by Tracy Kidder
On the short plane ride to Da Nang, I told him to call me by my first name, for the time being, during R & R. In Da Nang, we parted for the night, Schulzie to the enlisted barracks, I to the officers’ quarters, Schulzie saying, “By this time tomorrow night, you and me are gonna be gettin’ laid!”
“And drunk!”
We nudged each other and went our separate ways.
A briefing officer had warned us that more than one soldier had gone to sleep here on his way to R & R and awakened to find his wallet gone, the buttoned pocket where he’d stashed it neatly scissored away. So the place felt weird even before I went to the officers’ latrine and read, on the inside of the door, an argument in graffiti that went like this: “The First Air Cav. saved the Marines’ ass again in Khe Sanh.” This insult was signed by a U.S. Army captain. Right below it came the retort, signed by a Marine Corps major: “The United States Army has never, repeat never, saved the Marines! Semper Fi, asshole!”
The barracks were dimly lit. Rows of single beds covered with olive-drab scratchy wool blankets and crisp sheets. A place where strangers slept side by side. A place full of rumors of war, war at various levels. A few years later, I wrote up notes of my memories of the night I spent in that place. In them, I describe sleeping in a roomful of officers, my bunk next to the bunk of a young infantry lieutenant, who lay with the sheet pulled up to his chin and talked softly to the ceiling, saying aloud, “But it wasn’t exactly a bad smell. You could tell they were graves when we found them, and when we reported it, the S-2 said to dig them up. The S-2 wanted to know what killed them. They want to know if it was artillery or air strikes that killed them whenever you find graves, so they can say who gets the kills. Wounds have a funny smell, too. I can always tell if someone’s wounded just by sniffing.” Reading this, conversing with my memories, I feel as though I’m looking down a long corridor and sense something in the shadows at the end.
The next morning a sergeant led a large group of us onto the tarmac of the huge Da Nang airfield. He yelled instructions. I heard him say that enlisted men and officers would ride in different parts of the plane. I must have stopped listening, because I was in my seat—a commercial airliner seat—when the sergeant said, “Is there someone on this plane who isn’t going to Hawaii?”
I walked fast down the aisle, feeling eyes on me, keeping mine straight ahead. The sergeant seemed more mystified than angry. “Sir, didn’t you hear me say this plane was for Hawaii?”
Schulzie came up to me when I returned to the group for Singapore. He was grinning. I could tell he was trying not to crack up. “What were you doin’, Lieutenant?”
I glared at him.
In a room at the Singapore airport, an Army major briefed us. “All right, listen up.” They wanted us to have a good time. This was our chance to let off some steam. But Singapore was a big city, and they didn’t want us getting in trouble. We could have our R & R canceled for driving a car, for … I didn’t listen to the rest. Then he told us about the recommended hotels. “Stick with these hotels. You don’t have to stay in them, but if you don’t want to catch something …”
In that barren room at the airport, I had a feeling, which I didn’t fully trust, that we were suddenly transformed into a crowd of equal rank, finally being offered something we all wanted, even the smattering of older guys, sergeants and officers in their thirties or early forties, all exploding in one great pent-up roar of laughter. I was more aware of hearing the laughter and of Schulzie’s agitation beside me than of laughing myself. And yet I couldn’t wait to get to one of those hotels.
The major said, “Every girl in the hotels on this list gets checked once a week.”
“Who gets to check ’em?” somebody yelled from the crowd.
The major smiled. He said, when we quieted down, that we should remember we represented our country and our branches of service. “Now go have some fun!”
We had to choose our hotel right away. I was used to making decisions by now. Schulzie looked over my shoulder at the list. “What do you think, Trace?” One name stuck out. “Serene House.”
On the bus, a handsome, dark-haired soldier sat beside us, scowling. Suddenly, he was talking to me and Schulzie. I guess he had to tell his story to someone. A week before, when his week of R & R was over, he tore up his identification card because someone had told him, correctly, that the government of Singapore wouldn’t let him leave without one.
Schulzie couldn’t believe it. That was too much good fortune.
“You think I’m shittin’ you?” the young soldier said.
Every day he had to ride down to the airport in case his new card had arrived. Then he could go back to Serene House, where the military was paying his room and board. They couldn’t prove he’d destroyed his ID card, so they couldn’t punish him, he said. But it seemed as if they might as well have, because he’d run out of spending money. He’d met a girl at Serene House named Lea. He’d kept her for a week. He didn’t have money to keep her now. But what he had with her wasn’t like what other GIs had. What a girl. What a woman. No one better call her a whore. He’d tear up his new card when it came if he hadn’t run out of money, he said. He might tear it up anyway, just to stay near her. He didn’t ask us for a loan, and we didn’t offer one. He gazed out the bus window in silence the rest of the way.
Serene House was a motel, three stories, I think, nothing exotic about it, except that a line of young Asian women stood in the lobby, all in high heels and miniskirts, elaborately made up. I heard someone say there were fifty, for only forty GIS. We rushed up to our rooms. “See ya later,” said Schulzie. I didn’t shower. I wanted to get back to the lobby before the others had taken the best-looking ones.
I saw the broke, dark-haired soldier standing in the lobby some distance away, beside a potted palm, staring at one of the girls in the lineup—his Lea, no doubt—and she seemed aware of his gaze and was making a point of not looking at him. She looked older and far less beautiful than some of the others. For example, the one I approached, a petite, black-haired girl in a miniskirt. I tried talking to her. She shied away. There was a sudden commotion, the girl turning and speaking to an older woman behind her, the madam, I guessed. I had no idea what the girl was saying—the language must have been Malay or Chinese—but she spoke rapidly and her voice sounded urgent.
The madam approached, speaking soothingly to her. The girl twisted away. Suddenly, she broke into English, no doubt for my benefit. “He isn’t good-looking!”
The older woman answered sharply, succinctly, fiercely, in Malay or Chinese. Then the girl stood motionless, head bowed.
It shakes one’s confidence to be rejected by a prostitute. I look at that photograph of myself, standing bare-chested with Schulzie beside our truck at my detachment. I’m muscular, but not heavily. I don’t seem to be carrying any fat at all. I’m a little over six feet. I have a full head of brown hair, a good chin, and no outlandish features, though if it weren’t for the thatch of hair on my chest, I could have passed for sixteen. Standing there in the lobby of Serene House, I thought, It must be my glasses. I had worn them ever since I confessed to my first-grade teacher that I couldn’t see the blackboard. I thought I was much better-looking without them on, when I looked in the mirror without them on. And I’d have taken them off before presenting myself to the prostitutes in Serene House, but I knew from unfortunate experiences at college dances that, when I had them off, all women were also much better-looking.
“Listen,” I said to the madam, feeling heat in my cheeks. “No problem. Forget it.”
“No, it’s okay,” said the madam. They all spoke good English, it seemed. “She’s going with you.”
What followed, almost at once, up in my room, might have occurred in a doctor’s office, if there were ones set up for the purpose. A completely passive, naked girl on the bed, with a wiry bush that scratched a bit; brief exertions—there was something rubbery-feeling about her vagina—and afterward the return of dull sanity.
I noticed, for instance, a box in the wall of my room through which Muzak, real department store Muzak, was piped. And cruel feelings toward the girl, who now seemed to take a livelier interest in me. I wanted to send her away, but I’d bought her for the night, and after I’d taken a shower and found her still there in the room, I thought I should get my money’s worth, later on.
She, however, wanted to talk. About her family. She said she’d been forced into this business because her father had died, and she had to raise money to take care of her sick aunt. I don’t remember with certainty, but I think I was planning to give her more money, until I started getting dressed to take her out to dinner and she threw another tantrum—this time about my sport jacket, blue with white buttons. She said it wasn’t “good-looking.” She was clearly quite young, in life and in her trade, a petulant teenager, remarkably straightforward.
I didn’t rehire her. I saw Lea at a table in the barroom the next morning. I sat down and talked to her. Up at the bar several girls were working on my fellow soldiers, rubbing themselves against them, wriggling down onto their laps. Lea didn’t do any of that. She seemed very grown-up, dignified actually, so that, after we’d talked for a time, I had to drop my eyes in order to ask if she was available.
Maybe I only imagined that when I walked out to the lobby with her, on the way to my room, I caught a glimpse of the dark-haired soldier. I didn’t much care, to tell the truth. I have a clear memory, though, of seeing him from the lobby, maybe later that day or the next morning. The bus that had taken us from the airport was just leaving, and I saw his face in profile in one of the bus windows. He looked straight ahead. He looked scared to me, or as if he were trying not to look scared, as if he were being taken to jail.
Lea sat down on the edge of the bed. She patted a hand on the spread beside her. I sat down. She leaned forward and looked carefully at me. “I don’t understand why that girl said you weren’t good-looking.” Then she undressed me.
She plumped up the pillows and gently pushed my head back on them, and I don’t think it was possible to feel stiffer than I did, or more surprised—that she would do this, without even being asked—when her lips started gliding up and down the ventral side of my cock. This ridiculous thing, always embarrassing me as a schoolboy, now jutting up in the air, and here was this person treating it so respectfully, so tenderly. A hand reached up and covered my mouth.
I knew it was only right to reciprocate. This was a time long before AIDS. I didn’t for a moment think about all the soldiers who had preceded me and, if the randiest of my men were at all representative, how many dangerous, unsavory places their cocks must have entered. I just knew that the noises she made were genuine, and that when, in due course, her small body shuddered, she was having an orgasm. My own was a triumph, a thunderous event, nothing that almost any young man celibate for six months couldn’t have accomplished, but in that moment the universe made up for every wrong it had done me. Then I didn’t want her anywhere near me, for a while.
Schulzie and I went on a double date that night, in Lea’s car. She straightened my necktie before we left the room. She had me drive. Mary Anne had wanted me to change. Well, I had. No question about it. Driving a car, in spite of emphatic warnings from the authorities. In fact, this was pretty adventurous. Singapore had retained that vestige of contrary Englishness, left-hand-side driving. It was tricky.
Lea had chosen a fancy restaurant. It was clear at the door that the women with us weren’t entirely welcome. I seem to remember an explanation from Lea that had to do with the fact that she and Schulzie’s escort were Malaysian, not Chinese. I suppose there was a more obvious problem. Anyway, I sensed that Lea enjoyed the slight discomfort we caused, lifting her chin to the headwaiter, smiling slightly when he turned and led us to a table.
Schulzie’s choice of girl surprised me. She was scrawny. I kept thinking, She looks like a chicken. I thought he’d probably hire a different girl the next day. But he rode to the restaurant with his arm around her in the backseat, and escorted her in on the crook of his arm. I felt embarrassed for him, until I’d had a few drinks. I did the driving back to Serene House. At one point, Lea cried out in panic and grabbed the wheel, and we swerved away from oncoming headlights just in time. I don’t think Schulzie noticed. He was necking in the backseat.
The next morning I woke up to find Lea getting out of the bath. I said I was hoping she would stay in bed awhile. She said she was sorry, but she had to go. She didn’t say why. She didn’t say she had to take care of an ailing relative. She would come back that evening. Did I want her for another night? I said I wasn’t sure. She said she had to know.
I grew up in an era when, at least in that vast, amorphous social region carved out by returning World War II soldiers, or at least in my town, or maybe just in my own interior world, what was called “getting bare tit off a girl” ranked as an achievement you wanted to tell everyone all about, but only on the night when it happened. Waking up the next morning, a boy of my era was apt to think, Uh-oh. A line had been crossed, a commitment made. A boy had only two options: accept it and carry the girl’s books to class or, my early solution, stay as far away from her as possible. I told Lea I just wasn’t sure. When she left, I felt elated. By the time I went downstairs to find Schulzie, I wondered if I’d made a mistake.
We sat at the bar, Schulzie and I and another young soldier.
“These girls. Does every one of them have a sick aunt or uncle or something?”
Schulzie put his head back and howled.
“They try that on you, too?” the other soldier asked.
“Fuckin’ A!” Schulzie banged his fist on the bar. This was the Schulzie who talked from the side of his mouth. “That’s all they want. The green stuff. Fuckin’ whores.” And he said it so knowingly and with such a leer that the true import of this, the innocence of it, went right past, and we all laughed.
“How come it’s never her father or mother, or one of her kids?”
“That’s true. I don’t know. I wonder why.”
“Maybe there’s something about their religion. You can’t tell a lie about a really close relative.”
What was their religion? I ought to see Singapore. Schulzie said he didn’t feel like it. His girl was coming back in an hour or so. I went for a long walk alone. I saw one temple, gaudily painted, and got a glimpse of some fishing boats from a bridge. I started out with the stranger’s edginess and after a while realized I was utterly safe in that modern-looking city, where, as Lea had told me, you could be arrested for spitting in public. I was careful not to throw my cigarette butts in the gutter. I followed a pretty Western-looking woman, a round-eye, for a few blocks, imagining that I might pick her up. I stopped at a tailor’s and got myself measured for a white linen suit. Back on the streets, I saw a sign for something called the American Club. Inside, a middle-aged Brit—he was in oil, he said—bought me a drink, and his wife set me straight about the general shiftiness of Malaysians.
I got back to Serene House in time for “The Suzy Wong Show,” a small Asian woman up on the stage, doing a complete striptease. Total nakedness in public was still risqué, indeed illegal in most of America. There were hoots and hollers and many shining faces of drunk GIs, but more who now looked like men with their wives, standing with the whores they’d hired at the back of the room, laughing and clapping, but rather sedately, as if at a floor show in Las Vegas. I saw Lea. She walked past on the arm of a tall black man with a mustache, a sergeant, probably. I was impressed, in one way. Several girls I had talked to said they didn’t like to go with black soldiers, with “spades,” as they called them. She didn’t seem uncomfortable. She didn’t seem to make a point of not noticing me. I thought she might not remember me.
The madam pursued me. Maybe I didn’t like girls, she said. I ended up with a wiry one, who went about her business cheerfully but quickly and tidily, as if it were housekeeping. I had drunk a fair amount, and I felt like doing something I would have done back
home. I felt like reading aloud to her. I had brought along my collected Yeats. I read “The Second Coming.” “Isn’t that great?”
She looked puzzled.
“Sorry,” I said.
No, no, she said. She liked it. It’s possible, of course, that she did, that the music of Yeats reached her more deeply than it did me. No doubt she preferred a poetry reading to further mandatory sex. I didn’t care. I lay in my bed in Serene House, a young woman against my shoulder, her hair so stiff from spray it felt like a rash on my skin, and I read some of Yeats’s poems about art, until she fell asleep.
I hadn’t talked to more than a few other soldiers. But Schulzie had been making new friends. The next day he took me to meet a couple of them, who were sharing a room in Serene House. Two grinning young GIS, naked save for underpants, sat side by side at the head of a king-size bed. One held a bottle of whiskey by the neck. Three young Asian women, in bras and panties, lay as if scattered around the room, one on the floor, laughing, clearly drunk, another in an armchair, with a woozy smile on her face, another curled up on the foot of the bed and fast asleep.
A year later, when I wrote Ivory Fields, I was newly sensitive to the plight of oppressed Asian women. After all, Lieutenant Dempsey’s story turns on his attempt to stop the rape of a Vietnamese girl. But I can’t claim to have had such feelings at Serene House. Schulzie and I walked out, and he started laughing about the scene behind us. Those two GIs, he said, had holed up with those three girls, and for the past four days they’d hardly left their room.
“We should’ve done that,” Schulzie said.
