William Boyd - Sweet Caress

Then John Oberkamp came in with a friend, a lanky Englishman, who was introduced as another photographer called Guy Wells-Healy. They were both stoned, but functioning, looking for ‘poontang’. Wells-Healy found his tart but John Oberkamp was plainly more interested in talking to me, waving away the circling bargirls impatiently. I made him drink a quart of Coca-Cola and we went and found a booth where we, with an undergraduate earnestness, discussed the art form we both practised. I started with my usual broadside — that there were only thirteen types of photograph — but I could see he wasn’t willing to engage.

He took out a pack of Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes — twenty immaculate ready-rolled marijuana joints that retailed for $3.50 on the streets of Saigon — and suggested I try one. I held up my Scotch and water and told him that this was my chosen means of intoxication. But he wheedled away at me so eventually I agreed to join him in his joint.

I did it, not because I wanted to smoke marijuana but, for the first time since Sholto’s death, I was aware of being attracted to a man. How does this happen? I wasn’t looking for it — but it creeps up on you and, if you’re honest with yourself, you can’t ignore it. From the first second of meeting Oberkamp in his Non-Com Hotel I had felt that little frisson of interest in him. There was something lithe and unpredictable about John Oberkamp that I responded to. It might have been his smile, or the way he’d touched my breasts that night (so I knew he was attracted to me). I wanted to get high because I fully intended that to be the excuse I would offer for making love with him, shedding all responsibility. Not my fault, Your Honour, he drugged me. I desired John Oberkamp that night and I didn’t want to pretend that wasn’t the case, didn’t want to do the sensible thing and back off.

So I smoked his cigarette and felt good — but I had been feeling good with the whisky, anyway — maybe I felt better. Who knows? My theory about intoxication is that it all depends on mood and inclination. If you are thus inclined, a sip of Madeira will do the job for you. If you’re not, a bottle of 70-proof bootleg gin won’t work. And of course we had the added ingredient of the old war-zone aphrodisiac. If you stepped outside Marlon ’n’ Mick’s and listened hard you could hear the muffled thump of explosions as the Mini-Tet offensive played itself out in Saigon’s distant suburbs. We were safe in our Tu Do bar but not far away ordnance was being delivered and people were dying. It concentrated the mind on the here and now.

We sat close together in our booth listening to Dionne Warwick walking on by and, in the way that two human beings who are sexually interested in each other — and in very close proximity — understand exactly what is going on, neither of us needed to say anything. Messages had been sent and received.

‘I don’t have anywhere to stay tonight,’ John said, taking my hand.

John Oberkamp. Saigon, Vietnam, 1968.

‘I have an uncomfortable daybed in my horrible flat, if you’re interested.’

‘I might well be. Can we check it out?’

And so we left, after a final drink, and wandered back to my place and one thing led to another, as we both intended it should, and John Oberkamp and I made love several times over the next twelve hours.

In the afternoon — we rose late — I had Truong drive me to MACV for the ‘five o’clock follies’ press briefing. John wandered off to pick up a plane heading for Nui Dat.

We kissed goodbye, chastely, and John said he’d be back in a week. I said fine — you know where to find me — and off he went, glancing over his shoulder, giving me a wave. I felt a warmth that I hadn’t experienced in a long time. I had no illusions — it was the classic Saigon encounter — but I had needed it. John Oberkamp was the first man I’d slept with since Sholto. Some personal sexual Rubicon had been crossed, as far as I was concerned, and I felt pleased and strangely fulfilled. Sholto’s ghost laid to rest.

As it turned out I was sorry that he’d gone back to Nui Dat because that evening I had a Telex from the New York office informing me that one of my photographs — that I’d called ‘The Confrontation’ — had won the Matthew B. Brady Award for war photography. It was an honour that brought with it a cheque for $5,000.

I went out on the town with Mary Poundstone and a couple of other photographer acquaintances — we went up one side of Tu Do Street and then back down the other, and wound up with a bunch of AP staffers in the bar of the Majestic — and in the course of the evening we duly drank ourselves into an agreeable state of quasi-insensibility. But all the time I was thinking: I wish John Oberkamp were here. It would have been altogether better with John.

Mini-Tet was more or less over by the end of May. As the fighting in the suburbs fizzled out I came to realise that what had disturbed me as much as the nightly show of flares, artillery and the throbbing pulse of helicopters passing over, had been the sense that the city had been surrounded by the Viet Cong and the NVA. There had been fighting in the north and in the south; in the south-east of the city and the north-west and so on round the compass. It seemed unreal — this is the capital, what’s going on? — but a little further thought was destabilising. If they’re everywhere, if they’re this close, how long can we realistically hold out? What happens the next time. .?

‘ The Confrontation’, winner of the Matthew B. Brady Award, 1968.

I visited areas of Cholon where the street battles had been fiercest and took photographs — none of which were ever used. Restaurants were open; the streets were a honking gridlock of traffic and shoppers, and then you’d come across a shattered building, pitted, scorched and blasted apart; a gaping shell crater steadily filling with rubbish or the carbonised remains of an Armoured Personnel Carrier. And there was a strange reek in those streets that seemed to cling to your clothes and hair when you went home at night — like a sweet brackish perfume of smoke, cordite, charred wood, decomposing bodies, gasoline — that you could still smell when you woke in the morning.

Even in early June at night from the roof bar of the Caravelle you could see the flares going up and the nervy chatter of a machine gun sending its looping beads of tracer up into the black sky. First-time visiting journalists were very impressed as they sipped their drinks. I heard one Englishman say that he felt like Lord Raglan on the heights of Balaclava.

I was in my makeshift darkroom in the bureau checking my supplies of developer, stopper and fixer when Renata Alabama peered in the door and said, ‘There’s some crazy Australian out here insisting on talking to you.’

I hadn’t seen John since our night together — a week ago — and I felt that breathless rush of anticipation as I went downstairs and along the corridor to reception, running my hands through my hair and wishing I’d put on some lipstick that morning. Fool, I said to myself — you’re not sixteen years old.

But I could see at once he was in a state, ill at ease. We shook hands — Renata was hovering, curious — and he asked if we could go somewhere quiet where we could talk properly. I picked up my bag and we left, heading down the street to Bonnard’s, a French-style café where they played American Forces Radio at low volume — you could talk without raising your voice.