Blood Tide Read online

  So Culdee grew slowly sullen. That’s when the drinking started in earnest, and the bar fighting. He began looking forward to long tours at sea—Operational Readiness Training, offshore work as a target ship for submarines honing their torpedo marksmanship, complex landing and minesweeping exercises, especially the nine-month rotations to WestPac. An old navy tradition had it that all marriage vows were null and void once a man had crossed the international date line. At first he resisted. Then he said, Fuck it. And did.

  On one of those tours the baby was born. Miranda—he loved her, a bouncing, brown little thing that ran around naked in the backyard of their cracker-box house in Seal Beach, splashing in and out of the small blue plastic wading pool they’d bought her. A savage, feral little rug rat, quick to talk and fight. He called her his cookie crook, his house ape—while Viv bit her tongue in her own sullen silence. Miranda’s eyes were green like his, specked with motes of brown—sea eyes, he called them, with islands scattered here and there. She was ten the last time he saw her, just before he left for Vietnam, and he loved her more than the sea. But it wasn’t enough.

  On another of those WestPac tours Viv went back to school. She studied computers and banking. She was an admirably vital woman, energetic, committed, a ball of fire as they say—a human dynamo. Everyone said so. To housekeeping and child rearing, full-time occupations for most women in those days, she added one activity after another—cooking classes, Planned Parenthood meetings, yoga, modern dance, a history course at a community college, where women gathered at night to drink bitter tea and rewrite the texts that described the nature of their sex. Then she took part in a sit-in. They were back on the East Coast by then—Culdee was in a frigate out of Newport—and Viv went down to the sub base at Groton for an antinuclear demonstration. Culdee’s CO called him on the carpet for that.

  “Look, sir,” Culdee told him, “she’s her own woman.”

  “It doesn’t look good, Boats,” the skipper said. “I mean, a navy wife—”

  “She’s a better navy wife than many, sir,” Culdee said. “She’s no lush, she doesn’t fool around, she runs a taut ship at home. I mean, hell, sir, she keeps a lot of balls in the air.”

  The skipper stared at him. “Yeah,” he said. “Yours among them.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Sir,” Culdee said. He could feel himself shaking.

  The skipper looked away and blushed.

  “I’m sorry, Boats,” he said. “That was out of line—way out of line. I’m sorry. But please try to talk to her, would you? It was the goddamn FBI blew the whistle on her.”

  So Viv got a job, at one of the new electronics companies on Route 128 up in Boston. Within a year she was earning double what Culdee made as an E7. When he was transferred back to California in 1963, she stayed in the East. It was better that way. They both agreed. Oh, sure, when he pulled leave, he’d come back to Boston if he could deadhead on some navy or air force plane going that way, and once they rendezvoused in Pensacola and spent two weeks sailing and fishing in the Gulf. Miranda was with them, and already she was a good man in a boat.

  “Just like your mommy,” Culdee told her.

  “And my daddy,” she added solemnly.

  But it wasn’t the same. The marriage was in limbo. They both knew it.

  “Why don’t you put in for retirement?” Viv asked one night as they lay at anchor off Cedar Key. “We’ve got plenty of money in the bank. You could get something in Boston, or even out on Cape Cod. Something to do with boats and the sea.”

  A night heron croaked, hunting along the mangroves of the shore.

  “I’ve still got four years to go on my twenty,” Culdee said at last. “And now with this thing in the Tonkin Gulf, the navy might really need me.”

  “Goddamn the navy,” she said. “At least ask for shore duty.”

  And this was shore duty with a vengeance.

  Culdee came to know it—its geography, language, customs, nuances—better than he knew his own homeland. From Dogpatch up near the Chinese border to the cluster of camps in and around Hanoi—Alcatraz, the Zoo, the Plantation House, Skidrow, the Rock-pile, Farnsworth, and Camp Hope. He knew the floor plan of the Fiery Furnance—Hoa Lo in Vietnamese, the Hanoi Hilton to the POWs—as well as he knew that of any house or ship he’d ever lived in. Hoa Lo had all the amenities. It was an old French prison from colonial days. Many times he took a sauna and massage in Room 18, more familiarly known to paying guests as the Meathook Room. Many days and nights (indistinguishable from one another) he spent in meditation in the austere decor of the Black Room or the Knobby Room.

  He came to know the staff with an intimacy formerly reserved for family members, and not just by face or name, but by the very tread of their sandals and the jangle of their keys. He could not fault them for attentiveness. Often he wished he could. Manager of the entire chain was Major Bui—the Cat to those on conversational terms with the man—slim, soft-spoken, tall for a Vietnamese, well educated, fluent in both French and English. A busy fellow, the Cat, assiduous, serious, totally dedicated to his profession, the consummate military hotelier. Unfortunately, though, he was addicted to quiz shows. A malaise of the times, no doubt. His favorite was a Tonkinese variation on Truth or Consequences. If you didn’t do well on the questions, Beulah the Buzzer rang, and in came the consequences—Pigeye, Vegetable Vic, Hocus Pocus, or the one they called Puddles. These men were conjurers of great art, adept with leg irons, handcuffs, and the Southeast Asian rope trick. In the wink of an eye they could turn a white man’s hands and feet black with dead blood. They were marvels at the vanishing thumbnail gag. In a matter of mere hours they could cause shiny bright scars to encircle a man’s arms—“Hanoi bracelets,” which were a great rarity Stateside.

  The highest-paid masseurs and bone crackers of the Western world had nothing on these practitioners when it came to limbering a man up. By tying his arms—tightly, in Manila rope—behind his back so that the elbows touched, they imparted remarkable elasticity to the rib cage and chest muscles. They were expert as well at tenderizing tough meat. Their skill at evoking a sincere primal scream was unequaled in therapeutic circles.

  Puddles in particular seemed fond of his work. At the height of the treatment, with his client enjoying (perhaps for the first time in his life) a total aspiration of the lungs and maximum vibration of the vocal cords, Puddles was wont to step back thoughtfully, a dreamy smile playing about his lips, and perform an act of manual self-therapy—selfish but uncontrollable—the culmination of which earned him his nickname. Or, as Culdee once relayed it in tap code through the camp: “Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village slope-head sat, amusing himself by abusing himself and squirting the juice in his hat.”

  Most of the prisoners in the Hanoi camps were fly-boys—either brown-shoe navy or air force. Culdee had little in common with them. Now and then, though, a blue-water sailor would fall into the hands of the V, men like Culdee with no state-of-the-art technological or tactical knowledge. He thought at first that because of his ignorance of the big picture he would be spared the quizzes and beatings afforded his superiors—the talking walls reported nightly on these sessions. But the V weren’t really after military information. They wanted to break your spirit. They wanted propaganda. They were out to break you, whoever you were, to get you singing the full-dress blues regardless of rank or service. If they could get you talking once, they could teach you how to sing. Writing was even better.

  Culdee first caught on to this at a temporary camp near Haiphong Harbor called Brigadune. He’d been out at a place they called Upper Slobbovia, near the Laotian border—the camp must have been used by Russians at one point, because the walls of the huts were plastered with pinups of enormously fat ladies, the Fanny Fullenwiders of the Slavic world—and was suddenly awakened in the night, told to grab his tin cup, bamboo mat, blanket, and spare pajamas and di-di-mau. He di-di’ed as mau as he could after two years of jungle soup, cold rice, sour brussels sp
routs, weevily bread, and an occasional piece of pigskin with the hair still on it. The truck bumped and rattled for hours, then they were at Brigadune.

  It looked like a navy camp, and you could smell the sea. There were sand flies and mangroves and mosquitoes as loud as A6 Intruders. The commandant was a fat little lieutenant commander of the North Vietnamese Navy with a weedy cookie-duster on his apelike upper lip. The My—the Americans—nicknamed him Wimpy. His henchman were Bluto and Swee’pea. The assistant commandant was a two-striper who played good cop to Wimpy’s bad cop. This man was known as Olive Oyl.

  Culdee spent his first two weeks at Brigadune in solitary, in a stifling, mildewed, ten-by-ten cell called the Chain Locker. His only companions were spiders as big as teacups. In the haste of departure from Upper Slobbovia, he had lost his mosquito net. No replacement was issued. The room, windowless, was lighted by the world’s weakest light bulb. Culdee figured it at about fifteen or twenty watts. The diet was nautical—hardtack, nuoc mam, smoked shark, the occasional hunk of boiled catfish, but more often, its whiskery head. And rice, of course. But at least there was plenty. No two ways about it. Brigadune was a feeder.

  Or at least until the quizzes began. A Quiz:

  WIMPY. Cuddy, you tell. What you do U.S. Navy?

  CULDEE. Toi khong hieu. [I don’t understand.]

  W. What your job—your rating—in American navy?

  C. Oh, I thought you were talking Vietnamese.

  (Silence, only the sound of buzzing mosquitoes.)

  W. Cuddy, You tell! I wait! What you rating? (He is angry now, mustache twitching.)

  C. You know that already. Deck Ape.

  W. (Calmer now). Cuddy, what is deck ape? Same bosum mate, hein?

  C. Yeah.

  W. (Getting to the point.) What equipment you use bosum mate, Cuddy?

  (Silence. This is stupid, Culdee thinks, his balls contracting. This shit heel knows damn well what a boatswain does—same fucking thing he does in any navy. He just wants to break me. Again. If I don’t talk—if I follow the code . . .)

  W. You tell, Cuddy, or you receive resolute and severe punish.

  (There it is, Culdee thinks, the operative phrase. They use it at every camp.)

  W. Cuddy, you have bad attitude. You tell!

  C. Well, I can’t tell you without violating the code of conduct I swore to uphold.

  W. You have bad attitude, Cuddy. (He gestures to BLUTO and SWEE’PEA.)

  (Later.)

  C. (Hoarsely). I use the same gear as these guys. (He looks up at BLUTO and SWEE’PEA.)

  W. (Looks over at the torturers, shocked, perhaps a bit fearful.) What equipment, Cuddy?

  C. Ropes. Hooks. Blocks and tackles. Fids—

  W. What is fid, Cuddy? (He pushes over pen, ink, and paper.) You write down.

  C. Well, no. I can’t. I can’t write it down.

  W. Cuddy, you have bad attitude. You will receive reso—

  C. Okay, okay, I’ll write it down. (He reaches for the pen and knocks over the inkwell, splattering the soggy gray writing paper. Patiently, WIMPY takes more paper from a desk drawer and hands it to CULDEE. CULDEE forces his fat, black fingers around the pen, dips it weakly in the ink, writes: “Fid: A long, pointed wooden spike used in the splicing of rope.”)

  W. Cuddy, now you have good attitude. Now you do for camp! (He smiles beneath that ratty cookie-duster. WIMPY’S got his hamburger at last.)

  That night Olive Oyl dropped by Culdee’s cell, armed with a Flit gun. He slunk around, spraying delicately, casting fervid, sidelong glances at the prisoner. He smiled gently. He checked that the guards weren’t watching and then reached into his pocket. He handed Culdee a piece of fudge. The fudge had lint on it, and what looked like a curl of pubic hair.

  “You are good man, Cuddy,” he whispered as he left. “Tomorrow you get roommate.”

  When the cell door closed, Culdee dropped the piece of fudge into his honey bucket. It sank out of sight in the day’s excrement.

  FIVE

  He was moved to a new cell the following morning. Compared with the Chain Locker it was spacious—ten paces wide by five deep. It had a big, iron-barred window that opened onto the beach. There were sou trees outside and a few tattered palms, and beyond them he could see the blue water of the Tonkin Gulf. The breeze tasted sweet after his long confinement. The window even had a screen in it to keep out mosquitoes.

  There were no leg irons at the foot of the long, wide bunks that stood one over the other on the starboard bulkhead. The bunks were built of hardwood, well joined and smoothly sanded. In the lower bunk lay his new roommate. A blond guy, tall but not cadaverous, and freshly shaved. He grinned and got up with an outstretched hand.

  “Hi, Chief. I’m Tim Turner.”

  Culdee took his hand. No fat fingers on Turner, all fingernails present and accounted for. He had a strong grip for a POW.

  “Culdee,” he said. “Chief boatswain.” He looked around the cell in wonder. “Where’s the complimentary basket of fruit and wine?”

  Turner laughed. “Hey!” he said. “As a matter of fact I do have something for you.” He rummaged in his gear, folded neatly at the foot of the lower bunk, and came up with a square of fudge. For a moment Culdee wondered if it was the same piece he’d shit-canned the previous night. He took it anyway.

  “What’s your rate and rating?” he asked.

  “Gunner’s mate second,” Turner said. “Off the Hancock. We were out on Yankee Station when the chaplain got word my mother was sick. I pulled compassionate leave. The plane that was taking me down to Quang Tri splashed—engines crapped out.”

  “Tough,” Culdee said.

  “Could be worse,” Turner said. “I’m the only one got out of the plane. I guess I’m lucky. A fishing boat spotted me.”

  Turner had only been in the Dune for a couple of weeks. The Hancock had just arrived in the area from Stateside, so he was full of news. Things were bad back there—anti-war protests, sit-ins, draft-card burnings, hippies all over the place. It didn’t sound like the same country to Culdee. Bobby Kennedy was dead, shot by some Arab. Martin Luther King, too, by a redneck. LBJ wasn’t running again. It looked like Nixon would be the next president. He was making noises about ending the war.

  Oddly, the news left Culdee unmoved. It all sounded unreal, as if it were happening in Oz. But then, a few weeks later, Turner said something that stirred him up for the first time since he’d reached the Dune.

  “There’s PT boats in the basin just south of the cellblock,” Turner reported. “I saw them today when I was on work detail. Russian PA-3 types. Old but fast. Forty knots or better. They’ve got ’em hidden under camo netting, lightly guarded.”

  Culdee passed the word by tap code to the senior officer, a SEAL lieutenant named Mr. Thomas. Slowly but surely, at Culdee’s urging, the escape plan took shape. Turner reported that it was no more than two hundred meters from the southern side of the compound to the boat basin. A low seawall offered cover most of the way. Only a fence of concertina wire lay between the cells and the seawall, maybe some razor wire as well—Turner couldn’t be sure. Guards walked the wire day and night with AKs, but they didn’t appear especially alert, and there was a ten-minute cycle to their appearance at any given point on the perimeter. The monsoon season was fast approaching—wind, rain, darkness. . . . It looked eminently workable.

  Culdee was not picked for the escape party. His shoulder wound, where the gaff had pierced him, had suddenly flared up again—some sort of deep-seated infection. Neither was Turner. He was too junior—there were men in the Dune who had been POWs for five years. Culdee himself had been in only two. Turner lamented more about Culdee’s not going than about his own disqualification.

  “It’s not right,” he said angrily the night before the breakout. “You know these waters better than those SEALs. You ran a Swift boat, you’re a boat handler from way back. I don’t see why they can’t take you along if only to guide them through the channel.”
/>   “I’m not a SEAL,” Culdee said. “They stick together.”

  “Well, it’s not right.”

  “They ought to take you,” Culdee said. “You’re the one who spotted the PTs in the first place. You’re the one who mapped out the escape route.”

  “Well, not really,” Turner said. “It was a fluke. Anyone who’d been on that detail would have seen the possibilities. And anyway, you’re the one who passed it on to Mr. Thomas.”

  It almost seemed to Culdee that Turner didn’t want to go. For a moment, suspicion flared: could this be some kind of setup? But he dismissed the thought as just another episode of POW paranoia. Turner was a good sailor. He couldn’t be slimy. And yet there was something about him. . . . Then it came back strong for a moment. Turner had too much vitality. He moved with a certain snap. His eyes were bright, his tongue uncoated. He smiled too much—not bitterly or ironically, but with a kind of contentment that might almost be mistaken for pride in duty well done. And Turner’s wrists were unscarred. No Hanoi bracelets, as if he’d never been handcuffed. How had he remained so healthy, so unscarred if he weren’t slimy?

  In POW lingo, a man who was slimy was a collaborator.

  He stared at Turner long and hard. When Turner caught his eye, he looked away.

  The following morning Culdee was haled to Wimpy’s office. Bluto and Swee’pea cuffed his hands, bone-tight, behind his back. Wimpy smiled.

  “Cuddy,” he said, “you have bad attitude.” He slapped Culdee hard across the mouth. Culdee tasted blood. “I think you spend some time alone for now. Ponder your sins. Then maybe you get good attitude.”

  So it was back to the Chain Locker for Culdee, but not without a preliminary massage and manicure from Bluto and the Pea. That night it rained hard, the monsoon winds howling eerily through the bars of the other cells so that they resonated like harp strings, the music reaching even his sealed compartment. The breakout was set for two in the morning. Culdee remained awake all night, listening. Then, during a lull in the storm, he heard it: the slow, hollow chugging of the AKs as they cut down Mr. Thomas, Chief Wysocki, and the three SEAL ratings who went with them.