Volltext - ub-dok: der Dokumentenserver der UB Trier - Universität ...

and time. Feng reports that ‘we found ourselves climbing down a ladder, one by one, through
a hole that went straight into the earth. And now there was no more rain: no more water.’
They are confronted by shadows in the tunnel. ‘Strange soldiers appeared to greet us: young
men and women in pale green uniforms’, Feng says, both relieved and mystified ‘to see the
delicate, elf-like faces of the Vietnamese girls’. He is not sure ‘whether any of these people
were real, or whether I was hallucinating’ (HW, 342-43). Feng’s complete confusion
resembles that of Alice when she first descended into the White Rabbit’s hole:
I didn’t know where I was, or how much time had gone by, or whether it was
day or night. I only knew I was underground. Distant voices and laughter had
woken me, so distant they seemed like dreams, and it seemed to me that I’d
entered some old fairy story, and had come into an underground citadel of
goblins, where time and the days and the seasons had no meaning. (HW, 343-
44)
Feng finds that the ‘dry earth smell made me feel safe’, and the Soldiers Three are soon
rejuvenated in the womb-like confines of the ‘red-brown earth’ bunker (HW, 344). Their
metamorphosis is soon complete, both spiritually and physically, so much that when their old
clothes, metaphor of the perspective from which one defines the ‘Other’, are returned to them
before their release, they no longer appear to be theirs: ‘Sitting here in our NVA fatigues and
Ho Chi Minh sandals, it was strange to see these clothes; they seemed to belong to other men,
and to come form another reality’ (HW, 346). This change in identity is also shown in Feng’s
attitude about his Rolex. He deeply regretted its confiscation when they were captured, but
when it was returned, he is not correspondingly relieved. It rather proves the NVA cause to be
stronger and more righteous than that of the South Vietnamese and their Western allies, and
that the North Vietnamese, as epitomised by Captain Danh, represent the forces of the justice
and virtue of dharma.
Langford, Feng and Volkov have discovered how, once one has moved from one world
to the ‘Otherworld’, the two change identities. Reality, as in the wayang kulit, depends on
which side of the screen one watches from. Just where and what the NVA bunker was
remains, for those who did not accompany them to the ‘east bank’, like nirvana, unknowable.
Speculation is that it was part of the COSVN complex, Central Office South Viet Nam, the
- 308 -