Evan Hunter - Sons

He also told me that I had arrived in Vietnam at a particularly bad time weather-wise, since the country was blessed with a monsoon climate, which meant that there were only two seasons, the wet and the dry. The worst time of the year was between February and April, when the weather was hot and humid, as I may have noticed. He then went on to tell me some other pleasant little tilings about this prize nation we were saving for democracy, like the fact that the rats in Vietnam were as large as alley cats, and that there were twenty known species of poisonous snakes here, including cobras, kraits, and vipers, and that there were sharks in the coastal waters and leeches in the jungle underbrush, and mosquitoes carrying malaria and dengue fever, not to mention spiders, bedbugs, scorpions, and cockroaches, an altogether delightful place. Not for nothing had Saigon been named Pearl of the Orient. I thanked Pete for the information, and made a date to meet him at four o’clock the next day. The night air, as he had promised, was oppressively muggy. In the distance over Saigon, I could see flares drifting brightly against the sky, like a summertime fireworks display over Playland. There was not much else to see. I went back to the barracks to write a letter to Dana, expecting to be bitten on the ass by a spider at any moment. I was asleep before lights-out.

The next day, we passed through the guards at the gate without any difficulty. Pete was known to them, and all that was required was a discreet nod from him; it was nice to have important friends in high places, even if the importance was only that of a slick-sleeve sergeant. I was wearing a boat-necked sports shirt and pale blue slacks, loafers and socks. Pete, who had been a pretty flashy dresser even back in the old days, had on a bright purple silk shirt that had been made for him when he was on Rest and Recreation in Hong Kong, together with a pair of beautifully tailored tan slacks and a pair of sandals he had bought for 1200 piasters on Le Loi Street. In the fifteenth century, Le Loi had waged ten years of guerrilla warfare against the occupying Chinese, finally driving them out of the nation and becoming a king, only to die of beri-beri in Hanoi six years later. It was an interesting comment on this new war five centuries later, that the street named after a famous Vietnamese hero was one of the two streets in Saigon notorious for the sale of black market goods.

We had our choice of transportation from Camp Alpha — taxi, minibus, or cyclo. My mother had once shown me pictures of herself and my father on their Atlantic City honeymoon, and they were both being pushed along the boardwalk in a big wheelchair with a canopy over it. A cyclo looked something like that, except that the man pushing it was not on foot. There were, in fact, several varieties of cyclo, and all of them were on display and being hawked by their drivers outside the base. The cheapest cyclo (five to ten pee for the ride into Saigon, depending on how strenuously you felt like arguing) was a wheelchair with a bicycle attached to it; you sat in the chair and the driver pedaled the vehicle from behind. A cyclo with an attached motorbike was twice as expensive to hire, and a Lambretta with a van behind it had a variable fare that depended on how many passengers were being carried, its capacity being eight. Pete and I chose two motorized cyclos at an agreed price of fifteen pee each. The exchange rate in 1966 was a hundred and seventeen piasters to the dollar, so when you considered that the ride into Saigon must have been four or five miles, for a fare of less than fifteen cents, we weren’t doing too badly. My driver, sitting behind me and wearing Army fatigues which he had undoubtedly purchased on either Le Loi or Nguyen Hue Streets spoke English reminiscent of the chop-chop variety invented by Chinese cooks in Gold Rush movies.

“You here long time?” he asked.

“Just got here yesterday,” I said.

“Oh, you like Saigon,” he said. “Much nice thing in Saigon. Number One town. Same like Paris.”

“Mmm,” I said.

“Where you from?” he asked.

“Connecticut,” I said.

“You like Saigon,” he said. “Better than Kennycunt.”

As we came into the city, as the city opened before us the way a melody line will open into a wider exploration of theme, implemented by a full orchestration where there had earlier been only a piano statement; as Pete in his bright purple silk shirt purchased in Hong Kong and I in my boat-necked shirt purchased in New Canaan came into this city that was the Paris of the East, I experienced the oddest sensation of believing suddenly and with the sharpest sense of conviction, that the entire war was a put-on, that there really was no war in Southeast Asia, that the daily communiques from the battlefield (together with the ghoulishly required body-count of enemy dead) were comparable to the battle-action reports in 1984, Eastasia is winning, Eurasia is losing, War Is Peace, Saigon Is Schenectady.

There were, of course, clues in these traffic-cluttered streets that this was the capital of a nation at war, the Army jeeps, the two-and-a-half-ton trucks, the Skyraiders streaking contrails over head in a sky as blue as that of Talmadge in the spring. But the Army no longer required its officers or men to wear uniforms except while on active duty, and it was impossible to tell whether the hundreds of Occidentals riding cyclos or taxis or stepping out of buses or standing on street corners or ogling girls or idly looking in shop windows were civilians or servicemen since they were all dressed, like Pete and myself, in clothes that would have been acceptable at any second-rate American resort. The city did not look truly oriental. It had instead the half-assed appearance of a movie shot on the back lot in the thirties or forties, a Shanghai Gesture that didn’t quite make it for believability. Even the Vietnamese women, strikingly beautiful in their traditional ao-dais with paneled overdresses and satin trousers, seemed to have been supplied by Central Casting to satisfy the American stereotype of what an oriental woman should look like, long black hair and slanting brown eyes, narrow-waists, delicate smiles, a France Nuyen or a Nancy Kwan to play the romantic interest in a movie about a white man in love with a Negro girl (carefully disguised as a white man in love with an Oriental) the motion-picture clichés springing to life everywhere around us, these slender inscrutable lovely girls chirping to each other in singsong ululation on every street corner or shouting in pidgin English across the bedlam of tooting horns. Saigon was Dragon Seed and Macao and maybe even The General Died at Dawn, and I was Gary Cooper, grinning somewhat sheepishly when a Vietnamese male approached my cyclo to satisfy yet another stereotype, that of the working pimp in a sinful city. He had undoubtedly learned his trade in the years when the French still controlled this garden spot, there was the promise of Parisian sin in his eyes and on his mouth as we waited for the light to change, Quelques choses que vous desirez, monsieur? the master pimp peddling pussy and pornography. But he recited it instead the way they’d written it in the hack script about the Mysterious East, gold tooth flashing in his mouth, lopsided grin (what no pigtail?), “You like Number One fuck, GI, I fix?” I shook my head as the light changed, and he shouted after me, “You lousy Number Ten, GI,” and Pete yelled over from his cyclo, “That’s the gook version of the bestseller list.” To Pete, every Vietnamese in the country was a gook. The Vietcong were gooks, the ARVNs were gooks, the NVA were gooks, the Buddhists were gooks, the cyclo drivers, the bar girls, the policemen, the Prime Minister, each and all were only gooks. We moved slowly through tree-lined streets echoing Aix-en-Provence, designed by the French colonialists for a projected population of half a million people, and now trying hopelessly to cope with more than two million people, 150,000 automobiles and trucks, and another 500,000 bicycles and motorbikes. The sense of unreality persisted, was there truly a war being fought a hundred miles, fifty miles, twenty miles away? The horns honked, the lights changed, the cyclo drivers called to each other in Vietnamese over the roofs of Fords and Volkswagens, Toyotas and Triumphs, Citroëns and Chevrolets. I could not believe I was really here, but more than that I could not believe that here was real.