The Delta perhaps demands every reserve of mysticism from the Americans who live there.
Frances FitzGerald, The Long Fear
1972
The Delta was a place of regular geometries. It was a place of straight lines and pale shades of green. It was a man-made terrain of dikes and canals with deceptive distances in which a line of darker green trees could hide almost anything. It was a place of almost billiard-table green flatness. This hydraulic, engineered landscape was designed so that the flat sheets of water sustained the rice and also could move ever so delicately from place to place. This was the Wagon Wheel, a place that was the junction of six canals into a hub on the edge of Ba Xuyen Province.
That day we walked down the path on the top of the paddy dike and I was among them, very tall and unlike any of my fellow soldiers. In the luminous morning light the men I walked with were in single file with blackened rice-cooking pots strapped to their gear. They were carrying obsolete rifles and they chattered softly in their musical language.
If I had to find a hiding place here it would be down in the water up against the side of the dike. As I walked I towered above my companions and I was even more marked out by the cluster of radio men who followed me everywhere. As I walked I was simply a target, hard to miss.
Our course was a step-wise approach to the hub of the wagon wheel. We made right angle turns at the intersections of the dikes and sometimes had two files of small men walking parallel to each other on different dikes. Water buffalo with their little boy handlers stood in the water and watched us pass. The deep, black, patient eyes of the buffalo kept secrets from us They seemed to be waiting.
We moved slowly as we approached the green cluster of planted trees that marked the hub. One of the dikes intersected a canal and now there was still brown water on one side and green rice fields on the other.
The rotting woven bamboo huts of an abandoned hamlet marked the end of our march. The cooking sites there were long cold. We huddled and and I listened to them chatter about what to do next on this empty day. The soldiers began to go slowly down into the earth on the edges of the hamlet. Water began to fill their holes before they’d gone more than a foot or two deep.
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