The Language of Men Read Online Free Page A

straight and sweeps it across the windshield, fingertips grazing the glass. "All
Platoon."
    Anh knows me. He has never seen me before, but he knows me well. He's driven me up Highway 1 since the late 1980s, when I traveled to Vietnam from New York or Boston or Idaho or Kentucky, when I sat in the back of his car beside a father or a grandfather, a brother, an uncle. He takes us north from Ho Chi Minh City, to small towns whose names we know well, have been to or heard stories of. Anh studies the movies, listens to the music, points to a square of cement where Charlie Sheen once stood or patches of jungle that inspired CCR's "Fortunate Son." He drives us through the towns, and they all look the same, and perhaps none of us in the car would recognize a thing if Anh didn't mention a movie title or song lyric or speak the name of the town written on the back of the photograph in my pocket, my father standing in front of the old movie house:
Bien Hoa, '71.
*
    "Many men came here for a woman."
    We stand on the cement pier in Bien Hoa, Anh's cigarette now lit, the driver watching us from the road. Anh looks around, paying close attention to the locals walking by, staring. I can tell by the slow pulls he takes on his cigarette, his calm tone, that he is not nervous, just careful. He tells us most tourists don't come here, and many of the locals have not seen a white person since the war.
    "Very few women left in Bien Hoa," he says, almost under his breath.
    "How come?" I ask.
    "Marry soldiers. Soldiers take them home."
    I think about the souvenirs we had bought earlier in the trip, the black chopsticks and their ceramic holders, wrapped tightly in tissue paper.
    "Did the women want to leave?" Vanessa asks.
    Anh purses his lips and stares down the street. "Perhaps some," he says. "Others, maybe not."
    We stand on the pier for another minute or so as Anh finishes his cigarette. The stores across the street are different from the shops in Ho Chi Minh City. Instead of pizza and hamburgers, pirated copies of
Dispatches
or
The Things They Carried,
these stores sell scrap metal and lumber and copper piping. One man sits in the only empty space in his shop, as if at the helm of a small ship made of tires and hubcaps. Men laugh on the corner, drinking coffee, playing cards. Men crouch on the pier, pointing into the dark water. Men watch Anh flick his cigarette into the canal, clap his hands together, and their eyes follow us back across the street, into the car, as we disappear behind tinted glass.
    The highway is less congested once we leave Bien Hoa and head toward Long Binh. Long Binh is where my father spent his twentieth birthday. This is where he spent most of his nineteen months in Vietnam. This is where he worked as a cook, mixing vats of oatmeal and mashed potatoes, brewing oceans of coffee, baking mountains of donuts. This is where he and the other
spoons
spent one-hundred-degree days preparing soup or baking apple pie. This is where the jokes start:
How long you been in Long Binh? Been too long in Long Binh.
This is where he cleaned and polished his rifle, hung posters of Jimi Hendrix and Playboy centerfolds, drank weak, government-issued Budweiser. One of the sixty-thousand soldiers living within this militarized metropolis, he constructed a hooch out of scrap wood and empty crates. This is where he sunbathed on a lawn chair, somewhere in the dusty divide between two of the U.S. Army's largest structures in South Vietnam: a hospital and a prison. This is where he bought a television and a stereo, tapped off a buddy's extension cord that was tapped off a buddy's extension cord. This is where Vietnamese women went hooch to hooch, waving white rags, speaking the only English necessary.
    And this is where a giant supermarket now stands.
    "Not many stores like this in Vietnam," Anh says, standing up tall and nodding as he looks around the parking lot. I snap a picture and the driver glances at me. Anh smiles. "Come."
    Vanessa and I