Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

The bars, with flyblown signs advertising cold beer, music, girls, were empty and most looked bankrupt, but it was in the late afternoon that I saw the real dereliction of Danang. We drove out to the beach where, fifty feet from the crashing waves, a fairly new bungalow stood. It was a cosy beach house, built for an American general who had recently decamped. Who was this general? No one knew his name. Whose beach house was it now? No one knew that either, but Cobra One ventured, 'Probably some ARVN honcho.' On the porch a Vietnamese soldier idled with a carbine, and behind him a table held a collection of bottles: vodka, whisky, ginger ale, soda water, a jug of orange juice, an ice bucket. Laughter, slightly drunken and mirthless, carried from inside the house.

'I think someone's moved in,' said Cobra One. 'Let's have a look.'

We walked past the sentry and up the stairs. The front door was open, and in the living room two Americans on sofas were tickling two busty Vietnamese girls. It was the absurd made symmetrical – both men were fat, both girls were laughing, and the sofas were side by side. If Conrad's dark re-enactment of colonialism, 'Outpost of Progress', were made into a comedy it would have looked something like that.

'Hey, we got company!' said one of the men. He banged the wall behind his head with his fist, then sat up and relit his cigar.

While we introduced ourselves, a side door opened from the wall the cigar smoker had punched and a muscular black man hurried out hitching up his trousers. Then a very tiny, batlike Vietnamese girl appeared from the room. The black said, 'Howdy' and made for the front door.

'We didn't mean to interrupt your picnic,' said Cobra One, but he showed no inclination to leave. He folded his arms and watched; he was a tall man with a severe gaze.

'You're not interrupting nothing,' said the man with the cigar, rolling off the sofa.

'This is the head of security,' said the American official who had driven us to the place. He was speaking of the fat man with the cigar.

As if in acknowledgement, the fat man set fire to his cigar once again. Then he said, 'Yeah, I'm the head spook around here. You just get here?' He was at that point of drunkenness where, acutely conscious of it, he made an effort to hide it. He walked outside, away from the spilled cushions, full ashtrays, supine girls.

'You took the whatV asked the CIA man when we told him we had come to Danang from Hue on the train. 'You're lucky you made it! Two weeks ago the VC blew it up.'

'That's not what the stationmaster in Hue told us,' said Cobra One.

'The stationmaster in Hue doesn't know whether to scratch his watch or wind his ass,' said the CIA man, 'I'm telling you they blew it up. Twelve people killed, I don't know how many wounded.'

'With a mine?'

'Right. Command-detonated. It was horrible.'

The CIA man, who was head of security for the entire province, was lying; but at the time I had no facts to refute the story with. The stationmaster in Hue had said there hadn't been a mining incident in months, and this was confirmed by the railway officials in Danang. But the CIA man was anxious to impress us that he had his finger on the country's pulse, the more so since his girlfriend had joined us and was draped around his neck. The other fat man was in the bungalow, talking in frantic whispers to one of the girls, and the black man was a little distance from the porch, doing chin-ups on a bar spliced between two palms. The CIA man said, 'There's one thing you gotta keep in mind. The VC don't have any support in the villages – and neither do the government troops. See, that's why everything's so quiet.'

The Vietnamese girl pinched his cheek and shouted to her friend at the edge of the beach who was watching the black man swing a heavy chain around his head. The man inside the bungalow came out and poured himself a whisky. He drank it worriedly, watching the CIA man rant.

'It's a funny situation,' the CIA man was saying..'Like you say this village is clean and this village is all Charley, but there's one thing you gotta understand: most people aren't fighting. I don't care what you read in the papers – these journalists are more full of shit than a Christmas turkey. I'm telling you it's quiet.'

'What about the mine?'

'Yeah, the mine. You should stay off the train; that's all I can say.'

'It's different at night,' said the man with the whisky.

'Well, see, the country kinda changes hands after dark,' said the CIA man.

'I think we'd better go,' said Cobra One.

'What's the rush? Stick around,' said the CIA man. 'You're a writer,' he said to me. 'I'm a writer too – I mean, I do a little writing. I pound out articles now and then. Boy's Life – I do quite a bit for Boy's Life, and um-'

The girls, shouting in Vietnamese and giggling, were beginning to distract him.

' – anyway, where'd you say you're going? Marble Mountain? You wanna stay away from there about this time.' He looked at his watch. It was five-thirty. 'There might be Charley there. I don't know. I wouldn't want to be responsible.'

We left, and when we got to the car I looked back at the bungalow. The CIA man waved his cigar at us; he seemed to be unaware that a Vietnamese girl still clung to him. His friend stood on the porch with him, agitating in his hand a paper cup full of whisky and ginger ale. The black man had returned to the high-bar: he was doing chin-ups; the girls were counting. The sentry sat hugging his rifle. Beyond them was the sea. The CIA man called out, but the tide was coming in and the noisy surf drowned his words. The refugees in Danang had taken over the barracks; these three had the general's beach house. In a sense they were all that remained of the American stake in the war: degenerate sentiment, boozy fears, and simplifications. For them the war was over: they were just amusing themselves, raising a little Cain.

Four miles south of this, near Marble Mountain, our car stalled behind a slow ox cart. While we were waiting, a Vietnamese boy of about ten rushed over and screamed through the window.

'What did he say?' asked Cobra One.

'"Motherfucker",' said Dial.

'Let's get out of here.'

That evening I met Colonel Tuan who, under the name Duy Lam, writes novels. He was one of about ten writers in Vietnam who told me how severe censorship was under Thieu's regime – not simply political censorship, for A Streetcar Named Desire is also banned. Afraid that their own books will be censored, Vietnam's novelists have chosen the safer course of translating inoffensive novels: Saigon's bookshops are full of Vietnamese versions of Jane Eyre, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and the works of Washington Irving and Dorothy Parker. Colonel Tuan said he liked writing in Vietnamese, although he could write with equal ease in French or English.

'Vietnamese is a very beautiful language,' he said. 'But it is hard to translate. For example, if a man is addressing his wife there are so many ways he can do it. He might say "You" – but this is considered rude. Or he might call her "Little sister", and she will call him "Brother"… The most beautiful is when a man calls his wife "Myself" – "How is myself?" he will say to her. And there are others. He might call her "Mother", and she will call him "Father" -'

'"Mother, Father",' said Cobra One. 'Why, Mister and Mrs Front-Porch America say thatY

Before he left I asked Colonel Tuan what the general feeling in Vietnam was towards Americans after so much war, disruption, and death, after all the years of occupation.

Colonel Tuan thought a long time before he replied, and when he did he chose his words carefully. 'We think the Americans,' he said, and stopped. 'We think they are well disciplined… and they made many mistakes in the war. And of course we think they are generous. But we also believe they are people without culture – none at all, none that we have seen. I am not speaking for myself: I have read Faulkner and many other American writers. I am thinking of the average person – most of the people in Vietnam. That is what they think.'