The Sympathizer (7 page)

The explosion was deafening, the force of it launching the crewman onto the passengers, the last thing I saw for several moments as the flash of light through the open door washed the sight from my eyes. The General tumbled into me and I fell onto the bulkhead, then onto screaming bodies, hysterical civilians spraying my face with sour saliva. The tires of the plane squealed on the runway as it spun to the right, and when my sight returned a blaze of fire shone through the door. I feared nothing more than burning to death, nothing more than being pureed by a propeller, nothing more than being quartered by a Katyusha, which even sounded like the name of a demented Siberian scientist who had lost a few toes and a nose to frostbite. I had seen roasted remains before, in a desolate field outside of Hue, carbonized corpses fused into the metal of a downed Chinook, the fuel tanks having incinerated the three dozen occupants, their teeth exposed in a permanent, simian rictus; the flesh of their lips and faces burned off; the skin a finely charred obsidian, smooth and alien, all the hair converted to ash, no longer recognizable as my countrymen or as human beings. I did not want to die that way; I did not want to die in any way, least of all in a long-range bombardment from the artillery of my communist comrades, launched from the suburbs they had captured outside Saigon. A hand squeezed my chest and reminded me I was still alive. Another clawed my ear as the howling people beneath me struggled to heave me off. Pushing back to try to right myself, I found my hand on someone’s oily head and myself pressed against the General. Another explosion somewhere on the runway heightened the frenzy. Men, women, and children caterwauled at an even higher pitch. All of a sudden the plane halted its gyrations at such an angle where the eye of the door did not look out onto fire but only onto the darkness, and a man screamed, We’re all going to die! The loadmaster, cursing inventively, began the lowering of the ramp, and when the refugees surged forward against the opening, they bore me backward with them. The only way to survive being trampled to death was to cover my head with my rucksack and roll down the ramp, knocking people down as I did so. Another rocket exploded on the runway a few hundred meters behind us, lighting up an acre of tarmac and revealing the nearest shelter to be a battered concrete divider fifty meters from the runway. Even after the explosion faded, the disturbed night was no longer dark. The plane’s starboard engines were aflame, two blazing torches spewing gusts of spark and smoke.

I was on my hands and knees when Bon seized me by the elbow, dragging me with one hand and Linh with the other. She in turn carried a wailing Duc, her arm wrapped around his chest. A meteorite shower of rockets and artillery shells was falling on the runways, an apocalyptic light show that revealed the evacuees dashing for the concrete divider, stumbling and tripping along the way, suitcases forgotten, the thundering prop wash from the two remaining engines blowing little children off their feet and staggering adults. Those who had reached the divider kept their whimpering heads below the concrete, and when something whizzed overhead—a fragment or a bullet—I fell to the earth and began crawling. Bon did likewise with Linh, her face tense but determined. By the time we fumbled our way to an unoccupied space at the divider, the crew had turned off the engines. The relief from the noise only made audible that someone was shooting at us. Bullets zipped overhead or ricocheted off the concrete, the gunners zeroing in on the bonfire of the burning plane. Our guys, Bon said, knees drawn up to his chest and one arm thrown around Duc, huddled between him and Linh. They’re pissed. They want a seat out of here. No way, I said, that’s NVA, they’ve taken the perimeter, even though I thought there was a fairly good chance it was our own men venting their frustrations. Then the plane’s gas tanks blew, the fireball illuminating a vast stretch of the airfield, and when I turned my face away from the bonfire I found that I was next to the sub-undersecretary, civil servant unextraordinaire, his face nearly pressed against my back and the message in his Chihuahua eyes as clear as the title on a cinema marquee. Like the communist agent and the lieutenant at the gate, he would have been happy to see me dead.

I deserved his hatred. After all, I had denied him a considerable fortune as a result of my unannounced visit to his house, the address procured for me by the louche major. It is true I have some visas, the sub-undersecretary had said as we sat in his living room. I and some colleagues are making them available in the interests of justice. Isn’t it unjust that only the most privileged or fortunate have the opportunity to escape? I made some sympathetic noises. If there was true justice, he went on, everyone would leave who needed to. That is clearly not the case. But this puts someone like me in rather difficult circumstances. Why should I be the judge of who gets to leave and who does not? I am, after all, merely a glorified secretary. If you were in my situation, Captain, what would you do?

I can appreciate the situation you find yourself in, sir. My dimples hurt from smiling, and I was impatient to arrive at the inevitable end game, but the middle had to be played, to provide me with the same moth-eaten moral covers he had already pulled up to his chin. You are clearly a respectable man of taste and values. Here I nodded to the left and right, gesturing at the tidy house that had to be paid for. Plastered walls were dotted with a few geckos and some decorative objects: clock, calendar, Chinese scroll, and colorized photograph of Ngo Dinh Diem in better days, when he had not yet been assassinated for believing he was a president and not an American puppet. Now the little man in a white suit was a saint to his fellow Vietnamese Catholics, having suffered an appropriately martyred death with hands hogtied, face masked in blood, a Rorschach blot of his cerebral tissue decorating the interior of an American armored personnel carrier, his humiliation captured in a photograph circulated worldwide. Its subtext was as subtle as Al Capone:
Do not fuck with the United States of America.

The real injustice, I said, beginning to get heated, is that an honest man must live a penurious life in our country. Therefore, please allow me to extend to you a small token of the appreciation of my patron for the favor that he is requesting. You do have enough visas on hand for ninety-two people, do you not? I was not certain he would, in which case my plan was to put down a deposit and promise to return with the remainder. But when the sub-undersecretary replied affirmatively, I produced the envelope of remaining cash, $4,000, enough for two visas if he was feeling generous. The sub-undersecretary unsealed the envelope and ran his thumb, callused by experience, over the sheaf of bills. He knew immediately how much money was in the envelope—not enough! He slapped the cheek of the coffee table with the white glove of the envelope, and as if that were an insufficient expression of his outrage he slapped the cheek again. How dare you attempt to bribe me, sir!

I motioned to him to sit down. Like him, I, too, was a man trapped by difficult circumstances, forced to do what I must do. Is it just for you to sell these visas when they cost you nothing and were not yours to begin with? I asked him. And would it not be just for me to call the local police commander and have him arrest us both? And would it not be just for him to appropriate your visas and engage in some just redistribution of his own? So the most just solution is simply for us to return to the situation where I offer you four thousand dollars for ninety-two visas, since you should not even have ninety-two visas or four thousand dollars to begin with. After all, you can return to your desk tomorrow and procure another ninety-two visas easily enough. They’re only paper, aren’t they?

But to a bureaucrat paper was never just paper. Paper was life! He hated me then for taking his paper and he hated me now, but I was bothered not in the least. What bothered me as I huddled at the concrete divider was yet another miserable wait, only this time one with no clear resolution. The glimmer of a rising sun brought a measure of comfort, but the soothing bluish light showed the tarmac to be in an awful state, chipped and pitted by rocket and artillery explosions. In the middle of it all was the smoldering slag heap of the C-130, exuding the pungent stink of burning fuel. Between us and the embers of the plane were little dark heaps that gradually took shape, becoming suitcases and valises abandoned in the mad rush, some of them burst open and spilling their entrails hither and thither. The sun continued rising notch by notch on its rack, the light becoming harsher and brighter until it achieved the retina-numbing quality generated by an interrogator’s lamp, stripping away every vestige of shade. Pinned down on the east side of the divider, people began to wilt and shrivel, beginning with the elderly and the children. Water, Mama, Duc said. All Linh could say was, No, darling, we don’t have any water, but we’ll get some soon.

On cue, another Hercules appeared in the sky, approaching so fast and steep a kamikaze pilot might have been at the controls. The C-130 landed with a screech of tires on a distant runway and a murmur rose from the evacuees. Only when the Hercules turned in our direction to approach haphazardly across intervening runways did that murmur turn into a cheer. Then I heard something else. When I poked my head over the divider cautiously, I saw them, darting out of the shadows of hangars and between revetments where they must have been hiding, dozens, maybe hundreds of marines and soldiers and military cops and air force pilots and crewmen and mechanics, the air base’s staff and rear guard, refusing to be heroes or sacrificial goats. Spotting this competition, the evacuees stampeded toward the C-130, which had pivoted on the runway fifty meters away and lowered its ramp in a not-so-coy gesture of invitation. The General and his family ran ahead of me, Bon and his family ran behind me, and together we brought up the rear of the fleeing masses.

The first of the evacuees was running up the ramp when I heard the hiss of the Katyushas, followed a second later by an explosion as the first of the rockets detonated on a far runway. Bullets whizzed overhead, and this time we heard the distinct bark of the AK-47 along with the M16. They’re at the perimeter! Bon shouted. It was clear to the evacuees that this Hercules would be the last plane out of the airport, if it could even take off with communist units closing in, and they once more began screaming with fear. As they rushed up the ramp as fast as they could, a slick little airplane on the far side of the divider shrieked into the air, a needle-nosed Tiger fighter, followed by a Huey helicopter thumping by with its doors flung wide open, revealing more than a dozen soldiers squeezed inside. What remained of the armed forces at the airport was evacuating itself with whatever air mobile vehicle was at hand. As the General pushed on the backs of the evacuees in front of him to propel them toward the ramp, and as I pushed the General, a dual-hulled Shadow gunship soared from the tarmac to my left. I watched it out of the corner of my eye. The Shadow was a funny-looking plane, the fat fuselage suspended between two hulls, but there was nothing funny about the smoke trail of the heat-seeking missile scribbling its way across the sky until its flaming tip kissed the Shadow at less than a thousand feet. When the two halves of the airplane and the bits and pieces of its crew fell to the earth like the shattered fragments of a clay pigeon, the evacuees groaned and shoved even harder to make the final climb up the ramp.

As the General set foot on the ramp, I paused to let Linh and Duc pass by. When they did not appear, I turned and saw that they were no longer behind me. Get on the plane, our loadmaster shouted beside me, his mouth open so wide I swear I saw his tonsils vibrating. Your friends are gone, man! Twenty meters away, Bon was kneeling on the tarmac, clutching Linh to his breast. A red heart slowly expanded on her white blouse. A puff of concrete dust rose when a bullet pinged off the runway between us, and every last drop of moisture in my mouth evaporated. I tossed my rucksack at the loadmaster and ran straight and fast toward them, hurdling abandoned suitcases. I slid the last two meters, feet first and shaving the skin off my left hand and elbow. Bon was making sounds I had never heard from him before, deep guttural bellows of pain. Between him and Linh was Duc, his eyes rolled back in his head, and when I pried husband and wife apart I saw the wet bloody mess of Duc’s chest where something had torn through it and through his mother. The General and the loadmaster were yelling something I could not understand over the increasing whine of the propellers. Let’s go, I shouted. They’re leaving! I pulled at his sleeve but Bon would not move, rooted by grief. I had no choice but to punch him in the jaw, just hard enough to shut him up and loosen his grip. Then with one tug I pried Linh from his arms, and when I did so Duc tumbled onto the tarmac, his head limp. Bon screamed something inarticulate as I ran for the airplane, Linh thrown over my shoulder and making no noise as her body bumped against me, her blood hot and wet on my shoulder and neck.

The General and the loadmaster stood on the ramp beckoning me as the plane taxied away, aiming for any clear stretch of runway as the Katyushas kept arriving, singly and in salvos. I was running as fast as I could, my lungs in a knot, and when I reached the ramp I threw Linh at the General, who caught her by the arms. Then Bon was at my side running with me, extending Duc with both hands to the loadmaster, who took him as gently as he could even though it did not matter, not with the way Duc’s head flopped from side to side. With his son handed off, Bon began to slow down, head bowed in agony and still sobbing. I grabbed him by the crook of his elbow and with one last push I shoved him face forward onto the ramp, where the loadmaster seized him by the collar and pulled him up the rest of the way. I leaped for the ramp, arms extended, landing on it with the side of my face and all of my rib cage, the grit of dirt and dust against my cheek while my legs flailed in open air. With the plane barreling down the runway, the General pulled me to my knees and dragged me into the hold, the ramp rising behind me. I was squeezed against the General on one side and the prostrate bodies of Duc and Linh on the other, a wall of evacuees pushing against us from the front. As the airplane ascended steeply, a terrible noise rose with it, audible not only through the straining metal but through the clamor from the open side door, where the crewman stood with his M16, firing three-round bursts from the hip. Through that open door, the patchy landscape of fields and tenements tilted and wheeled as the pilot took us into a corkscrew, and I realized that the terrible noise was not only coming from the engines but from Bon, too, pounding his head against the ramp and howling, not as if the world had ended, but as if someone had gouged out his eyes.