THE LOTUS REDEMPTION
by W. Darrell Gertsch
They made a wasteland and called it peace.
—Tacitus
The road to Hanoi is cut and mined every night … we lose one class of St. Cyr every year. But we are professionals: we
have to go on fighting until the politicians tell us to stop. Probably they will get together and agree to the same peace
that we could have had at the beginning, making nonsense of all these years.
—Graham Greene, The Quiet American
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. The Incident
2. The Meeting
3. The Precursors
4. The Academy
5. The Journey
6. The Valley of Death
7. The Killing Ground
8. The Beach
9. Winners and Losers
10. The Interregnum
11. The Return
12. The Denouement
Epilogue
1: The Incident
Gerard had mentioned to Le Chi only casually, even half-jokingly, his concern about returning to Saigon aboard a Russian
plane, any Russian plane, much less the old and notorious Tupolev-134. It seemed that almost every day the Asian press
carried an article about a Tu-134 crashing somewhere in the region.
They had boarded the Vietnam Airlines flight early that afternoon in Danang, on Vietnam’s central coast, after spending
several days in what seemed like timeless, boundless solitude and togetherness at China Beach, the last stop on their
nearly three-week voyage of personal discovery and, for Gerard, a closing of the circle on Vietnam after thirty years.
As the Australian pilot went through the start-up procedures for the Tupolev’s two jet engines mounted near the tail
section of the aircraft, Gerard gazed to his right, across Le Chi, out the window at Danang’s old airfield facilities. There
were several rows of crumbling, camouflaged, concrete aircraft revetments, which used to protect American air force and
marine fighter planes from Communist artillery shelling and sapper attacks. This airfield had been the major air base in
central Vietnam during the war. Protection of the base had been the immediate objective of those units of the American
First Marine Division, who had waded ashore calmly through the placid waters and onto the soft white sands of China
Beach on that bright, sultry March 8 of 1965. Many of the battle-gear-laden GIs, having had flower leis placed around
their necks by comely Vietnamese girls, had probably thought, This ain’t gonna be so bad.
On the climb-out from the Danang airport, Gerard was struck again, as he had been countless times in the past, by the
incredible contrasts that were always Vietnam. Visible in the landscape below were carpetlike arrangements of beautiful
white and purple bauhinia flowers and terraces of amber-hued rice paddies extending up to the hilly, heavily canopied
jungle terrain that surrounded Danang. To the east were miles of white sand beaches lapped by the azure emerald waters
of the South China Sea. The devastation of a century of war and the poverty it caused were invisible.
As the Russian plane gained altitude, Gerard could make out in the distance the Hai Van Pass, which, years ago, had
been a choke point on the Truong Son Road (Ho Chi Minh Trail), along which North Vietnam moved men, equipment, and
supplies to feed the war effort in the south against the Americans and the Saigon government. Here the trail crossed part
of the narrow, central waist of Vietnam as it wound its way south into neighboring Laos, and from there into Cambodia
and South Vietnam. Gerard knew the pass well. He and his bomber crew often attacked it, usually in broad daylight,
though well above most of the Communist ground fire. Given its strategic position on the trail, the North Vietnamese
eventually reinforced the approaches to the pass with deadly Russian-made surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), making the
trip to Hai Van a little dicier.
Wishing there was a way he could delay his return to the United States the next day, Gerard subconsciously monitored
their approach into Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport, the same approach used by thousands of American air force pilots like
him during the war years. Tan Son Nhut was the busiest airport in the world at that time, in the mid-1960s. Its long taxi
and takeoff queues often had planes from Air France, Pan Am, and other commercial airliners bound for Paris, Bangkok,
Jakarta, or Hong Kong interspersed with camouflaged air force C-130 cargo planes and F-4 Phantom jet fighters. Gerard
often wondered what fighter pilots, airline crews, and passengers must have thought, gazing solemnly at each other in
the few minutes before takeoff, wondering what the other’s day was going to be like.
That guy is probably going to be beaching it in Bali this afternoon with his girlfriend while I’m headed out to vaporize
some more goddamn Michelin rubber trees and risk getting my ass shot off in the process—and for what?
I wonder what that American guy’s chances are of coming back today? Must be incredibly exciting—and dangerous. I’m
glad the Americans are fighting this war here instead of us.
Gerard was silently thankful, as he sat with Le Chi’s hand in his, that this one-and-a-half-hour Tupolev flight had gone
OK. As reluctant as he was to have the trip with Le Chi end, he would still be happy to be on the ground as soon as
possible. Maybe we can have a good-bye dinner tonight, possibly at the Continental, if Chi is up to it, he thought. He had
long since shortened her name, at her request.
The sixty-five or so passengers were buckled in as the plane prepared to touch down. Judging by the position of the wind
sock at the end of the runway, there appeared to be only a moderate crosswind. Gerard felt the tires contact the runway
in a slightly harder-than-normal landing.
At that moment, the plane jerked violently and tilted severely to the right. Gerard’s twelve years of flying told him that
the right main gear had collapsed. Instinctively, he braced himself. In his mind’s eye he envisioned the plane careening
into a cartwheel, most likely ending in a fireball. Since that hadn’t happened yet, he guessed that the nose gear had
collapsed as well. The right wing slammed down in a crescendo of screeching against the concrete runway. Columns of
sparks trailed the sliding, scraping wing as the flaps, which had been set at full down for landing, were shredded and
partially dehinged from the wing.
Le Chi had been sitting in a window seat, gently resting her head against Gerard’s shoulder as he sat to her left. For
about the last hour, Le Chi had been sleeping in this position, her hand joined with Gerard’s in her lap. The violence of
the gear collapse and ensuing veer of the aircraft sent her head slamming into the metal frame of the Tupolev’s window.
Amid the screams of the other passengers and the sound of tearing aircraft metal, the plane left the runway and
shuddered convulsively to a stop in an adjacent construction area. Thankful that there had not yet been a fire or
explosion from a ruptured wing fuel tank, Gerard unbuckled the belt holding Le Chi’s limp body, noting that the right
side of her face was wet with blood from an ugly gash on her temple. Gently grasping her beneath each arm, he
struggled to get her into the aisle amid a fray of shouting and pushing passengers heading in a panic for the emergency
exits the flight crew had opened. The Vietnamese copilot, bloodied from a large cut above his left eye, emerged from the
cockpit shouting instructions in Vietnamese. Through the cabin door, Gerard could see the Australian pilot slumped
forward over the control column.
Cradling Le Chi’s limp but light body in his arms, Gerard was jostled toward the exit on the undamaged left side of the
aircraft. As he knelt through the exit to place Le Chi on the wing, he sensed the danger of their being trampled in the
bottleneck exit. Whirling about as he arose from his crouching position halfway through the exit, he sent his fist crashing
into the face of a pushing, panic-stricken Vietnamese man, sending him reeling backwards into the plane with blood
spurting from his nose. Quickly, he moved Le Chi away from the exit toward the leading edge of the wing. There he
lowered her, feet first, unconscious, into the helpful waiting arms of a young German with whom he had chatted at the
Danang airport prior to departure. Together, they carried her at a half run in a direction upwind from the stricken aircraft
in the event the plane caught fire or worse, exploded.
Out of breath, but safely removed from the plane, they stopped, placed Le Chi on the ground, and knelt on their hands
and knees gasping for air. Only then did they become aware of the sirens from the airport emergency vehicles summoned
by the control tower.
The hours dragged by at the Swedish hospital in Saigon to which Gerard had directed the ambulance driver. Nearing
midnight in the clean and dimly lit semiprivate room where Le Chi lay in a critical condition, Gerard sat by her bed,
struck at the pathetic sight of her still unconscious, fragile body. Her head wound was closed and bandaged around her
long black hair, and she wore a rigid neck brace as a guard against movement if and when she should awaken. Packets of
saline solution, dextrose, and whole blood dripped through tubes into her veins. The nighttime silence was broken only by
the infrequent soft paging of a doctor or by an attending nurse coming in to record Le Chi’s vital signs.
Gerard held her hand so that he could feel her pulse, silently praying that her life force would not ebb. He rested his
head, disconsolately, on her shoulder, an occasional tear dripping onto the white bedsheet.
Throughout the night, as if to forestall the approach of death, he probed the wellspring, the unfathomable mystery, of his
deep affection for her. He tried to determine how much of what he felt was for her personally and how much was
vicarious. He thought of her youthfulness and the promise of her generation of postwar Vietnamese, his love for her
country and her people. He remembered the crushing devastation visited upon her country and her family by himself
and thousands of other Americans during a decade of war. He reconnected with the vividness of her reality and her
teasing personality, and her family heritage of opposing Western invaders of her country. He relived the joy of the
improbable circumstances of their meeting only weeks, seemingly hours, earlier.
2: The Meeting
Two weeks prior to his departure for Asia, Gerard had been in Washington DC with his eldest daughter, Rachel, who had
been sent there and to Boston and New York on a two-week business trip. She was the same age as Le Chi.
Rachel had graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with degrees in linguistics and international business,
and spoke fluent Japanese and German. For the past six years, she had been living in Tokyo, employed by Sony in its far-
flung international sales operations. She had inherited her mother, Hannah’s, tall stature, good looks, and effusive,
extroverted personality. From Gerard she had inherited whatever gene it was that was encoded “adventure and
wanderlust.” Although Rachel made an occasional trip back to the States to visit her family whenever Sony’s infrequent
vacation time permitted, she preferred to hang out with her friends in Bangkok, Phu Kiet or Koh Samui in Thailand, Hong
Kong, Bali, or Kuala Lumpur. Her path and Gerard’s frequently crossed, sometimes in Asia or Europe and sometimes in
the United States, as on this occasion. When they did, their time together was always special.
In Washington that day, they did the father-daughter thing that they both always looked forward to. They enjoyed
brunch and time together sightseeing, with visits to the Supreme Court, the Capitol, and the Lincoln and Jefferson
memorials. In late afternoon, before heading to one of Gerard’s favorite places in Georgetown for dinner, they visited the
Vietnam War Memorial, a solemn black granite wall tapering to points at each end. The wall was inscribed with the names
of over fifty-eight thousand Americans dead from the war.
They approached the wall from the end where several locator files in weatherproof Plexiglas containers were placed.
Withdrawing a pen from his sports jacket, Gerard thumbed rapidly through the files. As he did, he wrote the locator
references on his hand, by wall section and line number, for several individuals. He then turned to Rachel and said, “As
sobering as all of this is, Rachel, imagine another wall of about equal size over there, with about the same number of
engraved names. Those names would also be of American veterans who physically survived the war, but who could not
survive the hellish peace they endured in the aftermath of their experience in Vietnam, and eventually ended it all by
killing themselves.” No Saving Private Ryan–style heroism or nostalgia for this generation. These were veterans who, if
they did not win the war, at least survived it, but lost that elusive individual peace.
“See that statue over there?” asked Gerard, pointing to a beautiful sculpture of three American soldiers, each wearing a
vacant, haunted facial expression. Though separated from the wall by a large, neatly trimmed grassy area, the statue was
part of the Vietnam War Memorial.
“Early on the morning of the very day that statue was unveiled to the public several years ago, a distraught Vietnam
veteran in his midthirties, dressed in his jungle fatigues and bush hat, sat down at its base, took out a .38-caliber service
revolver, and blew his brains out. The park service had to tidy up the mess before the ceremonies that afternoon.”
Rachel stood motionless, wide-eyed, one arm folded across her body, her other hand held to her mouth, slowly shaking
her head in disbelief. “And how about the Vietnamese, Dad; what were their losses?”
“Most estimates place the number at about three million throughout the country, north and south, with another million
or so living screwed-up, deformed lives as a result of the dioxin laced chemicals like Agent Orange we dumped on them
to defoliate the trees and undergrowth. It worked … it worked, oh so well,” Gerard replied, his voice trailing off with
sarcasm.
“Why this slaughter, Dad?” inquired Rachel. “It all seems so pointless. God, millions of people.” Rachel was only two years
old when Gerard left for the war, the second of four children that he and Hannah would have together.
“Few knew then, and even fewer know now,” Gerard responded. “Except there was a vaguely defined assumption that if
we didn’t fight Vietnamese communism there and at that time, we would have to do so elsewhere at another time,
perhaps in Laos, Burma, Thailand, or even Australia or California, as absurd as that sounds now. The simplistic analogy
was that nations were like dominoes; if one were undermined somehow by a revolutionary ideology and capitulated to
that ideology, then its neighbors would likely ‘fall’ as well.”
Gerard and Rachel walked slowly along the wall, hand in hand. Gerard, referring to the locator information he had written
on his hand, pointed out names and dates, in roughly chronological order of their deaths, with a few memories of each
person: Brent, an army Green Beret sergeant on whom Hannah had a crush during high school; Bill, an army officer,
Gerard’s roommate at West Point, best man at their wedding, and former center on Army’s football team; Joel who, like
Gerard, was from Wyoming and had entered West Point the same year as Gerard, but who was older and had spent three
years in the Marines before going to West Point. Joel had been a Golden Gloves boxing champion in the Marines. His 165
pounds were compacted into a muscular, five-foot-six-inch body like a fire hydrant. Gerard’s 165 pounds, in contrast,
were strung out along a gangly, six-foot-one-inch frame. When Joel and Gerard fought for the brigade boxing
championship in their 165-pound weight class, Joel only had to throw one punch, and Gerard was down for the count.
Joel won the Congressional Medal of Honor in Vietnam—post-humously. There was Art, a young air force officer who had
flown with Gerard before the war, and whose F-100 Super Saber jet fighter was shot down on his third mission. Art’s
remains would not be found and returned to his wife, Jean, for nineteen years. Jean was eleven years into another
marriage when Art’s status was changed from “missing, presumed dead” to “killed in action.” And there were others,
many others.
Rachel stopped and faced her father, her hand still in his. “Dad, maybe you shouldn’t make this trip to Vietnam right
now.”
“No, it will be OK, dear; now is the right time. You know Alex Johnson at home? He was a navy pilot during the war, was
shot down, and was interned as a prisoner in Hanoi for six years. He just went back for the first time. Had a great
experience and wants to return again. Besides, Fred Isaacs at work has put me in touch with this person he knows in
Saigon whose family was on the other side during the war, and we’ve got a really interesting itinerary planned to some of
the old battlefields and historic places. Should be fun.”
“Besides, Rachel,” he continued, “you know how the European holocaust is remembered—some six million Jews, Gypsies,
and other people the Nazis categorized as political dissidents. Well, some two million people in Cambodia—roughly a third
of the entire population—died in the killing fields as a direct result of our destabilizing that country during our war in
Vietnam. We started to bomb Cambodia when I was there. Then, in 1970, Nixon and Kissinger ordered the invasion of
Cambodia. The poor neutralist government in Phnom Penh didn’t have a chance. Cambodia has yet to emerge from that
dark descent into the abyss at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. So, directly or indirectly, we, and I, were responsible for
rendering a third of the Cambodian people as war casualties, and similarly for about 10 percent of the entire population
of Vietnam. The sorry fact is, Rachel, I was part of that efficient American killing machine in the 1960s that took the lives
of literally millions of people.
“I don’t know what I expect to find when I get there in a couple of weeks, or how I will feel if I do find whatever ‘it’ is,
but I do have the very strong feeling that I would like to go back, and now seems the right time,” Gerard explained. “I
don’t very often have as pronounced feelings as I do about this matter and its timing. It’s a gap in my life that has just
got to be closed or reconciled, or something. Kind of hard to explain.”
Rachel replied simply, “I love you, Dad,” as she embraced him standing there next to the wall.
It had been decided well in advance of his departure that Hannah would not go to Asia with Gerard; whenever Gerard
went on long international trips she preferred to stay in Wyoming with their son and his wife, both veterinarians, and to
help with their son’s two small children. Gerard’s and Hannah’s two other girls also lived nearby. His trips were frequent,
but Hannah had no wanderlust. Give her home, hearth, children, and grandchildren anytime.
* * *
On his return to Vietnam for the first time in thirty years, Gerard spent a few days in Singapore to see how it had
changed over the years and to accommodate some of the jet lag before he went on to Saigon.
Exotic Singapore, with its blend of Chinese, Malay, and Indian cultures, had always been one of Gerard’s favorite Asian
cities. He especially enjoyed passing the evening hours in the lounge of the Singapore Cricket Club, established in 1852,
swapping stories and experiences with other foreign nationals on vacation or doing business in Southeast Asia. With the
help of a few cocktails, he might catch a glimpse into the past glories of the club in its British colonial era, with British
officers and bureaucratic functionaries strutting about like peacocks in their tropical white military uniforms and suits,
enjoying their cigars and Napoleonic cognac in the evenings, or at tea times in the afternoons between sets of lawn tennis
or cricket. Beautiful, romantic, exotic Singapore, “the last resort of yesterday in the world of tomorrow."
Gerard’s interest in military history, acquired at West Point, often took him to points of interest on the island associated
with the Second World War, especially Fort Canning on the southern tip of the island facing the sea. Here, during the
1930s, the Brits had erected a chain of coastal defense guns and fortifications, anticipating that if the Japanese did attack
Singapore, they would most likely do so from the southern sea approaches. To the great surprise of the British, General
Yamashita elected instead to invade Malaya at Kota Bharu near the border with Siam (Thailand) and march south down
the Malay Peninsula with his army, battle tested from years of previous campaigns in China and French Indochina, to
attack Singapore from the north. The British were unable to swing the heavy fifteen-inch guns around to defend the
northern approaches to the island. In what was the greatest failure of British arms in England’s history and a monument
to the sterility of British strategic planning in the years preceding the Second World War, the Japanese swept through
the peninsula and Singapore virtually unopposed. The Brits would not be the last Western military power to fail to craft a
successful grand strategy for military operations in Southeast Asia.
* * *
Gerard was nervously anticipating his first meeting with Le Chi early the following afternoon in Saigon. Ever the person in
control, he had thought about possible signals that he would discuss with Le Chi by which they would be able to
recognize each other at the airport since they had only met by correspondence two months earlier, and he was sure the
airport would be incredibly crowded. From his room in the old Raffles Hotel, built by the British in 1887, Gerard called Le
Chi concerning his expected arrival time and some proposed meeting arrangements.
The phone rang with that distinctive tone of overseas telephone systems.
“Xin Chao,” answered a soft female voice. “Hello … is this Le Chi?” Gerard asked.
“Oh … Mr. Gerard? I am so happy to hear from you. I thought that you must call today, and so I have remained at
home,” Le Chi replied in excited sing-song, but clear, English. “How are you? How has your trip been? Where are you?”
“I am well. I am in Singapore and have been resting a little from the flight from the United States. I am looking forward
to meeting you tomorrow, and please, Le Chi, call me Frank, OK?”
“Yes, of course, Frank. I look forward to see you also.”
“I will arrive in Saigon on Singapore Airlines flight 2102 at one o’clock in the afternoon … that is 13 hours.” As he started
to describe his build and what he would be wearing, Le Chi interjected, “That way is boring. Let’s not do the common
way. I will just go to airport and, by the imagination, let’s try to recognize each other. It will be challenging for us right
at the first time we meet. But I think we will know, and let’s see who is the first to know.”
Somewhat astonished and thrown off balance by Le Chi’s coquettish manner, Gerard mumbled something about having a
contingency plan, so, if things fell through, he would simply take a cab to the Majestic Hotel near the Saigon River
waterfront and perhaps they could meet there.
Le Chi responded, “Do not worry, we will know.”
Smiling, Gerard gently replaced the receiver, took a long draw on his Malaysian Tiger beer, gazed aimlessly out of the
hotel window at the Singapore Cricket Club and its lawns below, and pondered the inscrutable ways of the Orient.
The next afternoon as the Singapore Airlines Airbus 320 touched down at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport, which had been
the nerve center of the misbegotten American war effort in Vietnam until 1973, Gerard’s nervousness began to turn to
panic. How, in a baggage area unloading over two hundred people, would he recognize, let alone dare approach, a single
Vietnamese female to sense if the vibes, or whatever Le Chi had been talking about, were there? What would he say?
How would he act—or react?
As he waited for his bag at the luggage carousel, Gerard eyed the throng of people waiting to greet the new arrivals,
knowing that somewhere in that crowd someone was searching for him. With one foot cocked on the bag conveyor frame
and self consciously shifting his hands from his pockets to his waist to the arms-folded position, Gerard tried to appear
confident and self-assured, knowing all the time that he was failing.
Retiring to one side of the exit area after collecting his suitcase and clearing the immigration and customs checkpoints,
Gerard studied the scene to identify, hopefully, the mysterious Le Chi and see what kind of recognition and greeting he
would offer. There’s nothing like the unknown.
A tall, handsome Vietnamese woman emerged alone from the crowd of waiting people. Taller by far than the average
Vietnamese, she was wearing a flowered dress and medium high heels, sporting designer sun glasses perched upon her
black, short, Western-style haircut. Gerard likened the moment to when, as a boy hunting pheasants on his family’s
ranch in Wyoming, he would flush a big rooster and feel his heart and stomach explode with excitement. Is she looking
for me? Gerard wondered, as he suddenly became aware of the sweat on his brow and upper lip from the hot and humid
air that is unique to Saigon, and that was accentuated by his current circumstances.
As he started to offer a smile of recognition and to move tentatively in her direction, he quickly realized that they were on
a parallel, rather than a collision course, as she waved to another woman coming into the area from an adjoining terminal
corridor. Oh well, one of those “wish is the father of the thought” deals.
With a sense of disappointment—did it feel something like rejection?—Gerard retreated to his position near one of the
glass doors leading into the terminal building and continued to eye the crowd. Within a few minutes, he noticed the
approach of another Vietnamese woman. She was alone and of somewhat more average height. As she entered, she
moved to one side of the entrance against the glass wall fewer than ten feet from Gerard, cast a quick glance in Gerard’s
direction, and then in the opposite direction, as she folded her arms in a waiting mode.
A good possibility. Gerard absorbed in a single sensory experience the woman’s stunning Oriental beauty: petite, with
long-flowing, jet-black hair tumbling over her shoulders, sheened to an uncommon brilliance, and an orchid lei around
her neck. Her cheekbones were especially high, typical of northern Vietnamese women and reflective of the north’s
interaction with the Chinese over hundreds of years. She was wearing an ao dai, the traditional Vietnamese tunic, with
slits up each side, the most exquisitely feminine dress anywhere in the universe. Hers was a light blue color,
incorporating a gentle pink orchid design, and fastened an inch or so up the neck. Its front and back panels joined about
two inches above the top of full-length white silk pants, slightly revealing light olive-tan skin at her waist on each side.
The garment was designed to accentuate the female form and to tantalizingly reveal the configuration of undergarments.
Many visiting Western tourists, both male and female, as well as soldiers and businessmen, have passed many happy
hours in Vietnamese restaurants, bars, and hotels contemplating the genius behind this uniquely Vietnamese creation.
Whenever he left Vietnam for the last time Gerard knew that of the many things he would miss, the ao dai would be near
the top of the list. And these were the people we tried to kill by the millions to get them to accept or save “democracy”
in South Vietnam?
Could this man possibly be Gerard? she wondered. The tall man wearing an old pair of jeans, boots, and a worn-out
jacket looked more like a Texas cowboy than her mind’s image of Gerard, the professional energy consultant and
businessman. Yet he was surprisingly interesting, with something of a contradictory appearance: a kind, serious face with
a closely trimmed beard and wearing a cowboy outfit.
In almost a whisper, barely audible even to himself so he wouldn’t be embarrassed in case it wasn’t her, Gerard voiced
the name he hoped was hers: “Le Chi?”