Dukkha Reverb. Loren W. Christensen
I couldn’t begin to imagine. His smile softens it.
“Thank you, sir,” he says, his English accented. “Are you enjoying your flight?” He’s wearing a wooden bead bracelet, Buddha beads, I think.
“Yes. It’s a long one, isn’t it?”
He sighs. “Ah, yes. But I do not like to complain. I make the trip many times to see my brother in Hanoi. You go Vietnam or Japan?”
“I’m going to see my family in Saigon.” Wow, that came out before I could censor it. It’s true but it still sounds strange.
He frowns. Guess he thinks so too.
A heavyset Caucasian woman wearing all black excuses herself as she sidesteps behind my new friend and me. She struggles with the folding door for a moment before squeezing herself in, pulling it shut behind her.
“Oh, so sorry,” the man says, covering his hand with his palm. “Did you have to piss very, very bad?”
I chuckle. “I can wait, thanks.”
“Okay, good. Maybe she won’t sit too long.”
I shrug without saying anything since the woman can probably hear through the door.
The man half nods, half bows. “Maybe I see you in Vietnam.”
“Yes, I hope so. Enjoy the long flight.”
He shoots me a salute and heads up the aisle.
A moment later, the woman pushes open the door, glares at me, and slides her ample frame through the opening. I give her a big smile, happy that she didn’t sit there too long.
After a seven-hour nap, a Disney movie, and few more chats with Bobby, we landed in Tokyo for an hour, just long enough for us to grab a bento box for—I don’t know if it was for breakfast, lunch, or dinner—and wash up a little in the restroom. Our last plane is Cathay Pacific Airways, my favorite so far of the three. Bobby was seated a couple rows forward, but he managed to charm the guy next to me into switching seats. It was the boy’s turn to sleep this time, which he’s been doing for the past few hours.
Although I’m enjoying the break from all his questions, the cabin is anything but quiet; the closer we get to Vietnam the louder and more excited the chatter throughout the plane.
Most of the Japanese got off in Tokyo and were replaced by Vietnamese, who now make up about ninety-nine percent of the passengers. Some are probably returning home from abroad and others, like my restroom pal, are likely American citizens making a routine trip to the motherland. I wonder if there might be some on board who haven’t been home since fleeing the invasion by the North in the seventies. If so, I can’t imagine their emotions.
What’s Bobby’s story? I like to think that I can read people but the boy is a challenge. At first, he came across as a charming kid with an abundance of enthusiasm for the martial arts. Then a couple of times I thought he might be working in some capacity for Lai Van Tan and trying to uncover something useful about me and my family. Curiously, he became subdued and evasive when I asked about his parents, and he remained so during the last leg of the flight into Tokyo, and throughout the hour-long layover.
Once we were airborne, flight attendants handed out Arrival/ Departure Cards and Baggage Declaration forms to everyone. The boy helped me with mine and said that I shouldn’t lie about anything because the customs police could be pretty hard. He said they are harder on Vietnamese Americans than on Caucasian Americans, but it’s still important to be honest so as not to give them any reason to harass. Once we completed them, he twisted in his seat and rested the side of his head on the seatback, his face toward me. I had a fleeting thought that he wanted to keep me in his company as he went to sleep. He conked out in a minute and has yet to awaken six hours later. Cute kid, but what’s going on behind that cherubic face?
In the last few minutes, the rising sun has splashed the ocean of clouds with orange, blue, red, and some other colors that only a poet could describe.
I look for a hint of Vietnam in the distance but there are only more clouds and blue. When I was a rookie in uniform, one of my first training coaches was a Vietnam vet. Elmer didn’t talk about it much, and whenever the topic did come up his entire body, especially his face, became so tight that he looked as if his skin might rip open. He did open up a little once and told me about his initial arrival into the country.
Elmer and I were on a stakeout in the middle of the night, sitting in our car and watching the front door of a house half a block down the street. We sat mostly in silence for a couple of hours when out of the blue he just started talking about it.
“We were on our way to Nam. It was nighttime,” he said. “About two in the morning, like now. After the captain announced over the PA that we were entering Vietnam airspace, he shut all the lights off in the cabin, except along the floor. You know, so the VC down below couldn’t see us. It was real spooky in there, and there wasn’t a peep out of any of the troops. Down below we could see an occasional flash outline the mountains. Artillery. I remember how my hands trembled… no, not trembled, they were shaking like crazy, so were my legs, and my head. As we got lower and lower, I could see tracer rounds down below on the ground. Not coming up at us. Moving parallel with us. A firefight.
“I wasn’t the only shaky kid. At one point, someone way in the back of the plane screamed, ‘I ain’t getting fuckin’ off. No way in hell am I getting fuckin’ off the plane.’ Someone yelled at him to shut up and he did. Then the guy next to me started throwing up. He had been all about killing VC all the way over, but when we started descending he threw up. Not in a bag. Down on his chest and lap. He just puked and sat there looking across me toward the window, like he didn’t know he was doing it.
“When the plane was descending, there was a sudden, metallic clattering throughout the aircraft. When all of us fresh-faced, wide-eyed, and scared-shitless boys looked around, we could see a long line of inch-wide holes along the aisle floor next to the small lights. The plane was still too high to hear the weapon that did it, and we didn’t see tracer rounds coming up from the ground, but there was no doubt that all those quarter-sized holes were from big rounds that had punched through the bottom of the plane, passed through all the luggage and structural members in the belly of the plane, and ripped through the floor. Once we landed and the lights were turned on we could see holes in the ceiling where the rounds exited.”
Then Elmer let out a bark of laughter, “It would have been a real pain in the butt if those metal-piercing rounds had punched up through the floor a couple of feet to the right or left of the aisle and had gone through the occupied seats.”
“Ladies and gentleman, please make sure your tables are up and your seats are in the upright…”
The announcement brings me out of my reverie. I can see the ground now, flat, large squares and rectangles of green. Rice paddies? Surreal. Two months ago, I had been planning another trip to Maui. Man, my life would make a great amusement park ride, except some of those hills and curves haven’t been all that amusing.
“Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” I say, giving Bobby’s shoulder a nudge. He’s still facing me, not having moved an inch in hours—ahh, to sleep like that again… “Time to wake up and meet the Land of the Rising Dragon.”
He stirs and opens his eyes. “We’re landing?”
“Either that or we’re crashing veeeery slowly.”
He sits up. “Wow, I slept the whole time.” He leans over me and peers out the little window at the panorama of green earth, the brown snaking rivers, and a sprawling city that grows larger as we near the runway.
“Amazing,” I say. “I saw something on the History Channel about a Viet Cong attack on Tan Son Nhat Airport in the late sixties. The footage showed lots of explosions, sputtering small arms fire, and spirals of black smoke. Look. There’s Tan Son Nhat’s runway, and beyond