The Other War in Vietnam

After five Air France meals and three Air France movies, I arrived in Saigon. The civilian terminal at Tan Son Nhut was smaller and less crowded than I expected. I saw no information booth and I had no idea where I was supposed to go. There was a sign: Do Not Pay With Dollars but no money exchange.. There was a telephone on a wall that pretended to be an information hot line. I picked it up several times but it was always busy.

“The phone is always busy,” a well dressed Vietnamese business man said without stopping. 

I caught up with him in three steps and explained my situation.

“Try MAC-V,” he said. 

I knew that I would need to check in with MAC-V (Military Assistance Command-Vietnam) at some point, but now I needed a place to set down my bag and shower. “Where is MAC-V?” I asked giving up all intention of appearing a slightly jaded sophisticate.

“See those metal buildings over there?” he said pointing at warehouses. “That’s MAC-V. “

Of course I could see them. They covered the horizon. This was beginning to look like a snipe hunt. “Which one?”

“All of them,” he said, dismissing me.

I picked up my bag and stepped into the heat and humidity. I was fortunate. I was coming from San Antonio with its usual balmy fall of warm days, cold nights. Imagine arriving from Minnesota or Montana where there was snow on the ground. I walked through the gate for pedestrian passengers and those arriving by cab, past the bunker with ARVN and a machine gun in fixed position and across the street to…warehouses.

They were locked warehouses. I trudged between heat-emitting-buildings and heat-exuding-buildings that expanded into the curvature of the earth. Jet lag and the bag were about to get me when I discovered a metal building with a door and windows. The door was not locked and opened into air conditioning. “Let me die here,” I mumbled. I put the bag down and straightened up. There were people in U.S. uniforms in the distance, about a basketball court from the unlocked door, typing or staring at what looked like radar screens. They knew I was in the building and didn’t care. I didn’t care either. We were cool in most meanings of the word. 

A major appeared from the darkness behind the screen, talked to one of the typists, watched while a corporal pointed at things on the screen and noticed a suitcase and a pile of rags against a wall. He slowly approached moving his head from side to side as though trying to decipher what he saw. “Thought you were an i.e.d.”, he said. “What can I do for you?”

I explained that I was a reporter without a bureau or an office, I had just arrived and I didn’t know where I was supposed to be or how to get there. 

“We’re closing shop at 17:00. If you can wait until then, we’re going downtown. You need to contact JUSPAO. We can drop you there and there is a hotel on every corner. Sarge, get this guy a cold pop.”

I could wait until morning. I drank the cold pop and they had to wake me to take me to the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office in the Rex Hotel. As usual, the hotel was filled with reporters and soldiers spending the night. I missed the Five O'Clock Follies but discovered I could change dollars for “funny money”, military script that I could use instead of dollars to frustrate the blackmarket.

I needed a Vietnam visa before they could give me credentials, a pass to the PX and an I.D. card the size of a modest business card. “If you get in trouble, keep your head down, hold up your I.D. card and yell ‘phong vien” as loud and as long as you can.” The card said that if I was captured I should be treated as a major in the military. That was a big promotion from a Corporal in the Marines.

I checked into the Caravelle Hotel, next to the Opera House, despite its reputation for the slowest elevator in the East, caught a cab to as close as I could get to the visa office that was off-limits for vehicles, argued with the cab driver who wanted dollars. “Script number ten”. He yelled “cheap charlie” as long as I could hear him. 

The visa office was a simple building in a park-like area bordered on one side by an open sewer. A short but haggard looking line waited ahead of me. Some were siting on the sidewalk. Some were lying in the grass. The man at the head of the line turned on his heel and walked stiffly away, swollen with anger. The second man followed him. The third, a woman, lay down on the grass. The line lost unit integrity. Everyone looked at everyone else for a conclusion. 

“They’re closed,” shouted a woman sitting on the grass. We ignored her but our cohesion was gone. Three people went to the door and looked through the glass. The older gentlemen limped to the grass and picked out a place for the night, tried it, shifted around a bit to fit its contours, closed his eyes and instantly went to sleep. 

The way to the door was clear and I took it. There was a light inside. If I could get a form I could fill it out and return it tomorrow morning, maybe get a visa by noon. I rapped on the door. A man appeared from nowhere walking toward the dim light. “Hey,” I yelled banging on the door. He stopped and stood perfectly straight as though wondering if he had heard something. I banged harder on the door and screamed “phong vien” as loudly as I could. Some who had been sleeping groaned and shifted looking for softer grass. 

Yes, he heard me. He made his way toward me. “I’m an American,” I yelled needlessly. “I’d like to get…” he lowered the venetian blind over the window. 

I walked back to the Caravelle, put in an early wakeup call. I wanted to get out of Saigon as quickly as possible and get to work. I showered, dressed and went to dinner in the hotel topped off by the “most hygienic ice cream in Southeast Asia”. I had never before tasted ice cream for its hygiene but I judged Caravelle ice cream as average. I returned to my room and crashed.

Two loud explosions rattled the hotel. I pulled on trousers and ran down five floors—faster than the elevator—and went outside. There seemed to be no excitement outside although I could hear sirens. Three men stood together but looking in different directions. Hotel security. A fourth man said that two rockets had landed short of MAC-V hitting a crowded residential area. A first report was Vietnamese casualties but no Americans.

He said that without turning around or looking at me. I didn’t know if Saigon had an equivalent of the CIA but if they did, he was it.

I got up before the wakeup call, skipped breakfast, caught a cab to as close as I could get to the visa office. Although the office was not open there was a long line and people sleeping on the grass. Apparently they had been there all night. Where were all these people going? This was 1970; Saigon was not in danger except for a grenade tossed into a movie theater or a bomb left in a shopping bag in a restaurant or rockets aimed at U.S. warehouses.

About midmorning a civil servant opened a side door pointed at me and waved me to come that way. What if he wasn’t waving at me and while I was walking toward him my place in the line was lost and I had to go to the end of the line near where I got out of the cab yesterday. The people around me were telling me to go as though my departure would help them. I walked toward the open door, acutely aware of how I would feel if a Russian were given preference to me an honest to God Texan. I smiled at the likelihood of that but I would gladly step aside for someone who made it to the second round of the Miss America or Mrs. America contest.

The civil servant led me to a chair and a desk with forms to fill out. Each form had to be copied seven times. There was no carbon paper. Try to write legibly the same line or paragraph seven times with jet lag, dozing off in the middle of a form and having to go back to be certain every line was copied. I was told my visa would be sent to the hotel.

I decided to walk back to the hotel to clear my head while looking for a restaurant. I turned into the first one I saw. It turned out to be a no English restaurant. The servers spoke no English but there was an English menu. I drank two cups of coffee and unloaded one while trying to look through an extensive menu with more opportunities than Walmart.

The teacher of the four lower grades in the two-room country school I attended advised us that if we were in Mexico to never order scrambled eggs because rotten eggs could be scrambled but could not be boiled. We were four hundred miles from Mexico and she was the only person we knew who had been there. The lesson stuck.

I ordered boiled eggs and toast. Two eggs were brought in a saucer with a pot of water that stopped boiling when it was removed from the fire. 

What did I do? Put the eggs in the hot water and wait for a server to pick the pot up and return it to the fire? Let a server put the eggs in the pot and do with it whatever he was supposed to do? Walk out of the restaurant and look for another one. I put the eggs in the pot and waited for something to happen. And waited a long time. I ate the toast. It was good. 

Out of curiosity I picked a warm egg out of the warm water and opened it in the saucer to see what had become of it. In the saucer was a very, very soft boiled egg that looked like it might have been away from its mother too long.. 

How was I going to eat it. My choices were a fork or chopsticks. In high school when I got home from football practice Mother broke an egg in a glass of milk added a bit of vanilla and put it in the mixer to confuse things. I drank it believing I would fill out with muscles. I could ask for a straw but could I suck a liquid yolk up a straw and swallow it? It was my first day in Vietnam and I was overwhelmed by choices. I gave the second egg another fifteen minutes, broke it into the saucer and used the fork to guide it into my mouth.

After a nap at the Caravelle, I was still hungry and walked to the Brink Hotel that was supposed to have a good restaurant, American style. The Brink was famous because it had been blown up when it was believed that the Bob Hope cast and crew were staying there. They weren’t. I turned a corner and had started across the street when I saw an M.P. standing in the middle of it. I didn’t have credentials. Maybe I wasn’t allowed to eat there. I decided to walk past him as a V.I.P. reporter and make him challenge me. He ignored me but I stopped when he stopped two officers. 

He warned them that a stolen Jeep had been parked beneath the hotel and an E.O.D. team had been called to check it for explosives. They turned back and so did I but only to the corner. I tucked my body behind a very sturdy building with only half my face exposed. If the Brink blew up, I was going to have a photo of it.

The E.O.D. team arrived, checked the Jeep for explosives and drove it away. I was a little disappointed but I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt but I had expectations. And nothing happened except that life was so full of nothing happeneds. If just for once some thing happened. 

Maybe I would have a great meal. I sat at a round table where some people were already eating and we were joined by others. I told about the bomb threat marking myself as a new guy or as the troops said, an F.N.G. Some people just shook their heads but three people felt it necessary to tell me that it happened somewhere every day. “If you’re going to be in Saigon long you need to get used to.” I told them I hoped to get out of Saigon tomorrow. More head shaking. “You know there’s a war out there don’t you.” That was sort of the point. “You’ll learn more about the war in bar here than you will in the jungle.” That was probably true but beside the point.

The food was no better than the company. I walked to JUSPAO, told them my problem and asked if they could hurry up the Visa process.

No. Don’t even think about it. That would gum things up and I would never get out of Saigon.There was a snack bar and I had a hamburger, fries and a milk shake. That met my ground level expectations but did not exceed them. For excess I walked down Tu Do Street. 

It was not yet quitting time and already young women in go-go dancers skirts and boots, airline hostesses in cutoff uniforms, high school teachers in pullover sweaters, short skirts and high heels, high school cheerleaders in very short skirts. Everyone of them said, “I love you too much. Buy me one drink. You cheap charlie.”

Despite their smiles and clownish outfits it was a sad and too familiar scene in tourist cities. In some places in the East it is a daughter’s duty to her family; often so that a brother can go to school. If a history of women is ever written, it will be the story of male oppression, even in religion. Even in my autobiography.

My second night at the Caravelle was interrupted by gunshots. Grab pants, stumble down five flights of stairs, the same people outside. “Two Vietnamese Marines went into a bar, had a drink, one Marine started a fight, the other grabbed a bottle of liquor and both ran out of the store. The bar owner ran outside and fired shots at them. Nobody was hurt, the bottle of 15-year-old Scotch was retrieved, the two Marines were caught and will be returned to their unit where they will be punished. If they were given decent pay there wouldn’t be scenes like this,” Mr. C.I.A said without turning around.

When I first dreamed of being a writer, one question I wanted to pursue was whether a person could persist in believing the truth of an event in which he was the only participant, and maintain the integrity of that event if everyone else believed an alternative story. A very young boy is sobbing at the frustrations of boyhood. A magnificent convertible stops beside him. A very old man climbs out of the back seat. He is all duded up in gowns and robes with jewelry on his head and fingers and around his neck. He bends over the boy puts his fingers on the boy’s tears, kisses him on top of the head and tells him that someday he would be king. He climbs back into the convertible that leaves in a rush without stirring up leaves or dust. 

The boy tells the story too soon to the wrong people. In the first story the old man is a pervert but the boy’s dog frightens him away. Later he is a kidnapper and when he tries to pick up the boy, the dog attacks his ankles until he jumps in his car and drives away. The most popular version is that a stranger to the area has been invited to a costume party in the nearby city. He rents costumes and a fancy car and gets lost in the country. When he sees the boy, he stops because he believes the boy’s parents are nearby. The boy, frightened by the man’s outlandish costume, starts sobbing. The man sees the boy’s father running toward him and shouts, “You’re a prince,” jumps in the car and drives away. 

The father asks who the man was, what he wanted and what he shouted at the boy. The boy, more frustrated than before, says, “the man said I was a prince”. “And he’s a queen. How many times have I told you not to talk to strangers.”

Everyone chose, mixed or matched the story until they found a version that comforted, amused or angered them.

I had gotten far enough in traffic-light-thinking and just-before-sleep- dreaming to know a simple story that became a heroic legend needed to be a military misadventure at a time the military and the media needed a feel-good-story. a time when America’s morale both at home and in the war was sinking toward despair.

A truck convoy could be ambushed, a convoy that took the wrong road because of bad information, everyone killed except for one man who played dead. He was flown to a hospital in Japan, went through rehab in Japan and when he came home everyone believed an alternative story.

The good folks at JUSPAO almost clapped with delight that I wanted to write about motor transport. Trucks left Camp Eagle every morning hauling retrograded materiel—artillery tubes that had worn out or been hit, trucks that had been warped by RPGs or land mines, tanks without treads and/or turrets—on one of the most dangerous highways in the world and returning in the afternoon dragging vans or trailers carrying everything warriors needed to continue the fight.

The clerks in JUSPAO liked the idea of drivers leaving the bunkers and barbed wire security of Camp Eagle, driving in danger all day but returning to bunkers and barbed wire security at night, a cold shower, a hot meal, a couple of beers, a movie before stretching out on a dry bed in a sandbagged hootch that was home away from home. Similar to bomber crews in England spending days flying into the heart of Germany and nights in “merry ole England”, with alcohol, partying and sometimes women. Without the glamour and nobility.

The clerks in JUSPAO spent their nights in Saigon.

They checked my credentials and arranged a flight to Da Nang early the next morning. My PX card was limited. I could buy limited cartons of cigarettes, limited bottles of alcohol, limited electronics from Japan. Check in at the Press Center in Da Nang and if you get in trouble, we said together “keep your head down, wave your I.D. card and shout ‘phong vien’”.

to be continued