I was recently reading a book called 'Slow Boats To China', in which the author, Gavin Young, describes a series of sea journeys he took whilst travelling from Athens to Canton. In that book he narrates an incident that happened to him whilst he was working as a war correspondent in Vietnam. It is a passage that I'd read before, in one of his other books. It is a passage that moved me deeply, which is why I want to share it with you, the passing surfer, as you browse through my websites.
Mr Young writes:
In 1965, before the American forces landed en masse in Vietnam, the Vietnamese army seemed to be heading for total destruction; it was losing a battalion or two every week, most of them in engagements very close to Saigon. One day I travelled from Saigon to the riverside township of My To, south of the capital, in a bus crowded with Vietnamese civilians and soldiers; bundles of shopping and chickens cluttered the floor under the seats.
We crossed bridges fortified with sandbags and barbed wire, and sometimes soldiers stopped the driver and peered in at the passengers. Two laughing Vietnamese behind me leaned over my shoulder: 'Aren't you frightened of VC? Maybe Vietcong come on bus.'
A day later, I was walking in a single file of Vietnamese soldiers along the narrow banks that divided the paddy fields of the Mekong Delta. The column was part of a larger force scraped together to clear the Vietcong out of an area of several square miles of trees, paddies, water buffaloes and hamlets. Sometimes we heard a propellor-driven aircraft overhead, and the deep voice of artillery.
On the wider tracks it was possible to break the single file, and I walked beside the young Vietnamese soldier who had been in front of me. He looked like a child playing soldier; his helmet was absurdly big, his American carbine too long and heavy. His dull-green battle dress revealed the amazing slighness of his body. Small dark crescents of sweat stained his armpits and the small of his back. He pointed at my suede boots and said admiringly, 'Shoes you number one.'
'I give them to you.'
'Oh, no. You very big. Small, me.' After a pause he looked up at me again. 'Home America?'
'England.'
'Home me Nha Trang. You see Nha Trang?'
I hadn't up to then; I got to know it later, a small and beautiful city on the South China Sea. It has fine beaches, and in those days a French restaurant served fresh lobsters.
'So much fishing in Nha Trang,' the soldier said, smiling.
I hadn't met many Vietnamese at that time, and I looked at him with interest. Where the fine line of his Oriental cheekbones swept down to the rosebud mouth there was no hint of hair. He couldn't have been much over nineteen.
It began to rain, and the dark stain on my new friend's back quickly widened as the water dripped down from his helmet. He turned his carbine upside down so that the rain wouldn't run down the barrel, then he put a hand on my sleeve and smiled up at me.
'You number one friend. Come Nha Trang, okay?'
'I come Nha Trang.'
A sergeant waved impatiently and laid a finger on his lips. In silence now, except for the drumming of the rain and an occasional clink of metal or a cough, we approached a tree line. When the shell burst, my impression was that a small volcano had sprung out of the ground, not that something had fallen from the sky. I felt a tremendous shudder through the soles of my boots, and then the blast through me to the ground.
I lay there waiting for other shells, but it was not an ambush or even a sustained harassment. Another shell roared much further away, and then heavy silence fell. My heart thumped and my hands shook. Then I heard a human sound quite close, half-sob, half-gasp. A helmet lay on the ground like an abandoned seashell, and near it was my friend from Nha Trang, clasping his stomach with one hand, pushing feebly at the ground with the other, trying to get up. I went over and stopped him.
I put my left hand across his shoulders and made him lean back across my knees, but I didn't know what to do next. His eyes were closed, and the rain poured through his hair and down his face and neck. There was a terrible smell. I opened his sodden shirt and saw below his breastbone a dark, shining mess - ripped clothing stained black with rain, blood, bile and whatever else comes out of bellies torn open by metal splinters.
His eyelids flickered open and he frowned. 'Hurt, me,' he said faintly.
He was dying. He fumbled for my right hand - in a futile way, I had been trying to wipe the rain from his face - and pressed it to the warm, liquid mess. I didn't feel the least disgust. I had an idea that between us we might hold him together.
'Hurt, me,' he whispered again. At the inner corner of the delicate half-moon fold of his eyelid a drop of water had lodged. Rain? A tear?
Soon people came and carefully carried him away, limp, with his head lolling back as if a hinge in his neck had snapped.
Gavin Young.
Of course, in the great scheme of things, this incident means nothing. A few people might have been effected by it, but we don't hear of them, and the world carried on much as it did before. Was the course of the war was changed? - well no, not at all. The leaders never knew that it had happened, and probably wouldn't have cared much even if they had. But for me, it is a supremely important narrative, as it describes perfectly one of the many who are caught up in the escapades of unfeeling politicians, and pay the ultimate price of a pointless death. We never even learn the guy's name, but for me, the world is a poorer place without him. Perhaps one day I'll visit Nha Trang, but even if I don't, I'll never hear the name 'Nha Trang' again without thinking of him. Thank you, Mr Young, for introducing us.
