Sweet Caress

by William Boyd

  I was walking past a bar in Tu Do Street, coming back from my tailor, when I saw a girl sitting outside a shack called the A-Go-Go Club. She was an ordinarily pretty bargirl, her hair teased and lacquered, but there was something about her pensive mood as she sat there dreaming of another life that made me stop and surreptitiously remove my camera. She was wearing white jeans and a white shirt – maybe ready to go on her shift. I snapped her – she never noticed.

  ‘Shouldn’t you ask permission, first?’

  I turned round to see John Oberkamp standing there. He was in jeans and a tight, ultramarine, big-collared shirt.

  ‘I suppose I should have,’ I said. ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘She’s my mama-san. Come and meet her.’

  Her name was Quyen and she worked in this bar and also at Bien Hoa airbase as a cleaner. She seemed fond of Oberkamp; when she said ‘John, he numba-one man,’ she seemed to mean it. Oberkamp called her ‘Queenie’. We strolled in and ordered a beer. It was mid-afternoon and the place was quiet, the bargirls sitting around in their tiny lurid miniskirts and bikini tops, chatting, smoking, reapplying their make up, waiting for the cocktail-hour rush. Oberkamp told me he finally had accreditation – he was now a recognised stringer for a Melbourne-based newspaper, the Weekly News-Pictorial, and was now spending much of his time with the 1st Australian Task Force at their base, Nui Dat, south-east of Saigon. He came up to the city as often as he could to be with Queenie. He kissed the top of her forehead – ‘My little lady’ – and she hugged herself to him. By coincidence I ran into her again two days later at Bien Hoa where she was polishing the boots of some Air Cavalry gunners. She looked different, hair wild, uncoiffed – a servant, not an object of male fantasy – humble and hard-working. ‘You tell John I love him,’ she said to me. ‘Beaucoup, beaucoup love.’

  Two photos of Queenie. From Vietnam, Mon Amour.

  For some reason I can’t bring myself to read Charbonneau’s book. Absence de marquage has been sitting on my bedside table for two weeks, now. I know where this dread comes from: without thinking I read the blurb on the back – it was one of those large-format, pale cream, soft-covered French novels, just lettering on the front, no illustrations. Absence de marquage was the story of a young Free French diplomat – called Yves-Lucien Legrand – in New York during the Second World War, so the blurb informed me, and his doomed love affair with a beautiful English woman, a photographer, Mary Argyll.

  I actually felt a squirm of nausea in my throat when I read this and dropped the book as if it were burning hot. Mary = Amory. Argyll = argile, the French for clay. A roman à Clay, then, I said to myself – not amused.

  Of course it has to be read, and I have skimmed through it looking for those passages that concerned ‘Mary Argyll’, my alter ego, my doppelgänger . . . It’s disturbing to read a fiction when you know all the fact behind it. I’ve been consuming it in small sips, as it were, reading a paragraph here, half a page there, only to realise that Charbonneau was recounting episodes of our time together wholly unaltered in any degree, apart from the names of Yves-Lucien and Mary. Here is Charbonneau describing Mary Argyll after their first night together:

  Mary Argyll was one of those almost-beautiful women, a not-quite-beautiful woman. But, for Yves-Lucien, that was precisely what made her, paradoxically, more beautiful than anyone he had ever encountered. Beautiful women were boring, he thought; he needed something other than mere perfection to interest him. Her nose was a little too prominent and she should have paid more attention to her hair, which was dark brown and straight, and as a result of this negligence could often look lank and ungroomed.

  He loved her body, naked, however. She was so slim that her ribs showed but her breasts were full and generous with small perfectly round nipples. Her feet were a little too large, another imperfection he cherished as it made her seem sometimes graceless and awkward, particularly when she wore her highest heels. Yves-Lucien found this ungainliness un peu loufouque and extremely exciting, sexually.1

  My breakthrough as a photographer in Vietnam has occurred with the publication of this photograph of a Huey pilot waiting for his mission briefing. It made the front cover of three magazines and was syndicated to over forty other magazines and newspapers, worldwide. I have to admit I saw its potential as the image was printed. The suspended man, the shades, the ‘danger’ arrow, the can of beer – all perfect juxtaposition. Once again the photograph stops time (in monochrome); the historical moment, with whatever freight it carries, ideally frozen.

  I garnered fees of over $3,000 at the end of the day but, more importantly, it saw my name being bandied about – requests came in for more, similar images – and I have suddenly become aware of the commercial dividend of working in a war zone with the eyes of the world upon you. Your accreditation was extra-valuable, not just because it gave you access, took you places other photographers couldn’t go and made you sometimes a unique witness, but also because all that could be turned into cash. This was (I was learning fast) another edge to the stringers’ hunger for action – there was money to be made for putting yourself in harm’s way.

  To my surprise, Lockwood was very excited by the response to my ‘Pilot in his Hammock’ photo. I received a rare Telex from him: more of the same, please, now, now, now. People were growing tired of towering GIs and cowering peasants; Zippo lighters firing thatch; muddied wounded being medevac’d – show us the hidden human face of Vietnam, Lockwood urged. I was way ahead of him.

  But encouraged, and finding doors were opening as a result of my new reputation, I resumed my tour of the bases – Long Binh, Bien Hoa, Da Nang – and their backstreets and byways. I even went to visit Oberkamp at Nui Dat and saw the little sandbagged, cinder-block hooch that he called home, now, out on the airport perimeter – but he wouldn’t let me take any photographs of the Australians. ‘The Aussies are mine,’ he said, and he wasn’t joking.

  I was in Hong Kong when the Tet Offensive broke out in January 1968. I watched the simultaneous mass assault on some thirty South Vietnam towns and cities as I sat in my room in a hotel – the Royal Neptune – that looked out over Kowloon Bay, seeing the faces of the TV reporters I knew, ducking and wincing, under the roar of incoming fire in Hué, in Khe Sanh, in Saigon itself. They were that close.

  I had needed a holiday, a break of some sort, as I’d now been in Vietnam for nearly a year. In the GPW bureau in Hong Kong I could call my family and have a proper conversation – Annie was thinking of doing postgraduate work; Blythe was playing in London pubs in a folk group called Platinum Scrap.

  I had a long conversation with Blythe and there was something about the flat tone of her voice that worried me.

  ‘Is everything all right, darling?’ I said. ‘Boyfriend trouble?’

  ‘How do you know I’ve got a boyfriend? Did Annie tell you?’

  ‘Educated guess. Is he nice?’

  ‘Tall, blond, talented, wicked.’

  ‘Sounds good to me. Is he nice as well?’

  ‘Only four adjectives, Ma. You know the rules.’

  But she seemed to have brightened up, now she’d told me and we chatted on about her band and the awful pubs they played in.

  While I was in Hong Kong I was also able to sort out the financial mechanics of the new success I was enjoying as a result of the prominence of my photographs of young soldiers. I was in almost daily telephonic correspondence with a counter-cultural Californian entrepreneur who wanted to license one of my photos to put on a T-shirt. His name was Moss Fallmaster.

  ‘I’m thirty, tall, skinny, I have a beard. I’m pretty sure I’m gay.’

  ‘I don’t quite understand.’

  ‘Of a homosexual persuasion.’

  ‘Oh. Good for you. So’s my uncle.’

  ‘Well, isn’t that wonderful! So, I’m on your side, Amory, I won’t rip you off. If I win, you win. We’ll make a fortune.’ (I never made the fortune that Moss Fallmaster promised me. However, the deal still provides me with a dimi
nishing but still welcome dividend.)

  He bought the rights to the photo he was after for $1,000 with a ten per cent royalty for me on every $2 T-shirt he sold. He printed them up with an ambiguous caption that caught the mood of the time: ‘Never Too Young To . . .’

  The ‘Never Too Young To . . .’ photo.

  I had vowed never to go back into combat again but, to our general consternation, after the cataclysm of the Tet Offensive seemed to have died down, so the Mini-Tet arrived in May ’68 – and right on our doorstep. You could stand on the roof terrace of the Caravelle in downtown Saigon watching the gunships strafing the streets of Cholon a mile away.

  Mary Poundstone, back in Vietnam, fully accredited to the Observer, said it reminded her of Madrid in 1936 when the Falangist forces were dug in right in the heart of the University district. You left your hotel – the Ritz, by preference – and caught a bus to the front line. Meanwhile, here on the roof of the Caravelle in 1968, we sipped our martinis, smoked our cigarettes, and watched the lambent roseate jewels of tracer arc into the evening sky.

  I had Truong drive us into Cholon – Mary came with me, it was her insistence – as close as we dared. Truong would take us down narrow side streets, drop us off and we would creep forward to join whatever unit we could find, US or ARVN. I was very nervous but I could see all Mary’s old war fever return, her passion fired again. Tracer, machine guns, mortars, RPGs – she loved it, perversely; her dander was up.

  At one stage, a few days ago, we took shelter in a ruined house during an airstrike. The fetid air in the room seemed to physically shudder from the percussive force of the bombs. We huddled in a corner, backs to a wall.

  ‘Mary,’ I said, ‘what are we doing here? Are we insane? We’re two old ladies.’

  ‘We’re not old – we’re wise. We’ve lived, we’re experienced, that’s why we should be here. Not like these potheads running around trying to get their million-dollar wounds. That’s not for us. We see things clearly.’

  After that I’ve only been up once again. I’m beginning to feel my luck is running out.

  I was in a newish bar in Tu Do Street called Marlon ’n’ Mick’s – perhaps to lure in both rock fans and film buffs. It was always dark and only played American soul music, which was why I patronised it. I was becoming an uncritical admirer of Aretha Franklin.

  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.