The morning began with unusual jocularity. Perhaps because we were beginning to get to know each other, or perhaps because it was Friday, and we were facing two days off. Snippets were developing into anecdotes and occasionally into full-fledged stories. We had sparred enough to fall into a comfortable banter, accepting the fact that we had been here together forty years ago. I could sense the beginning of a bonding much like the one we had during the war. As the minibus dodged one moped after another, one of the vets pulled out his iPod and a small tower speaker the size of a cracker package. The sounds of “Running on Empty” filled the bus. We sang along, miserably out of tune.
Our language patterns reverted back to the war years. Expletives, always to be expected on a construction site, were replaced with “Choi oi; or “choi duc.” That Vietnamese man or Vietnamese woman once again became papasan or mamasan. “You number one G.I.” (good) and “You number ten G.I.” (bad) worked its way back into our speech patterns.
Our homeowner continues to amaze us. Thi, pronounced “twee” is a single parent of two daughters, one fourteen and one nine. She is at the site when we arrive and works harder than any homeowner I've seen and harder than us. Her husband was killed in an accident, and her house is being built on his family land. It will be twelve feet wide and twenty seven feet long, skim coated brick with a fiberglass roof.
Beside it is a lean-to, the “house” the three of them live in now. Four bamboo poles hold up two tarps. Three more tarps form the sides and the back. The front is open. It is furnished with a chest of drawers, a small chest, a bed frame with no mattress and an altar that displays a photograph of her late husband flanked by two vases stuffed with incense. Crayon drawn artwork is taped to the tarp over the bed. The kitchen is in a shed four feet from the lean-to. There is water, but there is also a meter; we surmise Thi cannot afford to use the water too often. The tarps bake in the hot sun. When it rains, there is no place to hide.
Thi brings us sour water from the stream that runs through the village to mix mortar for the bricks. The sun starts beating down. The iPod with its Goliath speaker cranks up and we juke, jive and lay bricks to the songs of Bob Dylan, Carol King and Rod Stewart, returning to the sixties together. Then a song I have never heard begins. In a soft melodic voice, a woman sings about names on a wall. The words described how once those names had lived, they had breathed, they had families, now they are names on a wall. I realized she was singing about the wall in Washington DC where the names of sixty thousand Americans killed in Vietnam are etched in black granite. I swallowed hard, suppressing the anger that was building inside; at least most of it.
This is the story of RM. RM was a LRRP- long range reconnaissance patrol. He has three Purple Hearts, but none of his wounds were of the “million dollar” kind--the kind that got you sent home. It is Saturday, and we are in Cu Chi. The Cu Chi tunnels are a huge tourist attraction; Disneyland on a Vietnamese scale. The tunnels are famous because of their size and complexity; a network of tunnels over 200 kilometers long that provided access to underground bunkers, a kitchen, mess hall, armory and a clinic. Craters formed by hundreds of bombs dropped from B-52s mar the landscape. Yet the tunnels held up.
The paths we walked at Cu Chi were the paths RM patrolled in 1969 and 1970. After his first wound, he was treated and returned to his unit. He was assigned to a team for the next morning’s patrol. His best friend stepped up and asked that he go instead, to give RM a little more time to recuperate. The team was inserted the next morning. Thirty five minutes later, RM's best friend was dead, and there was one more name to add to the wall: Ray Enzie.
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