Crater

By Peter Trivelas

Lucien's girlfriend, Abbie, called him Luscious. He could deal with that because such sweet pillow talk helped soothe the remnants of war.
Abbie was a Network TV news producer.
One day, she was more excited than usual when she phoned him. “Guess where I’m going? Tokyo! And guess where else? Hanoi! You were in Hanoi in the Army, right?”
Civilians thought everyone in the military was in the Army.
“Yes, well it was the Navy, not the Army. And yes, I was in Vietnam on a ship. What’s going on in Hanoi?”
“They want me to do a story about what daily life is like in Vietnam, now that our countries are friends again.”
Lucien had served on an aircraft carrier from 1965 to 1969 when the U.S. was incessantly bombing strategic targets in North Vietnam to weaken their ability to invade South Vietnam, but that was twenty-five years ago. A lifetime ago.
This was perfect. “I’ll come with you. Can I? I’ll pay my own way.”
“Yes, I’d love that. I’m not sure I want to be in Vietnam alone. I have to go to Japan first, so you could go ahead and I can meet you there.”
Abbie and Luscious weren't living together, though they did overnight at each other’s place frequently. Abbie was on the lookout for the right guy to settle down with. Lucien would fill in just fine until someone permanent showed up. He’d have pushed to make it more than that if it weren’t for their twenty-year age difference. She was a loving partner to Lucien, which made it easier for him to cope with this kind of uncertainty.
Lucien often wondered, needed to know, about the North Vietnamese people’s attitude toward Americans all these years later. Now that we’d officially reopened trade with them. Now that POW issues had been resolved. Now that an American could tour the country as simply as visiting England.
Now that he’d stopped having nightmares about the war.
Now that people were starting to say, “Thank you for your service.”

Flying into Hanoi, he spotted some bomb craters from the window of the plane—as he’d hoped he would.
Most of the craters were gone now, transformed back into farmland, built upon or merely melted away by so many rainy seasons. But he did see faint familiarity in a scarce few. Was certain he was the only person on the flight who saw them.
Craters were Lucien’s most persistent memory of Hanoi. Serving in the ship’s intelligence office, he’d handled hundreds of daily aerial recon photos. He knew his way around North Vietnam from a spotted eagle’s perspective. A single narrow bridge spanning a small stream would have bomb craters surrounding it. Near hits, near misses. Way too many per bridge. And there were a hundred bridges.
As bombing progressed over the years, craters proliferated. Repeated airstrikes spanning many days would ultimately destroy a small bridge—but it’d be rebuilt within 24 hours. To the enemy, Lucien imagined, the bombs were likely an annoyance on the level of mosquito attacks.
The larger bridges, however, were targets with a higher level of difficulty. Intelligence photos often showed anti-aircraft weapons nearby under camouflaged cover.
Luscious arrived in Hanoi two days before Abbie.
He’d researched hotel rooms and booked one in a stately structure that featured enormously spacious suites. He hoped she’d love it and perhaps create a unique romantic mood. The setting and impeccable service conjured images reminiscent of former times when grandeur prevailed. The suite’s large windows were open to the streets one story below; sheer curtains gracefully described warm breezes. The living room’s tall French doors opened to a New Orleans-style balcony. The rate was so low he thought it was a mistake.
Bicycle rental was a dollar a day, including the bike lock on a thick chain. Bikes were the way to go from the looks of things on the busy streets. He bought a map and squeezed his way into the chaotic, crazy flow of traffic. The rentals were archaic with fat tires, one gear and a big metal basket mounted above the front wheel, like the locals used. The map paranormally highlighted everything he’d wanted to see.
One of Lucien’s post-Navy jobs had been bicycle messenger. Up and down the mountainous streets of San Francisco on the very same lack of bike technology he was now riding in Hanoi. The challenge in San Francisco had been to struggle up insanely steep hills and brake hard enough going down so as not to lose control. In Hanoi, same bike, but the challenge was to daredevil it through every intersection. No traffic lights. Hordes of bikes and scooters and sometimes a car perpendicularly meshing. He never witnessed a single accident.
Right off the starting blocks, he was surprised by the lack of animosity, the lack of any real sign that America was the enemy. That was in the past. For anyone under twenty-five, the war was a history lesson.
The country’s attitude seemed to be that after a hundred years of war—the American war being only the final conflict in a long succession—they’d won. They’d prevailed. Proud of their survival.
One of Lucien’s unexpected finds on his bike was The War Museum. Inside, a display room filled with photos of mothers honored for their part in the wars. Mothers of war heroes. They’d sent their children into war. Of course. Honoring the mothers was a concept that tweaked his brain in new ways.
There were displays of Women Warriors who'd fought side by side with the men in defense of their country. They looked sexy to him with their long black braids beneath berets and a rifle slung across their chest. More brain tweak.
And he learned that tours are given—in the south, not in Hanoi—of the tunnels that were instrumental in conducting the war. The tourist brochures promoted the network of tunnels where soldiers had lived, hidden and traveled undetected by American troops. Tour guides would describe successful tactics, booby traps and what it took to survive.
Lucien navigated with his paper map to the hull of a downed American warplane deliberately left undisturbed in the middle of a small lake in a Hanoi neighborhood, an informative plaque planted nearby. Instead of resembling a dart in the ground as he would’ve imagined—tail sticking out, nose buried in the mud—it looked more like an old bus rusting in ten feet of water. Wheels and a pile of metal.
As Lucien stood there absorbing this stark reality way off the beaten path, he wondered what Vietnamese residents were thinking as they walked past him in the mundane course of their daily routine. Here was an American looking at his crashed jet. His gracious answer came in the form of two young schoolboys with big smiles trying out their English on him.
They walked up to him fearlessly, buoyant even, with the same set of questions he repeatedly heard all over Hanoi. Vietnam was actively encouraging its citizens to learn the English language.
“Hello!” they said.
He returned a hello and smiled. Their little faces lit up.
“What is your name?” they asked, in rote unison.
“My name is Lucien,” he replied, enunciating carefully. “What is your name?”
“Ha,” said the shorter boy. “Kim,” said the other.
When these boys and others like them came to the standard question, “How old are you?” he always lied and said he was thirty-five. He didn’t want anyone to realize he could’ve participated in the war.
He said, “Goodbye.”
They said, “Goodbye. See you later.” They actually said those words, “See you later.” In unison.
They were clearly fascinated by the conversation, laughing as they continued proudly on their way. Lucien made a paranoid scan of the area, spotting a nearby adult looking on, sitting with a baby on a bench. She was smiling, nodding her head in approval.
He’d had similar warm experiences all over Hanoi—all day. But that benevolent attitude a few feet away from the dead plane in their lake meant something even more to him. It could’ve been different. The boys could’ve been afraid, but they weren’t. The adult could’ve shooed them away. She hadn’t. The adult and other adults could’ve averted their gaze or given him the stink eye. None of this happened. They were open, natural, happy, friendly.
He couldn’t wait to share these experiences with Abbie.

Abbie arrived, but she was working. She was gone from the suite from early morning until after sunset with her camera crew shooting interviews and action shots. So Luscious biked the streets alone and met the people. The language started becoming familiar.
Xin chao means hello.
Thank you is cam o’n ban.
Dep means beautiful.
In the commercial section of Hanoi, bands of young boys accosted him, declaring in memorized English what they wanted him to buy. It was an eclectic assortment of goods—mostly gum, candy and shoelaces. Some had maps and pens and shoeshine gear.
After the initial wide-eyed days of his visit faded, he regularly declined the boys’ solicitations despite the pinch in his heart. He discovered it didn’t take much to win them over.
They were young and unjaded. Offering to take their photo was enough to transform them from rebuffed salesmen to the innocent kids they were.
They held his hands, one on each side of him, practicing their English, a small crowd guiding him to wherever he wanted to go, especially to the photo store where he could get the roll of film developed and printed. Giving out prints to them the next day was so joyful it became the highlight of his days. The kids were hyperanimated after seeing their own image and would run here and there showing it to anyone nearby.
“Look. Nhìn. See this.”
Adults who happened to witness this adventure gave Lucien indications of camaraderie as they, too, got caught up in the excitement. This approval was all he needed to know he hadn’t misread the culture.
As the rhythm of Hanoi grew familiar, Lucien sensed more and more its unsophisticated condition. It was endearing. Those who’d never seen a Westerner stared with wide eyes. It occurred to him he hadn’t seen any other tourists.
In the evenings, he and Abbie would meet at the hotel, shower from the day’s dust, sometimes together, and share room service dinner in the suite. Down time.
Lucien tried to convey the revelations of his day to Abbie who’d been chauffeured from location to location with her head in a computer, making notes in preparation for the next shoot. She was discovering the same culture as Lucien but in a more formal manner. She was all about the content of her video. He was about negotiating the streets.
She’d say, “We interviewed a rice farmer today. He was washing his water buffalo, five of them. Can you believe it? Lined them up, head to tail, in a muddy pond and scrubbed them with a brush like a car wash. We taped the whole thing. I can’t wait to show you.”
He’d say, “I rode past the Hanoi Hilton today. That’s what the prisoners of war called the prison where they were held and interrogated.”
“I know,” she said. “Isn’t that where John McCain was?”
“Yes, and I had no desire to stop and take the tour. It’s one degree too raw to chance it. Things are going really well with this purge of mine. I don’t need to see the torture.”
“I don’t blame you,” Abbie said. “You do seem happy.”
Lucien: “I’ve chanced to eat at a few of those cafes on the streets. You know, in the rows of tiny shops everywhere. People eat at these little kid-size plastic tables and chairs.”
Abbie: “Yeah, they’re called shophouses. They’re long and narrow for a reason. I found out in an interview we did. They used to be taxed according to the width of the storefronts, so they made them small in front. They’re wider in the back where they live.”
Lucien: “I have to tell you about something peculiar. When I was eating, I saw this little pile of chicken bones on the cement floor in front of my chair, so I looked around and saw the same mounds under each table. Then I saw people spitting various things out of their mouths onto the floor. Caught in the act! It was disgusting and disturbing and dis-everything.”
Abbie looked at him with a pukey expression, “Ew. Gross. Were you able to eat after that?”
“I spit some food, too, to see what it was like. Weird to do that, but no one seemed to mind. Now I obsessively look for those gurgey-piles whenever I pass one of those cafes.”
At the War Museum was a thirty-foot-tall sculpture made of chunks of American planes shot down during the war. Lined up on the ground in front of the sculpture were various types of bombs—U.S. bombs that hadn’t exploded on impact. On some of the pieces of the planes was the name of the pilot, still stenciled, as it had been when catapulted from the flattop in the Gulf of Tonkin not so long ago. It was very real to Lucien—it completed a circle. It helped fulfill the reason he’d wanted to come to Hanoi. Closure. This wasn't just a romantic trip with Abbie.
He’d seen similar planes—stencils and all—leave the ship hour after hour, day after day, year after year. He’d watched the ordnance crew load the crated 500-pound bombs onto the ship and then affix them one by one onto the planes each day in preparation for the launch toward their missions.
Sometimes the sailors wrote on the bombs in chalk or paint: Eat this, Gook or This one’s from Oklahoma.
He’d been in the intelligence office when pilots were briefed before their mission—weather, route, photos of the target. All Top Secret. He was there when they returned and were debriefed. Did you hit the target? What’s the weather doing? Any resistance? His job was to compile these observations into a report.
Sometimes sweat-soaked pilots described evasive maneuvers they took to avoid a surface-to-air missile (SAM). They may have had to dogfight or outrun a MIG fighter jet. Once in a while, a pilot didn’t come back. It tended to dampen the often-jovial mood in the rarefied air of the intelligence office.
A shiny, silver Vietnamese plane in perfect condition, a MIG-21, was also on display at the War Museum. A sign listed the names of the dozen pilots who’d flown it bravely and, in propaganda-style language, stated their missions had been flown in the resistance war against the American Imperialist.
Interacting with the Vietnamese for a week, bicycling their streets, watching how the country works, seeing the tiny stores, people delivering live chickens and fruit and vegetables and meat on bicycles, piece by piece, gave him a feel for whom we’d bombed. It made them less abstract, less the enemy.
At the time of his military service, Lucien had great distaste for the war. He disliked pilots coming back from their missions saying stuff like, “I couldn’t find my target because the cloud cover was so dense, so I strafed a gook I saw on a bike.” High fives all around. “Then I bombed some fish”—meaning he'd dumped leftover bombs into the sea. Safety protocol prohibited landing on the ship with bombs under your wings. War was an expensive waste on every level.
Lucien has a recurring mental image of one pilot entering the intelligence office before his mission cheerfully exclaiming, “How’s the war going today?” Big smile on his face.
Lucien told him, bitterly, “We’re still losing.” Lucien didn’t like being a part of this endeavor and it was wearing on him, creating a deep anger.
But now, today, it was mercifully dawning on him that it was over. The Vietnamese are in peacetime and rebuilding their economy. Everyone Lucien encountered seemed focused on that task. He transacted with them, one person at a time. Somehow these simple days were helping him get on with parts of his life that otherwise hadn’t been free to do so.
Seeing breathing people get on with their own lives somehow helped. Playing with kids in the streets somehow helped. Giving presents and kindness to those he met somehow helped.
Something deep inside was lifting. It was like grass sprouting through pavement.

Abbie wrapped a day earlier than expected. Everything had gone well; she was relieved to be done and was hungry. It was late, but Luscious knew his way around. He’d been wanting to check out a recommended restaurant a few blocks from the hotel. This was the real test. It was ten o’clock, the city was deserted and all the street signs were in Vietnamese.
To Lucien, it was odd to see the familiar streets so empty. The metal rollup doors on every tiny storefront, one after another on every street, down and locked for the night. To Abbie, the possibility of danger existed. They were affluent Westerners, wandering alone. Lucien had helped bomb this same city. When he rode his bike, he thought about that pilot who bragged about killing a bike-riding civilian. Yet, these concerns were tempered, for both of them, by the week’s bonding with residents—a trust had formed, the strangeness had become transparent. So the two of them set out confidently.
It was a secret restaurant with no signage, only a number on a building on Phat Loc Street in the Old Quarter. You had to know it was there. They waited a few minutes alone on the dark street after rapping the ornate door knocker. Knocked only once because it sounded like a small-caliber pistol echoing into the silent neighborhood. They looked at each other with nervous anticipation. It didn’t get any more mysterious than this.
The door opened. A worn woman in black pajamas gazed out at them.
Lucien said, “Eat,” and gestured with his hands like scooping food into his mouth.
She waved them in and led them up a long flight of wooden stairs, past a large room with a huge table filled with aromatic food and twenty people talking and laughing, not a Westerner in the bunch.
Abbie looked at Lucien and said: “Are you sure this is a restaurant?”
Lucien raised his eyebrows and shrugged, meaning I think so.
Passing more doors, inscrutably closed, they were led into a similar room, farther down the narrow hall from the dinner party. It held the same large wooden table, surrounded by a couple dozen chairs, but otherwise empty. No menus, no tablecloth, no utensils, no cups or glasses. No window. An empty room. The woman closed the door and left. They'd entered a world they knew not much about—an authentic adventure.
They sat down at the large wooden table, side by side.
After a minute of silence, save muffled sounds from the first room, Luscious was the first to laugh. “Where are we?”
“Maybe we should leave.”
They stared at each other. Lucien joked: “We’ve been kidnapped. We’ll never be seen again.”
Five more unsettling minutes passed, sitting and listening to the footsteps and other clues outside the door. Lucien said, “I should go find someone. Get a menu?”
The door opened. It was a young man in white shirt and black slacks. He spoke some English, but not a lot. His nametag read, “Trai.” Maybe this really is a restaurant. Through hand gestures and loud declarations of Chicken… Vegetable… Rice, the three of them planned a meal. Maybe. It was hard to tell because Trai laughed in between every sentence. He left.
They sat there. The lights flickered and then went off. Abbie found Luscious's hand. This wasn’t her idea of romantic, but she did find it intriguing.
“Don’t worry, this just got crazy, but it’s gonna be all right,” he said automatically, her male protector.
Sitting in the darkness, Lucien imagined what Abbie would look like in 25 years.
The door opened and in came the original maître d’ woman with a candle. She left a pot of tea with two cups and went back out, closing the door. What did she look like 25 years ago? Ponytail, beret, rifle? Was her photo on display in the War Museum?
Time meant nothing.
The lights crackled back on.
They sat for a long fifteen minutes in a state between curiosity and hunger along with a splash of fear of the unknown. They drank green tea.
The door opened. Trai entered with five steaming platters overflowing with food, most dishes recognizable and all beaucoup edible. The warm aromas of home cooking created some welcomed comfort. They ate like it was their last meal, but it wasn't. They hadn't been deliberately poisoned like in the movie version. Instead, they made plans to ride bikes around Lucien's Hanoi in the morning, their final full day in-country.

Abbie left for the airport first. She was traveling with her crew. Lucien stayed behind to check them out of the hotel. He didn’t see much of Abbie after that. Some sort of era had ended.
His flight was later than hers, so he took the opportunity to wander the neighborhood to possibly bump into some of his new friends for a proper farewell. He found a Vietnamese man named Thuc, around his own age, who summed up Lucien’s takeaway from the journey. Two days before, Thuc had given Lucien directions to a munitions warehouse that was now an upscale tourist hotel. He’d needed help finding it because it was tucked away across a narrow bridge.
As he crossed the wooden bridge, the landscape became all too familiar. The warehouse had been a prime objective back in the day along with the bridge that provided the only access. The ground had been riddled with craters in photos taken from above, attesting to the importance of the target. They never did destroy the building. On the far end of the bridge, Lucien spotted a grass-covered indentation in the now beautiful grounds: a lone crater. And over there, southwest of the warehouse—yes, unmistakable—three trees, larger now, still stood. Every pilot knew this target. They’d known the trees were hiding anti-aircraft guns but had never been able to maneuver close enough to take them out. And now a fourth tree, tender and new, sprouted in their shadow from the once barren field.
Lucien called upon his new language to thank Thuc for the directions, “Cam o’n ban.”
“Friendship,” Thuc replied, looking pointedly into his eyes.
“Friendship.”

****

Peter Trivelas served in the US Navy for four years aboard the USS Intrepid (CVS-11) during the Vietnam war era. His fiction has appeared in Deadly Writer’s Patrol, Blood & Bourbon and various other journals and anthologies. He recently completed a first novel and is creating a collection of short stories. Peter is a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute and is a longtime member of the UCLA Wordcommandos creative writing workshop for veterans.