by Paul Carter
Twelve hours later I heard a scream by the boot rack. He was going to have one green foot and one blue foot for weeks.
‘Paul, pick up . . . you bastard . . . English pig.’ He was on the PA so I answered.
‘Good evening Frog One.’
‘Fuck you . . . I get you back you bastard.’
I thought I got away clean but a week later I was on another job in another part of the world when one of the roughnecks ran up to me.
‘What happened? Sit down,’ he said then took off my hard hat and burst out laughing.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I protested.
Frog One had soaked the black foam inside the sweat band of my hard hat with red food dye. As I sweated it ran down my face and looked like I was bleeding. And I had a red band around my bald head for weeks.
The Philippines offered up a lot of surprises towards the end of my two years there. The Abu Sayyaf had become a real problem for expat personnel. We continued staying at the same hotel, the staff were very nice and efficient, and would try to get you back if you got kidnapped. However, we could no longer stray too far from the hotel as the terrorists had begun a hardline bombing campaign: detonating devices in shopping malls, outside churches, in the international airport, in rubbish bins in crowded streets. And there was the regular decapitation of some kidnapped tourist splashed over the papers and TV.
Standing-by in the hotel one day, I ran into Dangerous Dave, an American ex-army man; if Dave was any more laid back, he’d be dead. After four consecutive tours in Vietnam, Dave just doesn’t sweat the small stuff. I think that’s the way he’s been since the early 1970s; he can recall the most horrific moment and still smile afterwards. I liked Dave; he never acted dangerous, but wouldn’t tell me how he got his nickname. We would chat for hours in the hotel bar; Peter would join us but only until Tommy was ready to drive him to the Hobbit House.
After one particularly enjoyable session with Dave, I wandered up to my room and fell into a deep sleep, only to be woken by a nauseous feeling. I hadn’t had that much to drink, but I felt like I might throw up, so I sat up in bed, turned on the bedside light and rubbed my head. The curtains were moving, but it didn’t register. I got up and felt dizzy. The curtains were definitely swaying from side to side. I stepped out onto the balcony, hundreds of car alarms shrieked below and I realised that the whole building was swaying. It was an earthquake. Shit.
I tried to remember what to do. I grabbed my wallet and passport, threw on a hotel bathrobe and took off down the fire stairs. Passing the lift door I could hear people crying out from the long shaft below. Taking three stairs in one step I made it from the top floor to the lobby in record time, blasting through the side door into the crowded lobby. The hotel manager was reassuring a throng of guests that the hotel was built on those rubber shock absorber things that let the building move rather than fall down.
‘They have been used in America for some years, and I can assure all of you that our hotel is built to withstand . . .’
Crack.
He stopped as the massive chandelier above us began to break free of the roof.
Everyone scattered. I jumped over the reception desk, hitting the floor at the same time as the chandelier. But there wasn’t a huge explosion of breaking glass as everyone expected, more of a thump. The whole thing was made of some kind of safety glass and it basically just bounced about for a while, a bit of an anticlimax really.
I found Dave in the lobby examining the shatterproof chandelier.
‘Pretty cool,’ he said and smiled.
I bummed a smoke from him and suggested we have a drink.‘I’m not going back up to my room just yet.’ The quake was over, but the whole aftershock thing was playing on my mind.‘Let’s sit out the front,’ I said,‘Then if there’s another one we can just grab our drinks and run across the street and watch the hotel bounce.’
We had just sat down when the petroleum engineer from the oil company came bounding up to our table. In her late forties—I can’t remember her name I must have blanked it out—she was a nightmare, the only aggressive Vietnamese woman I ever met. She worked in the office south of Manila and had been staying in the hotel waiting for her flight home in the morning. Dave kept his disdain for the woman to himself; always a gentleman, he just smiled and sipped his whiskey. She was in a state over the quake but suddenly digressed into giving Dave a hard time about his company’s equipment failure on the rig, something Dave was totally uninvolved in.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘He’s been standing-by in town for the last week, talk to his back-to-back on the rig in the morning.’ (‘Back-to-back’ is the man on the rig who does your job when you’re not there.)
She put her hands on her hips and glared at me, not sure what to say.
‘Okay, bye bye then,’ I said and glared back.
There was a short burst of high-speed Vietnamese then she spun on her heel and stormed off.
‘What did she say?’ I asked Dave.
‘You don’t want to know,’ he said, watching her walk off. Then he added, with a smile, ‘Could have sworn I shot her in the war.’
My jaw dropped.
‘Just kidding,’ he said.
Dave told me stories about the war. He had seen a lot and I guess his number just wasn’t supposed to be up then. He talked about Saigon, the good times he had. I asked if he ever went back after the war.
‘Sure,’ he said then explained how it just made him feel old as the few former girlfriends he managed to find had all turned forty and had bad backs.
Dave was not a grumbling veteran; if anything, I had to really push him to talk about the past. He always painted an intriguing picture of Vietnam—his backbone stiffening at the memory of long gone combat—and I hoped to go there and see it for myself one day. Once again synchronicity put me there on my next campaign.
I took a break in Sydney, riding my motorcycle all over the place, exploring. Stopping for a drink one night I watched a stunning young woman walk into the bar and in one fluid movement peel off her jacket and hurl it on top of a giant fridge.
Her name was Pia, and she was as bright and funny as she was beautiful. I spent the rest of my time in Sydney with her. I was so caught up I missed my departure flight back to work for the first time in ten years. She was all I could think about for the next month. I was in Singapore, preparing the tools for Vietnam, mundane stuff, and I phoned her every night, feeling unable to wait a month to get back to Sydney. When I did get back, the time passed way too fast.
Pia’s family were superbly hospitable. We would spend weekends together and I was completely at home in their company. For the first time it hurt me to have to go offshore, and I realised how hard it was to have a family and work in the oil industry.
That was a bad moment. If this was true love then I understood the agony but not how to deal with it.
I ARRIVED IN VIETNAM without incident, even my flight was comfortable. However, I then had to hang around the airport for two hours, waiting for a colleague to arrive from the United States. John was a Texan, he sounded nice on the phone, it was his first trip overseas, and I had been assigned to babysit him until he got to the rig.
In the past young men in the oil industry were pulled like magnets to the neon lights and semi-naked teenage prostitutes of Vietnam, often on the way from the airport to the hotel, only to end up in trouble, handi-vacced of all documentation, money, jewellery, vital organs, and they haven’t even seen the rig yet. This is done in all manner of slippery ways, my favourite being the ‘Titty Mickey’: this involves some kind of powerful God-knows-what sedative applied to a nipple, said nipple is then thrust into the face of Western John Doe who thinks, ‘Super’, and two minutes later he’s face down.
I found a comfy place to sit with a good view of the arrival hall. I always travel in jeans and an old T-shirt, trying not to look like anything but a backpacker fast approaching his use-by date. I couldn’t have missed John: he was six feet plus, well built, in hi
s late twenties, wearing a Stetson and the obligatory hubcap-sized belt buckle; he had the confident cowboy-boot stride of a man who knows how to rope a barmaid; his Halliburton alloy briefcase was covered in oil company stickers, and his Rolex and puzzle ring twinkled ‘MUG ME’ across the airport.
As I approached he looked at me the way you would if a stranger asked for loose change. I talked him into waiting inside the airport while I got us a taxi—one look at Big Tex and the price would quadruple.
We dumped our bags in the boot, I told John to keep his briefcase with him, and if possible to sit on it. The taxi was an old Chevy with no airconditioning. As we got in he wound down his window and laid his ten-thousand-dollar arm on the sill. I tried to explain why that wasn’t a good idea, and the taxi driver also suggested he wind up the window, but John just spat his wad of chewing tobacco out the window, gave me an ambiguous grin and said, ‘Aw hell no-one’s gonna fuck with me old buddy.’
I smiled back and locked my door. Ho Chi Minh City is full, to the smog-filled tune of six million people. We coursed down tree-lined Phan Dinh Phung Boulevard, past French villas, with their wrought-iron gates green with age, then went deeper into the heart of ‘Old Saigon’ which is local jargon for the city’s increasing decline into drug trading and prostitution. To get to our hotel we had to drive through a seedy part of town, navigating through a few million people on scooters, and before long the wide boulevardes gave way to narrow backstreets.
Amputees scuttled up to our car, begging for change. Street kids pounded on my window. The driver yelled at them,‘Bui doi (dust of life), no good.’
John was throwing US coins out the window, much to the dismay of the kids who threw them back as no-one trades in coins, only paper money. In this grim sanctuary for panhandlers John got nailed. Two young men on a scooter roared up, the pillion jumped off and held a machete under John’s throat, while a third came from nowhere and stripped him of everything—all in a few seconds. There was nothing any of us could do, with John sitting there, the blade rammed against his throat pushing him up until his cowboy hat was pushed down over his eyes. In a plume of blue exhaust smoke they were gone, and so was John’s passport and offshore pass. Oh well, I thought, that put me on the job alone.
The driver turned around, shaking his head at John, and said,‘We go embassy now.’
‘Hotel first, then you take him to the embassy,’ I instructed.
John was in shock, he wanted to get out of the car and chase them, but they had long gone. ‘You’re lucky they didn’t take your arm off,’ I said.
The next day I left John at the US Embassy and continued on to the industrial area of Bien Hoa, once a massive US air base during the war, and from there to Vung Tau, a crowded town where all the supply boats gather to feed the rigs. I found my hotel near the harbour and phoned the rig, explaining that John wasn’t going on the job and there was no-one else obtainable at short notice. They understood so I stood-by in the hotel waiting for the rest of the crew to arrive later that day.
The crew members were flying in from all over the place, arriving one by one at the hotel. Erwin and Ambu, amongst others, were involved, and I was stoked to be with them again. I left a message for the crew to meet me in a bar nearby, and there we stayed for the next three days, waiting for the rig to finish delayed operations.
On the second day Damian came down to the bar and sheepishly stashed a pink shopping bag under the table. Another one of the guys grabbed it and pulled out a skipping rope.
‘I’m fed up with jogging around the heli-deck,’ explained Damian.
‘You can’t skip,’ said Erwin.
‘I can . . . I can even do the crossover thing.’
‘Go on then Leon Spinx.’ I handed him the rope.
It wasn’t any old skipping rope mind you, this one had an elasticised rope and weighted handles. Damian stood in the middle of the rundown bar, directly underneath a huge ceiling fan. I was about to say something but Erwin winked at me, and I thought, what the hell, it could be funny, so shut my mouth.
Damian swung the rope in an ‘I could have done this for a living’ confident way, only to wrap it over the centre of the fan which then snatched it from his hands, whipping the rope at head height around the bar. Damian hit the deck, hands over his head. Everyone stopped laughing and took cover when the momentum of the fan stretched out the elastic rope, sending it swinging in our direction. The helicoptering handles began smashing glasses on the bar as the fan started to come out of the roof. It eventually fell, landing on top of Damian, who just got up and walked out, but refused to speak to us for days.
The afternoon of the third day finally found us walking over the grassy airstrip towards the chopper on our way to the rig. The small airport was still riddled with thirty-year-old bullet holes, and everywhere you looked brass casings littered the ground. From the air, however, we got a much better idea of just how much ordnance was dropped on South Vietnam during the war.
The huge craters left from the bombing had never been filled in, just overcome. Rickety bridges had been constructed over any that landed on roads, the rest were now ponds.
‘Fuck . . . they shelled the shit out of this place,’ Damian said with his camera pressed up against the chopper’s perspex window.
The rig was nasty, with cramped dirty rooms and old smelly toilets. I had a shower after we arrived, that is to say I stood under a nozzle that jutted out of the wall dribbling water on my head. The TV room wasn’t much better; you never know what you’re going to find when you walk into a rig TV room, CNN, BBC, Discovery Channel, naked prom queens cavorting in jello. Then it was off to the galley for something to eat. The crew had renamed it ‘Chucks’, the food was bad, even now when I burp I can taste it. I shuffled along in the queue, my aluminium tray in hand, playing ‘Spot the Con’ with Erwin.
Spot the Con passes the time while you’re waiting for your gruel. There are a reasonable number of ex-convicts working in the oil industry. You can usually pick them by their rough jailhouse tattoos, and the way they protect their food: the ex-con is the guy who looks at everything except what he’s eating without making eye contact.
I got to the service window and found a three-hundred pound, sweaty, bald Chinese guy glaring at me over the bain-marie. Had he been wearing a black one-piece suit and a bowler hat, he would have looked exactly like ‘Odd Job’ from the Bond movie Goldfinger. I asked him to identify the various grey reconstituted meat food products bubbling in front of me. He began rattling off the menu as Erwin leaned in and started doing his best Sean Connery, but Odd Job had obviously heard the joke about who he looks like before and let fly with some high-speed abusive spittle-ridden Cantonese.
Dinner was foul, it had all the texture of a boiled shoe and even less flavour. I went to bed miserable, pulling back my threadbare sheets to reveal a cockroach that resembled a bronzed soap bar with legs. I thought, I will dream and escape to wide rolling hills and quiet walks with Pia, wake up happy and refreshed if Ambu doesn’t snore, rig up and start the job. The sooner it’s over the sooner I’m home.
The Vietnamese crew was great to work with, the job was going well and we would have all the pipe run in the hole and be back on the beach in two days—nice one. I started my second shift at night; a nasty storm was blasting the rig and the seas had really picked up. It was raining hard and the rig was moving around a lot. This makes the derrickman’s job even harder; Ambu was up there doing his best. The driller on the other hand didn’t see it that way. An American with no patience and a short temper, he got fed up around three in the morning, told the assistant driller to take over, and stepped out from behind the brake.
The brake is a large metal lever jutting out of the floor at the driller’s feet. It can be locked down into place via a chain and, as the name suggests, the brake stops the movement of the top drive, and in turn the up or down movement of the pipe which is being made up (screwed together) on the drill floor.
The assistant driller took hol
d of the brake while the driller came over and told all the Vietnamese roughnecks to step back. The local roughnecks are small people and we were running a 133/8-inch casing, a big heavy pipe.
With the movement of the rig and the small people trying to line up the free joint hanging in the derrick it was all too heavy with too much movement. The driller got hold of the loose joint of pipe, swinging about in the derrick in a manly kind of vertical head lock, and started heaving and pushing it over the static pipe sticking up in front of him. Finally the two pipes looked lined up, separated by only six inches and the driller’s beer gut hanging over the inside rim of the static pipe. The driller had his back to the assistant driller, who let the loose pipe down and they lined up, slamming together with a loud metallic clang.
The driller staggered back but at first none of us realised what had happened. His arms were doubled over his belly, then he straightened up, dropping the contents of his abdomen on the floor at his feet. He had disembowelled himself, and was dead within seconds.
Because of the weather it was out of the question to get a chopper and send his body home, so the medic taped him up in bin liners and put him in Odd Job’s cool room. The chopper we were expecting was a Bell-type 212, the same model used in the war and luckily someone realised the driller, a really tall man, well over six feet, was too big to lie on the floor as his feet would stick out the doors. The seats were welded to the chopper so moving them was impossible too. Then we hit on the solution: we moved him into Odd Job’s freezer, taped him to a plastic chair and froze him in the sitting position. When the chopper finally arrived for him, the roughnecks gathered around his rigid body strapped into the seat and had a group photo while he began slowly defrosting.
