The Sympathizer

When all the passengers had boarded, the General motioned for me to go before him. He was the last to walk up the ramp into a cargo hold with no seats. Adults squatted on the floor or sat on bags, children perched on their knees. Lucky passengers had a bulkhead berth where they could cling to a cargo strap. The contours of skin and flesh separating one individual from another merged, everyone forced into the mandatory intimacy required of those less human than the ones leaving the country in reserved seating. Bon, Linh, and Duc were somewhere in the middle, as were Madame and her children. The ramp slowly rose and clamped shut, sealing us worms into our can. Along with the loadmaster, the General and I leaned against the ramp, our knees in the noses of the passengers before us. The quartet of turboprop engines turned over with a deafening racket, the vibrations rattling the ramp. As the plane grumbled its way along the tarmac, the whole population rocked back and forth with every motion, a congregation swaying to inaudible prayers. The acceleration pressed me backward while the woman in front of me braced her arm against my knees, her jaw pressed to the rucksack on my lap. As the heat in the plane climbed over forty degrees Celcius, so did the intensity of our odor. We exuded the stink of sweat, of unwashed clothing, and of anxiety, with the only succor being the breeze through the open door where a crewman stood in a rock guitarist’s wide-legged pose. Instead of a six-string electric guitar slung low across his hips, he carried an M16 with a twenty-round magazine. As we taxied along the runway, I caught glimpses of concrete revetments, giant cans sliced in half lengthwise, and a desolate row of incinerated warbirds, demolished jets blown up in a strafing run earlier this evening, wings plucked and scattered like those of abused flies. A hush blanketed the passengers, hypnotized by trepidation and anticipation. They were, no doubt, thinking what I was. Good-bye, Vietnam. Au revoir, Saigon—


The explosion was deafening, the force of it launching the crewman onto the passengers, the last thing I saw for several moments as the flash of light through the open door washed the sight from my eyes. The General tumbled into me and I fell onto the bulkhead, then onto screaming bodies, hysterical civilians spraying my face with sour saliva. The tires of the plane squealed on the runway as it spun to the right, and when my sight returned a blaze of fire shone through the door. I feared nothing more than burning to death, nothing more than being pureed by a propeller, nothing more than being quartered by a Katyusha, which even sounded like the name of a demented Siberian scientist who had lost a few toes and a nose to frostbite. I had seen roasted remains before, in a desolate field outside of Hue, carbonized corpses fused into the metal of a downed Chinook, the fuel tanks having incinerated the three dozen occupants, their teeth exposed in a permanent, simian rictus; the flesh of their lips and faces burned off; the skin a finely charred obsidian, smooth and alien, all the hair converted to ash, no longer recognizable as my countrymen or as human beings. I did not want to die that way; I did not want to die in any way, least of all in a long-range bombardment from the artillery of my communist comrades, launched from the suburbs they had captured outside Saigon. A hand squeezed my chest and reminded me I was still alive. Another clawed my ear as the howling people beneath me struggled to heave me off. Pushing back to try to right myself, I found my hand on someone’s oily head and myself pressed against the General. Another explosion somewhere on the runway heightened the frenzy. Men, women, and children caterwauled at an even higher pitch. All of a sudden the plane halted its gyrations at such an angle where the eye of the door did not look out onto fire but only onto the darkness, and a man screamed, We’re all going to die! The loadmaster, cursing inventively, began the lowering of the ramp, and when the refugees surged forward against the opening, they bore me backward with them. The only way to survive being trampled to death was to cover my head with my rucksack and roll down the ramp, knocking people down as I did so. Another rocket exploded on the runway a few hundred meters behind us, lighting up an acre of tarmac and revealing the nearest shelter to be a battered concrete divider fifty meters from the runway. Even after the explosion faded, the disturbed night was no longer dark. The plane’s starboard engines were aflame, two blazing torches spewing gusts of spark and smoke.