Winter Soldier

The sun was setting when the rain stopped. The air had cooled ever so slightly. Leah produced apples and oranges, peanut butter and cheese crackers and bottled water from her backpack. They shared their makeshift meal with the guards, who spoke English far better than Adam spoke Vietnamese. As darkness fell, a little battery-powered lantern materialized from yet another pocket of Leah’s backpack. It fought the darkness to a standstill in a small circle around them.

As the hours slowly passed, he’d kept her talking about her work, about growing up an army brat and about her family. He’d learned her parents were retired, her father after thirty years in the military, her mother after a career as a teacher. One brother was a U.S. Navy SEAL, one a navy chaplain, the third an army Green Beret.

And in return he had given up a few details of his own life during the dark minutes before midnight—broken home, one brother, who lived in California, he saw only now and then. Both parents dead. They’d lived hard and died young, he’d told her. She hadn’t asked for more details and he hadn’t offered them. He told her about the judge who’d given him the choice of joining the U.S. Marine Corps, or going to jail for a joyride that had resulted in a totaled car. He’d taken advantage of college courses the Corps offered, found he was a good student and went on to medical school. And then the unrelenting grind of a neurosurgical internship and residency, followed by one marriage, one son, one divorce and all the nightmares he could handle. This last he hadn’t spoken aloud.

Than Son Nhut he’d faced and survived. This morning it was Saigon. The city had fallen to the victorious enemy only one day after his helicopter had lifted off the airfield. He wondered if Leah’s company might be as potent a talisman against the past today as it had been yesterday.

He walked the few feet down the hallway to her room and pushed open the louvered door. Her accommodations were identical to his—high ceiling, white walls, sheer curtains at the French doors. The place had once been a villa that belonged to a South Vietnamese general, B.J. had told him. Now it was a hotel, a joint venture between the Vietnamese and an Australian firm. They were trying hard, but they hadn’t gotten it quite right yet. The rooms were clean, the toilets worked, and there was hot water, but no soap and only one towel in the communal bathroom. The electricity was eccentric, as Leah had said. To turn on the ceiling fan, he’d had to hook two bare wires together, and there was no such thing as room service.

Leah must have heard him enter the room. “There’s whitener in those little packets,” she called from the balcony.

“No, thanks. Black is fine.” He couldn’t help himself to her coffee and then just leave, walk back into his room and stare at the walls, so he made himself move through the doors onto the balcony to stand beside her.

Saigon was up with the sun. The dusty, tree-lined street below was crowded with bicycles, motor scooters and cyclos, the bicycle-rickshaws that served as taxicabs and couriers everywhere in Vietnam. There were also a few cars and buses, but completely absent were marked lanes and traffic signals, at least none that anyone was obeying. Traffic moved in both directions on both sides of the street. It was every man for himself.

Leash was leaning over the railing watching what went on below. She was wearing a flowered cotton skirt that ended just above her ankles and a shortsleeved pink blouse that complemented her creamy skin. Her mink-brown hair was pulled back into a French braid so complicated he wondered how she could accomplish it on her own. There was nothing even vaguely military about her appearance. Today she was all woman.

“How does anyone manage to cross the street safely?” she asked.

“Like that,” Adam pointed with his coffee mug. A man with two young children in tow waded, undaunted, into the traffic. Miraculously, bicycles, cyclos, motor scooters, even a bus, swerved to miss him and the children.

Leah let out her breath in a whoosh. “They made it,” she said, turning to Adam with amazement on her face. “You just start walking. Show no fear. It’s like my dad said it would be.”

“Your dad was here?”

“In ‘65 and ’68,” she said.

“He was in the country during the Tet offensive?”

She nodded. “That’s where he got his Purple Heart. He wants to come back, but Mom says no more. She’s never going anywhere that requires a passport again. We moved eleven times in fifteen years. I’m sorry. I told you all this last night, didn’t I.”

“I enjoyed it,” he said. She blinked. He’d spoken too tersely. He was out of the habit of making small talk with a woman.

“I’m going to do some sight-seeing right after breakfast. Dad wants pictures of the embassy and Chinatown, and I want to tour the presidential palace. They’ve kept it exactly as it was the day the North Vietnamese marched into the city. Want to come along?”

“No.” Again, too terse. “I mean, I...I hadn’t thought about it.”

She rested her hip against the stone railing and looked at him over the rim of her coffee mug. “Of course, you were here before. You said so last night.” She turned her head, her gaze moving in the direction of the abandoned American Embassy. “It’s so different—not what I expected at all. My impressions were shaped by those videos of the last days—pictures of tanks and soldiers with guns, mobs of terrified people fighting to get out. But this... It’s as if the war never happened.”

“For most of these people it didn’t,” he said. “Vietnam is a young country. Half the people here were born after the war. They don’t want to look back. They want to move forward.” Good advice. Too damned bad he couldn’t follow it himself.

B.J. appeared on Adam’s balcony. “Hey, buddy, there you are. You left your door unlocked, did you know that?” He waved a greeting. “Good morning, Leah.”

“Good morning, B.J.”

“Leah has coffee.” Adam moved to the edge of the balcony and surveyed his friend across the few feet separating them. B.J. was wearing jeans and a Hawaiian-print shirt in shades of pink and orange. His red baseball cap was emblazoned with the Marine Corps emblem in gold.

“So does the hotel restaurant, old buddy. Café filtre and baguettes. Delicious.”

Leah laughed and held out her mug. “You mean I dragged a coffeemaker all the way from Kentucky for nothing?”

“Nope. I’m only saying they’ve got great coffee in the hotel. Hospital coffee is the same the world over—not fit to drink. I doubt it’s any different at Dalat. You’ll get plenty of use out of it there.”

“Any word on when we’ll be moving out?”

B.J. poked at a piece of crumbling balcony railing with the toe of his shoe. “That’s what I came to tell you. The trucks pulled up at the airport about an hour ago. If there’s any sight-seeing you want to do, I suggest you do it this morning. We’ll be leaving here before noon. Don’t want to get stranded overnight somewhere along the highway. Luckily the day starts early here. Most of the shops are open by seven, the museums, too. Some of the others have already left the hotel. If you apply yourself, you should be able to see a little of the city and at least hit the antique shops on Dong Khoi Street.”

“An excellent plan, B.J. If you gentlemen will excuse me, I’ll be on my way.”

“Why don’t you go with her, Adam? Take her to the embassy and the presidential palace,” his friend suggested.

“No.” His voice was harsh. Striving to soften it, he added, “I figured I’d go back to the airport with you. Make sure everything’s okay.”

“Not necessary. I’ve paid all the fees and a few plain, old-fashioned bribes. Nothing’s going to go missing. Head out with Leah and get a souvenir to take home to Brian. Have your picture taken in front of the embassy. Better yet, have a beer on me if you can find the Tiger’s Den.”

“It’s too early for a beer, and I doubt the Tiger’s Den survived the reunification.” The panic-filled streets of the defeated city he’d known were long gone, but he wasn’t interested in trying to find the bar he and B.J. and their buddies had hung out in.

“I don’t need a chaperon,” Leah said. “I’ll find my own way.”

“I know you will. It’s Adam I’m worried about. Lousy sense of direction. Gets lost all the time. Why I remember one night in Norfolk—”

“Stow it, B.J. You lead,” he said to Leah. “I’ll follow.”

She stayed where she was. “But I thought—”

“I changed my mind. I’d like to go if you’re willing to put up with my company.”

She studied his face for a moment and he endured the scrutiny. He had the feeling she could see all the way to the center of his soul, but that was ridiculous. If she could really see what was inside him, she’d turn and run like the sane and sensible woman she was. Instead, she said, “Okay, let’s go.”

LEAH WALKED DOWN the vaulted hallway with Adam Sauder on one side and B. J. Walton on the other. She was glad none of her brothers were around to see what she was up to. They’d teased her about picking up strays all her life. Usually it was the four-legged kind, puppies with sore paws or homeless kittens, but she tended to do the same thing with people. Most of the others probably couldn’t see the pain behind Adam Sauder’s dark gaze, but she did, and it should have warned her to stay away. Instead, she found herself riding down to the lobby in the elaborately grilled elevator, saying goodbye to B.J., hailing a double cyclo and moving out into the bewildering stream of traffic with him still at her side.

Their cyclo driver was a young man of French and Vietnamese descent who spoke excellent English. He maneuvered them skillfully through the heavy traffic, taking them directly to the abandoned American Embassy, a concrete-and-glass fortress every bit as ugly as it had looked in the news footage on TV. The building had a sad, defeated air about it, Leah thought. Someone had hung laundry in one of the old guard towers. She sat quietly for a moment, Adam equally silent beside her. Then they climbed out of the cyclo and stood by the gates where she had seen videos of refugees trying to climb over, of grim-faced young Marines on the wall pulling others into the compound, of overloaded helicopters taking off from the roof.

She’d brought her camera, and without her asking him Adam took her picture in front of the gates, and then their driver took a picture of both of them together. Her father’s ghosts were close. She could feel their eyes on the back of her neck. “Were you here?” she asked Adam.

He shook his head. “I never got this far.” His expression appeared set, his jaw clenched. Leah didn’t ask any more questions about the past.

They didn’t stop to tour the presidential palace. She didn’t know what she was going to tell her dad when she got back, but she’d think of something. Most likely the truth. I went there with a Marine who was in Saigon at the end. He didn’t want to go inside, so we didn’t. Her dad would understand.

Instead they took B.J.’s advice and went shopping. Their driver took them to a small, bustling marketplace. It was alive, wall-to-wall, with sights and sounds and smells that were raucous and tantalizing, unfamiliar and fascinating. Leah stood for a long minute just looking around. Street vendors peddled their wares on every corner. Food stands crowded storefronts, shoppers jostled one another as they ogled the merchandise. Vietnam was still a Communist country, and poor, but you would never know it by the stacks and boxes and cartons of VCRs, televisions, CD players and microwave ovens piled inside the tiny stores, spilling outside onto the sidewalk, lashed to cyclos and bicycles, and stacked in pushcarts.

She bought a pale blue silk ao dai, the traditional slim dress and loose pants worn by Vietnamese women, for her mother. Exactly like the one her father had brought home thirty years ago, but three sizes larger. Then she bought a mint-green one for herself. She chose greeting cards with beautiful, silk-screen paintings of craggy green mountains and mist-covered valleys that she could frame for Caleb Owens and his wife, Margaret. Also one for Juliet Trent, the pregnant teenager she had befriended. That left only her brothers, and for them she bought carvings of elephants and of smiling old men smoking their pipes and wearing the traditional conical hats called lo nan.

Adam stayed by her side saying little, waiting patiently. He didn’t buy anything, not even for his son, Brian. She knew his name, knew he was nineteen and a sophomore at Harvard. Adam had told her that much the night before. But she knew nothing beyond those few facts, certainly not why his father wasn’t buying him a gift from this exotic and fascinating place.

Like the stray animals Leah had rescued in the past, once or twice she’d become involved with stray men—men with haunted eyes and sad smiles like Adam Sauder. Trying to heal wounded souls was much harder than healing wounded bodies, she’d learned to her sorrow. His hurts and heartaches were none of her business. This time she wasn’t going to get involved. She was going to protect herself for a change. She saw him pick up a watch, turn it over, then put it down again.

“Do you suppose it’s really a Rolex? For only a hundred dollars?” There was a sign in English above the table of watches. There were a lot of signs in English, nothing in Russian. The few Russians who came now didn’t have money to spend. The Americans and Australians did.