George Black - The Long Reckoning : A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam

The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran almost all the way from Hanoi to Saigon, with a Sea Trail that carried supplies from the port of Haiphong. This map shows the main axis of the Trail in Laos and Cambodia and the principal infiltration routes into South Vietnam.

H er name is Kieu. There are thousands like her.

She had seen many different kinds of airplanes in the year since the Americans arrived. There were tiny ones with only one man inside that circled almost soundlessly overhead like a hawk searching for some small field creature. There were fast, terrifying ones that swooped down from the sky like birds that had spotted their prey. Some of these had short, stubby wings, and some had wings that were swept back like the point of an arrow. Both kinds threw down a curtain of red fire and black smoke that consumed long lines of banana trees and bamboo thickets and stuck to peoples bodies and burned off all their flesh. Sometimes these airplanes fired rockets that made the houses explode and burst into flames.

She had also seen many different kinds of bombs. Some came in big containers that opened up before they hit the ground and shot out hundreds of little round bombs in all directions, small enough to fit into your hand. They reminded her of the ball she sometimes saw the Americans tossing around when they were off duty. Some of these little bombs thudded to the ground but did not explode, lying half-buried in the dirt. They seemed to be harmless, but Kieus mother warned her not to pick them up. Not every child in the village heeded that warning, and they paid dearly for it. There were also shells that were bigger than her baby brother, and her father told her that these came from the big guns on wheels that the Americans had placed on a hilltop west of the town. They made a whistling, roaring sound as they streaked overhead, and sometimes you could see the puff of smoke that rose when they struck their faraway targets. But the worst bombs of all fell from airplanes that flew so high no one could see them, and these shook the ground for many kilometers around and left rows of large deep holes in the rice fields that filled with water when the rains came.

There was also another kind of airplane that whirred like a dragonfly, and like a dragonfly, it could stop in midair and hover motionless. Mr. Tuan, who spoke the language of the Americans and helped them when they wanted to talk to local people, told Kieu that the soldiers gave these planes a special name: Huey. Once she had seen them firing their weapons at a patch of forest on the outskirts of her village, and then one of the fast planes came and set fire to all the trees. Then the dragonfly planes landed nearby, and all the men inside climbed out and hurried away, ducking their heads in the wind that gusted from the part on top that spun around in circles, flattening the grass.

Once Kieu was so close to one of the dragonfly planes that she could see the face of a soldier who sat in the open doorway holding a big gun. Somehow that made these hovering airplanes less frightening; you could look at him and hope he might look back and see that you were not his enemy. It was very different in this way from the silvery shapes in the sky that seemed to fly by themselves without human assistance.

Many of the soldiers lived at the base the Americans had built at the edge of the nearby town, on the road that led to the border between Vietnam and Laos. You would see them every day in the market, tossing coins to the women who squatted on the ground with their meager piles of fruit and vegetables for sale. Most of the men were friendly, although the ones from the government army who helped them could be rude and insulting. Some young women had come to live in the town when the Americans arrived, and they often waited at the gates of the camp and went for long walks with them and did not come back for a long time. Occasionally a soldier unwrapped a bar of sweet brown chocolate from its silvery paper and gave Kieu a square or two that she kept on her tongue until it melted.