Finding the Cross

Gerald A. Jennings
about 2550 words
c. 1995


FINDING THE CROSS
by

Gerald A. Jennings

The trip back to the Meyercord was the usual blur of filthy, crowded streets, loud with the mingled noise of man and machine common to cities everywhere. After six months in country, only the smells remained elusively alien, still able to occasionally penetrate my dogged indifference.
It was dusk; striped by the heavy security gates closed for the night, dim, spectral candlelight was beginning to flicker through the grimy windows of many of the numberless tiny shops as we passed. Trinh Minh The was still busy, but not as frantically so as at other times of the day. People were beginning to gather at the curbs and under awnings to share the fleeting communion of day’s end—the fellowship of a meal, a bit of gossip—any illusion of peace. Some were nearly lost in the shadows cast by a wall or a storefront, visible only as silhouettes or disembodied faces in the flare of a cigarette. Old women, curiously evocative of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath despite their race, squatted over curbside braziers deftly slicing vegetables and fish into pots of steaming rice. Their men huddled in circles nearby, talking in low voices. Occasional laughter seamed their wizened faces with wrinkles, exposing discolored teeth and gaps where teeth were not even a memory. One particularly ancient old man, a patriarch wrapped in an elaborate robe that looked too expensive for street wear, sat apart from the others, gazing at the sky. Only when he laughed with the others did I realize that his apparent otherworldly meditation was due to blindness. The sleek young men seemed to be the only ones still in a hurry, smoking, jostling, all too pantherishly Westernized. By contrast, the night-eyed young women, delicate, almost fragile-looking in their Ou Dhzais, seemed to be in no hurry, just intent on carefully and gracefully measuring each step. Some of them were bar girls; in a few minutes they would be on Tu Do telling new arrivals in country that they were numba one or numba ten, judgement depending upon whether or not the victims would buy them Saigon Tea. Wallets lighter, these innocents would find out soon enough that these girls might as well be nuns for all the good they would do them. Those drunk enough, or just horny enough, to attempt copping a feel would be heatedly denounced as numba ten thou and invited to leave.
We didn’t even rate a glance from most of the street people as our jeep bumped along over the ruts, weapons pointed at the sky. The rifles, presumably, were for Charlie. Charlie was in the crowd, of course, as we knew he always was, indistinguishable from anyone else. We were alert enough in a way, but fatalistic. The knowledge that Charlie was there was nothing new. You just had to accept that in the same way you accept that there are snakes in the woods and tornado weather in July. It was a poor substitute for bravery, but it beat the hell out of paranoia.
I was too dog-tired to care much anyway, even if Charlie came up and bit me in the ass. Six months down, six months to go. I knew that tomorrow would be just another sweltering hot, double-shift workday like the previous hundred seventy-two (according to my figmo calendar) that I would spend working at the hopeless task of trying to help make sense of the circle-jerk that was supposedly a major supply center. My ambitions at this point were limited; I wanted to sleep and wake up rested, and not too slimed with sweat. And a beer—I would drink it in my room. The bars were expensive and frustrating, and I had no intention of getting on that merry-go-round. There was a very busy whorehouse next door to the BOQ, but I didn’t want a good dose of what so many of the girls could give you in mockery of love.
The little restaurant that was part of the BOQ/hotel was on the ground floor in the rear of the building, which had been built by the French. I bought a cheeseburger that tasted of unripe soybeans. I ate mechanically, without appetite, wondering absently why I had bothered. To be doing something, I guessed. I bought my beer—wonderfully cool—and left.
The antique, ornate cage elevator always made me nervous, but it never failed despite often faltering in a heart-stopping manner. The building was a narrow wedge with a triangular courtyard on the ground floor that was open all the way to the sky twelve stories up. The interior hallways of the hotel were all visible from the elevator. I could see the meaty blond signal corps Captain who lived on the sixth floor leaning with one arm against the wall, talking to his smiling maid, coming on for all the world like some Joe Jock at the hop in hot pursuit of some pretty little gum-chewing freshman he was trying to lay. Still in there pitching, I mused. She had a little more to fill out a bra than most Vietnamese, and the poor bastard had been in country for nearly eighteen months. No wonder he couldn’t keep from drooling, no matter how slight the provocation. Sensory Deprivation.
The elevator stopped at the eighth floor, and I shuffled down the long corridor to my room taking the last few pulls on my beer on the way. Mercifully, my roommate was out. Lewis was okay, but more than a little dense, a butterbar just in country a month or so. Worked on the docks with the 4th TC.
The room was like a sauna, as I expected. Making a face full of sour self-pity, I clunked my empty bottle into the battered trashcan, turned on the big fan and stripped to my skivvies and threw myself onto the bunk without even turning down the poncho liner that served as a blanket. I noticed peevishly that my dirty fatigues were still in a heap in the corner. So the maid hadn’t been in today, either. The dizzy bitch. Ever since she had started balling the big black down the hall, she hadn’t been worth a shit. I made a mental note to complain to the CWO that managed the place.
Lewis came in, looking as tired and grubby as I had a few minutes before. I didn’t want to talk—a propensity for conversation being one of his nasty habits—but it was too late to pretend I was asleep. I dug a little deeper into the pillow and resigned myself, watching him strip and lay down. For a breathless moment I thought I might actually escape, but no such luck.
“Say, did you know tonight’s the night—the big new year Tet thing. Fireworks at midnight.”
Suddenly I discovered, tired as I was, I was even more bored. I couldn’t help showing some interest, turning my head toward him and half opening the eye not buried in the pillow.
“So?”
“So I’m gonna get up at midnight and go up and the roof and watch. Bucher says it’s really something.”
Bucher was the warrant who ran the hotel; he liked to brag that he had been in the ‘Nam since the Frogs left. His tough luck. He could have it.
“Farris?”
“Ummmm?”
“You want me to get you up?”
I grunted assent and went to sleep.



It was very cool as Vietnamese nights went, and I hesitated, considering going back to the room and changing into a long-sleeved shirt. In the end I shrugged it off; the temperature was high sixties-low seventies, and it was somehow oddly satisfying, a small act of independence, to refuse to admit being so acclimatized to this damned asian shithole. Back in the world, I reminded myself, this is like a pleasant spring evening, suitable for pizza, Strohs, and long-legged sorority girls. Six down, six to go.
Lewis caught up with me, fumbling sleepily with the buttons of his fatigues. We said nothing as we rang for the elevator, exchanging only a point-counterpoint of yawns.
I liked the roof. I went there often; it was a pleasant place, blessedly breezy and cool in the evenings. From the roof, filthy, overcrowded Saigon was beautiful, all its imperfections veiled by the gentle cosmetics of distance and darkness. The street lighting, extremely dim by Western standards, lent a sort of peace to the frantic city. There were a number of other people on the roof, smoking and conversing quietly, hands or elbows idle on the rib-high cement railing that enclosed the expanse. The stars were bright; impulsively, I went to the south rail, searching on the horizon for the Southern Cross. Astronomy had been a love of mine since I was a little boy, and I vaguely remembered from my voracious reading that the stars of the Southern Hemisphere would be visible from Vietnam. Either I had remembered wrongly, or the nightly low-lying mists blocked it from sight. I never saw it.
I gave up the search and lowered my gaze. The city was more brightly lit than usual; I picked out candles and festive crepe paper on the walls of shops and houses as far as I make out any detail. In a courtyard to my right, a hundred dizzy feet down, a tiny brown boy bent over something that commanded his total attention. Suddenly, he sprang from his squatting position and dropped what he had been holding. In the dim light, the series of impossibly rapid sparks of light, followed by tardy reports, were an oddly not unpleasant shock to my senses. Memories of bygone fourths came to mind—Dad and I in the back yard with a whole grocery sack full of ‘crackers. Below, the boy squatted on his heels once again, several feet from the small inferno he had created, blank-faced as if hypnotized or shocked into momentary idiocy by his handiwork.
It was a signal. All at once the night air was filled with a swelling roar, somehow the more powerful for being softened and subdued by distance. The city was alive with innumerable tiny firefly sparks extending to the limits of vision, like Cygnus or Lyra through a good pair of glasses on an evening in early fall. The noise was not so loud as to be uncomfortable, but loud enough to preclude easy conversation. Like the little boy, now vanished and forever anonymous, I blinked stupidly at the panorama, stunned by its magnitude. All the old and laughably romantic stereotypes I had ever harbored as a child about “the Orient” welled forth from memory and overwhelmed the toilet-bowl reality of the Vietnam I had come to know. I found myself accepting their higher reality with the simple but profound childish wisdom, that wisdom adults cast away so cavalierly and then, weeping and desperate, come to spend their whole lives trying to regain. THE DRAGON RISES. From some corny and forgettable old movie about wartime China; I tasted the reality of the fiction.
Beyond the dim outskirts of the city, whether in harmony with the celebration or dictated by the desperate pragmatism of combat, Puff the Magic Dragon rained violet-orange destruction, a river of fire from the heavens. Whatever its reason for being, it was achingly lovely, somehow harmonious and fitting. Individual ARVN grunts outside the city, lacking other fireworks, fired leisurely, awesomely beautiful and graceful arcs of tracered death into the air. I was transfixed, eyes rheumy and glazed like an addict’s.
It was a long time before I became aware of myself, alone on the roof. I don’t remember thinking about anything for that span of time, however long it may have been. I became aware that I had been gripping the railing so tightly that my wrists hurt and my knuckle joints were numb. Unhurried, I dropped my hands to my pockets and looked at the stars again, this time northward, eyes caressing the old, familiar constellations, laughing for some silly reason at my own surprise at finding them so low in the sky. I hesitated at the elevator door and searched once again for the Southern Cross, finally shrugging myself into an odd and unfamiliar sense of wellbeing when once again I was unable to find it.


I woke abruptly, not knowing at first where I was. With effort I took in each detail of the shadowy room, shifting my gaze from object to alien object, willing sense and proportion onto each in turn.
Lewis was standing in the french doors that led to the precarious aerie of the tiny balcony. In the moonlight, his body took on the hard grace and beauty of white marble. Outside there was an expectant silence. Somehow I found myself at his side. We listened, hearing the night punctuated by the hoarse, distant shouts of desperate men. Fear hung on their incoherent cries like a clammy fog.
We gazed down like Olympians onto the broad avenue that,
blocks down, passed the cathedral and the Presidential palace at the city’s heart. Obscure figures, men in uniform, scurried now and then through the pools of dim lamplight and back into the protective darkness.
A vehicle with slitted headlights raced down the street toward us—ARVN MPs. Abruptly, the ridiculous cherry light on its top began an indiscriminate red splashing, beaming idiot alarm for brief seconds before it shared the fate of the white mice driving it. The frame of the little machine was suddenly outlined in flame, as vivid as a Klee etching somehow made indelible in molten steel. A terrific concussion rocked the street; I saw four man-shadows outlined starkly in black in the heart of the inferno, arms outflung in reaction to a last blazing nanosecond of consciousness before the final dark. The silhouettes that had been men, with hopes and fears and loves, were so frail and wispy in the voracious fire I felt like weeping. But a strange detachment ruled me. I felt Lewis and I were doomed to stand there, frozen somehow like those pathetic relics, the Siberian mammoths, the first victims of some new ice age. I had a cold, distant, confused feeling of having been violated and demeaned which surfaced as an illogical but powerful resentment of the whole world for having intruded on the small death of my sleep. All of this might have consumed an immensity of time, but it didn’t. I acted quickly. From nowhere, like a benediction, came the memory of the cool stars, the fireworks, the sweet air. I could move and speak.
“Lewis, get your ass under the bed. Here’s your helmet.”
Deliberately, without the least sense of urgency, I found my own helmet and followed suit.
I slept. Under the bed, helmet and all, I slept despite the best Generals Giap and Westmoreland could contrive. The memory is strong and sustaining; the remembrance of a sense of irrational, inarticulate triumph at the power, godlike intensity, and peace of that sleep.