A River in May

by Edward Wilson

Genres: War & Military

Synopsis

A magnificent debut novel, which follows in the spirit of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, in which an alienated student named Lopez joins the Vietnam war to escape from his past and himself. Forced out of self-pity by the brutality and injustice surrounding him, Lopez begins to shed his layers of acquired culture, identifying instead with the Vietnamese and their cause. 'Stylistically sophisticated, visually and emotionally present; the pace is good and the author knows how to hold the reader's attention.'

Release date: March 15, 2007

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 146

Sample

Praise for A River in May

‘Once I started it of course I couldn’t stop. A reader is really privileged at coming across something like this – excellence of the highest, never a note wrong… by far the best. The novel fills in all the black holes of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’ – Alan Sillitoe



‘A superb, surrealistic novel of killing and not wanting to kill. Just wonderful. One of my books of the year’ – Brian Case, Time Out



‘In Wilson’s vivid debut novel the protagonist is a GI in Vietnam who not only feels the war is wrong, but ends up taking the side of the Viet Cong. His tale, addressing the suffering of the Vietnamese, has integrity and evocative details, making this a worthwhile addition to the huge body of war novels’ – Metro



‘One of the most painful and insightful accounts of the war that you will read. The scope of his realisations give this novel of profound moral force and relevance to any modern interventionist conflict from Vietnam to Iraq’ – Chris Searle, Morning Star



‘Lavish praise for A River in May, which tells the story of the war from the viewpoint of Vietnamese fighters – as well as that of US soldiers. Wilson made it to the early stages of the Booker Prize with his novel based on his own harrowing experiences in the Vietnam War. His commander was Robert Realt, who partly inspired Colonel Kurtz, the character played by Marlon Brando in the film Apocalypse Now, who was hunted down by the US army’ – East Anglian Daily Times



‘Embodies in one character the issues and dilemmas of an entire era. Wilson’s Vietnam is a sordid and disturbing place. He gives us vignettes of scarred and wounded men – both mentally and physically – who live from body-count to blow-job, with morphine for chasers. In the tradition of Sassoon, or Graves’s Goodbye to All That’ – Listener NZ



‘A profoundly shocking read, which stays with the reader long after the last page is turned’ – Historical Novels Review



‘Disturbing … Edward Wilson, an American Special Forces officer during Vietnam, is a new name to watch’ – Maris Ross, Publishing News

HO CUC WAS ON HIS WAY BACK from an ambush patrol when he heard the American planes begin their attack. He knew the bunkers of Son Loi were deep and well timbered, but there was something about these bombs that sounded like fracturing bones. Cuc broke into a cold sweat and started to run; the path was overgrown, but he was oblivious of the thorns tearing his skin. When he reached the open paddy bordering the village he could see that the familiar silhouette of bamboo and palm trees was now broken and distorted, as if there had been a great wind.

Ho Cuc sprinted across the paddy dyke, hardly bothering to sidestep the defensive land mines. There was an acrid scent of explosive and burnt earth. He pushed through a tangle of broken palm trees. The first thing he saw, as he emerged on the other side sweating and bleeding, was an outer circle of flattened huts and a line of deep overlapping craters. Trees were burning and the earth itself was steaming.

One of the 750-pound bombs had made a direct hit on the bunker where Ho Cuc’s wife and two-year-old daughter were sheltering and, fused to burrow deep, had killed Cuc’s family and eighteen other civilians. He flung himself at the earth and began to claw the erupted soil with bare hands, screaming his wife’s name like a madman. He found an arm – but when he pulled, it came away attached to nothing. It took three men to drag him away.

Cuc’s wife had been seven months pregnant when the bomb blew her apart. The last night that he had slept beside her she had woken him in the middle of the night, taken his hand and placed it on her womb. ‘Can you feel the kicking?’ she asked. ‘This is such a strong restless baby.’ He felt the child thud a secret message against the palm of his hand. Cuc placed his face against his wife’s womb so that he could be closer to their baby, and kissed the child through the taut rounded flesh.

One of those who dragged Ho Cuc away from the collapsed bunker was Nguyen Ton, the cadre chief. Ton made Cuc sit on a log under the banana trees and tried to comfort him. Cuc was aware of a voice, but could not make out the actual words – it was like a muffled voice sounding through the walls of a tunnel. He wondered where he was. This was no longer Son Loi: the ripe bananas hanging from the trees had become festering bodies. Overcome by nausea, he turned away and vomited. When it was dark the cadre chief embraced Cuc, told him to sleep and gave him a packet containing dried aromatic cassia bark. ‘Chew this,’ said Ton. ‘It will help.’

Cuc returned to his empty house. He chewed a mouthful of cassia bark; the narcotic juice invaded his weary body, and he fell into deep dreamless sleep. When he woke up it was one in the morning. For the rest of the night he lay awake sweating and groaning; sometimes he sat up and howled the names of his wife and his daughter into the dark.



In the hour before dawn, the village began to stir: voices, cooking noises, people padding on bare feet to the night soil heap to squat and defecate. It all meant nothing to Cuc: nothing connected to nothing. The woven partitions and the bamboo beams above his head were only meaningless patterns. The dawn twilight was a sickly pale nothingness. Later, as the sun dispersed the morning mist and the southern wind dried his tears, Cuc discovered hate – a hate that was blind, undirected and anarchic. Hate would nourish him and he would nourish it. Hate would become his foster child.

Cuc knew that he could not spend another night sleeping on the rush mat that still bore the musky scent of his dead wife. His home, the life they had lived there, had turned into a gangrenous limb that needed lopping off. He remembered the leaflets dropped by American planes like millions of paper blossoms, which offered bribes to Hoi Chanhs, deserters. Few people even bothered to read them. Cuc himself had no desire to desert his unit, only a need to leave. He couldn’t even breathe: the air of Son Loi was poisoned by the death of his own flesh.

The leaflets also offered money for surrendered weapons. Cuc knew this was a stupid idea – anyone approaching an American compound carrying an AK-47 rifle would be shot before he had a chance to shout, ‘Chieu hoi! – I surrender!’ Nonetheless, he didn’t want to walk the twelve miles to An Hoa, the district capital, without a weapon. He remembered a Chinese 9mm automatic pistol in one of the village arms caches – it had belonged to a North Vietnamese major who suffered an attack of recurrent malaria while passing through Son Loi and died. As soon as night fell, Cuc went to the cache and made the pistol his own.

Later that night, when his neighbors were either sound asleep or portering supplies of rice to the NVA division in the mountains, Cuc prepared for departure. He spread out his wife’s best blouse to use as a satchel. He laid out a water bottle, a ball of cooked rice and a tin of Russian mackerel; then photographs of his wife and child bound between layers of oilcloth. He slowly picked up a gold hair clip that had been his wife’s dowry, closed his eyes and kissed it before tying it to the photograph parcel. Finally, an extra magazine of 9mm cartridges, and he had finished packing. Cuc tied the arms of the blouse together, slung it around his neck and set off into the night.



The first obstacle was the Son Thu Bon. Cuc unmoored one of the flat-bottomed boats which were used for ferrying supplies. The boat had been hidden under a camouflage of freshly cut green vine – it was the job of the village children to renew the camouflage before it wilted. Cuc sculled across the current with a stern oar. There was no moon. The river gorge was so dark that he felt his spine tingle; it was like passing over a black chasm.

When he reached the other side, he moored the boat under an overhanging bank. He knew the next four miles of river valley intimately, knew how to avoid patrols, ambush sites and minefields. But beyond the place where the river hugs the steep slopes of Black Widow Mountain, he knew nothing. The far side of the Black Widow was a foreign country. Cuc had never been more than six miles from Son Loi in his entire life.

Two hours after setting out, Cuc had reached the outskirts of Xuan Hoa, the last village before the mountain. He kept well away from the village by walking along the paddy dykes in the surrounding fields. Despite his detour, a dog started barking from the kitchen garden of the nearest house, and Cuc felt a twitch of fear; he knew that government patrols often spent the night in the village and set ambushes on the adjoining trails. A few seconds after the dog had begun to bark, a parachute flare from the camp at Nui Hoa Den lit up the entire river valley with a ghostly green light. Cuc threw himself prone on the paddy dyke; he squeezed his eyes shut. Nothing happened; the flare sank and expired, womb-safe darkness returned. Cuc waited two minutes, then got up and continued his journey.

Soon he reached the end of the paddy fields and the end of his known world. His next obstacle was Black Widow Mountain itself. The most direct route was a steep cliff path above the river, but this path led straight to a Regional Forces outpost. Even if its defenders were asleep it would be difficult to get round the outpost because of barbed wire and mines.

Cuc chose instead a long detour through the low scrub covered hills on the far side of the mountain. These hills comprised a barren uninhabited landscape so untypical of Vietnam’s green lushness that Cuc felt as if he were on another planet. The going was much more difficult in the moonless night than he had expected. There weren’t any trails, but this was also a good thing because it lessened the dangers of encountering an ambush or patrol. The vegetation was chest-high thorn and prickly vine. His legs were soon covered with deep scratches and his clothes torn. His progress slowed to less than one kilometer an hour. It wasn’t until just before pre-dawn half-light that Cuc found the outermost rice fields of the cultivated valley bottom. The North Vietnamese Army purchased many of their supplies from the large productive farms there.

The village of Que Son and its sprawling Saigon government refugee camp was on his left and the valley of Que Son and its scattered hamlets was on his right. For Ho Cuc, the Que Son was the place of the greatest danger. He knew that the village and the refugee camp were occupied most nights by the Viet Cong, who disappeared into the hills and countryside just before daybreak. He was afraid of running into them, afraid that he might be recognized, and annoyed at himself because he couldn’t think of a likely story to explain what he was doing so far from his village and his unit.

He walked rapidly, at times breaking into a run, wanting to be as near as possible to the safety of An Hoa by daybreak. He was lucky: he saw no one and no one saw him. When the sun had burnt away the dawn mist Cuc found himself on a busy road that passed close by the river.

As the day brightened there was a small traffic of peasants carrying produce – live chickens in baskets, dried fish, cured tobacco leaves – to the market at An Hoa. Cuc was impressed by how rich and prosperous everything seemed on this side of Black Widow Mountain. Even the people looked fatter and cleaner.

He squatted on the riverbank near a landing stage to eat his rice and mackerel. Just as he finished, a motorized sampan arrived at the landing and a crowd of prosperous chattering peasants disembarked, laden with bulging baskets of market produce: vegetables, fresh herbs, noisy ducks, even a few piglets. The stout peasants hoisted the baskets on the ends of poles which they balanced across their shoulders, then trudged off towards the town. Cuc caught fragments of gossip – ‘Big’ Trinh’s niece was sleeping with the carpenter – and hopeful talk about prices.

Cuc knew that he wouldn’t be safe if he traveled on the road; there were Communist cadres even in the most secure villages. He was sure that his soiled torn clothes and emaciated features would give him away as a Viet Cong deserter. There were no vagrants in the Vietnamese countryside, and beggars in rags were found only in the cities; Cuc feared that one of these plump peasants would report his cropped hair and ragged clothes to a local cadre. He knew that if he were seized and bundled off to a camp in the hills he would be severely punished by his former comrades. A week earlier, he himself would have beaten a deserter without pity – it wasn’t anything personal; it was just the way things were.

Determined that nothing would delay him, Cuc left the busy road at the first opportunity and set off across country along paddy dykes and disused trails. He soon arrived at a place where the paddy fields had been abandoned and left to revert to weed and scrub. Two years before there had been battles with American marines. The paddy dykes had been destroyed by the treads of tanks and armored personnel carriers, and the houses torched by the infantry or incinerated by napalm. The hamlets had then been abandoned and the population re-located. The area was now a parched wasteland of thorn and crater inhabited only by ghosts, and the hulks of burned out armor and downed helicopters had already been obliterated by straggly vine.

The sun was high and hot in the late morning sky. Cuc was passing through the most devastated of the deserted hamlets when a voice greeted him from behind, ‘Chao anh – Hello, elder brother.’ The words, even though an ordinary greeting between strangers, were full of menace. Cuc turned and stared into the blank eyes of a North Vietnamese Army lieutenant. The lieutenant’s face was pitted by smallpox and as narrow as an ax blade.

‘Chao anh,’ said Cuc.

The NVA lieutenant had an automatic pistol in a holster slung over his shoulder, identical to the one that Cuc was wearing concealed under his baggy peasant blouse.

‘Do you live near here, Ong?’ Ong – uncle – was a term used to show respect for an older or distinguished person. The lieutenant was mocking.

Cuc didn’t know how to reply. He wondered what an NVA officer was doing alone in such a wasteland. The officer repeated his question. Cuc remained silent. ‘I suppose you need an interpreter, Uncle?’ The lieutenant spoke in the harsh guttural tones of Tonkin, the dialect of Hanoi and the North. He asked his question again, but this time he pronounced the words for interpreter – thoung dich vien – not in his own northern dialect, but in an exaggerated imitation of the lilting sing-song speech of the Annamite peasant, with its diphthongs and soft consonants. ‘Do you need a “thoouung yich wien”, Ong Que Lam – Uncle Dullard?’ The lieutenant laughed and placed his hand on Cuc’s makeshift satchel. ‘What have you got in here, Uncle Que Lam?’

Ho Cuc handed it over and, while the lieutenant had both hands occupied with the parcel, drew his pistol and shot the Hanoi officer in the face. The bullet entered the skull through the left eye. The body was still twitching, so Cuc bent over and shot the lieutenant again in the temple. The twitching stopped. Cuc nudged the corpse with his foot. ‘Dog shit.’ Then he picked up the feet – the lieutenant was wearing faded green espadrilles – dragged the body off the path and rolled it into a ditch overgrown with prickly vine.

Cuc retrieved his bag and started walking. He still couldn’t understand why the lieutenant had been there and what he had wanted. Could they be after him? After walking twenty meters, Cuc turned around. He felt that someone was following him, watching him – but there was nothing, just blinding sun and dry thorn.



Ten minutes later, Ho Cuc came to a large road that carried a good deal of military traffic between the coast and the American base at An Hoa. The convoys were heavily guarded and escorted by helicopter gunships. Cuc was stunned. He had never seen a motor car, not even a motorbike, and here, roaring up the road in a grinding inferno of sound and steel, were a battle tank followed by two armored personnel carriers, a convoy of two-and-a-half ton trucks, and, hovering above it all like deadly wasps, two pencil-thin Cobra gunships. The armor thundered past in the heat haze, the helmeted and goggled crew looking more like giant insects than humans. Cuc shouted ‘Chieu hoi – I surrender’, but they ignored him. He had never felt so small and insignificant in his life. Each truck had four marines armed with machine-guns and M16s searching the road verges for the likes of Cuc in his previous incarnation, but utterly uninterested in his re-born persona. He shouted ‘Chieu hoi’ at each passing vehicle and gestured frantically.

Finally, a marine gunnery sergeant acknowledged Cuc’s existence and shouted back, ‘Hey, gook! Slopehead! Wanna Coke?’ The American gave Cuc his first contact with the western world by throwing a half-full can of Coca-Cola at him and hitting him square on the side of the head. Too terrified to dodge it, Cuc at first thought he was bleeding, but it was only the sticky brown Coca-Cola trickling down his neck.

The convoy passed and all was suddenly and strangely still. Cuc squatted in the dust of the road, weeping with exhaustion and humiliation, and lamenting his decision to leave Son Loi. He was on the verge of turning back when a jeep appeared. Cuc waved and shouted – it stopped. An American smiled a flash of perfect teeth and greeted him in fluent Vietnamese. Cuc had just met the senior advisor for Quang Nam.



Over the next few weeks Cuc was interrogated, assessed and made to swear an oath of allegiance. He was ‘a good catch’ – strong, intelligent, adept at handling weapons and equipment. He was selected for the elite Kit Carson Scout program where the best defectors were trained as scouts to serve with the Americans, just as Apache and Sioux warriors had scouted for the US cavalry in the last century.

Ho Cuc was assigned to an American airborne infantry battalion where his expert knowledge of mines, booby traps and guerrilla tactics saved dozens of GIs from being killed or maimed. His bravery won him an American Bronze Star, and he was shown off as a prize defector whenever VIPs visited the division HQ. On one occasion, Cuc even appeared on US national television with a Republican senator. The senator, attired in flak jacket and helmet for the TV cameras, was a notorious hawk who believed in more bombing including tactical nukes. He also believed that the Vietnamese had to ‘stand up for themselves’ and picked out Ho Cuc as a prime example of one who was doing just that. The television screens showed the senator with his arm around Cuc, describing him as ‘a brave young Vietnamese who had chosen freedom.’



A week later the airborne battalion’s luck ran out in a big way. They had been lured into attacking a ridgeline at Dak To. The North Vietnamese allowed them to pass through well-concealed positions before attacking them from behind. The battalion was trapped in a well-planned crossfire and decimated. Ho Cuc was written off as missing, presumed dead.

FRANCIS LOPEZ WOKE an hour before dawn and watched the light creep in through the frayed curtain. He was hung over and wanted to get drunk again: it was the only way to cope with being at his step-parents’ home. At first light, Lopez dressed and went down to the jetty. He found raccoon tracks just above the high water mark; they led up the beach to where a lightning-split oak leaned over the bank. Tom, his adoptive father, always kept him informed about the raccoon: she had a den and cubs where the river had eroded a cavern under the tree roots.

Though it was mid-May, it was too early in the morning for dragonflies, but there were whippoorwills calling from the wood, and a hummingbird in the marsh. Lopez thought that Stormy Petrel looked low in the water, so he jumped on board to pump the bilges. The tide was full and the river a mirror. A yellow perch hovered near the weed bank and further out, towards the point, a school of alewives rippled the water. He wanted to slip Stormy Petrel’s moorings and sail out, away from Rideout’s Landing, into the broad bay, past the white clapboard lighthouse on stilts, past the islands and down into Virginia. The rivers and bays, he thought, had always been fresh and wonderful. Nothing ever went wrong out there.

Lopez went back to the house. Tom used to call it ‘the tomb’: it was too big to heat in winter and always seemed damp and cold. He went into the studio and sat at the big roll-top desk where Tom did the farm accounts. He started to write a farewell letter – but then he stopped and looked at what he’d written. It was so, so stupid; it was fantastically awful – melodramatic ‘to be opened only in the event of my death’ crap. Unless one does manage to get killed, he thought, letters like this prove pretty fucking embarrassing.

He tore the letter into tiny pieces and instead doodled a cartoon on the blotter of Tom’s Hampshire boar holding trotters with a sow and singing:



Pour voir la vie en rose

Je n’ai pas besoin de grand’ chose…



Lopez knew that Rosie was proud of his being good at French. He drew a picture of a bridge and sketched in the two pigs leaning over the parapet and captioned it:



Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

Et nos amours…



Lopez added a few swans to the river and a spying periscope. It felt good to be doing something stupid. And silly things like that made Rosie happy, showed he wasn’t being morbid. He knew that after he was gone, Rosie would date the drawings and put them in her diary for safekeeping. She kept everything.

Rosie Ardagh had gone to a lot of trouble to organize her adopted son’s life and education. She had arranged the lycée exchange in Paris, and later his year at the Sorbonne. His fluent French was tangible proof that she had accomplished something, that she had civilized him. Learning Spanish, on the other hand, would have been a sign of regression, of ingratitude even. Rosie had envisioned him becoming some sort of genteel professor or diplomat bouncing back and forth across the Atlantic. And then he had spoiled her silly dream. He had spoiled everything, forever. And Tom and Rosie had forgiven him. And he couldn’t bear it. So, unable to live with that terrible forgiveness, he was running away from it, knowing that they would forgive that too.

Lopez stared out the window and tried to make his brain melt into mush. He held his head in his hands: he could feel the soft tick of his carotid pulse. ‘They love me so much,’ he said to himself. ‘They need me.’ The day was starting to get warm. In the honeysuckle the bees were going berserk pillaging pollen.

Lopez looked around the studio and remembered why he hated it so much. He and Ianthe used to call it ‘the dead brats’ room’. The disrespect was a childhood dare thing started by Lopez. But Ianthe’s eyes watered and her lip always shook when she called it that, for one of the ‘brats’ had been her father. All the photographs, the sports trophies, the scrapbooks, the newspaper clippings and the other relics of those lost lives were there. Maybe, he thought, that was why Rosie’s paintings were so depressing. She ought to work someplace else. Lopez used to hate being alone with the ghost sons. He could feel their presence, and was even afraid to turn around too quickly lest he should catch one of them smiling and staring at his back. And there was always this dull musty smell: the stale perfume that clings long after the party’s over, the scent of wilted funeral flowers.

A photograph of Arthur, in a gilt frame, stood on the baby grand next to a silver salver of dried rose petals. Arthur looked more corpulent and affable than Peter – there was even a hint in his face of something voluptuous and carnal. Rosie never said much about Arthur, even after the secret was out. At least he’d done what pleased him. Maybe that was why the eyes in the photograph looked sleepy – but the mouth beneath the moustache seemed cruel, perhaps sadistic. It was the younger son, Peter, for whom Rosie truly and passionately mourned. There was a photograph of Peter on the writing desk, about to take off from an airfield in Suffolk, giving the thumbs up from the cockpit of his plane. He was a celebrity hero even before he died and his photo had appeared on the cover of a national magazine.

Lopez found Peter’s scrapbook in the desk drawer and turned to the final page. The newsprint cutting was yellow and brittle. It was from a local English paper that described the explosion as ‘the largest ever to have shaken the British Isles’. Eighty-nine buildings were damaged by the blast, including the church of Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, which had all its windows blown in. Lopez closed the book and put it back. Ianthe had known the contents by heart: when she was young she had read all the articles over and over again so that she could recite them from memory like the Hail Mary or the Apostles’ Creed. It had been her only way of connecting to her father, all that was left of him.

Peter had volunteered for a secret operation to attack the sites that were launching V1 rockets at London. Conventional bombing had had no effect on the V1 sites for they were protected by concrete fifty feet thick. The plan involved packing a B-24 Liberator with twelve tons of high explosive. The idea was for Peter and his co-pilot to get the bomber off the ground, point it in the right direction and then parachute out. The pilotless plane would then be flown by remote control until it reached its target. Something, probably an electric fault, had blown them up fifteen minutes into the flight – right over the garden.

The coincidence was so bizarre and so cruel that Lopez wondered if there really was such a thing as a family curse. Ianthe’s mother, three months pregnant, had been sitting in her garden enjoying the late afternoon August sun when the father of her child disintegrated to atoms in the sky above her. The casement windows were blown in, and for several seconds afterwards there was a gentle patter of white ash, all that was left of Peter Ardagh. Lopez reckoned that the whole thing – so freakish and gruesome, like someone tipping a loved one’s cremation urn over your head – must have deranged Peter’s fiancee. When the baby was born she christened her Ianthe – the code name of the very mission that killed the father. The poor woman never did get her marbles back. Instead there. . .