Chapter EightAN HOUR LATER, they could smell the Perfume River as they walked up Duy Tan Street. They reached the first throng of refugees, looking wary and wretched, uncertain whether to be grateful or fearful and watched the Marines with expressionless faces. Many of the refugees slept in the streets at night. Others had holed up inside the vacated houses behind the MACV compound. One hundred thousand South Vietnamese had already fled the city and the thousands that remained were either too poor, frightened or stubborn to leave. A cyclo-rickshaw driver peddled past, but there was no one to taxi and no safe place to go. Ancient elders with long, wispy beards stood guard over wooden handcarts with rickety wooden wheels, scores of children and orphans among them. Like children everywhere, t
