David A. Poulsen's Young Adult Fiction 3-Book Bundle. David A. Poulsen
which ones did you do?” I yelled back.
“All of ’em. The opium less often than the other stuff.”
We found a place that looked like it had pretty good food. We were right … the most amazing won ton soup ever. Not that I’ve had it a lot — Mom and I don’t dine out a bunch — but I’ve had won ton soup a few times and this stuff was awesome.
We didn’t talk — or yell — much during lunch, and it wasn’t until we were out of the busiest part of Cholon that we tried conversation again.
“There’s something I want you to see,” the old man said. “It’ll take us a little while to get there.”
We walked for a while, then got on this bus and sat about halfway back. I wanted to ask the old man where we were going, but by then I knew better. He’d tell me if he felt like it. We drove through the city, and this time it was my turn to stare out the window. I can’t say I was liking Saigon, but it was definitely interesting. Okay, maybe I was liking it a little.
It seemed to me that a lot of the people on the bus were tourists, not a lot of Vietnamese. Several different languages were being spoken around us. Not much English. Quite a few backpackers.
There were three people sitting across from us. They were Caucasian and speaking English, with an accent. Husband, wife, daughter, about my age. The daughter smiled at me. I gave her a little smile back. Reminded myself I was saving my love for Jen Wertz. The two adults — they looked about Mom’s age — nodded at us and we nodded back.
“Where you from?” the old man asked.
“Australia. You? Yank?”
“Canadian.”
“You going to Cu Chi? The tunnels?” the lady asked.
“Yeah.”
I looked at the old man, wondering why it was so tough for him to tell me the stuff he could tell somebody we’d only just met.
The Australian guy leaned forward, looked at the old man. “You look the right age to have been here during the war. You a veteran?”
The old man didn’t answer, just turned and looked out the window. Not real friendly, I thought. The Australian guy sat back and looked at his wife. I couldn’t tell what the look meant. The daughter smiled at me again. I figured I knew what that look meant.
“What’s your name?” I said.
“Jennifer.
Jennifer. Jen. Whoa, what are the chances?
As we were getting off the bus, the Australian man stepped up close to the old man. “Listen, I’m in the middle of writing a book about Vietnam, the Australian experience, you know? But I want it to be on the mark, get it right. Talk about the war America and its allies lost, how Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon, how all of them screwed up … how it was the most unpopular war the west ever fought, even more than Iraq. What I need is the perspective of the American soldier — ”
“No.”
“Look, mate, I wouldn’t take up a lot of your time, I really only need you to — ”
“I really only need you to shut the hell up … mate.” When the old man said that, the Australian guy took a couple of quick steps backward. He was nervous — maybe even scared. Scared of someone in his sixties.
The weird thing is, if I’d been him, I’d have been scared of the old man too. There was something about the way he was looking at the Aussie writer that was kind of crazy — off base, like he wasn’t totally with the program. Guys like that are scary and right at that moment the old man was a scary guy.
The writer dude from Australia shut the hell up. And got out of there, dragging the family with him. They were moving quite rapidly
I thought about trying to say something funny. Like well, I guess I won’t be taking her to the prom. But I changed my mind. Maybe not the time for Huffman humour.
We moved away from the bus and followed the crowd that all seemed to be heading the same way. Cu Chi was a town. But we weren’t there to see the town. Nobody was. It turned out everyone on the bus, and all the people from all the other buses, were there to see the tunnels. The Cu Chi Tunnels.
I figured this would be more boring than the Saigon zoo with its No Animals policy. Now we’d be poking around a couple of little tunnels with those things hanging down — stalactites. Total yawner.
I was way wrong.
The old man led me over to where you pay for the tour. He went up to this sort of cage and paid. He came back and handed me a piece of paper.
“Where’s yours?”
“I’m not going.”
“Why not? I don’t want to go by myself.”
“I’ve been in tunnels. Not these tunnels but others like them. Charlie was very good at digging.”
“Who’s Charlie?”
“It’s what we called them … the enemy. We called them other names too. But a lot of the time it was Charlie.”
“So why are we here if you’re not even going in there?”
“I don’t need to go down there.”
I shook my head. “Well, I don’t need to go down there either. I thought this was about you. You’re the one who was in the war.”
“This is about us. I’ve been in tunnels, you haven’t. You better get going. Your tour guide is leaving.”
I wanted to tell him this was crap, but there were a lot of people around, and I didn’t want to look like the pain-in-the-ass teenager. I shook my head again and turned to follow the tour guide and about ten people who were in our group.
The guide didn’t say much at first, just walked off and signalled for us to follow her. She looked like she was having a bad day.
There were maybe twelve of us. We hadn’t gone far when suddenly this guy popped out of the ground right in front of us. He was wearing a black army shirt that looked like it came from Value Village and a floppy green bush hat. He was holding the hatch over his head like one of those sewer covers and grinning like crazy at us. He made his fingers in the shape of a gun.
“Bang, bang, you all dead now,” he said, still grinning.
I could see what he was saying. A bunch of soldiers walking along and suddenly, this guy is there with a machine gun or a grenade or something and yeah, everybody’s dead.
Everyone snapped pictures like crazy for a couple of minutes. Everyone but me. I wasn’t going to waste film on a guy doing an impersonation of a jack-in-the-box and wearing cheap black pajamas. We walked on and eventually came to an exhibit. I’ve been to a few museums on field trips and stuff, but I’d never seen an exhibit like this one.
The whole exhibit was booby traps that the Viet Cong used to kill guys. The worst one for me was this pit that was covered over just like the hole the guy had come out of. When the thatch cover was pulled away from over top of the pit, there were all these sharp bamboo stakes at the bottom, pointing up.
I tried to imagine what it would be like to be walking along and falling into one of those pits. I had this picture in my mind of these soldiers looking down into the pit where one of their buddies was spread out with those stakes all through him. Trying to think of a way to help him. To get him out.
Something I’d noticed: whenever you saw anything about American war crimes, it was all those rotten bastards. But anybody who ran into one of the booby traps I saw displayed there was going to die a pretty horrible death. Cruel. But this exhibit was like a celebration. Like somebody had won the Stanley Cup. We showed ’em. I guess they did.
I was glad we didn’t spend a lot of time at that exhibit. Next we got to go down into one section of the tunnels