Grace: Filled With Grace

Vendor, Dalat, Vietnam, Photo Courtesy of The Cape Club

39

Where are we going? Do not ask! Ascend, descend. There is no beginning and no end. Only this present moment exists, full of bitterness, full of sweetness, and I rejoice in it all.

Nikos Kazantzakis, Saviors of God

1972

They sent me up out of the Delta to Đà Lạt. Maybe they thought I needed a break. Maybe it had something to do with my time in country. Or maybe I was just on some roster kept somewhere and my name came up. I packed my AWOL bag with an extra uniform, clean socks and underwear, spare ammunition, and went where I was told to go. This was not an operation, so under the loose jungle fatigue shirt I wore only my .45 and a knife. Instead of a helmet I wore a floppy jungle hat with the three lotus-blossom symbol of my rank. 

I was driven to Cần Thơ where I caught a ride on an Air America C-47. I strapped in and they took off. The Delta began to flow below me, the flatness marked by irregular stream beds and the ruler-straight canals. The long flight took me over the rubber plantations of III Corps and up into the soft-looking mountains surrounding Đà Lạt.

The airstrip was set on a small plateau. As we turned on the final approach I saw the orderly rows of crops, very different from the rice paddies I was used to. Ambitious Vietnamese truck farmers were raising produce for the Americans scattered up and down the country. But on the drive in there were the same black-eyed water buffalo and their child herdsmen.

I was driven through the town where the streets were filled with a frantic clutter of bicycles and cyclos, past fragrant marketplaces and up to an old resort hotel. When I stepped out it was as if I had fallen into a Somerset Maugham story. A porter grabbed my bag and led me up a wide set of stairs and into a high-ceilinged lobby. Broad-bladed fans hanging far overhead slowly turned. I walked on wide planks of polished wood through a room defined by upholstered furnishings, oriental carpets, brass ash trays and potted palms. Small men in starched white coats scurried about. A distinguished-looking Vietnamese man dressed in black noted my reservation and room assignment. He gave the porter an old fashioned key attached to a wooden fob that reminded me of the tops I used to spin on my grandfather’s driveway.

A stately four-poster bed dominated my room, the diaphanous mosquito netting rippled from the air blown by a ceiling fan and swayed in the breeze that came through a tall open window. The view from that window was of a green lawn and the peculiar spindly trees left behind when the jungle was cleared. In the near distance were green rumpled hills. 

My dinner was sautéed trout, new potatoes, and fresh green beans, with ripe strawberries and cream for dessert. On the veranda after dinner I felt out of place in my loose green fatigues smoking unfiltered Luckies. I thought I should be in a white linen suit and smoking a thin black cheroot or perhaps an Algerian briar pipe filled with a blend of cured Virginia tobaccos flavored with latakia and perique. The conversation should have been of the fate of Empires, the British or the French or, for the older Southeast Asia hands, the Dutch. Or of rubber production and markets, of shopping trips to Paris, of tigers bagged or Eurasian women available to share one’s room. Instead, even though the coffee was strong and French, the conversation was about Provinces and Corps, VC infrastructure and HES reports, of time in-country and DEROS, of the status of peace talks and the Vietnamese response, of the prospects for promotion and the possible location of the next war, the next place for us.

As I watched, the sky shifted abruptly from a cloud-streaked blue to purple, then black. In the very far distance a flare blossomed and drifted down over the forest. It reminded me of where I was, the time I was in, as I sipped my coffee and smoked my cigarettes.

The conference was just for one day. So I only had two evenings on the cool veranda before I stuffed my underwear and spare ammunition back into my bag and was driven back to the airstrip. This time my ride to the south was in an old C-123, the two-engined predecessor to the C-130. I got on board by walking up the ramp that dropped down at the back and took a seat along the side. Pallets were strapped down the length of the cargo bay, a shipment to the Americans at Cần Thơ and elsewhere in the Delta.

The engines were running. Over them I heard the high-pitched whine of the electric motor for the ramp. The ramp rose up and shut out the sky until with the final thump I was enclosed in a noisy darkness broken only by the light from the scattered port holes. 

My nostrils flared and filled with the scents flowing from the lashed-down pallets. They were loaded with the produce from the fields nearby. In the coolness and darkness around me were lettuce, strawberries, cucumbers, cantaloupes, and watermelons. I breathed in deeply, again and again and again, not even noticing that we had left the ground.