In Ho Chi Minh city — once called Saigon — the night was filled with the sounds and smells of scooters and vendor stalls, for even with galloping inflation, enough of the 4.5 million Vietnamese in the city had been able to buy the three-thousand-dollar, two-stroke-powered motorbikes, no doubt sacrificing much along the way. To own a scooter in Vietnam was like owning a car anywhere else.
Despite familiar odors of gasoline fumes mixed in with the pungent smell of cooking and spices, it was still nothing like Saigon used to be. It lacked the excitement and zest of the old Asian “Paris” nightlife. Still, even though it was more than twenty years since Vietnam’s defeat of the Americans in ‘75, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam had failed to kill the entrepreneurial wiles of beggars and ladies of the night. It was simply more organized. Many of the beggars in good health had been sent to reconstructive labor battalions, a move that U.S. Army captain Ray Baker, assigned to the U.S. legation office, endorsed as he walked through the dimly lit city with a mixture of nostalgia and anger.
It had been difficult enough to accept the defeat. Every American alive at the time — and not only those who had fought in ‘Nam — had that picture frozen in their memory: the sight of a lone chopper poised atop the American embassy, a string of frantic people falling from it, trying to board, those already aboard shoving them off — everyone for himself. Americans and South Vietnamese in panic. And then there was the sight of Huey choppers heading out from the delta over the South China Sea like so many angry gnats dotting the sky, fleeing, again in panic, landing atop a Seventh Fleet carrier, and once the human cargo had been disgorged, not going back again but being pushed overboard — three million dollars a pop. And when the carriers couldn’t provide any more deck space, the helo pilots cut off the engines, coming down in a semi-controlled crash, pancaking on the sea with about thirty seconds to escape before the doomed chopper began its slow then sudden dive to the bottom, bodies floating up and swimming soundlessly beneath the noise from the six-thousand-man carrier, as many on deck as possible — against orders — just standing there, witnessing the historic humiliation and debacle of me awesome American defeat.
This evening Ray Baker wanted to evict that image from memory, but the more he tried, the more persistent and nagging it became, and for a moment he was glad it was nighttime, as if the darkness could somehow hide his private sense of humiliation. But on second thought, what the hell did he have to be ashamed of anyway? He’d done his bit, hadn’t he? Or was he unconsciously harboring the secret torment that if he’d done that little bit extra during the war — if enough of them had done more, gone that extra mile — it might have been enough to turn the tide? For some vets who had fought in the Iraqi War, a full measure of self-respect had been reclaimed, but Baker had not been with Schwarzkopf’s winning team. While many of his buddies had been racing over the desert destroying Saddam Insane’s armor and closing on the Republican Guard — when the most terrifying phrase for the Iraqi combat pilots was “Permission to take off!”—Ray Baker was sweating in the shirt-clinging tropical climate of the Mekong Delta, still trying to find out after twenty years what had happened to all those unaccounted-for MIAs and POWs who some believed were still held prisoner deep in the jungles of the north.
Tonight he was going out to meet yet another “lead,” the follow-up to yet another informant’s phone call about yet another POW-MIA tip — another 100,000 new dong, ten U.S. dollars — just for the meet. Another ten for whatever his informant told him, even if it was bullshit — otherwise the informant might not come back if he did find something more concrete at a later date.
At the U.S. legation office they told Baker he was wasting his time, and he knew they were probably right, but if after all these years he could bring even one American out, bring one American home, it would be worth something. For himself, yes — for the man’s family it would be everything. It was worth doing.
He lit another cigarette and made his way toward the heart of Cholon, the big market district largely populated by Chinese, once a thriving capitalist community but now much less so, after the anti-Chinese purges of the late 1970s. Now and then amid the gasoline fumes of the scooters, Baker could smell the freshly made French bread, croissants, and coffee from the sidewalk kiosks. There were dozens of them, the people of old Saigon refusing to give up the habits and civilities that had once made this vital part of the old city one of the busiest capitalist enclaves in all Asia. The Communists had realized their mistake in ostracizing so many Chinese, and were now letting many of them back to revitalize the ancient city of French Indochina, but many had already escaped through Hong Kong or been killed by pirates who boarded the boat people’s sailboats to steal, rape, and murder.
Baker walked down an alley lit by Chinese lanterns, heading for Hung Vuong Boulevard. He passed the electronics market, with radios blaring, turned onto Ngo Gia Tu Boulevard, and passed the Nha Sau Church. Although he was over a quarter mile from the Kinh Tau Hu Canal to the south, he could smell its garbage mixed with gasoline and dust, and the odor of more baking in the hot, sticky air. Still, he would rather meet whoever had made the phone call here than at 28 Vo Van Tan — in the War Crimes Museum — where the last Vietnamese who supposedly had a “hot tip” had insisted on meeting him. Baker had been compelled, then, to see the black and white photographs of atrocities by American “imperialists,” specifically the American photo of the My Lai massacre and Lieutenant Calley, and some fuzzy shots of “China’s imperialist aggression” against some of the “Vietnamese islands” in the Paracels and the Spratlys.
“Chao.”
It was a softly spoken hello, filled more with apprehension than warmth.
“Chao,” Baker replied.
“Toi,” the Chinese urged, leading the way. He was a man in his late thirties, Baker guessed, no more than five feet two at the outside, and looking furtively around as they passed one of the sidewalk stalls, its wooden plank shelves bent with glass jars full of pickled cobras, the old woman in the stall busy cooking rice. The Chinese man told Baker that it wasn’t far.
“What isn’t far?” Baker asked, not bothering to hide the irritation in his voice. “Where are we going?”
“Not far,” the other man said, and Baker realized that he was probably just a go-between and would cost him another 100,000 dong.
“If this turns out to be nothing,” he told the man as he walked more quickly, now passing stalls smelling of fried rice and spices, “you get nothing. Understand? Zero. Zilch.”
“Co, phai,” the man assured him. “Co, phai… yes, yes. I understand.”
“Good,” Baker said.
They made a sharp right turn onto Nguyen Tri Phuong Boulevard, heading toward the canal. Down by the waterway, the Chinese pointed to a sampan with an old man aboard, among dozens of others, then held out his hand.
“Not so fast,” Baker told him in English. “Let’s hear what grandpa has to say.”
“I go now,” the man said urgently, his hand outthrust.
“Well, off you go, buddy,” Baker told him. “But you don’t get one dong until I hear from Uncle Ho here.”
The elderly chin-bearded Chinese on the sampan gave no indication that he knew what was going on. He merely stared out from the boat at the black water.
Baker touched his cap as a sign of respect for the elder and said, “Chao.”
The old man nodded, the white taper of his beard barely visible for a second as he turned to watch a police boat chugging by, its searchlight darting here and there, momentarily illuminating the scores of sampans and other houseboats.
“Parlez-vous français?” the old man asked.
“No,” Baker replied, getting more irritated by the second. Why in the hell was he wasting his time by the fetid canal when he could be enjoying a good drip coffee and croissant back at his office?
The old man raised his head in the direction of a younger Chinese nearby — perhaps his son — indicating that he should go away. The young one didn’t like it and said something sharp to the old man, who in turn barked a quick rejoinder and waved him off. The young man walked sullenly along by the canal, and in the habit of the Chinese, paused for a long spit, standing there, letting it dribble down his chin before he moved on, casting a faint shadow on the lanterns’ silken reflections as they undulated over the wake of the passing police boat.
“I know a secret,” the old man said.
Baker said nothing.
“A bad thing has been done,” the old man continued, in no hurry to explain himself.
Baker took out a Gitane and lit it, its pungent odor floating about the sampan, shrouding the old man momentarily in a dark fog. How many times had he waited like this for information, Baker asked himself, for the merest suggestion of some of the 2,434 MIAs who were either buried by now or had been kept as prisoners until they were of no more use to the “Black Pajamas,” as the Viet Cong had been known to the Americans? How many times had he waited for one decent lead?
“The gangsters in Beijing are in charge,” the old man said. “Li Peng’s gang.”
“They’ve always been in charge,” Baker said impatiently. He remembered the words of the historian Bo Yang: “With each new dynasty and each new reign throughout Chinese history, the throne has never changed, only the ass that is on it.”
“But not so much when Chairman Deng was alive.”
“Deng,” Baker answered, “was as bad as the rest of them. Who called in the tanks at Tiananmen Square?”
“But Deng understood how far to go.”
“Did he? I wouldn’t know. You should ask the students who were run over.”
“Still,” the old man said, “there must be order.”
Baker had had enough. “Do you know anything about Americans still being held — POWs, MIAs?”
“Yes.”
“What do you know?”
“That Li Peng’s gang have done a bad thing.”
“You mean some MIAs have been taken across the border into China?”
“Possibly, but I mean this giving money to the pirates.”
“Look,” Baker said exasperatedly, “do you have something to tell me about our MIAs or not?” With that, the American straightened up, ready to leave, adding, “There have always been pirates. They made a fortune smuggling cigarettes, liquor — plundering the boat people. That’s not news.”
“But this,” the old man said insistently, making the point with his left forefinger bent, crooked down like a fishing hook, the shape of Vietnam, “this is to make Vietnam look like the aggressor.”
“What are you talking about? What aggression?”
“Against the disputed islands.”
Baker didn’t know too much about any disputed islands. China and Vietnam were always arguing about some offshore reef or such, especially now with the promise of big oil and gas deposits beneath the South China Sea and with oil accounting for more than a third of all Vietnam’s exports. But though Baker’s concern was MIAs, he now sensed there was something bigger at hand. It wasn’t the old man’s chin wagging about Li Peng’s gang, but rather his tone. It was the voice of a man who was too burdened, who had heard something in the sampans or the stalls and had to share it. At first Baker wondered why the old man, a Chinese, would be bad-mouthing China, but if there was something China was doing — or about to do — that might bring down the wrath of the Vietnamese on the Chinese Vietnam community, like the pogrom of 1978-79 here in Ho Chi Minh City from which so many Chinese fled, some taking to the open sea, he could appreciate the old man’s concern.
“How will Beijing make Vietnam look like the aggressor?” Baker asked.
“The pirates are to use the Vietnamese flag.”
“For what?”
“For attacking disputed islands. The flag is to be upside down.”
“Distress signal?”
“Yes. It is to get in close.” The old man looked at Baker with a face the color of ancient parchment. “How long have you been here?”
“In Vietnam? Five, going on six—” Then Baker fully understood. It was like looking through a microscope, suddenly seeing a blurred slide jump into focus. “You mean the Chinese pay pirates to use the Vietnamese flag so everyone’ll think it’s Vietnamese attacking?” But why was the old man telling him this? “Because,” Baker continued, answering his own question, “it would cause trouble between China and Vietnam again, and when there’s that kind of trouble, the Vietnamese take it out on you.” He meant not only the Chinese in Cholon, but all over Vietnam.
The old man nodded. “We are the Jews of Vietnam. But all we want is to live here in peace and harmony.”
“You want me to tell someone in Washington that Vietnamese Chinese aren’t involved? That it’s Beijing behind the attack on the islands?”
“Yes. Beijing will deny it, of course.”
“Let me get this straight. You say Beijing is doing this— attacking the oil rigs.”
“Yes,” the old man said, “to give Beijing an excuse to seize all the islands in the South China Sea.”
“You think Beijing’s so corrupt,” Baker went on, “that it would use pirates to attack two of its own rigs, kill its own—” Baker stopped. It was a foolish question. These were the men who had run over hundreds of their own students. A few dozen oil-rig workers wouldn’t faze them. “But wouldn’t this put off American investors as well?” he asked.
“Not if Beijing and some American investors know the truth of it.”
“But that would mean an American company would have to go along with…”
The old man smiled. It wasn’t a smile of joy, but rather one of wry amusement at the American’s naïveté—to think a U.S. company would not secretly side with Beijing, and to think Beijing would be concerned about a few Chinese workers, was to be in a kind of kindergarten of politics. What were a few lives to Beijing if they could use the attacks to bring the world against Vietnam in Beijing’s push to claim all the islands as theirs?
All Baker could respond with was to say that Americans would never do such a thing — stage an incident, kill their own to frighten away the competition, in this case, Vietnam.
“You Americans,” the old man said confidently. “You hold the individual so sacred. Here we are but grains of sand in the ocean.”
“But won’t the Vietnamese twig? I mean, won’t the Vietnamese suspect the raids were to blame them?”
“Of course,” the old man replied. “But for the Vietnamese to retaliate against China would be an act of war. It would be to risk international sanctions against Vietnam, and it has taken Hanoi over twenty years since the Vietnam War, since the American defeat, to build relations up with the U.S. again. It’s only a few years since the U.S. embargo on trade with Vietnam has been lifted.”
“Then China is free to keep hitting whatever claim they like?” Baker asked. “Be their own agents provocateurs? Frighten everyone off the islands, then say they’ll have to garrison them with troops for self-protection?”
“Yes.”
Baker shook his head worriedly. “But without proof, I can’t go anywhere with this. We’d have to have proof that—”
The old man was astonished. “But you are an American officer,” he said, as if that explained everything. “If you tell your government what I have told you, surely—”
“They won’t believe it. Or rather, they might believe it but they won’t do anything unless there’s proof positive.”
“But you are an officer. A—”
“I am a grain of sand,” Baker said. “Besides, why should I believe you — with respect. This could be a Vietnamese ploy to attack their own islands in the Paracels to make it look as if the Chinese—”
“But I have told you the truth,” the old man said, his head rising in indignation.
“And where did you get it?” Baker asked.
“From people of my blood — who were offered gold to sail with the pirate junks.”
Baker could see he’d deeply offended the old man. “I’m sorry but — I mean, I’d need proof. Otherwise it’s just another story in a sea of stories that one hears—”
“Dalat!” the old man said. “Near Dalat.” Dalat was a temperate city in the central highlands, and during the Vietnam War there had been an unwritten mutual agreement that it was a no-fire zone. Both sides had used it for R&R in one of the stranger aspects of that long-ago conflict. The weather in Dalat was always good. At the coldest, it would rarely fall below 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and at its hottest, wouldn’t rise to much more than 73 degrees. A place of gardens, of tranquility, it would be pleasant to visit if for no other reason.
“What about Dalat?” Baker pressed.
“To show you I am a man of the truth.”
Baker, nonplussed, waited impatiently. It had become cooler, a waist-high mist covering the canal, creeping toward the congestion of sampans and other river craft.
“In Dalat there is an MIA.”
Baker felt his heart thumping. “Where in Dalat?”
“I will tell you if you will tell your government what I have told you.”
“Yes,” Baker said, “I’ll send in a report.”
“The MIA is in a village near Lang Bian Mountain,” the old man said. “North of Dalat The people of Lat village will help if you give them this.” He took a small scrimshawed shark’s tooth pendant from around his neck. “When will you leave?”
Baker gave the old man twenty dollars, to be shared with the go-between. “In the morning.”
Afterward, Baker sent a message to the Pentagon about what the old man had told him concerning the attacks on the oil rigs, but he cautioned that it was only one old man’s story amid so many.
When morning came, Baker did nothing about the MIA— there was nothing he could do until he got special permission from the Vietnamese. Lam Dong province, in which Dalat was situated in the central highlands over 225 kilometers north of Ho Chi Minh City, had been closed again to United States citizens, who were still being charged by the Vietnamese with covertly supporting the FULRO — Front Unifié de Lutte des Races Opprimés — United Front for the Struggle of the Oppressed Races — guerrillas in the highlands. The CIA had long denied any continuation of funneling arms, but now and then FULRO rebels would stage another ambush or shoot up one of the supposedly secret Vietnamese reeducation camps, which, rumor had it, were still run for some U.S. POWs and MIAs.
In the evening, Baker went down to the canal to talk again to the old man, to get more details, but he was gone. Baker found him near midnight in a sampan that was bumping among the bridge pilings, his throat cut. He guessed the old man had been killed for what he’d known either about Dalat or about the pirates’ attacks in the Paracels and Spratlys.
What Baker hadn’t banked on was the Vietnamese response to the very first attack in the Spratlys, but then again, the Vietnamese had had dealings for a thousand years with the Chinese, and they decided to react immediately rather than let their traditional enemy think he’d gotten a toehold in Vietnamese waters. Hanoi headquarters ordered the Haiphong base to attack, and within the hour, with an efficiency that, after the Vietnam War — or what the Vietnamese had called the Second Indochina War — was among the best response times of any Asian coastal navy, two Soviet-made Osa-class missile craft armed with four surface-to-surface N-2 missiles raced out into the Gulf of Tonkin, ready to attack anything Chinese.
The flag behind each of the missile boats, that of Vietnam, fluttered furiously as the Osas’ bows lifted and the brown water boiled in urgency, the Vietnam missile boats picking up speed, heading southeast to the Chinese-occupied islands in the Paracels. The boats’ crews, however, were under no illusion, for they knew that they were heading toward the People’s Liberation Army’s new navy, which Beijing had boasted was nothing less than “a great wall of iron.”
Ten miles from the nearest Chinese-claimed island in the Paracels, one of the Vietnamese boats’ radar picked up two blips advancing from the east at thirty knots plus: two Chinese Huch’uan-class fast-attack hydrofoil boats. A Vietnamese Osa fired its starboard forward SS-N-2 missile, the Chinese hydrofoil immediately going into a defensive “weave” pattern.
Closer now. the Vietnamese Osa fired a second missile, its backblast on the stern immediately raising the Osa’s sharp bow so that she gained a knot or two. The Vietnamese captain saw one of the Huch’uan-class hydrofoils leap into the air and crash down again, its portside foil shattered along with the midships and cockpit — now a crushed pile of smoking metal.
The Chinese hydrofoil had turned hard astarboard as the orders were given by its skipper to abandon ship. The second Chinese hydrofoil fired its starboard twenty-one-inch-diameter torpedo from its large, corrugated housing, and now its 12.7mm machine-gun stations opened up against the fast-turning Vietnamese boats which, suddenly slowing near the site of the injured and sinking Huch’uan hydrofoil, machine-gunned all those Chinese in the water.
“Great wall of iron!” snorted one of the Vietnamese skippers, motioning toward the detritus of wreckage and bodies. The second Chinese hydrofoil had already fired its torpedoes, but they were easily avoided by simply opening the throttle, allowing the Vietnamese Osas to skid in wide thirty-five-plus-knot semicircles. There was some stray machine-gun fire from the Chinese—12.7mm tracer playing about the Osas, hitting the Monkey Island, or clear-weather bridge, on one of the Vietnamese boats, but doing no more damage than that.
Hanoi now broadcast to the world via an accommodating CNN that Vietnam had “punished Chinese aggressors” in Vietnamese waters.
In reply, the Chinese vehemently denied that they had violated Vietnamese waters, but stated that “the peace-loving People’s Liberation Navy” had been patrolling, as was its right, within two hundred miles of its coastline, which included the big island of Hainan, and from Hainan it had every right to patrol another two hundred miles, as Hainan was indisputably Chinese territory. Beijing immediately requested a meeting of the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions and other disciplinary measures against the “imperialist aggressions of the Republic of Vietnam bandits.”
Vietnam followed suit and asked for U.N. sanctions against China. The fear on both sides of the dispute — and well-founded fear — was that the issue would be ponderously delayed while no action would be taken. In the meantime, both Beijing and Hanoi were accusing each other of violating the other’s zone of ownership. It was a very capitalist argument, as seen by the Wall Street Journal:
In New York today, a U.N. meeting of Southeast Asian and East Asian nations called to decide who owns what in the oil-rich archipelagos of the South China Sea ended in uproar as the Chinese and Vietnamese representatives came to blows over ownership of the disputed islands.
As well as being rich in oil and natural gas deposits, the islands, the Paracels to the northwest and the Spratlys in the southeast, are also strategically vital to naval and mercantile routes to and from Japan and the United States.
The U.S. State Department is closely monitoring the talks, which it hopes will resume on Monday. Moscow and Tokyo are also watching the talks closely, as the outcome could have serious and wide-ranging geopolitical implications for all island disputes, particularly the so-called “Northern Territories” islands in contention between Russia and Japan.