Message from Nam (34 page)

“Are you willing to make sense? Can I send you home? Or do I have to call them to come and get you? They will, you know. Your guy in San Francisco is getting pretty freaky. He wants us to call the ambassador and have you expelled if you don’t agree to get your ass home.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll go home. You win.”

“Christ.” He heaved a sigh of relief. He’d been desperately worried about her. And he had run into Campobello at the PX once, too, and he didn’t look so hot either. It had taken a toll on all of them. “Okay, when? Tomorrow sound okay?”

“Why so soon?” She wanted more time. She didn’t want to go. Maybe because Bill had died there. Staying in Saigon was like staying with him, in the room they’d shared, near the restaurants they’d gone to.

“Why not?” Ralph answered her. “I’ll get you a ticket for tomorrow morning. There’s a Freedom Bird out of here sometime before noon. And I want you on it.”

“You just want to get rid of me.” She smiled through her tears. She hated to leave him, and the people she’d met, and even the noise and the fumes and the craziness of Saigon. In an odd way, she’d come to love it.

“I’m jealous of the shit you write,” he teased. “I’m never going to get my Pulitzer, if you stick around here.”

“Will you come and see me in San Francisco?” she asked sadly.

“Is that where you’re gonna be?” He’d relaxed now that she’d agreed to leave the following morning.

“I guess so. I don’t know. I will if they give me a job on the paper.”

He smiled admiringly at her. He had come to love her like a kid sister in the past seven months, and he was going to miss her very badly. “They’d be stupid if they didn’t give you a job. Lady, you’re one hell of a good reporter.”

“From you,” she said with awe and love in her voice, “that means a lot. Christ, I’m going to miss you. Do you want to have dinner tonight?”

“Sure.”

He came alone, he left France at home with An, as he often did. Most of the time he didn’t like her hanging out with the other reporters. And tonight he just wanted to be with Paxton.

“You gonna be alright?” he asked her seriously after their second Scotch.

“I guess so,” she said, looking into the glass as though it had all the answers. “I don’t know.” She looked up at him. “Is anyone ever the same again when they leave here?”

“No,” he said honestly, “they aren’t. Some of them just hide it better. But maybe you haven’t been here that long, maybe it hasn’t really changed you.”

“I think it has.” He was afraid of that too. For her sake.

“Maybe you just think that because of Bill,” he said hopefully. He’d seen people ruined by Viet Nam. The drugs, the VD, the danger, the disease, the wounds, and the strange things it did to one’s spirit. It was so beautiful, and our being there was so wrong. For most people, it was desperately confusing. But he hoped she hadn’t been there long enough to be poisoned by it, or to fall so in love with it that she couldn’t forget it. “It’ll do you good to go home. There is life after immersion foot.” He smiled, but she didn’t.

“It would do everyone good to go home. Maybe you too one day,” she said gently. “God, I’d love to see you there. It’s going to be so hard going back. How do you begin to tell people what you’ve seen here?”

“Does your family know about Bill?” She shook her head. She hadn’t told anyone. She’d been waiting to see what he decided to do about Debbie. And maybe he would never have left her after all. That had always been a possibility between them.

“I don’t think I’ll tell them now. There’s no point.”

He nodded. There was a lot one could never tell anyone about Saigon.

They stayed up drinking until four o’clock in the morning, and he came back later to take her to the airport. She had the same small tote bag she’d had when she arrived, the same small valise, the same ache in her heart, except now it was considerably bigger. She had lost two men in Viet Nam. And yet, in spite of everything, she had come to love it.

“Do yourself a favor, Pax,” he said with a sad smile as they said good-bye. “Forget this place as fast as you can. If you don’t, it’ll kill you.” Some part of her suspected he was right, but another part of her told her not to let go of it. Because she didn’t want to.

“Take care of yourself, Ralph.” She hugged him tight. “You know, I really love you.”

And when he pulled away from her there were tears in his eyes, and the last thing he said to her before she boarded the plane was “I love you too, Delta Delta.”

C
HAPTER
18

S
he landed at Oakland Airport after a seventeen-hour flight, on a plane that had been chartered by World Airways. She had talked to a few returning GIs on the flight, but almost everyone was so exhausted and burned out and scared to be going back that they didn’t want to talk to anyone, not even a pretty blonde like Paxxie. They had all hoped and dreamed of this day for so long that now it was terrifying to be going home. And what were they going to say? How did you explain to someone what it felt like killing a man? How did you tell someone what it was like killing a man hand to hand, running a bayonet through his guts, or shooting a sniper in the face who turned out to be a woman. How did you explain the nine-year-old boy who had thrown a hand grenade and killed your friend, and then you rushed into the bushes and dragged him out and killed him? How did you tell them what it was like? Or about the sunsets on the mountains, or the green of Viet Nam, or the sounds and the smells, and the people, the girl who couldn’t even say your name, but you knew you loved her. There was nothing any of them could say. So most of them rode home in silence.

And when Paxton got off the plane in a skirt and a blouse, her hair pulled back in a bun, wearing the red sandals that were battered now, it was hard to believe that she was home. This didn’t feel like home anymore. Home was Saigon and a room at the Caravelle. Or was it here in the house she had once shared with Peter in Berkeley? Or the Wilsons’ home? Or her mother’s house in Savannah? It was only when she got off the plane that she realized she didn’t have a home anymore, and a young boy standing next to her, looked at her, shook his head, and whispered, “Man, it feels weird to be home from Nam,” and she knew what he meant, because she had been there with him.

Ed Wilson had sent a limousine for her, and she rode sedately in the back of it, on her way to the paper. But she wasn’t prepared for the reception she got. She felt like a hero in a foreign land, when editors and people she had never met shook her hand and told her what a terrific job she had done in Saigon. She was stunned, and she had no idea what they meant, and there were tears rolling down her cheeks as she thanked them. And then finally, she was alone with Ed Wilson, and he looked long and hard at her and he knew that it had taken a terrible toll on her. She had changed. She had grown thin and gaunt, but more than that, there was something in her eyes now that scared him. Something sad and old and wise. She had seen men die. She had been in battle.

“You’ve had a rough time,” he said without asking her anything, and she tried to smile as she nodded.

“I’m glad I went.” And she really meant it. Because of Bill, and Ralph, and herself. And because in an odd way, she’d felt she owed it to Peter, and her country.

“I’d like you to go home and rest for a while, and then come back, Paxton, and write about anything you’d like to. You’ve done a beautiful job, and we’d like to keep you on, with your own byline.” She was touched and pleased and she wanted to do that, but there was still a little tug at her heart when she thought of the column she’d written from Saigon.

“And ‘Message from Nam’? Will someone else be taking it on?”

He shook his head and smiled at her, knowing that all journalists were like that. Their columns were their babies. “Nixon is promising to de-escalate the war. And for the time being, I think we can get by getting our reports from Saigon from the AP office there.”

“They’ve got some great people,” Paxton said, thinking of Ralph, but Ed Wilson was smiling proudly at her.

“And you were one of them. Paxton,” he said honestly, “you surprised the hell out of me. I never knew you had it in you. I thought you’d be back here in a month, horrified at what you’d seen there.”

“I was pretty horrified at first, but at least I felt I was doing something useful.”

“You certainly were. And for the last few weeks, I never thought we’d get you back to San Francisco.” He frowned. “What was the delay anyway?” For a minute, she didn’t know what to tell him. The man I fell in love with was killed … another one …

“I … you get pretty involved over there. It’s not easy to just up and leave.”

“I guess it isn’t. Well, get a good rest now, and come back here in a few weeks, whenever you feel ready.” She wondered how soon that would be, and she looked at her watch, remembering that she still had to get a hotel room. But his office had already taken care of that too. “We booked a suite for you at the Fairmont. Marjorie wanted you to stay at the house, but I thought you’d need the rest, and by now you must be pretty independent.” And he’d also told Marjorie that if she was carrying any diseases from Viet Nam, they didn’t want that in their guest room.

They had also provided a car and driver for her, and the Wilsons were expecting her for dinner. But by dinnertime it was fifteen hours later for her, and Paxton could hardly keep her eyes open at the table. It was an emotional meeting for all of them, and she felt almost as though they all expected her to tell them why Peter had died, and she had no new answers for them now, only more questions.

Gabby chatted endlessly all through the meal about how cute Marjie was, how active little Peter was, and how wonderful their new house was. They had Fortuny fabric on the walls, Brunschwig wallpaper everywhere, and blue curtains in the bedroom, she explained, and twice during dinner, Paxton was so exhausted and got so confused, she accidentally called her Debbie. It was as though she couldn’t cope with it all. It was all too much, and their lives for the past seven months had been just too different from hers. And more than once she had to fight back tears and the urge to tell them she just couldn’t stand it. She missed the sounds, the smells, her room at the Caravelle, Peter … Bill … she felt as though her head were spinning when she left them. And when she got back to the hotel, she lay there awake for hours, feeling vulnerable and tired and shaken. She finally fell asleep as the sun came up, and two hours later the hotel operator woke her up. And she had to get up and shower and change to catch her plane to Savannah.

And there things were even worse. She had brought all the wrong clothes. She had nothing to say to anyone. And she couldn’t deal with the Junior League, or her mother’s bridge club, or the luncheon given for her by the Daughters of the Civil War. Everyone said they wanted to know about Viet Nam, but they didn’t really. They didn’t want to know about the stench of death, or the boy from Miami with his arm blown off, or the beggars with no limbs crawling around the terrace of the Continental Palace Hotel at sunset. They didn’t want to know about VD, or drugs, or boys dying at the hands of the VC, or how old people and children were being shot. They didn’t want to know how it broke your heart, and yet how you came to love it.

And all she could say to anyone was how sorry she was that she was so tired, so ill, so thin, so totally unable to tell them. What they wanted was a nice clean war movie, with popcorn, no bones, no blood, no shrapnel, no flying flesh that splattered all over you, no boys who were lost, no country that was dying.

Paxton had never felt lonelier than she did in Savannah. And she had never looked worse, and she had never missed Queenie so much. But she knew she couldn’t have told Queenie about it either. She had come of age, and she was alone. And she was a stranger. It was impossible to tell anyone, except someone who’d been there. She was out with some friends she was sorry she’d called when she ran into a boy in a bar one night. They began to talk, and finally there was someone she could relate to. They talked about Ben Sue and Cu Chi, and Nha Trang, Bien Hoa, Long Binh, Hue, and Vung Tau where she and Bill had spent their first weekend. It was like a secret language among old friends and it was the only good evening she had during her two weeks in Savannah. They firmly shook hands, and she went home that night feeling a little less lonely.

She had a hard time talking to her mother too. She thought Paxton was still grieving over Peter. But there was so much more than that. If anything, she was grieving for her lost youth, and a country she would never see again, two men she had loved, and a part of herself they had taken with them.

And her brother put it down simply to exhaustion. And finally, with some new clothes that seemed more suitable than her combat boots, which she took with her anyway, in mid-February, Paxton flew back to San Francisco.

And she began working at the
Sun
in earnest. They put her up at a hotel for several weeks until she found a small apartment. And every night she promised herself she would call Gabby, and found she couldn’t. She had nothing to say to her, didn’t want to see her new house or her new curtains, and somehow now Matt seemed so stuffy and so stilted and they all seemed so artificial. And so totally unimportant. The days when they’d all seemed so close were somehow over. And the people she had come to love since then were gone. There was no one left. And she even hated what she was writing for the paper.