms of the blouse together, slung it around his neck and set off into the night.

  The first obstacle was the Son Thu Bon. Cuc unmoored one of the flat-bottomed boats which were used for ferrying supplies. The boat had been hidden under a camouflage of freshly cut green vine – it was the job of the village children to renew the camouflage before it wilted. Cuc sculled across the current with a stern oar. There was no moon. The river gorge was so dark that he felt his spine tingle; it was like passing over a black chasm.

  When he reached the other side, he moored the boat under an overhanging bank. He knew the next four miles of river valley intimately, knew how to avoid patrols, ambush sites and minefields. But beyond the place where the river hugs the steep slopes of Black Widow Mountain, he knew nothing. The far side of the Black Widow was a foreign country. Cuc had never been more than six miles from Son Loi in his entire life.

  Two hours after setting out, Cuc had reached the outskirts of Xuan Hoa, the last village before the mountain. He kept well away from the village by walking along the paddy dykes in the surrounding fields. Despite his detour, a dog started barking from the kitchen garden of the nearest house, and Cuc felt a twitch of fear; he knew that government patrols often spent the night in the village and set ambushes on the adjoining trails. A few seconds after the dog had begun to bark, a parachute flare from the camp at Nui Hoa Den lit up the entire river valley with a ghostly green light. Cuc threw himself prone on the paddy dyke; he squeezed his eyes shut. Nothing happened; the flare sank and expired, womb-safe darkness returned. Cuc waited two minutes, then got up and continued his journey.

  Soon he reached the end of the paddy fields and the end of his known world. His next obstacle was Black Widow Mountain itself. The most direct route was a steep cliff path above the river, but this path led straight to a Regional Forces outpost. Even if its defenders were asleep it would be difficult to get round the outpost because of barbed wire and mines.

  Cuc chose instead a long detour through the low scrub covered hills on the far side of the mountain. These hills comprised a barren uninhabited landscape so untypical of Vietnam’s green lushness that Cuc felt as if he were on another planet. The going was much more difficult in the moonless night than he had expected. There weren’t any trails, but this was also a good thing because it lessened the dangers of encountering an ambush or patrol. The vegetation was chest-high thorn and prickly vine. His legs were soon covered with deep scratches and his clothes torn. His progress slowed to less than one kilometer an hour. It wasn’t until just before pre-dawn half-light that Cuc found the outermost rice fields of the cultivated valley bottom. The North Vietnamese Army purchased many of their supplies from the large productive farms there.

  The village of Que Son and its sprawling Saigon government refugee camp was on his left and the valley of Que Son and its scattered hamlets was on his right. For Ho Cuc, the Que Son was the place of the greatest danger. He knew that the village and the refugee camp were occupied most nights by the Viet Cong, who disappeared into the hills and countryside just before daybreak. He was afraid of running into them, afraid that he might be recognized, and annoyed at himself because he couldn’t think of a likely story to explain what he was doing so far from his village and his unit.

  He walked rapidly, at times breaking into a run, wanting to be as near as possible to the safety of An Hoa by daybreak. He was lucky: he saw no one and no one saw him. When the sun had burnt away the dawn mist Cuc found himself on a busy road that passed close by the river.

  As the day brightened there was a small traffic of peasants carrying produce – live chickens in baskets, dried fish, cured tobacco leaves – to the market at An Hoa. Cuc was impressed by how rich and prosperous everything seemed on this side of Black Widow Mountain. Even the people looked fatter and cleaner.

  He squatted on the riverbank near a landing stage to eat his rice and mackerel. Just as he finished, a motorized sampan arrived at the landing and a crowd of prosperous chattering peasants disembarked, laden with bulging baskets of market produce: vegetables, fresh herbs, noisy ducks, even a few piglets. The stout peasants hoisted the baskets on the ends of poles which they balanced across their shoulders, then trudged off towards the town. Cuc caught fragments of gossip – ‘Big’ Trinh’s niece was sleeping with the carpenter – and hopeful talk about prices.

  Cuc knew that he wouldn’t be safe if he traveled on the road; there were Communist cadres even in the most secure villages. He was sure that his soiled torn clothes and emaciated features would give him away as a Viet Cong deserter. There were no vagrants in the Vietnamese countryside, and beggars in rags were found only in the cities; Cuc feared that one of these plump peasants would report his cropped hair and ragged clothes to a local cadre. He knew that if he were seized and bundled off to a camp in the hills he would be severely punished by his former comrades. A week earlier, he himself would have beaten a deserter without pity – it wasn’t anything personal; it was just the way things were.

  Determined that nothing would delay him, Cuc left the busy road at the first opportunity and set off across country along paddy dykes and disused trails. He soon arrived at a place where the paddy fields had been abandoned and left to revert to weed and scrub. Two years before there had been battles with American marines. The paddy dykes had been destroyed by the treads of tanks and armored personnel carriers, and the houses torched by the infantry or incinerated by napalm. The hamlets had then been abandoned and the population re-located. The area was now a parched wasteland of thorn and crater inhabited only by ghosts, and the hulks of burned out armor and downed helicopters had already been obliterated by straggly vine.

  The sun was high and hot in the late morning sky. Cuc was passing through the most devastated of the deserted hamlets when a voice greeted him from behind, ‘Chao anh – Hello, elder brother.’ The words, even though an ordinary greeting between strangers, were full of menace. Cuc turned and stared into the blank eyes of a North Vietnamese Army lieutenant. The lieutenant’s face was pitted by smallpox and as narrow as an ax blade.

  ‘Chao anh,’ said Cuc.

  The NVA lieutenant had an automatic pistol in a holster slung over his shoulder, identical to the one that Cuc was wearing concealed under his baggy peasant blouse.

  ‘Do you live near here, Ong?’ Ong – uncle – was a term used to show respect for an older or distinguished person. The lieutenant was mocking.

  Cuc didn’t know how to reply. He wondered what an NVA officer was doing alone in such a wasteland. The officer repeated his question. Cuc remained silent. ‘I suppose you need an interpreter, Uncle?’ The lieutenant spoke in the harsh guttural tones of Tonkin, the dialect of Hanoi and the North. He asked his question again, but this time he pronounced the words for interpreter – thoung dich vien – not in his own northern dialect, but in an exaggerated imitation of the lilting sing-song speech of the Annamite peasant, with its diphthongs and soft consonants. ‘Do you need a “thoouung yich wien”, Ong Que Lam – Uncle Dullard?’ The lieutenant laughed and placed his hand on Cuc’s makeshift satchel. ‘What have you got in here, Uncle Que Lam?’

  Ho Cuc handed it over and, while the lieutenant had both hands occupied with the parcel,
drew his pistol and shot the Hanoi officer in the face. The bullet entered the skull through the left eye. The body was still twitching, so Cuc bent over and shot the lieutenant again in the temple. The twitching stopped. Cuc nudged the corpse with his foot. ‘Dog shit.’ Then he picked up the feet – the lieutenant was wearing faded green espadrilles – dragged the body off the path and rolled it into a ditch overgrown with prickly vine.

  Cuc retrieved his bag and started walking. He still couldn’t understand why the lieutenant had been there and what he had wanted. Could they be after him? After walking twenty meters, Cuc turned around. He felt that someone was following him, watching him – but there was nothing, just blinding sun and dry thorn.

  Ten minutes later, Ho Cuc came to a large road that carried a good deal of military traffic between the coast and the American base at An Hoa. The convoys were heavily guarded and escorted by helicopter gunships. Cuc was stunned. He had never seen a motor car, not even a motorbike, and here, roaring up the road in a grinding inferno of sound and steel, were a battle tank followed by two armored personnel carriers, a convoy of two-and-a-half ton trucks, and, hovering above it all like deadly wasps, two pencil-thin Cobra gunships. The armor thundered past in the heat haze, the helmeted and goggled crew looking more like giant insects than humans. Cuc shouted ‘Chieu hoi – I surrender’, but they ignored him. He had never felt so small and insignificant in his life. Each truck had four marines armed with machine-guns and M16s searching the road verges for the likes of Cuc in his previous incarnation, but utterly uninterested in his re-born persona. He shouted ‘Chieu hoi’ at each passing vehicle and gestured frantically.