William Boyd - Sweet Caress

There is a curious, unspoken class system working here amongst the journalists. ‘Staffers’ versus ‘stringers’. Staffers are serious professional journalists; stringers are wild cards, eccentrics, fools, war-lovers, freaks, potheads, dangerous. There’s a celebrated stringer called John Oberkamp (an Australian) who has been here since 1965 and has been wounded in action three times. He and some friends rent a big house on My Loc Street — near Tu Do Street (where all the bars are) — that is known as the ‘Non-Com Hotel’. It’s like a just-under-control-twenty-four-hour nightclub. Lots of drinking, music, drugs — and, most valuably, information, contacts, rumours.

There’s still a strong prevalence of the French colonial days in Saigon, despite the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of Americans in Vietnam. And you can eat very well in the old style if you can afford it, and find it. I remember the other day I went to the café at the Hotel de la Poste and I asked for a whisky.

The waiter said, ‘Do you want a bébé? Or a grand bébé? ’

‘What’s a bébé ?’

‘A small whisky.’

I made contact with Lily Perette at a MACV briefing, and she claimed to remember me from Paris in ’44. ‘No, no, absolutely. You got me assigned to Patton. I interviewed him, thanks to you. Made my name.’ The young enthusiast I recalled from the Hotel Scribe had turned into a lean, mannish, somewhat bitter, but respected journalist. She wore a short-jacketed denim suit and smoked small cigarillos more or less constantly. She makes up the contingent of ‘Old Gals’, here in Saigon. Not that Lily’s old — she’s in her late forties — but most of the dozen or so women journalists and photographers here in Vietnam are young, almost all in their twenties. Lily, Mary and I are relics from the past, from other, older wars. She suggested we go out on the town — have a meal and then show up at the Non-Com Hotel for some fun.

‘Aren’t we too old for the Non-Com?’ I said as we headed there in a taxi.

‘They don’t fucking care,’ Lily said. ‘And we don’t fucking care. The main thing is that they know what we need to know — the units that like journalists.’ She was now writing for a magazine called Overseas Report that was perceived to be too left wing, and had found it difficult to gain new accreditation. ‘They keep saying no to me,’ Lily said, ‘so I’m going to take matters into my own hands.’

I have to say I did feel a bit old in the Non-Com Hotel, however, as I wandered through its rooms, the music blasting out, the mood raucous and edgy — and self-regarding: the place was full of people burnishing or developing their own myths. A lot of these young men — they were mainly men, the stringers — seemed to be high on the war, excited to be relaying atrocity stories, weird GI rituals, and the sheer thrill of choppering-in to a firefight near the DMZ. The air was bulky with acronyms.

I stood in a corner of one room, lit with blue neon, sipping at a can of beer, smelling the pungent reek of marijuana, the Rolling Stones telling everyone to get off of their cloud, thinking — this is different, this is why you came, my dear. This is why you’re not at the Northern Meeting in Inverness taking photographs of bagpipers.

‘Hi.’

I turned. A young man stood there in a silk collarless shirt. It was blue, everything in that room was blue, including our faces. He was small and handsome, this blue man, with big candid eyes — something elfin about him.

‘I’m John Oberkamp.’

‘Amory Clay.’

We shook hands. He had a noticeable Australian accent, I registered, as he asked me what I did and who I was stringing for. He said he was a photographer himself, currently unattached to any magazine or newspaper, though when the conversation turned, as it always did, to cameras and techniques, I realised he was something of an amateur. He could load film and press the shutter release but that was about it, I concluded. He brought me another can of beer.

‘Could you get me some kind of a job at Sentinel? I just need some validation.’

I said it was very unlikely; even I was deemed surplus to requirements.

‘Surplus to requirements.’ He repeated the phrase a few times. ‘Story of my life.’

I lit a cigarette. ‘Why can’t you get accreditation?’

‘Because there are too many fucking stringers in this town. Kids buy a camera, just jump on a plane in Europe, fly over, think they’re “war photographers”.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve been here for over two years, my pictures have been published in Life , in Stern , in the London Observer , but I can’t get accredited.’ He looked at me closely. ‘Do you mind if I ask you how old you are?’

‘Not at all.’ I told him.

‘You don’t look that old.’

‘It’s this blue light, takes years off you.’

He laughed at that.

‘It’s pretty fucking amazing that you’re here,’ he said. ‘I mean that’s really cool, someone like you.’

By now I realised he was very stoned, a thought confirmed when he touched my breasts. I gently removed his hands.

‘You’re not my type,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’ But I was thinking: intriguing, wild, irresponsible, sexy.

He nodded. ‘Surplus to requirements. . Have you ever seen action?’ he asked abruptly.

‘Yes.’

‘Doc Tri, Rockpile? Highway One?’

‘Second World War.’

‘No shit?’

‘Shit.’

‘That is completely amazing. Amazing. Can I kiss you?’

The evening at the Non-Com Hotel did provide me and Lily with information about a unit that had a reputation of being journalist-friendly, even woman-journalist-friendly. Lily suggested we team up — print and camera — and put in a joint request to MACV as if it came from both Sentinel and Overseas Report and she might just be able to sneak in unobserved. We applied and were accepted and four days ago we were flown in a Caribou transport plane up to An Boa — ‘Sandbag City’ as it was known, a huge airbase and firebase up north by Da Nang.

Before we left, Truong drove me to a rackety emporium in Hy Kiy Street where I could buy, on the black market, a helmet and flak jacket that fitted me. ‘ Où allez-vous, madame? ’ he asked. We tended to speak in a mixture of French and English. I told him. ‘Ce n’est pas good place,’ he said. ‘ Beaucoup dangerous.’ I could see his concern. I told him it was my job but I wouldn’t take any risks.

The night before we left, Lily and I had a meal in the Majestic Hotel, treating ourselves. She had been in Cuba and Algeria, she told me, and she wondered if it was the reports she filed from there that made MACV think she was some kind of communist. She was eager for our trip; I could see she still had that ardour and driven ambition of the true correspondent, driven also by the fear of being left out, missing out, somehow. I didn’t have that kind of zeal, that much I was sure of, and I thought of Truong’s anxiety and wondered again about my actual motives for coming. Now I was here in Saigon my vague thoughts about finding myself, needing a new war so I could reassess my old self, seemed a bit woolly and pretentious. Maybe, I thought, I was just as driven and ambitious as Lily Perette and was hiding it from myself. Did I want that adrenalin rush; did I still worry that I was missing something, just as much as Lily, I wondered?

An Boa is a ‘firebase’ — in so much as it is home to batteries of long-range artillery and vast numbers of helicopters — but that appellation gives a false impression. The place is huge, square miles of it, with its precincts and streets, just like a city, even though one constructed out of sandbags, cinder blocks, chipboard sheeting and corrugated iron. We queue for food in a giant cafeteria for T-bone steaks and a choice of six ice creams; shower in tiled bathrooms; sleep in bunkers — ‘hooches’ — with ceiling fans; buy six-packs of beer at the PX.