From Publishers Weekly
Webb's cultural and political portrayal of Vietnam 25 years after the war's end is delivered with such bold strokes and magical detail that it really doesn't matter that the plot itself is relegated to the backseat. This is a highly personal and empathetic look at today's Vietnam, a land of misery and inequity, yet one still vibrantly alive. The story follows the experiences of Brandon Condley, an ex-Marine whose job it is to find missing American soldiers, dead or alive. Condley is trying to track down Theodore Deville, an army grunt who not only deserted his unit in 1969 and killed a fellow serviceman, but then joined the ranks of the enemy. Condley is convinced Deville is still alive, operating somewhere in southeast Asia's underground economy. Webb introduces a rich cast of supporting characters as Condley pursues his quarry across Vietnam, Australia, the former Soviet Union and Thailand. Among the most delicately etched is Dzung, a former South Vietnamese officer now relegated, like thousands of others on the losing side, to a menial station in life, one that he and his family have no hope of escaping. Such characters, as well as the highly textured mood and atmosphere that Webb creates, tend to further eclipse the main narrative and shift the focus to the moral consequences and social fallout of the war. This detailed, lovingly drawn portrait of Vietnam reveals a sad, tortured country that has never recovered from the horrifying events of a quarter-century ago. Major print and radio advertising. (Sept. 4)Forecast: Webb (Fields of Fire) is no stranger to the bestseller lists; endorsements from heavy hitters like Sen. John McCain will help put him there once again.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.From Library Journal
Some of the memories were horrible. A few of them were good. But all of them had meaning. Thus begins a gripping tale of mystery and intrigue set in present-day Vietnam. The center of this fine novel is the search for two army deserters who led U.S. troops into ambush and then hid in North Vietnam after the hostilities ceased. Like the best of such tales, however, the novel offers more than the resolution of a mystery: it also tells a poignant story of a love that might have been and of friendship across partisan lines and is rich with the sounds and smells of its foreign setting. Former Secretary of the Navy and Assistant Secretary of Defense Webb (also the author of the best-selling Fields of Fire and other novels) has used his familiarity with the Far East to evoke the tangled net of loyalties and enmities bequeathed to a troubled country by a savage history of conflict. This exceptionally well-written book tells a gripping tale; enthusiastically recommended.
-David Keymer, Zayed Univ., Dubai
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
-David Keymer, Zayed Univ., Dubai
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
At the end of the Vietnam War, the victors threw a bamboo curtain around South Vietnam. It remained essentially closed to the rest of the world for 15 years while government, society, and culture were recast--and those who fought on the losing side were "reeducated." In Webb's sixth novel, the reopening of Vietnam allows Brandon Condley to return to the steamy, impoverished, maddeningly contradictory country he came to love while a Marine officer. He now works as a liaison between the Vietnamese government and the U.S. agency attempting to recover and identify the remains of MIAs. A body unearthed in a tiny highland village puts Condley on the 34yearold trail of a deserter who led a deadly ambush of his platoon. Finding and killing that traitor becomes Condley's reason for being. This gripping tale is a page-turner, but it is also much more: a compelling, insightful, and beautiful portrait of a fascinating place, as well as a moving saga of revenge, love, loyalty, honor, and, ultimately, redemption. Despite its tragic themes, the novel is an affirmation of life. Thomas Gaughan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
“Webb’s cultural and political portrayal of Vietnam 25 years after the war’s end is delivered with such bold strokes and magical detail.... This is a highly personal and empathetic look at today’s Vietnam.... This detailed, lovingly drawn portrait of Vietnam reveals a sad, tortured country that has never recovered from the horrifying events of a quarter-century ago.”
— Publishers Weekly
“James Webb’s new novel paints a portrait of a modern Vietnam charged with hopes for the future but haunted by the ghosts of its war-torn past. It captures well the lingering scars of the war, and exposes the tension between the dynamism of a new generation and the invisible bondage of an older generation for whom wartime allegiances, and animosities, are rendered no less vivid by the passage of time. A novel of revenge and redemption that tells us much about both where Vietnam is headed and where it has been.”
— Senator John McCain
“A masterpiece, one of the most poignant and powerful novels of this generation ... Lost Soldiers is one of those rare books that is not only a beautifully realized literary triumph but also a crackling good page-turner. Its seamless blend of mystery and intrigue, with its subtle truths of history and culture and its stories of love and honor played out by unforgettable characters, is nothing short of miraculous. Jim Webb did not set out to write a healing book, but that is what he has done. I suspect Lost Soldiers can bring my country together after years of debate and division — and it took a warrior to write it. You will come away a different person after you’ve read it.”
— Walter Anderson, Chairman and Publisher, Parade Magazine
Acclaim for the novels of James Webb:
Fields of Fire
“In my opinion, the finest of the Vietnam novels.”
— Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up
“In swift, flexible prose that does everything he asks of it, Webb gives us an extraordinary range of acutely observed people.... Fields of Fire is a stunner.”
— Newsweek
“Few writers since Stephen Crane have portrayed men at war with such a ring of steely truth.”
— The Houston Post
“A novel of such fullness and impact, one is tempted to compare it with Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.”
— The Oregonian
The Emperor’s General
“Powerfully compelling and moving ... historical fiction of a high order ... hypnotic storytelling ... mesmerizing.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“With The Emperor’s General, Jim Webb cements his reputation as an extraordinarily gifted storyteller. He excels in mining the rich veins of history to invest his fiction with the drama of great events.... An engrossing, moving, and splendid book.”
— Senator John McCain
“Webb writes history with an urgency and clarity that makes it pop from the page.”
— The Washington Post Book World
From the Hardcover edition.
— Publishers Weekly
“James Webb’s new novel paints a portrait of a modern Vietnam charged with hopes for the future but haunted by the ghosts of its war-torn past. It captures well the lingering scars of the war, and exposes the tension between the dynamism of a new generation and the invisible bondage of an older generation for whom wartime allegiances, and animosities, are rendered no less vivid by the passage of time. A novel of revenge and redemption that tells us much about both where Vietnam is headed and where it has been.”
— Senator John McCain
“A masterpiece, one of the most poignant and powerful novels of this generation ... Lost Soldiers is one of those rare books that is not only a beautifully realized literary triumph but also a crackling good page-turner. Its seamless blend of mystery and intrigue, with its subtle truths of history and culture and its stories of love and honor played out by unforgettable characters, is nothing short of miraculous. Jim Webb did not set out to write a healing book, but that is what he has done. I suspect Lost Soldiers can bring my country together after years of debate and division — and it took a warrior to write it. You will come away a different person after you’ve read it.”
— Walter Anderson, Chairman and Publisher, Parade Magazine
Acclaim for the novels of James Webb:
Fields of Fire
“In my opinion, the finest of the Vietnam novels.”
— Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up
“In swift, flexible prose that does everything he asks of it, Webb gives us an extraordinary range of acutely observed people.... Fields of Fire is a stunner.”
— Newsweek
“Few writers since Stephen Crane have portrayed men at war with such a ring of steely truth.”
— The Houston Post
“A novel of such fullness and impact, one is tempted to compare it with Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.”
— The Oregonian
The Emperor’s General
“Powerfully compelling and moving ... historical fiction of a high order ... hypnotic storytelling ... mesmerizing.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“With The Emperor’s General, Jim Webb cements his reputation as an extraordinarily gifted storyteller. He excels in mining the rich veins of history to invest his fiction with the drama of great events.... An engrossing, moving, and splendid book.”
— Senator John McCain
“Webb writes history with an urgency and clarity that makes it pop from the page.”
— The Washington Post Book World
From the Hardcover edition.
Book Description
Once in a great while there comes a novel of such emotional impact and acute insight that it forever changes the way a reader sees a nation or an era. Writing with an unerring sense of suspense and of history experienced firsthand, James Webb takes us on a myth-shattering cultural odyssey deep into the heart of contemporary Vietnam, with a riveting thriller that tells a love story — love for those who perished, for family and friends, and between a soldier and the land where he had always been ready to die.
Brandon Condley survived five years of combat as a U.S. Marine only to lose the woman he loved to an enemy assassin. Now he is back in Vietnam, working to recover the remains of unknown American soldiers. On a routine mission, Condley finds a body that doesn’t match its dog tags — a body that propels him into a vortex of violence and intrigue where past and present become one.
As the mystery of the dead man unravels, a link is revealed to two well-known killers: “Salt and Pepper,” a pair of treasonous Americans who led a deadly Viet Cong ambush against Condley’s own men. Galvanized by a fresh trail to these long-lost deserters, Condley has finally found a purpose: Under the auspices of his government job, he is going to hunt down the traitors. On his own, he is going to kill them.
Condley’s hunt cannot be kept secret from his former enemies, or his friends. And in the shadows that linger from Vietnam’s long season of darkness and terror, he has no way of knowing which side is more dangerous.
Surrounding him is an unforgettable cast of characters: Dzung, Condley’s closest friend, a South Vietnamese war hero who might have led his country if his side had won the war, now reduced to driving a cyclo as his family starves in Saigon’s District Four. Colonel Pham, a battle-hardened Viet Cong soldier who lost three children to American bombs. Manh, a cutthroat Interior Ministry official who blackmails Dzung into a mission of murder. The Russian soldier Anatolie Petrushinsky, who left his soul in Vietnam as his empire collapsed around him. And the beautiful Van, Colonel Pham’s daughter, who spurns the scars of war as she pursues her dreams of freedom.
As Condley stalks his elusive prey across old battlefields and throughout Eurasia, returning always to the brooding streets of Saigon, his mission — and the odds of his surviving it — grow more precarious with each step he takes toward the truth.
Lost Soldiers captures the Vietnam of past and present — its beauty and squalor, its politics and people. Propelled by a page-turning mystery, shot through with adventure and intrigue, it irrevocably transforms our view of that haunted land and brings us as complete an understanding as we will ever have of what happened after the war — and why. No writer today is more qualified to take us into that world than James Webb.
From the Hardcover edition.
Brandon Condley survived five years of combat as a U.S. Marine only to lose the woman he loved to an enemy assassin. Now he is back in Vietnam, working to recover the remains of unknown American soldiers. On a routine mission, Condley finds a body that doesn’t match its dog tags — a body that propels him into a vortex of violence and intrigue where past and present become one.
As the mystery of the dead man unravels, a link is revealed to two well-known killers: “Salt and Pepper,” a pair of treasonous Americans who led a deadly Viet Cong ambush against Condley’s own men. Galvanized by a fresh trail to these long-lost deserters, Condley has finally found a purpose: Under the auspices of his government job, he is going to hunt down the traitors. On his own, he is going to kill them.
Condley’s hunt cannot be kept secret from his former enemies, or his friends. And in the shadows that linger from Vietnam’s long season of darkness and terror, he has no way of knowing which side is more dangerous.
Surrounding him is an unforgettable cast of characters: Dzung, Condley’s closest friend, a South Vietnamese war hero who might have led his country if his side had won the war, now reduced to driving a cyclo as his family starves in Saigon’s District Four. Colonel Pham, a battle-hardened Viet Cong soldier who lost three children to American bombs. Manh, a cutthroat Interior Ministry official who blackmails Dzung into a mission of murder. The Russian soldier Anatolie Petrushinsky, who left his soul in Vietnam as his empire collapsed around him. And the beautiful Van, Colonel Pham’s daughter, who spurns the scars of war as she pursues her dreams of freedom.
As Condley stalks his elusive prey across old battlefields and throughout Eurasia, returning always to the brooding streets of Saigon, his mission — and the odds of his surviving it — grow more precarious with each step he takes toward the truth.
Lost Soldiers captures the Vietnam of past and present — its beauty and squalor, its politics and people. Propelled by a page-turning mystery, shot through with adventure and intrigue, it irrevocably transforms our view of that haunted land and brings us as complete an understanding as we will ever have of what happened after the war — and why. No writer today is more qualified to take us into that world than James Webb.
From the Hardcover edition.
From the Back Cover
“Webb’s cultural and political portrayal of Vietnam 25 years after the war’s end is delivered with such bold strokes and magical detail.... This is a highly personal and empathetic look at today’s Vietnam.... This detailed, lovingly drawn portrait of Vietnam reveals a sad, tortured country that has never recovered from the horrifying events of a quarter-century ago.”
— Publishers Weekly
“James Webb’s new novel paints a portrait of a modern Vietnam charged with hopes for the future but haunted by the ghosts of its war-torn past. It captures well the lingering scars of the war, and exposes the tension between the dynamism of a new generation and the invisible bondage of an older generation for whom wartime allegiances, and animosities, are rendered no less vivid by the passage of time. A novel of revenge and redemption that tells us much about both where Vietnam is headed and where it has been.”
— Senator John McCain
“A masterpiece, one of the most poignant and powerful novels of this generation ... Lost Soldiers is one of those rare books that is not only a beautifully realized literary triumph but also a crackling good page-turner. Its seamless blend of mystery and intrigue, with its subtle truths of history and culture and its stories of love and honor played out by unforgettable characters, is nothing short of miraculous. Jim Webb did not set out to write a healing book, but that is what he has done. I suspect Lost Soldiers can bring my country together after years of debate and division — and it took a warrior to write it. You will come away a different person after you’ve read it.”
— Walter Anderson, Chairman and Publisher, Parade Magazine
Acclaim for the novels of James Webb:
Fields of Fire
“In my opinion, the finest of the Vietnam novels.”
— Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up
“In swift, flexible prose that does everything he asks of it, Webb gives us an extraordinary range of acutely observed people.... Fields of Fire is a stunner.”
— Newsweek
“Few writers since Stephen Crane have portrayed men at war with such a ring of steely truth.”
— The Houston Post
“A novel of such fullness and impact, one is tempted to compare it with Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.”
— The Oregonian
The Emperor’s General
“Powerfully compelling and moving ... historical fiction of a high order ... hypnotic storytelling ... mesmerizing.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“With The Emperor’s General, Jim Webb cements his reputation as an extraordinarily gifted storyteller. He excels in mining the rich veins of history to invest his fiction with the drama of great events.... An engrossing, moving, and splendid book.”
— Senator John McCain
“Webb writes history with an urgency and clarity that makes it pop from the page.”
— The Washington Post Book World
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
— Publishers Weekly
“James Webb’s new novel paints a portrait of a modern Vietnam charged with hopes for the future but haunted by the ghosts of its war-torn past. It captures well the lingering scars of the war, and exposes the tension between the dynamism of a new generation and the invisible bondage of an older generation for whom wartime allegiances, and animosities, are rendered no less vivid by the passage of time. A novel of revenge and redemption that tells us much about both where Vietnam is headed and where it has been.”
— Senator John McCain
“A masterpiece, one of the most poignant and powerful novels of this generation ... Lost Soldiers is one of those rare books that is not only a beautifully realized literary triumph but also a crackling good page-turner. Its seamless blend of mystery and intrigue, with its subtle truths of history and culture and its stories of love and honor played out by unforgettable characters, is nothing short of miraculous. Jim Webb did not set out to write a healing book, but that is what he has done. I suspect Lost Soldiers can bring my country together after years of debate and division — and it took a warrior to write it. You will come away a different person after you’ve read it.”
— Walter Anderson, Chairman and Publisher, Parade Magazine
Acclaim for the novels of James Webb:
Fields of Fire
“In my opinion, the finest of the Vietnam novels.”
— Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up
“In swift, flexible prose that does everything he asks of it, Webb gives us an extraordinary range of acutely observed people.... Fields of Fire is a stunner.”
— Newsweek
“Few writers since Stephen Crane have portrayed men at war with such a ring of steely truth.”
— The Houston Post
“A novel of such fullness and impact, one is tempted to compare it with Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.”
— The Oregonian
The Emperor’s General
“Powerfully compelling and moving ... historical fiction of a high order ... hypnotic storytelling ... mesmerizing.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“With The Emperor’s General, Jim Webb cements his reputation as an extraordinarily gifted storyteller. He excels in mining the rich veins of history to invest his fiction with the drama of great events.... An engrossing, moving, and splendid book.”
— Senator John McCain
“Webb writes history with an urgency and clarity that makes it pop from the page.”
— The Washington Post Book World
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
James Webb, who has worked and traveled in Vietnam extensively since 1991, was one of the most highly decorated combat Marines of the Vietnam War. An attorney and Emmy Award-winning journalist, he has served as Secretary of the Navy, Assistant Secretary of Defense, and full committee counsel to the U.S. Congress. He lives in Virginia, where he has authored five critically acclaimed, bestselling novels.
From the Hardcover edition.
From the Hardcover edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Quang Nam Province, Viet Nam
“Typhoon,” said Brandon Condley, his hard gray eyes expertly searching the bruised horizon.
It had been drizzling all morning, which was no surprise because actually it had been drizzling for weeks. But off to the east the real deal was rolling in from the South China Sea, having just wreaked havoc in the northern islands of the Philippines. Condley zipped his rain jacket all the way up underneath his throat as if to emphasize the coming storm, then pulled his worn baseball cap lower over his eyes. And finally, just to make the point that he did not really care, he laughed.
“Hey, Professor, Buddha’s pissed. Welcome to the real Viet Nam!”
Hanson Muir stood like a dreamer ten feet in front of him, near the prow of the narrow wooden boat. The boat was struggling against the angry current of the chalky, swollen Thu Bon River, its two-cylinder motor putting like a loud lawn mower. Its bow yawed this way and that, smacking against odd flotsam and swirling eddies. The monsoon had come to central Viet Nam five weeks before. It had dropped a hundred inches of rain in two weeks and then settled into an intermittent drizzle that would last for months. The fog-shrouded, unending mountains to the west were still weeping tons of water every hour from it. The rivers and streams had outgrown their banks. The endless terraces of rice paddies that filled the valleys leading eastward to the sea were now hidden under vast lakes of rainwater, often indistinguishable from the rivers or even the sea itself. And along the tree-choked knolls and ridges in the middle of the paddies, hundreds of villages sat serenely above the water, isolated like ancient little islands.
“How much further, Brandon?”
Muir’s posed stance made Condley laugh yet again. The brilliant scientist seemed to be imagining himself as a Viking marauder with his puffed chest and raised chin, one hand stroking his beard as the other held on to a railing. Hearing Condley laugh, he turned and caught the smaller man’s amused expression.
“Having your fun, are you?”
“You look ridiculous, Professor.”
“And it’ll be even funnier if we drown, I suppose?”
“You won’t drown. You’re too fat to sink.”
“I’m surveying the riverbanks,” said Hanson defensively. “In the event I am required to swim ashore.”
Condley laughed again. He knew this river. “I wouldn’t give a nickel for you making it to shore if this boat splits in two.”
“I thought you said I wouldn’t drown.”
“That doesn’t mean I think you can swim.”
“Your sense of humor leaves me weak.”
“Then don’t lose your grip, there.”
Condley walked carefully toward the stern and caught the attention of the boat’s owner. The tight-muscled little man, whose name was Tuan, was intently working the till of his creaky wooden craft while standing barefoot in a gathering pool of water. Three hours before, Tuan had seemed incurably happy when these two Americans had offered him forty dollars to take them upriver to the village of Ninh Phuoc and back. Now he had lost his smile. His narrow eyes squinted as he watched the clogged current. He was drenched and shivering, his rain jacket and shorts soaked all the way through.
“Bao,” said Condley, using the Vietnamese word for typhoon and pointing again toward the distant sea. “Sap den! Phai khong?”
Tuan glanced quickly up into the sky, then focused back on the dangers of the river. He tilted the rudder away from a swiftly moving log and then narrowly dodged the bloated carcass of a dead pig. “Khong co sao,” he answered. Condley could tell that a typhoon would never deter Tuan. Forty dollars was the equivalent of a month’s wages, and the little boatmaster had already planned on how he was going to spend it. “Di Ninh Phuoc di ve Danang, bon muoi do-lah, duoc, duoc.”
“What did he say?” asked Hanson Muir.
“Roughly, he said, ‘So fucking what?’ The rain doesn’t matter. He wants the money. He’s a tough little bastard, I told you that.”
“No, let’s put this in character, Brandon. If you hired him, he’s got to be the toughest little bastard in all of central Viet Nam, right? And by the time we finish this trip he’ll have become a legend.”
“He’s already a legend, just for taking us,” said Condley, secretly enjoying Muir’s unease. “If we finish the trip, they’ll erect a shrine in his honor.”
Muir shrugged, nervously looking at the sky. “I take your point about the storm. Tell him we’ll give him the money anyway. He didn’t even look up at that cloud bank, you know.”
“He was born here. He can smell a typhoon from fifty miles away.” Condley waved the boatmaster on, laughing grimly. He loved the nguoi trungs, as they called the combative, tough people from Viet Nam’s central mountain region. “The fucker’s going to die for forty bucks.”
“I told you, give him the money.”
“Well, then you’ve got to deal with his pride. He’s a nguoi trung, Professor. He’ll never take a handout.” Condley nudged Muir. “Are you sure you want to keep going?”
From the look on his flabby moon of a face, it was clear that Hanson Muir was not sure at all. The boat hit a half-submerged log, jarring them and knocking Muir sideways. The heavyset anthropologist held nervously to the boat railing and pushed his dirty eyeglasses back up his nose. Finally he sighed. “We’re almost there, aren’t we? If we return to Da Nang we’ve got to come back out here and do it all over again.”
“If we keep going and then get back to Da Nang after the typhoon hits, we won’t get out. The plane from Sai Gon won’t even come in there. The entire airport area will be underwater. And if we get stuck in Ninh Phuoc during a typhoon, we might end up staying there till spring. The way the Taiwanese have been strip-logging up in those mountains, the root systems are almost gone. This whole region could become one giant mud slide.”
Muir forced a grin, masking his fear. “I’ve always been tempted to take a Vietnamese wife.”
“Trust me, you’re not going to feel like settling down in Ninh Phuoc. If you want a wife, I’ll find you one in Sai Gon.”
“I was teasing. My present wife would object rather violently to being replaced, you know.”
“No need for that,” shrugged Condley. “The Vietnamese have always been polygamous. You can have as many wives as you can afford.”
“Now you’re teasing me.”
“Actually, I’m not.”
Muir rolled his eyes, obviously thinking of a retort, then let the notion go. Sai Gon was a long way away, but Ninh Phuoc was just up the river. If they could make it up the river. He gave Condley a questioning look. “You haven’t really told me what to do or say when we get there.”
“It depends on what they’ve got, Professor. If it’s real, you can do your thing. If it’s chitchat, just be nice. Make the people feel important.”
“I’m a scientist. I’m not supposed to be nice.”
Another dead pig floated past, and then off next to the shore a dead villager, spread-eagled and bloated, spinning in the rapid current. Muir swallowed hard, watching the body twirl past them. Condley nudged him, snapping him out of it. “When we get there, just watch me. Smile when I smile. Eat the rice when I eat the rice. Drink the tea when I drink the tea. Smoke the cigarette when they give you one.”
“I don’t smoke.”
“You do now.”
Condley’s craggy face twinkled with secret happiness as the boat fought its way upriver. His shoes were squishy from the water in the boat and his fingers were crinkly from the rain. He feared the raw, surging power of Song Thu Bon, but at the same time he felt oddly content. The chalky river that ran from the mountains in Laos all the way to the sea just south of Da Nang was as comforting as an old friend. He had memories along its banks. Some of the memories were horrible. A few of them were even good. But all of them had meaning. And what was life if it brought you no meaning?
Muir had decided to ignore him. The brilliant academic had turned away from him now, studying the flotsam as if history itself were slapping and bumping along the gunwales. The old boat shuddered against the current, causing its boards to creak. Muir shifted his gaze from the river to the dangerous beauty of the mountains that now rose up fierce and shrouded on all sides. “Do you know where we are?”
Condley pulled out an old American tactical map he had kept from the war, carefully unfolding it. As a Marine thirty years before, he had laminated the map to protect it from the rains. It still bore black and red stains along its folds from where he had once used grease pencils to mark checkpoints for patrols and on-call targets for artillery. Turning it this way and that, he started matching the map to terrain features that rose up near the banks of the river. This was his area. He had walked every inch of it in another life, and neither he nor it had changed a whole lot since he’d left. Finally he held his finger on the map, showing Muir where they were.
“We’re right here, Professor. That mountain over there is Nui Son Su. It was one of our key outposts on the edge of the Fifth Marines regimental headquarters in An Hoa. An Hoa is jus...
“Typhoon,” said Brandon Condley, his hard gray eyes expertly searching the bruised horizon.
It had been drizzling all morning, which was no surprise because actually it had been drizzling for weeks. But off to the east the real deal was rolling in from the South China Sea, having just wreaked havoc in the northern islands of the Philippines. Condley zipped his rain jacket all the way up underneath his throat as if to emphasize the coming storm, then pulled his worn baseball cap lower over his eyes. And finally, just to make the point that he did not really care, he laughed.
“Hey, Professor, Buddha’s pissed. Welcome to the real Viet Nam!”
Hanson Muir stood like a dreamer ten feet in front of him, near the prow of the narrow wooden boat. The boat was struggling against the angry current of the chalky, swollen Thu Bon River, its two-cylinder motor putting like a loud lawn mower. Its bow yawed this way and that, smacking against odd flotsam and swirling eddies. The monsoon had come to central Viet Nam five weeks before. It had dropped a hundred inches of rain in two weeks and then settled into an intermittent drizzle that would last for months. The fog-shrouded, unending mountains to the west were still weeping tons of water every hour from it. The rivers and streams had outgrown their banks. The endless terraces of rice paddies that filled the valleys leading eastward to the sea were now hidden under vast lakes of rainwater, often indistinguishable from the rivers or even the sea itself. And along the tree-choked knolls and ridges in the middle of the paddies, hundreds of villages sat serenely above the water, isolated like ancient little islands.
“How much further, Brandon?”
Muir’s posed stance made Condley laugh yet again. The brilliant scientist seemed to be imagining himself as a Viking marauder with his puffed chest and raised chin, one hand stroking his beard as the other held on to a railing. Hearing Condley laugh, he turned and caught the smaller man’s amused expression.
“Having your fun, are you?”
“You look ridiculous, Professor.”
“And it’ll be even funnier if we drown, I suppose?”
“You won’t drown. You’re too fat to sink.”
“I’m surveying the riverbanks,” said Hanson defensively. “In the event I am required to swim ashore.”
Condley laughed again. He knew this river. “I wouldn’t give a nickel for you making it to shore if this boat splits in two.”
“I thought you said I wouldn’t drown.”
“That doesn’t mean I think you can swim.”
“Your sense of humor leaves me weak.”
“Then don’t lose your grip, there.”
Condley walked carefully toward the stern and caught the attention of the boat’s owner. The tight-muscled little man, whose name was Tuan, was intently working the till of his creaky wooden craft while standing barefoot in a gathering pool of water. Three hours before, Tuan had seemed incurably happy when these two Americans had offered him forty dollars to take them upriver to the village of Ninh Phuoc and back. Now he had lost his smile. His narrow eyes squinted as he watched the clogged current. He was drenched and shivering, his rain jacket and shorts soaked all the way through.
“Bao,” said Condley, using the Vietnamese word for typhoon and pointing again toward the distant sea. “Sap den! Phai khong?”
Tuan glanced quickly up into the sky, then focused back on the dangers of the river. He tilted the rudder away from a swiftly moving log and then narrowly dodged the bloated carcass of a dead pig. “Khong co sao,” he answered. Condley could tell that a typhoon would never deter Tuan. Forty dollars was the equivalent of a month’s wages, and the little boatmaster had already planned on how he was going to spend it. “Di Ninh Phuoc di ve Danang, bon muoi do-lah, duoc, duoc.”
“What did he say?” asked Hanson Muir.
“Roughly, he said, ‘So fucking what?’ The rain doesn’t matter. He wants the money. He’s a tough little bastard, I told you that.”
“No, let’s put this in character, Brandon. If you hired him, he’s got to be the toughest little bastard in all of central Viet Nam, right? And by the time we finish this trip he’ll have become a legend.”
“He’s already a legend, just for taking us,” said Condley, secretly enjoying Muir’s unease. “If we finish the trip, they’ll erect a shrine in his honor.”
Muir shrugged, nervously looking at the sky. “I take your point about the storm. Tell him we’ll give him the money anyway. He didn’t even look up at that cloud bank, you know.”
“He was born here. He can smell a typhoon from fifty miles away.” Condley waved the boatmaster on, laughing grimly. He loved the nguoi trungs, as they called the combative, tough people from Viet Nam’s central mountain region. “The fucker’s going to die for forty bucks.”
“I told you, give him the money.”
“Well, then you’ve got to deal with his pride. He’s a nguoi trung, Professor. He’ll never take a handout.” Condley nudged Muir. “Are you sure you want to keep going?”
From the look on his flabby moon of a face, it was clear that Hanson Muir was not sure at all. The boat hit a half-submerged log, jarring them and knocking Muir sideways. The heavyset anthropologist held nervously to the boat railing and pushed his dirty eyeglasses back up his nose. Finally he sighed. “We’re almost there, aren’t we? If we return to Da Nang we’ve got to come back out here and do it all over again.”
“If we keep going and then get back to Da Nang after the typhoon hits, we won’t get out. The plane from Sai Gon won’t even come in there. The entire airport area will be underwater. And if we get stuck in Ninh Phuoc during a typhoon, we might end up staying there till spring. The way the Taiwanese have been strip-logging up in those mountains, the root systems are almost gone. This whole region could become one giant mud slide.”
Muir forced a grin, masking his fear. “I’ve always been tempted to take a Vietnamese wife.”
“Trust me, you’re not going to feel like settling down in Ninh Phuoc. If you want a wife, I’ll find you one in Sai Gon.”
“I was teasing. My present wife would object rather violently to being replaced, you know.”
“No need for that,” shrugged Condley. “The Vietnamese have always been polygamous. You can have as many wives as you can afford.”
“Now you’re teasing me.”
“Actually, I’m not.”
Muir rolled his eyes, obviously thinking of a retort, then let the notion go. Sai Gon was a long way away, but Ninh Phuoc was just up the river. If they could make it up the river. He gave Condley a questioning look. “You haven’t really told me what to do or say when we get there.”
“It depends on what they’ve got, Professor. If it’s real, you can do your thing. If it’s chitchat, just be nice. Make the people feel important.”
“I’m a scientist. I’m not supposed to be nice.”
Another dead pig floated past, and then off next to the shore a dead villager, spread-eagled and bloated, spinning in the rapid current. Muir swallowed hard, watching the body twirl past them. Condley nudged him, snapping him out of it. “When we get there, just watch me. Smile when I smile. Eat the rice when I eat the rice. Drink the tea when I drink the tea. Smoke the cigarette when they give you one.”
“I don’t smoke.”
“You do now.”
Condley’s craggy face twinkled with secret happiness as the boat fought its way upriver. His shoes were squishy from the water in the boat and his fingers were crinkly from the rain. He feared the raw, surging power of Song Thu Bon, but at the same time he felt oddly content. The chalky river that ran from the mountains in Laos all the way to the sea just south of Da Nang was as comforting as an old friend. He had memories along its banks. Some of the memories were horrible. A few of them were even good. But all of them had meaning. And what was life if it brought you no meaning?
Muir had decided to ignore him. The brilliant academic had turned away from him now, studying the flotsam as if history itself were slapping and bumping along the gunwales. The old boat shuddered against the current, causing its boards to creak. Muir shifted his gaze from the river to the dangerous beauty of the mountains that now rose up fierce and shrouded on all sides. “Do you know where we are?”
Condley pulled out an old American tactical map he had kept from the war, carefully unfolding it. As a Marine thirty years before, he had laminated the map to protect it from the rains. It still bore black and red stains along its folds from where he had once used grease pencils to mark checkpoints for patrols and on-call targets for artillery. Turning it this way and that, he started matching the map to terrain features that rose up near the banks of the river. This was his area. He had walked every inch of it in another life, and neither he nor it had changed a whole lot since he’d left. Finally he held his finger on the map, showing Muir where they were.
“We’re right here, Professor. That mountain over there is Nui Son Su. It was one of our key outposts on the edge of the Fifth Marines regimental headquarters in An Hoa. An Hoa is jus...
