I replied, "I don't know. This might be the result of defoliation, napalm, and high explosives." I added, "The motto of the defoliation people was, 'Only We Can Prevent Forests.'" I had thought that was funny once, but it didn't seem funny anymore.

We came to the former marine base called the Rockpile, a towering, seven-hundred-foot-high rock formation, which we could see to our left as the road swung east again.

We continued on, and I saw a sign near a dirt road to the right that said Camp Carroll Camp Carroll. A mini-bus was coming toward Highway 9 from the dirt road, and on the side of the bus it said DMZ Tours DMZ Tours.

I remarked, "DMZ World." I said to Susan, "When I was back here for Part Two in 1972, Camp Carroll had been turned over to the South Vietnamese army as we were trying to turn the whole war over to the South Viets. During the Easter Offensive of '72, the South Viet commander of Camp Carroll surrendered to the North Viets without a shot fired. We heard about this down in Saigon, and we couldn't believe it at first. The whole garrison just laid down their arms."

It was then, I recalled, that I knew that as soon as the last American soldier left, the South Vietnamese would lose the war, and all the American blood that had been spilled here was wasted.

We continued on and pa.s.sed through the town of Cam Lo, which would never be a picture on a postcard. There were a number of DMZ Tour buses parked on the street near a cafe, and I said to Susan, "Just north of here is Con Thien firebase, which as you know means the Hill of Angels, and where a high school buddy of mine was killed."

We left Cam Lo, pa.s.sed the turnoff for Con Thien, and continued east.

The landscape hadn't improved much, and the sky was even grayer as we came toward the coast.

There were a few buildings on both sides of the road now, and there was even a decent-looking four-story stucco hotel with a big banner sign that said DMZ Visitor Welcome Here-Rooftop Restaurant Sees DMZ DMZ Visitor Welcome Here-Rooftop Restaurant Sees DMZ. I said to Mr. Loc, "Dung lai."

He glanced back at me and pulled over.

Susan and I got out and walked back to the hotel, named the Dong Truong Son. The lobby was small but new, and we took the one elevator up to the rooftop restaurant.

It was well past lunchtime, and not yet the c.o.c.ktail hour, so no one was there, except a young man who had to be the waiter because he was sleeping in a chair.

Susan and I took a table by the low wall of the covered restaurant where we had a panoramic view to the north.

I knew this place; I'd seen it from the ground and from the air, I'd seen it on maps, and I still saw it in my mind. I said to Susan, "That's the Cua Viet River, which runs out to the South China Sea over there. To the east is Con Thien on the Cam Lo River, and all along the Cam Lo were smaller fire support bases, starting with Alpha One to the east, Alpha Two, Three, and Four." I pointed and said, "Beyond the Cam Lo River, you can see the Ben Hai River, which runs right through the center of the old DMZ at the 17th Parallel, which was the border that part.i.tioned North and South Vietnam. I'll be going that way tomorrow."

She didn't reply.

Susan and I looked out over the still devastated landscape, and from up here, I could see the telltale ponds, some of them running in a straight line, evenly s.p.a.ced, so there was no mistaking that they were created by a bomb pattern.

She said, "It's bleak. So much different than around Saigon and Nha Trang."

"I had the same feeling when I came from Bong Son in January '68. We came into the winter monsoon, then the Tet Offensive, then Khe Sanh, and the A Shau. Rain, fog, mist, mud, gray skies, scorched earth, and too many corpses. I remember thinking that my father may have had it easier fighting the Germans in France in the summer of '44, although I never said that to him."

"Your father was in World War II?"

"He was an infantryman, just like me. The Brenners pride themselves on never having had an officer in the family, or anyone with a safe military job. We're just South Boston cannon fodder for the wars. I lost an uncle in Korea."

Susan said, "My father was an air force officer in Korea. A flight surgeon." She added, "As I said in Saigon, I think you'd like each other."

"Fathers have a tough time liking guys who are having s.e.x with their daughters."

"I've never had s.e.x. I'm still a virgin. Ask my father."

I smiled. "Well, then there's the age difference."

"Paul, I'm past thirty-my parents wouldn't mind if you were a Civil War veteran. They're desperate." She added, "So am I, or I wouldn't bother with you."

The waiter had woken up. He saw us and ambled over. We ordered two coffees.

Susan said to me, "How does it feel sitting in a rooftop restaurant overlooking the DMZ?"

"I'm not sure. I feel sort of... disconnected, like I know I'm here, though it's hard to think of this as a tourist attraction." I paused. "But I'm glad it is. None of this should be trivialized, but maybe it's inevitable that it will be. On the plus side, maybe the tourists can learn something, and maybe the vets can come to terms with a lot of things, and the Vietnamese can meet a lot of Americans and make a few bucks while they're at it."

She nodded. "I'm glad I came here."

The coffee came, Susan lit up, and we looked out over the silent battlefields below.

I said to Susan, "Okay, here's the brochure copy-DMZ Tours: A pleasant morning in the minefields where you can gather shrapnel and partic.i.p.ate in a sandbag-filling contest, followed by a picnic lunch in the ruins of Con Thien firebase, after which we look for unmarked graves along Highway One, and we end our day at the Dong Ha Soccer Stadium, where we'll see a re-creation of the surrender of Camp Carroll, performed by the original cast. Picnic lunch included."

She looked at me awhile and decided not to respond.

Somewhere around her second coffee and third cigarette, she said to me, "As if this isn't stressful enough for you-this return to your old battlefields-you're probably worried about the trip up country and what you have to do there, and the people in Washington are giving you a hard time, and this Colonel Mang is shadowing you-"

"Don't forget you."

"I was getting to that. So, on top of all this, along comes this pushy b.i.t.c.h-"

"Who's that?"

"This very forward, very brazen broad, who decides to pursue you-"

"Seduce."

"Whatever. And you've got a million things on your mind, and your heart is back in the States, and your soul is on temporary loan to the dead."

I didn't reply.

She said, "And yet, Paul, I think it worked. Between us."

I nodded.

She said, "But I'm thinking maybe I shouldn't go up country with you."

"I never asked you to."

"Maybe I'd be more of a burden than a help."

"I think you should go on to Hanoi, and I'll meet you there."

"No, I think I should go back to Saigon."

This sort of surprised me, and I said, "Why?"

"I think you have to finish your job here, then go to Honolulu... see how that works out, then... give me a call."

"From Honolulu?"

"No, Paul, from Virginia."

"Okay. Then what?"

"Then we can both see how we feel."

"You mean, we have to be in different hemispheres to see how we feel?"

Susan seemed a little impatient with me for some reason and said, "I'm giving you an out. Are you dense?"

"Oh. Where's the out? I missed the exit ramp."

"You're a complete idiot. I'm trying to be sensitive to your situation, and I'm willing to give up the man I love-"

"You already did that. You sent him a fax."

She stood, "Let's go."

I gave the waiter a few bucks, and we rode down the elevator. I said, "I'm sorry. It's been a stressful day. I make jokes when I'm stressed, and when I sense danger-old combat habit. Don't mean s.h.i.t, as we used to say about things that meant a great deal. Xin loi. Sorry about that." And so forth. By the time we got to the lobby, Susan was holding my hand and telling me she understood, which was more than I could say for myself. I mean, sometimes I'm full of s.h.i.t, but Susan's self-sacrificing performance was a whole barn-yardful of it. I know an out when I see one, and that wasn't it. For better or worse, we were going to complete this tour of duty together.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR.

Back on the road, we drove into the town called Dong Ha Junction, which looked a lot like a truck stop in New Jersey. There was a railroad station, a bus station, two gasoline stations, and a few guest houses. We came to the T-intersection of Highway One and turned south. On the other side of the two-lane highway I saw a building whose sign said, in English, Quang Tri Tourism Office Quang Tri Tourism Office, in front of which were a few tour buses.

Susan asked me, "Do you know this town?"

"I was never here, but I know it was a marine and army logistics base."

Susan spoke to Mr. Loc, who responded, and Susan said to me, "Dong Ha is the provincial capital of Quang Tri Province."

"Quang Tri City is the provincial capital. Send Mr. Loc back to school."

Susan spoke to Mr. Loc again, and then said to me, "Quang Tri City was completely destroyed by the American bombers in April 1972 and has never been rebuilt. This is now the provincial capital."

"s.h.i.t happens."

We drove south on Highway One, which was nearly deserted, and I said to Susan, "From here to Hue, this was called the Street Without Joy."

She looked around at the spa.r.s.e vegetation, and the ramshackle houses, and the occasional rice paddy and said, "Were you guys fighting to hold on to this, or make the enemy take it?"

I laughed. "I have to remember that line the next time I run into someone who was here." I said, "Somewhere around here is where the marine area of operations ended, and the army AO began."

We came to a newly constructed bridge that crossed a branch of the Cua Viet River, and I said to Mr. Loc, "Stop."

He stopped on the bridge, and I got out. Susan followed.

I looked downstream and saw the pylons of the old bridge, and I said to Susan, "My platoon guarded this bridge a few times. Well, not this bridge, but the one that was over there." I could see the remains of a French pillbox where the old bridge had crossed the river and said to her, "I slept in that concrete pillbox a few times. I scratched my name in the wall, along with a few hundred other names, including guys named Jacques and Pierre."

She took my hand and said, "Let's go see."

"Ask James Bong if he has a flashlight."

She asked him, and he produced one from the glove box. Susan and I walked about ten meters along the riverbank to where the destroyed bridge had been. The French pillbox or bunker was a round structure, about ten meters across, made of reinforced concrete with a domed roof to deflect rockets and mortar rounds. There must have been a time when boxes of pills looked like this, thus the name, but to me, it looked like an igloo. I could see embedded in the ground at the base of the concrete structure sc.r.a.ps of green plastic, which had been American sandbags. I said to Susan, "We used to sandbag the old French concrete fortifications because the newer munitions were able to penetrate six or eight inches of steel-reinforced concrete, and the sandbags would absorb that direct hit. Still, if you were inside one of these things when it took a direct, it would scramble your brains for a few hours. We used to call it 'becoming a marine.' Old joke."

I took the flashlight from Susan and shined the light inside the bunker. I said, "Looks nasty in there. I can't even see the concrete floor, just mud."

She asked, "Any leeches?"

"Not in there. I'll go in first and throw the snakes out." I stepped through the narrow slit opening.

The center of the dome was about five meters high, allowing a man to stand at any of the firing slits with plenty of overhead room.

I shined the flashlight around the concrete walls and floor and saw creepy crawlers, like centipedes, and lots of webs with big walnut-sized spiders on them, plus lots of slugs, but no snakes. The walls were all mildewed, but I could see names scratched in the concrete.

Susan called in, "Throw some snakes out."

"No snakes. But be careful and don't touch the walls."

She squeezed into the pillbox and stood beside me. She said, "Yuck. It smells."

"We kept these things very clean, but no one's been here since 1975."

Gray light came in through the firing slits, and I kept the flashlight moving to pick out anything I didn't want to come in contact with.

Susan said, "Where's your name?"

I moved the flashlight slowly across the round walls, and I stopped the beam at a grouping of names. I moved closer, avoiding the spiderwebs, and focused the beam on the names scratched into the concrete. They were all French names, and there was a date of Avril 1954. I seemed to remember these names and the date, which in 1968, was only fourteen years before, but to me, an eighteen-year-old kid who had been four years old when the French Indochina War ended, this seemed like the writings of an ancient army. Now, I realized the proximity of the two wars and the pa.s.sage of time since.

Susan said, "Someone wrote something under the four names. See that?"

I placed the beam on the French words. "It says, 'This place sucks.'"

"No, it doesn't." She moved closer and read the French, "Les quatre amis, les ames perdues-four friends, lost souls."

I moved the beam around and stopped at the name of Sal Longo. I said, "This man was in my platoon. He was killed in the A Shau Valley... incredible..."

I found my name, etched into the concrete with the tip of my beer can opener. The letters were barely legible, covered with black mildew. I stared at Paul Brenner's name, followed by the date of 11 Jan 68.

Susan looked at where the beam had come to rest and said, "That's amazing."

"Better here than on the Wall in Washington."

I looked at my name awhile, then moved the light around and saw a few other names I recognized, and some I didn't. Someone had scratched a heart and arrow in the wall that said Andy and Barbara, forever Andy and Barbara, forever. If that was Andy Hall, then forever arrived in May 1968, also in the A Shau. Basically, Delta Company, my company, had ceased to be an effective fighting unit after that three weeks, and the survivors almost all got another stripe on their sleeves, what the army called rapid battlefield promotions, but which we called blood stripes.