Vietnam Redux
One of Hannah Langdon’s articles, What a Vietnamese Survivor’s Story Showed me About Womanhood, triggered a memory about a special Vietnamese woman — and the man she stood beside while going through hell. The story follows.
I first met Le at the gym — I met my wife D there, too, but this story’s not about her. I’m calling her Le, though it’s not her given Vietnamese name. Le worked the desk part-time at the Skyline Health Club checking the gym rats in and out, always with a smile. Eighteen, already charming and self-possessed, in one of our first conversations, she tried selling me on adopting a puppy — I think it was a black lab mix — from a litter of pups who needed homes. At that point in my life, I was looking for a home myself with no means to take care of a dog; my two sons were enough.
Le has been caring for dogs as long as I’ve known her; the ones she can’t adopt she and Rob foster. Much like all the kids who’ve trooped through their house — though I’m getting ahead of myself.
Back in the early 90s, D and I were strictly running buddies. D had a boyfriend, and I was a basket case from my previous marriage. Le was hooked up (pretty much permanently as it turned out) to one of the personal trainers, this muscular U.S. male named Rob, who had half the women in the gym falling over themselves to date. Before he met Le, for a while he was dating a friend of D’s; he and D were friends, which circumnavigates us back to Le. Got it?
You don’t know a person at eighteen for sure. Some can change one hundred-eighty degrees without warning. Le was not one of those. She was a quiet, friendly person then as now.
I certainly qualified as a gym rat back then, being recently single again and pining for love — working out had to suffice. I was a half decent distance runner and a not so spectacular weightlifter, but I enjoyed the challenge — a good thing since I needed upper body strength. D and I ran nights after work, out Leesburg Pike from Skyline down the hill on George Mason Drive to the bike trail out to Falls Church and back, six miles round trip. The return hike up the long George Mason hill was always fun.
We were always talking on the runs — and I couldn’t help but notice all we held in common.
D was also doing step classes at the gym, as if running wasn’t sufficient aerobic exercise. So what if I fell in love with an over-achiever? Russ joined us some nights, but he had to work harder at it, whereas I’d been running distance for years, and D was a natural. Toward the end of that year D ran her marathon — we were dating by then, her boyfriend in the rear view window.
The social scene at the Skyline Club in the 80s into the 90s was half the reason people came. The place was/still is cavernous, sitting atop the former shopping center now converted into a Target superstore, though it’s not the place to meet it once was.
When it came to writing the gym scenes for Kill Devil, a tortured novel from hell, my go-to descriptions were borrowed from the Skyline Club. Write what you know, and all that.
Le and Rob were married near to the same day in ’94 that D and I were. Somewhere along the line, we became involved in their social lives outside the club. To explain, the six degrees of separation that applies to most people on the planet; for Rob it’s more like one or two at most. He’s the mayor of Annandale, and the place doesn’t even have a mayor. Walk into the Silverado’s restaurant, approach anyone at the bar, and they’ll ask: did you go to high school with Rob?
Soon enough, after making Rob an honest man, Le became pregnant and their first girl arrived. Followed by their second a few years later. Thank god the girls look like their mother. D and I could be blood relatives for all the baptisms and birthdays we’ve been invited to since. Le was determined to celebrate every single event in her daughters’ lives, though Rob didn’t object. Only a few months ago, we missed the younger one’s high school graduation. The older girl is bound to graduate from college shortly.
Rob is my kind of Catholic — Irish, and laid back (I didn’t say lapsed) — who attends the local Annandale church known for being the most conservative (is the Pope Polish? as the joke went). But the official godparents he and Le chose, Paul and Jeff, were a gay couple — not exactly on the Church’s approved list.
Rob loved to tease them for batting for the other team. Like I said, laid back. We haven’t seen as much of Paul and Jeff since they moved to California; rumor has it their beach house south of San Francisco is a treat for the eyes.
One evening, I don’t know how the conversation began, or even when it turned serious, but at some point deep into an excellent single malt, Rob started telling me about being the last of eight growing up poor. In a house the size of a large closet, the same one he and Le were living in after his mother passed. She missed their wedding by days.
I could relate to Rob’s story; with my mother being the sole bread earner, my family hadn’t been exactly rolling in cash either. At one point in the conversation, Rob and I landed on why he worked out so, how he’d begun as a teenager putting on muscle to defend himself — being the son of the church janitor, his attendance at the Catholic school hadn’t been the easiest. My own eight hard years in Catholic school allowed me to sympathize.
I think Rob has always cheered for the underdogs — one reason he’s gone out of his way to befriend gays, blacks, black gays... I’m always on the lookout for people like him when planning my lifeboat.
Then he started in telling me a bit of Le’s story.
Le’s mother had worked for the U.S. Embassy during the Vietnam War. I get the impression she and her two very young daughters were already on their own; their father was missing. When it came time for the U.S. troops to evacuate Saigon, she, with Le and her sister, were some of the last to leave. Le has never talked about their escape. According to Rob, she doesn’t discuss it.
“South Vietnamese refugees walk across a U.S. Navy vessel. Operation Frequent Wind, the final operation in Saigon, began April 29, 1975. During a nearly constant barrage of explosions, the Marines loaded American and Vietnamese civilians, who feared for their lives, onto helicopters that brought them to waiting aircraft carriers. The Navy vessels brought them to the Philippines and eventually to Camp Pendleton, Calif.”
from Wikipedia article, Fall of Saigon — photo description from U.S. Marines in Japan Homepage
War is hell, and it has always involved the noncombatants, intentionally for a fair part of the time. And the Vietnamese who’d supported the U.S. suffered — either by the aftermath inflicted by the victorious Communists, or by escaping to a country so diametrically different it might as well have been a punishment by racist exclusion.
The Vietnamese diaspora spreads from California across to the Mid-Atlantic. In greater Washington DC, we have a sampling of every culture the U.S. has had armies in, and a few others besides. There’s a Little Saigon not but a few miles from our house with some of the earliest Vietnamese restaurants.
Once in the States, Le’s mother became involved with a ‘white’ man at some point before Rob came into Le’s life — the man was the worst kind scum. He abused her mother; he abused Le. Once she began dating Rob, things changed. In the end, Rob drove the bastard off. Stepping deep into someone’s turmoil like he did with no more commitment than to protect her— trusting someone with your deep wounds like she did with him — goes beyond a facile attraction between two people.
When my son, Ryan, killed himself in ’02, I had a duty to call people. My sister was spending the weekend with us — standing next to me, she heard Ryan’s mother screaming across the phone line the same as I. Ryan’s mother was in no condition to deal with the aftermath.
I dreaded calling Sean, Ryan’s older brother; it broke my heart knowing how it would break his. And I needed to call my other sister in South Carolina, my longstanding running partner, Peter, my ex-girlfriend, Ilene — and Rob, because after that conversation, we’d shared too much not to share this misery.
When Le answered the phone, I asked to speak to Rob. After delivering the news, his response was, “I’m glad you asked for me. She doesn’t deal well with this kind of thing,” or words to that effect. Childhood trauma is hard to move past. His comment stayed with me; he was that protective of her. If memory serves, Rob came alone to Ryan’s funeral.
Five years ago, D and I were sitting down to dinner when Le texted me to say Rob wouldn’t be able to make our upcoming trip to the Outer Banks to haul an old sofa down to the beach house using his pickup.
She was texting from the Fairfax Hospital ER. “He’s been in a motorcycle accident.” Just like that.
A few hours later, I was helping her carry his heavy riding leathers, helmet and gloves from the ER out to the car. Some fool Rob never saw had stopped an SUV in the middle of a blind entrance ramp curve. He hit it on his motorcycle at 50 mph or better; he has no memory of it. Shut down I-95 while they worked on him laid out on the road. The police photos were hard to look at.
That was the start of a fearfully long struggle in the life of that family.
Standing in the ICU hallway, when Rob’s oldest daughter left his room, visiting the first time, he in a medically induced coma, she burst into tears — all I could do was hold the girl. Her sister emerged from his room, deathly silent and eyes wide with pain. They were too young — reminding me of what their mother went through as a child. Not a lot I could do except bear witness.
Yet in the following weeks, watching half of Northern Virginia visit him was stirring. It didn’t matter only one person was allowed in his room at a time. They filled the ICU waiting room, and the overflow folks stood in the hall. We had a Skyline Club reunion of sorts. No one knew if or when Rob might be brought out of the induced coma.
He’d suffered a traumatic brain injury and had so many broken parts, an infection in one leg or perhaps two, fractured wrists, smashed knee, compound fractures in his tibia and fibula, broken ankle, cracked ribs, by all rights he should have died on the asphalt. Medical science in one of the best hospitals in the country, and a team of nurses round the clock kept the boy alive — and the nurses never complained about the crazy people hanging out.
The largest part of whether he’d make it out of there whole was the family he had around him. His nephew from Wilmington took a leave of absence from his work and left his pregnant wife to sleep in Rob’s hospital room night after night so Le could go home. Le, who never cried, that I saw. And her daughters who followed her example.
You hear of bad motorcycle accidents, but you don’t always know of the long, painful months, coming off morphine cold turkey, the days of therapy following, with wife and daughters tending to every intimate part of the recovery. Rob’s daughters had to grow up in a hurry.
There is so little positive to say about losing a child. The scar tissue leaves nothing for the means to continue living — and I am still amazed I made it — that Ryan’s brother made it, their mother in her own way. This is the brutal reality.
Living through the trauma of a near-death injury — in Rob’s case multiple injuries — is only relieved after the fact. Hard to tell how much Rob misses his old life. I expect he does, though he’s not one to look back in sorrow. And if Le misses her once hard-charging spouse, she shows no sign; she doesn’t say.
Today he cheerfully complains about how his installed hardware makes his body hurt when a storm’s coming. Sitting too long in one place makes him hurt even worse.
While Le was living through the worst of it, with Rob in and out of consciousness in the ICU for a month followed by months more in recovery, caring for her children, caring for her husband, I can attest to the woman’s strength. She kept a journal on his condition through the worst days, so she could keep track of his meds and reconstructive surgeries — there were a lot of those.
That first night in the ER, I had to tell her the story about Rob thinking, “she doesn’t deal well with this kind of thing.” At that moment, she needed to know she was stronger than that.
This past spring Le texted me on the five year anniversary of Rob’s accident. At the high school where she teaches, last year she gave the Teacher of the Year address — on Zoom because of the pandemic. The honor is voted by the students, not the teachers. She has a soft spot for the kids, a majority coming from tough backgrounds and immigrant families where they’ll be the first to attend college. It’s no wonder they love her.
And she’s still sending me emails of stray dogs, insisting they need homes. My kind of woman.
