One Very Hot Day

by David Halberstam

  At first Beaupre felt as if he had been left in a dentist's anteroom, and was just about as calm. But the Negroes were very pleasant, bringing over a girl and introducing her to Beaupre. One of the Negroes said something to her in Vietnamese, and she giggled.

  “He's calling you a white Senegalese,” another translated, and added, “They call us all Senegalese. At first they thought all colored people are Senegalese, and it wasn't any big compliment because it seems the Senegalese kicked the shit out of them when they were here back in the French war, but it's something of a joke now."

  Beaupre bought her three drinks and smiled at her and held her hand, but he was still unsettled by the entire experience and he wanted to leave. He would have sworn they were all speaking a foreign language and that this was a foreign country (Vietnam, after all, was not a foreign country, it was Vietnam, it was theirs); the atmosphere was hazy and strange as if time had stopped; it was as if the Vietnamese girls were like Americans, like him and the Negroes were the foreigners; in the background a Vietnamese band was playing rock and roll on its electric instruments, but the sound too was foreign, it was playing such a driving Negro blues and rock that the music was alien too, as though it was more African than American; it was as if the Negroes had brought the band with them from Africa.

  She said her name was Thinh.

  “Tan?” he said.

  “No,” she said, “Thinh.”

  “Oh,” he said, “Thin.”

  “No,” she said, “Thinh.”

  “Thin?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Most of their conversation was similar; he didn't particularly want to make a date with her, he could do a lot of things, but he couldn't do that. But they had been very nice to him here, and he was embarrassed and afraid to leave without somehow trying to set something up, fearing that the Negroes would take it as racial, which it was, and become annoyed. So at great length and rather publicly, he began to make a date; at first she didn't understand him, so one of the Negroes who spoke Vietnamese came over to help him out; they were being so helpful that he felt even more embarrassed, putting so much energy into a rendezvous he had no intention of keeping for the next day in front of the Majestic. The date being set, he continued to drink, the Negroes surprisingly friendly to him by now, and when he finally left, the thin one, the interpreter, took him back to his hotel, and, sensing his feelings, said, “Look man, don't feel bad, it ain't that bad, we like it this way, we have our choice we do it the same way; you take the Mammasan, she don't bullshit us, and we don't have to drink that water-whiskey. Mammasan, she give us the real cognac brandy, same for the girls. You go down the Catinat with the white cats, nothin' personal and I ain't against it, but they pay 500 Peas for one piece. Five hundred Peas and them so small. Shit, here we pay 150, 200 Peas, same thing, just as good, some of them better; 500 Peas, we don't pay our Vietnamese cook up at Dak Pek that, and he's got just as good tits as most of them.”

  Beaupre nodded, oh it was fine, fine he said, he liked it a lot, he'd come back.

  “You do that, because the cats, they like you, they like you fine, they be hurt you don't come back.”

  Beaupre was appalled by the evening, yet finally touched by it too: appalled that that world existed and that he had entered it and touched by their attempts to retrieve it, and wondering for the first time how they felt every time they went into his world. And he wondered what happened to the silk pajamas when Big William was in the field.

  The next day he had skipped the appointment, sure that if the girl had kept the appointment at all, which he doubted (he never believed these people ever kept their word on anything, never were on time for anything) someone would pick her up. He wondered if it would be a white officer (only officers stayed in the Majestic area) and what he would feel if someone told him she had come from Big William's bar. He had wandered aimlessly around Saigon the next day, eating Chinese food at two restaurants, visiting several bars, watching with some sadness how grown men, officers, men with wives, were handled so coolly by the little seventeen-year-old bar girls, who would play two boyfriends off against each other, the tension at the bars rising, the officers vying to buy the whores more drinks, the cheap tea-tasting whiskey-colored substance that they poured away and were repaid for. He ended up the evening at a place called “The Beautiful Tea House.” The bar was a giant horseshoe and there was only one seat open. He was sitting by himself, without a girl; next to him there was a bald American speaking Vietnamese, a psywar type, Beaupre decided; the psywar people spoke the language, had lots of money, and got the best girls. He was talking with a pretty but tough-looking Vietnamese girl. She began to stare at him, and after a minute began to speak to him in Vietnamese. The bald man, not an American at all, but an Australian, apologized for interrupting Beaupre's peace and Started to interpret for him:

  “She says she thinks you're very handsome. She says she's nineteen years old which is a bloody lie, and from the north which is probably another lie, and that she'd like you to buy her a drink, which is the bloody truth, mate.”

  He bought her a drink, and the Australian continued to translate, taking an evil delight in this (“she says someone as brave as you must have killed many, many Vietcongs. Of course, Yank, we don't know what she tells the bloody VCs about you”); then finally the Australian turned with some resignation toward Beaupre, saying: “Look, mate, I spend the whole bloody day changing these languages until English sounds as crazy as Vietnamese, and I have more trouble with my own language than theirs. But the thing is, I'm free now, and if you and the lady don't mind, I'm going to work in only one,” and he went back to talking with the girl in Vietnamese. In a few minutes another girl was summoned; faceless at first, except for glasses which made her unique among the bar girls, like their schoolteacher. “Says she speaks some English,” said the Australian, “don't believe it very much.”

  In a fashion she spoke English. Beaupre was intrigued by the glasses and the prim look it gave her; it gave him his first sexual excitement of the long day. They all wore white dresses, that was the prescribed legal uniform, but they wore them so short and tight, that it was almost obscene (so tight that their panty lines could always be seen, and the helicopter pilots, who were insane for military abbreviations, had invented the phrase VPL, for Visible Panty Line). Later he remembered vague outlines of the conversation: he, trimming his age by five years, severing himself from any previous marriage, making himself, he decided afterward, remarkably innocent; he, asking questions about her family — she lived at home with her parents and four sisters. A good deal of the time must have been spent talking about her housing problems, because moments later when the girl disappeared, summoned momentarily to entertain a new arrival (Beaupre, suddenly jealous, felt himself like the other officers he had mocked earlier in the day), the Australian turned and said:

  “Not my place to butt in, mate, but don't take them straight home at night. Doesn't work. Not the right form. Country's got too many rules, and it's more efficient in applying them against the crumpet than the Communists. Very easy for the white mice to pick them up in this city at night, particularly with you Yanks, and the mice can be pretty tough on them, you know, police station or gang-bang, take your pick, lass. Mind you, they'll do it for you, go home with you, they're like that, very agreeable little crumpet. It's not fair though. Afternoon's the best. They're free then, and they're just another upper class girl out for a stroll with a Yank, except maybe better dressed. No one bothers them.”

  Beaupre and the Australian talked on, with the Australian becoming increasingly friendly; he was at ease with the Australian the way he would never be with another American. Out of it had come this suggestion: the Australian would be away at Cap St. Jacques the next day and Beaupre was welcome to use his apartment to meet the girl. He had accepted and had mentioned it to the girl, Lim Fung, and she had been obviously pleased. The Australian had been very precise in giving them both instructions and handing Beaupre
the key.

  Sunday he had been as nervous as a young boy, sure that she was not going to come, sure that she was going to come and be pounced on by the police the moment she entered the apartment. She was fifteen minutes late, and when he was sure that she had played with him and had no intention of coming, she showed up, wearing tight stretch pants, a tight blouse, and no glasses.

  He remained nervous: the uncertainty of being in someone else's apartment, the thought of the police outside, the cold sharp temperature of the room because of the giant air-conditioner (later he would remember the temperature and the noise of the air-conditioner first and the girl second), all combined against him. In the daylight her English seemed less adequate; that which with the smoke and the whiskey had passed for communication seemed more perishable now. They tried to speak for several minutes: each time he said something, he sensed that she heard it completely wrong (I am glad you are here; you what? I glad, happy you here. You not happy I here? No, I happy, very happy you here. I sorry). So they went to the bed.

  “Banan,” she said, giggling, and at first he thought she was mocking him, and then realized that she was simply talking and being friendly.

  “Banan, yes,” he said. He performed badly.

  “You no like Lim Fung,” she said.

  No, he said, he liked her fine, but again the more words he said the more confused she became. He tried again, but in the cold he could not work, and he could not even sweat. He tried to sleep, hoping to wake up stronger, but in the sunlight and with the air-conditioner, he could not sleep and seemed all the more restless for his attempt. He was unsuccessful for the rest of the afternoon, increasingly restless, not even sweating. She no longer talked of the banan, or pointed to it. It was, he thought, not even guilt which had stopped him. At the beginning, she had pointed first at him, then at herself and jabbered: “Like you, like me, like you yes.” Now she had stopped it.

  Now she began to talk about Kim Chi: “You like Kim Chi, Kim Chi like you. No like Lim Fung, no like you,” until he decided that Kim Chi must be the other girl, the Australians hard-looking little friend, and that she thought he preferred Kim Chi to her; so he began a long protest, pointing out that he didn't like Kim Chi, that she wasn't his type. At the beginning he spoke only in their mono-talk, but as he became carried away by the idea, he used more and more words, and more and more passion, until she was completely confused by what he was saying. In turn she started walking around the room and picking up the magazines. Most of them were old copies of Playboy. She was delighted with them and with the center spread. She stood naked in the little room, holding open one of the center spreads with its American-style and American-size voluptuousness. She was smaller, equally fine, rather like a miniature model of the pose; the girls who eat whole wheat bread and the girls who eat rice, he thought. She asked him something: he thought she asked if she looked like one of the models, and he nodded and said yes. She appeared delighted and walked around the room posing, holding the giant naked blonde beside her. She mimicked the exact pose, and he laughed and clapped his hands and in response she did a little dance. For a moment there was some life in the room. Finally she asked if she could keep the nude; at first he said no, but then her face fell; and so he said yes; after all, he had disappointed her enough that day. She tore the center fold out, dressed quickly and left the apartment happily. He waited for her to leave, and then he slowly dressed. He was sure the Australian would notice the missing pinup and would think that Beaupre had stolen it (did one, after all, leave a note saying sorry about the missing photo, but the Vietnamese whore liked it so much), and had thus repaid the kindness. And so he left the apartment and his newly found bar, two more places that he would never return to.

  * * * *

  “I figured you were a little more tired than usual,” Anderson was saying. “Must have been a rough weekend, So much of it in Saigon, you had to fight it off, huh?”

  “Yeah,” said Beaupre, “that's the tiring part, fighting it off.”

  “I hear you had to fight one of them wore glasses and looked like a schoolteacher.”

  “Where'd you hear that?” said Beaupre grinning, the grin acknowledgment of his success.

  “Oh, you know. There aren't any secrets in this country. All your other girlfriends know about it too. How was it, pretty good?”

  “Well, you know how it is about women with glasses.”

  “That true, huh?”

  “Even here. Worse here.” Grinning. “Or better here.”

  “Goddamn, I always wondered about that. You have to pay here.”

  “Supposed to, but first she said she didn't want any money. You know, the next time though they ask you to go to the PX and buy them hair spray, and the next time after that you have to get them hair spray and stockings, and then the next time it's hair spray and stockings and nail polish and perfume and a goddamn sweater, and cigarettes for their father, and canned milk for their sisters' babies. So I give her the damn piastres. Simpler that way. That way they don't own you.”

  “Sounds like they want to marry you,” Anderson said.

  “No, not marry, they don't expect that, except with some of these young troopers. No, they just want to own you, and make sure their little friends working next to you at the bar don't get to own you. They love each other a lot. Just like American girls.”

  They walked together in silence for a few minutes, Beaupre ahead of Anderson. “God, I bet you haven't walked this much since World War II,” Anderson said.

  “Not as much then. We didn't know how simple it was, and how good we had it. Sure we walked, but in a straight line. Boom, Normandy beaches, and then you set off for Paris and Berlin. Just like that. No retracing, no goddamn circles, just straight ahead. All you needed was a compass and good sense. But here you walk in a goddamn circle, and then you go home, and then you go out the next day and wade through a circle, and then you go home and the next day you go out and reverse the circle you did the day before, erasing it. Every day the circles get bigger and emptier. Walk them one day, erase them the next. In France you always knew where you were, how far you had walked, and how far you had to go. But this goddamn place, Christ, if I knew how far I had walked, it would break my heart. From Normandy to Berlin and back, probably.”

  Then he paused, walked on, and said, as though to himself, remembering this for the first time, thinking of it with fondness (it had never struck him that way at the time), “And France, France smelled so good.”

  chapter four

  At eleven-thirty they were moving haphazardly along the canal, one of those peaceful moments when earlier fears were forgotten, and when it was almost as if they were in some sort of trance from the heat and the monotony, when they were fired on. Three quick shots came from the left, from the other side of the canal. They appeared to hit short, and they landed near the center of the column, close to where Lieutenant Anderson was. He wheeled toward the bullets, spoke quickly in Vietnamese, taking three men with him and sending a fourth back to tell Thuong what he was doing — not to send anyone unless it was clearly a real fight, and he could hear automatic weapon fire; they were taking no automatic weapons, Anderson said.

  He sensed that it was not an ambush; you trip an ambush with a full volley of automatic weapons fire — to get the maximum surprise firepower and effect, you don't trip it with a few shots from an M-1 rifle; the fact that the sniper had fired so quickly, Anderson thought, meant that there was probably one man alone who wanted to seem like more than one man. But damn it, he thought, you never really know here, you tried to think like them and you were bound to get in trouble: you thought of the unique and they did the obvious; you thought of the obvious and they did the unique. He brought his squad to the canal bank, and two more bullets snapped near them. Ping, snap. Ping, snap.

  He told one of the Viets to go above him on the canal bank, and one to stay below him, and one to stay behind him as he waded the canal. They were to cover him as he crossed, and they were not to cro
ss themselves until he was on the other side; he didn't want all four of them bogged down in mid-canal when they found out there was an automatic weapon on the other side. They nodded to him. Do you understand me, he asked in Vietnamese. He turned to one of them and asked him to repeat the instructions. Surprisingly the Vietnamese repeated the instructions accurately.

  “The Lieutenant swims?” the Viet added.

  “The Lieutenant thinks he swims,” Anderson said, and added, “do you swim?”

  The man answered: “We will all find out.”

  Anderson waited for a third burst of fire, and when it came, closer this time, he moved quickly to the canal bank and into the water, sinking more than waist high immediately. As he moved he kept looking for the sniper's hiding place; so far he could not tell where the bullets were coming from. He sensed the general direction of the sniper, but couldn't judge exactly where the sniper was. He was all alone in the water, moving slowly, his legs struggling with the weight of the water and the suck of the filth below him. He knew he was a good target, and he was frightened; he moved slowly, as in a slow-motion dream; he remembered one of the things they had said of the VC in their last briefings. (“The VC infantryman is tenacious and will die in position and believes fanatically in the ideology because he has been brainwashed all his life since infancy, but he is a bad shot, yes gentlemen, he is not a good shot, and the snipers are generally weak, because you see, men, they need glasses. The enemy doesn't get to have glasses. The Communists can't afford 'em, and our medical people have checked them out and have come up with studies which show that because of their diet, because their diet doesn't have as much meat and protein, their eyes are weak, and they don't get glasses, so they are below us as snipers. Brave, gentlemen, but nearsighted, remember that”) He remembered it and hoped it was true.

  Ahead of him all he could see was brush and trees. Remember, he thought, he may be up in the trees: it was another one of the briefings: “Vietcong often take up positions in the tops of trees, just like the Japanese did, and you must smell them out. Remember what I'm telling you, it may save you your life. You will be walking along in the jungle, hot and dirty. And you hear a sniper, and because your big fat feet are on the ground, you think that sniper's feet are on the ground too. But you're wrong, he's sitting up there in the third story, measuring the size of your head, counting your squad, and ready to ruin your headgear. They like the jungle, and what's in the jungle? Trees. Lots of 'em. Remember it, gentlemen, smell them in the trees.”