Trapping the Monster

“You do know that Uncle James is flipping over in his grave right now,” said Irene, my older sister, who is two years older and six inches taller than I am.  I rolled my eyes, which she could not hear over the phone, but she probably knew I was doing it.

“Well, he isn’t here right now, now is he? He’s dead,” I retorted. It did not change the fact that I had thought about our Uncle James first when Brian, my husband, asked me to add on a week to our vacation to explore Ho Chi Minh City.

“Carmen, you hear this, right?” Irene chided at our oldest sister. You could hear Carmen’s lips smack over the three-way call. It was not as if either of their opinions would cancel my trip.

Carmen chimed in, “As I see it,” because all of her conversations in definitive favor of which side she chose began as such, “Erica has already made up her mind about where she is going. Even if Uncle James was alive, do you think that would stop her?”

Irene’s smirk was audible in the silence that ensued. I had sealed my fate long ago as the family outsider, the black Jeep of the family, the Red Devil. Among my family, I was titled as “Most Likely to Piss You Off and Send You Post Cards.” My reign as the rebel remained at one-hundred percent. Irene would blame my zodiac sign. Carmen would blame our enslaved upbringing. I would blame my passport for being so damned curious about the world. Blaming Uncle James would probably be prudent, too.

Uncle James had been a helicopter pilot for the US Army, being shot down twice, and flying for a third time. He engulfed his entire existence in remembrance of the Vietnam War. He purchased memorabilia items from whoever sold it: Franklin Mint, Time-Life, and sellers at flea markets. He watched VHS tapes of Vietnam War action until they all wore down to the point each video was marred with the demagnetized speckled stripe as they played. It was to the point that his son, the oldest of his two children, also had Vietnam flashbacks in the late 1980s at the age of ten.

Determined to teach us about the monstrous, yet innovative, people of Vietnam, his lectures were pocketed with vivid harsh language about the Vietnamese people and the descriptions of the violence of war. We were proud of Uncle James but exasperated. No media had wanted to hear his story. He was often overlooked for interviews with historians. Until he eventually settled into various jobs, ending with teaching, the family occupation.

He recounted being shot down, on the ground with his companion soldiers’ bodies dismantled either by launched grenades, land mines, or various traps set in the darkened forests. He had seen what war could do to a person, along with what it can make a person do. By the time more violent games, like Mortal Kombat, had arrived on the gaming market, we had been desensitized to the pulling out of spinal cords and exploding heads.

I could not be sure what to expect in Vietnam, after all the frightening things my uncle had told us. We were no longer at war. How readily accepting are Vietnamese of Americans, especially since I knew of plenty of Americans who despised them. I did not know if I was mentally ready to face what my uncle had witnessed firsthand. I was learning that I carried a prejudice that was not necessarily my own. It had been handed down to me, stamped in my brain like my passport at the border.

In the morning we were greeted by what looked like a lost freshman from high school. Her name was Lam. She wore a straw hat and dressed like a mix of Crocodile Hunter and a thrift store. She smiled. We smiled. We climbed into the tour van, little rust on the outside, inside smelling of lotus incense and cigarettes. Buddha, on the dashboard, ignored us and continued staring out the windshield. Our driver coughed out a greeting, patted Buddha’s fat, bald head, and cranked the van up. We began our drive along the Saigon River.

Lam introduced herself properly. We learned that she was seventeen years older than us, resembling a schoolgirl who has seen some things in her life. And she had seen some things. She was born in 1957. By the time America and my uncle had joined the war, she was eight years old. I had not been born yet. Carmen was born two years later, in 1967. When the war ended, this woman was eighteen, maybe nineteen, while I was drooling, babbling, and trying to keep my head straight enough to walk away from Irene. Lam had lived through her major developing years in a war zone. I realized that no amount of torment in the Myers household was comparable.

When we reached the Củ Chi Tunnels, it was a solemn affair outside. Words from Uncle James clouded my head. Lam did all the processing for us, wearing a smile, nodding, looking like a television version of the demure Asian.  When we passed the entrance, Lam’s expression turned suddenly. Not a smile could be found.

“I will be real with you. The media is propaganda,” she began. “You will hear things that contradict what you have learned in school in America. But, my family fought against the French and the Viet Cong.” My ears perked up because now we were getting to the part that my uncle had talked about. I was ready for this.

I was not ready at all. “My family had beautiful lands, filled with fruit trees and rice fields. I remember seeing them all mowed down when I was very young.  They dropped chemicals onto the ground with made the ground like cement,” Lam continued, stabbing her toe at the hardened soil beneath us.  I tried as well. It did not budge, not even the minute curdling of impact.

She walked us along to show us the traps. I pulled out my cellphone to record a video of a moving trap, which activated when walked on, dumping a person into a pit of sharpened bamboo. There was a lack of a breeze. The smell of old water and motor oil filled the air over the area. Lam told us that this “puddle” was a trap itself. It looked like something a kid would jump around it. She took hold of a chain, pulling it. From the pit underneath came a woven mat of sharpened bamboo as tall as Lam, scattered with bits of rusted metal.

Lam was discussing these with Brian. I was half-listening, but caught an earful of her saying, “The French did not care about whether we ate or not.  Our rice fields were turned into rubber tree groves. They only wanted rubber and cows.”

“Did your family make traps also?” I asked, pausing my videography of a door trap that I had been inspecting with the utmost attention to violent details.

“Yes,” replied Lam. “We had to protect ourselves from everyone.”  She paused for a breath. “Come, let’s see the tunnels.”

We approached the entrance of the tunnel. Lam had talked us through her history. Brian climbed down the tiny stairs to the mouth of the tunnel. I froze. I could not do this, not this tight space. Brian bent over and began duck-walking into the tunnel. My head started shaking back and forth. I began blaming my knees. Lam placed her hand on my sweaty back, pressing my linen shirt into its moist epicenter. Her hand began rubbing a large, smooth circle.

“It’s okay. You don’t have to go,” she soothed. She placed her hand on my cellphone. “I will take a picture of the entrance for you.” She went down into the trench and snapped two photos, climbed back up and handed the cellphone to me. “Did you have a relative that fought here?”

I nodded, turning away from the tunnels my uncle had told me about. Lam handed me a bottle of water. “There were many American soldiers. There was a helicopter shot down near my village. My family helped to drag some of the soldiers to our home. Those who were not badly injured, we hid them in our tunnels.  Those on the brink of death, we threw their bodies into traps to keep Viet Cong from finding those in our tunnel. We helped who we could,” she said.  I did not understand why she was telling me this story. “We are not monsters.”

A millipede crossed between us as Lam and I stood looking at each other. It had no sense of the battle between Uncle James, in my head as history, and Lam, standing before me as living history.  Both persons had been involved in this war. There were two sides to this war, two sides to this story.

“No,” I began, after a swig from the bottle of water. “You are not monsters.” Lam motioned with her hand for me to follow.  We started walking. “You had to survive. I probably would have done the same.”

When we reached a tank, positioned by a trenched chamber of mannequins making flip flop shoes from discard tires, Brian emerged from tunnel on his hands and knees. Lam was smiling again, and I paid more attention to her information. The bamboo as thick as my thighs. My mind wandered to Uncle James. He was correct, in that Vietnamese people were innovative. However, he had been wrong about them being monstrous. They were people, trying to survive, by any means necessary. I do not know if Lam’s family had helped Uncle James when he was shot down; however, I want to believe her story somehow linked us together.