I found myself drifting in and out of a sort of half-sleep, and these unexpected images passed through my mind: Peggy, Jenny, Father Bennett, my parents, the shadow of the priest behind the confessional curtain, St. Brigid’s, my old neighborhood and childhood friends, my mother’s kitchen and the smell of cabbage boiling in a pot. It was all very sad, for some reason.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Vietnam Airlines flight from Seoul through two time zones to Saigon was uneventful, unless you counted the events that were going on in my head.
In any case, the food, service, and drinks were good, and it seemed strange to be sitting in Business Class of a modern Boeing 767 owned and operated by Vietnam Airlines. People I knew who’d gone back to Vietnam in the 1970s and ’80s reported that the Vietnam Airlines equipment was all Russian Ilyushins and Tupelovs, scary aircraft, and the pilots, too, were mostly Russian, plus the food and service sucked. This seemed to be an improvement, but we weren’t on the ground yet. In fact, there seemed to be a problem regarding the weather, specifically a typical Southeast Asian tropical rain squall.
It was about 11 P.M., and we were already an hour late, which was the least of our problems at the moment.
I was in the window seat, and I could see the lights of Saigon through the breaks in the weather, and it seemed to me that if you could see the ground, you should land the damned airplane.
Again, I recalled my first government-paid trip to Vietnam in November 1967. I was flying Braniff that time — a military-chartered, psychedelic yellow Boeing 707, out of Oakland Army Base, complete with pretty Braniff stewardesses wearing wild outfits. The stewardesses were a little wild, too, specifically one named Elizabeth, a patriotic young lady, whom I’d met at a USO dance in San Francisco a few days before I flew to ’Nam.
Regarding my vow to Peggy to be chaste for a year, I guess I didn’t get off to a very good start with Elizabeth. The future then was looking a little uncertain for me, and I was able to justify nearly anything. But maybe I shouldn’t try to justify any of it three decades later. You had to be there.
Regarding the Braniff flight, who but the Americans could send their armed forces into war on a luxury jetliner? It was bizarre, and it was ultimately cruel. I think I’d have preferred a troopship, which was a slower transition from peace to war, and which at least got you into the habit of being miserable.
I don’t know what happened to Elizabeth, or to Braniff for that matter, but I realized that a lot of long-forgotten stuff was starting to come back, and there was a lot more to come, most of it much less pleasant than Elizabeth.
The guy next to me, a Frenchman, had been ignoring me since we boarded, which was fine, but now he decided to talk and said in passable English, “Do you think there is a problem?”
I took my time answering, then said, “I think the pilots or the airport are making a problem.”
He nodded. “Yes, I think that is the case.” He added, “Perhaps we have to go to another airport.”
I didn’t think there was another airport around that could accommodate a 767. Thirty years ago, there were any number of military airfields with runways that stretched forever, and the military pilots then had beaucoup balls, as we used to say. On the downside, you had to dive in fast to avoid the little guys with the machine guns who wanted to win an extra bowl of rice for smearing you across the landscape.
Despite the turbulence, and our proximity to the airport, and despite FAA regulations that didn’t apply here anyway, two flight attendants came by, one holding a champagne bottle, the other holding fluted champagne glasses between her fingers.
“Champagne?” asked the bottle holder with a nice French pronunciation. Cham-pan-ya.
“Oui,” I said.
“S’il vous plaît,” said my French friend.
The two flight attendants were impossibly young and pretty with straight, jet black hair to their shoulders. Both wore the traditional ao dai: silk floor-length dresses with high Mandarin collars. The yellow dresses had slits up the sides to their waists, but, alas, the young ladies also wore the modest white pantaloons to distinguish themselves from the bar girls on the ground.
The Frenchman and I each took a glass from the fingers of the second flight attendant, and the first poured half-glasses of bubbly as the aircraft bounced. “Merci,” we both said.
Unexpectedly, the Frenchman touched his glass to mine and said, “Santé.”
“Cheers.”
The Frenchman asked me, “You are here on business?”
“No, tourism.”
“Yes? I have a business in Saigon. I buy teak and other rare woods. Michelin is also back for the rubber. And there is oil exploration off the coast. The West is again raping the country.”
“Well, somebody has to do it.”
He laughed, then added, “In fact, the Japanese and Koreans are also raping the country. There are a lot of natural resources in Vietnam that have never been exploited, and the labor is very cheap.”
“Good. I’m on a tight budget.”
He continued, “The Communists, however, are a problem. They don’t understand capitalism.”
“Maybe they understand it too well.”
Again, he laughed. “Yes, I think you are correct. In any case, be careful. The police and the party officials can be a problem.”
“I’m just on vacation.”
“Bon. Do you prefer girls or boys?”
“Pardon?”
He pulled out a notebook from his breast pocket and began writing. He said, “Here are some names, addresses, and phone numbers. One bar, one brothel, one exquisite lady, and the name of a good French-Indochine restaurant.” He handed the note page to me.
“Merci,” I said. “Where should I start?”
“One should always begin with a good meal, but it’s very late, so go to the bar. Don’t take any of the prostitutes — choose one of the bar maids or cocktail waitresses. This shows a degree of savoir faire.”
“ ‘Savoir faire’ is my middle name.”
“Don’t pay more than five dollars American in the bar, five in the brothel, and twenty for Mademoiselle Dieu-Kiem — she’s part French and speaks several languages. She’s an excellent dinner companion and can help you with shopping and sightseeing.”
“Not bad for twenty bucks.” That’s what Jenny got thirty years ago in Georgia, and she only spoke English.
“But be advised, prostitution is officially illegal in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.”
“Same in Virginia.”
“Vietnam is a series of contradictions — the government is Communist, totalitarian, atheist, and xenophobic. The people are capitalists, free-spirited, Buddhists, Catholics, and friendly to foreigners. I am speaking of the south — in the north, it is quite different. In the north, the people and the government are one. You need to be more careful if you go to the north.”
“I’m just hanging around Saigon. See a few museums, catch some shows, buy a few trinkets for the folks back home.”
The Frenchman stared at me a moment, then sort of blew me off by picking up a newspaper.
The PA came on, and the pilot said something in Vietnamese, then French. Then the co-pilot, who was a round-eye, said in English, “Please return to your seats and fasten your seat belts. We’ll be landing shortly.” The flight attendants collected the champagne glasses.
I looked out the window and saw arcs of green and red tracer rounds cutting through the night sky around Saigon. I saw incandescent flashes of outgoing artillery and rockets, and red-orange bursts where the shells and missiles landed in the rice paddies. I saw these things with my eyes closed, thirty-year-old images burned into my memory.
I opened my eyes and saw Ho Chi Minh City, twice the size of old Saigon and more brightly lit than the besieged wartime capital.
I sensed the Frenchman looking at me. He said, “You have been here before.” It was more of a statement than a question.
I replied, “Yes, I have.”
&nb
sp; “During the war — yes?”
“Yes.” Maybe it showed.
“You will find it very different.”
“I hope so.”
He laughed, then added, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”
I listened to the hydraulic sounds of the aircraft as it made its approach into Tan Son Nhat Airport. This was going to be, I knew, a strange journey back into time and place.
BOOK II
Saigon
CHAPTER SIX
We came in through the clouds, and I looked down at Tan Son Nhat Airport for the third time in my life.
Strangely, it looked the same as it did almost thirty years before; the sandbagged revetments hadn’t been removed after the war, and there was still a military side to the airport where I could see Russian-made MiG fighters around the old American hangars. I also caught a glimpse of an American C-130 cargo plane, and I wondered if it was operational, or if it was some sort of war trophy.
I recalled that Military Advisory Command, Vietnam had been headquartered at Tan Son Nhat, which turned out to be convenient when, in April 1975, the victorious Communist troops approached the airport; the MACV guys, among the last American soldiers in Vietnam, blew up their headquarters and flew off on Air America planes. I had seen it on TV, and now I saw some rubble that might have been the old MACV Headquarters, known then as Pentagon East.
As we approached the runway, I saw that the civilian terminal, too, was the same old piece of crap I remembered. I had this weird feeling that I’d passed through the Twilight Zone, and I was going back for my third tour. Actually, I was.
We came down on the wet runway with barely a bounce, so the round-eye was flying. The tarmac, however, must still have had shell holes in it or something because the rollout was a mile of bad road.
The aircraft turned onto a taxiway and for some reason stopped. On the approach, I hadn’t seen a single aircraft around, so it wasn’t like we were backed up waiting for a gate at this nowhere airport. When the Americans ran it during the war, Tan Son Nhat was the third busiest airport in the world, and it ran fine. But that’s another story. I knew I needed to get my head into the reality of this time and place, and I tried. But as we waited on the taxiway, my mind kept pulling me back to 1972, and the events that led up to my second visit to this place.
* * *
I was stationed at Fort Hadley, where I had re-enlisted after my first tour, after Peggy Walsh and I had stopped writing to each other, or I had stopped writing to her, to be more honest.
After about six months at Hadley, for some reason known only to God and Sigmund Freud, I married a local Midland girl named Patty.
Patty was very pretty, had a cute Georgia accent, didn’t hate Yankees, loved sex and bourbon, was poorer than me, and always wanted to marry a soldier, though I never found out why. We had absolutely nothing in common and never would, but getting married young and for no good reason seemed to be part of the local culture. I really don’t know what I was thinking.
Housing for married people was tight during the war, and there was nothing available on the fort, so we lived in this squalid trailer park called Whispering Pines, along with hundreds of other soldiers, their wives, and kids.
We watched guys go off to war and some of them came back, some didn’t, and worse, some came back to the army base hospital, missing parts. We drank too much, there was too much fooling around with spouses not one’s own, and the war dragged on with no end in sight.
So, there I was, a kid from Boston living in a trailer park with a wife whose accent and outlook made her incomprehensible half the time, and I had a few years to go in the army, and guys around me were getting their second and even third sets of orders for ’Nam. Don’t think I didn’t miss Peggy and Boston, and my friends and family. Especially when Patty would turn on the country western station, and I had to listen to songs titled “Get Your Tongue Outta My Mouth ’Cause I’m Kissing You Goodbye.” Or “How Can I Miss You if You Won’t Go Away?”
Mom and Pop and my brothers had not yet had the pleasure of meeting the new Mrs. Brenner; I kept avoiding a trip north, or them coming south.
I never thought I’d see Whispering Pines Trailer Park again, but I did, last summer, when I was on undercover assignment at Fort Hadley investigating the arms deal case that turned into the case of the general’s daughter. I could have lived anywhere while undercover, but I chose Whispering Pines, which by that time was nearly deserted and filled with ghosts.
As I get older, I’m starting to make weird choices and decisions, and it seems that consciously or unconsciously I’m revisiting things and places from long ago. Like now, sitting on the taxiway at Tan Son Nhat Airport. I need to talk to a mental health professional.
But back to 1971, Fort Hadley, Georgia. By this time, I was a four-stripe sergeant — we made rank fast in those days — and as a combat veteran, I was assigned to the Infantry Training School, teaching young draftees how to stay alive and kill other young guys. The infantry sucks, by the way, but training new infantrymen was better than being one in Vietnam.
The country was in open rebellion by this time, the quality of the draftees was pretty low, and morale and discipline were in the toilet.
But all good things must come to an end, and I knew I was on the verge of getting orders for Vietnam, Part Two.
I really wanted to avoid this exciting opportunity, but I also had to get out of that hellhole I was in, including, I’m sorry to admit, my marriage. I wouldn’t be the first soldier who chose war over garrison duty and marriage, and I wouldn’t be the first to regret it either.
And there were other considerations; my brother Benny was now draft age. Benny was and is today a great guy, very bright and easygoing. Unfortunately, he spends a good deal of time with his head up his ass, and his chances of surviving a combat tour were not good.
The army had a sort of semi-official policy of not sending brothers, fathers, and sons to ’Nam at the same time, so I knew if I went back, Benny would probably not go until I returned, or might never go if I didn’t come back. The war was starting to wind down, and the name of the game was buying time.
I had a plan, and I’m a clever, take-charge kind of guy, and I managed to get accepted to Military Police School at Fort Gordon, Georgia. This was temporary duty, so Patty stayed at Whispering Pines Trailer Park in Midland, while I went to MP school at Gordon.
Under the conditions that prevailed at that time, if a soldier left his young wife alone for more than twenty-four hours around a military base, some guy named Jodie was helping her get over her loneliness. I wasn’t sure that’s what happened with Patty, but something happened. Or, as the country western song says “She’s Out Doin’ What I’m Here Doin’ Without.”
So, I returned from Fort Gordon after three months with a new MOS — military occupation skill. My old MOS had been Eleven-Bravo, meaning infantry, meaning a second tour in Vietnam from which I had no reasonable expectation of returning home alive this time. My new military occupation skill was Military Police, and Vietnam was a possibility, but not a sure thing. And even if I went to ’Nam as an MP, my chances of getting killed or maimed by the enemy were less than the chances of that happening breaking up a brawl in the Enlisted Men’s Club.
While I was at MP school, Benny got drafted, completed Basic Training, and was at that time in Advanced Infantry Training with a high probability of going to Vietnam, despite the troop reductions. We all knew that within the next year or so, someone was going to be the last guy in ’Nam to turn off the lights when he left, and someone was going to be the last man killed there. No one knew exactly when that was going to happen, but everyone knew they didn’t want to be one of those guys.
In any case, my marriage was heading south, so I decided to do the same and volunteered for ’Nam.
Quicker than you can say bye-bye, and with no leave time, I was at Tan Son Nhat Airport in January of 1972, where I got orders for Bien Hoa, the big replacement center nearby. Bi
en Hoa was where some of the fresh meat arrived from the States, awaiting further orders to join their units up country. It was also where a lot of the guys heading home waited for the freedom flight. It was a crazy place, made more so by the juxtaposition of the damned and the saved. They didn’t share the same barracks, but they mingled. They had little in common except two things: Those who were going home wanted to get drunk and get laid, and those who were about to go to the front wanted to get drunk and get laid. I, an MP sergeant, got caught in the middle.
As I said, morale and discipline had gone to hell, and I barely recognized the army that I had entered only about four years earlier. In fact, I barely recognized my own country anymore. So ’Nam was not that bad a place to be.
The war was winding down, at least for the Americans who were pulling out, but it would go on for another three terrible years for the poor bastards who had the misfortune of being born Vietnamese.
In fact, my second Vietnam tour lasted only six months before my MP company got orders to go home.
I hadn’t heard much from Patty in those six months, and what I did hear through her brief, but neatly written letters didn’t sound too positive. In fact, one letter said, “I’m sitting here listening to ‘I’m So Miserable Without You, It’s Like Havin’ You Here,’ which is how I’m feeling now.”
Some men returning unexpectedly from overseas call ahead, so that the loving wife can make preparations, or the unfaithful wife can get rid of the cigars in the ashtray. I called from San Francisco in June ’72, saying I’d be home in three days. This news was met with some ambivalence.
When I finally got out of the taxi that had taken me from Midland Airfield to Whispering Pines Trailer Park, I was somewhat ambivalent myself about what I wanted to find.
I threw my duffel bag on the ground and went to the door of the trailer. Coming home after a long absence in a war zone is a strange experience, like you just re-entered the earth’s atmosphere from outer space, and you know that things on earth have changed.
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