• • •
When he touched down in Vietnam, Eastman was met at Tan Son Nhut Air Base by an ARVN officer, who drove him to the Continental Palace Hotel. He was interested in the officer and pushed for more of a tour of the city, but found it difficult as the man’s English was limited. So he checked in and met Mrs. Nguyen, who seemed pleasant and accommodating. She could be useful, and he even thought to interview her at some point, as this was the famous Continental where newsmen had stayed for the duration of the entire war. His room was sufficient. A double with two beds, a desk where he could work, a set of lounge chairs, a ceiling fan, and a window-unit air conditioner that rattled ceaselessly. He was a floor above the Herald’s Saigon bureau, which he avoided for now. He set up his typewriter on the desk and organized his papers. The letter to his boys he signed Daddy and sealed it in an envelope to give to Mrs. Nguyen in the outgoing mail.
His reluctance to check in with the bureau was due to the phony pretenses of his trip, a trip that began as a lie, a fib, although it was a lie so convincing that it spread itself around New York publishing circles. And the last person to take him seriously wasn’t any of those publishing bloodsuckers he called friends, or his wife, but Eastman himself. He would have to be truthful now if he was going to write the kind of stuff Broadwater and the Herald wanted. A record of history.
He loaded a piece of carbon-backed paper into the typewriter and began:
THE UNLIKELY CORRESPONDENT, A.K.A. THE UGLY CORRESPONDENT
Our title recalls how our hero was feeling when he first stepped out onto the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut Air Base without any love in his heart. U.C. was heartbroken, you see? He was a palindrome of sorrow, front to back. Wait a minute . . . U.C. backward was C.U. See you as in so long. So it wasn’t a palindrome, but it resonated with him nevertheless. His marriage was falling apart just when the Herald was making arrangements to bring him to Vietnam. They wanted from him a series of hard-won dispatches to get you readers wiping the sweat from your brows each Sunday morning. U.C. in a foxhole with grunts. Hard conditions. But he was in no shape for this kind of work. Partly because of the aforementioned marriage. Partly because he had sent himself to a bombed-out country ill equipped and with no one to blame but himself.
He lost interest in what he was doing and wandered over to the bed to lie down. In the time between that surge of inspiration and the end of a single paragraph he grew depressed. There was no getting around it, and this deflation of all feeling was causing fatigue. He would have liked to talk to Penny at such a time, to even have her here with him. He could send her a letter and an express ticket to Saigon. Wouldn’t it prove to her that he was the passionate man?
He needed to talk to her.
Eastman reached for the phone on the bedside table, knocking over an ashtray. If he was going to overthink this he thought it best to just talk it out. He dialed the front desk and asked for an outside line to the U.S. As he began to dial he hesitated, then dialed, then failed, redialed. It took a few minutes to finally get something resembling a ring, a rat-a-tat-tat that made him sit up. He didn’t know what to expect. He was sweating. My God, will she still respect me?
A man picked up at the other end. “Hallo,” he said.
“This is Alan Eastman calling for Penny. Who is this?”
“Alan eats what? No, I don’t understand at all.”
“Excuse me. Am I calling New York?”
“I don’t know, are you?”
“Don’t play around. Is this Arnaud Fleishman? Are you in my house, you son of a bitch?”
“I’m waiting for the car at my house. I’ve been waiting for thirty minutes. Where are you?”
“Where am I? Who is this?”
“Where is the car? The car to take us to the airport. It’s been thirty minutes and I’m still waiting. Are you coming?”
“No, listen. This is a mistake,” Eastman said. “I think our lines got crossed. I’m not taking anyone to the airport.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m trying to reach my wife, Mac. Her name’s Penny. I think the lines got crossed. This is her husband. I’m calling from Vietnam.”
“Oh my God. Is everything okay?” The man sounded genuinely concerned.
“I don’t know how to answer that.”
“Well, are you in any sort of danger?”
“Not really, no. Listen, are you in New York? Maybe you can get a message to her for me.”
“Paris. I’m in Paris.”
“Oh, for Chrissake. I have to go.”
He was losing patience. All the energy Eastman worked up to call her had tired him out, and for what? Wasted on a wrong number. He again dialed the front desk to complain. Had they given him proper instructions? Yes, yes, the man apologized for the inconvenience and asked him to try it again. He ordered a pitcher of cold water. “I’ll try again,” he said. This time he didn’t get a rat-a-tat-tat but more tones of signals and circuits gone haywire.
He reconsidered calling Penny at this hour (New York was twelve hours behind) and concluded it would be detrimental to his health. So he gave up.
A room boy knocked on his door and Eastman yelled for him to come in. The boy placed the pitcher of water down on the nightstand. He handed over a few crumpled piastres as a tip. How was he going to manage in this country, he asked himself?
Eastman drank a big glass of water and then lay down, placing a cold-water compress on his forehead. He needed to rest, to nap, only he couldn’t fall asleep. He watched the ceiling fan circulate the musty air until finally he dozed off.
The water he drank and that soaked the facecloth on his forehead didn’t agree with him. Not yet anyway. He woke in the early evening to a stomachache deep in his intestines, and for the next two days he lived in the bathroom of his hotel room. Next to the toilet he kept a copy of Cosmopolitan, which he had bought at JFK because of a headline that read HOW TO GET OVER HIM, and he thought, or hoped, rather, that Penny would be reading the same thing. Healing a wounded heart, it said, was all about changing one’s way of thinking. If your husband or gentleman has left, you had to form new paths for yourself, both mentally and physically. Create new memories, it said, with those you didn’t have time for in your now defunct relationship. Take a different route to work and begin frequenting a different market. Eat dinner with a girlfriend at a restaurant you have never been to. Take a trip (you deserve it!).
He had to admit, even the rhetoric in Cosmo seemed a bit patronizing. An article on locating the G-spot he found much more compelling.
He didn’t leave his room at all and he hardly ate, except for some fruit and portions of a single croissant when he could keep it down. He took water that he was told was purified. The room boy came twice daily with fresh fruit in the mornings—bananas, mangoes, dragon fruit, kiwis—then a second pitcher of water in the afternoon and a fresh wet facecloth to take down Eastman’s fever. When the fruit on the coffee table began to shrivel, the room boy replaced it.
11.
He didn’t head straight to the news bureau on the second floor of the Continental, and this, he would later learn, was a mistake. It made the Herald’s staff in Saigon feel insignificant. Instead, he followed a lead set up by Broadwater, and set out to an early lunch to meet General Burke, a man who had been sending him messages since he arrived.
Eastman crossed Tu Do Street and took a short walk down Le Loi. He moved past the bookstalls, the paperbacks and newspapers in Vietnamese. Many of the books looked flimsy, as if they had been photocopied. Still, they were a literate culture and words seemed to carry some magnitude here. It was like that in oppressed societies. One could be imprisoned for writing a book, and not only because it was obscene—that was American puritanism—but because the book’s ideas were provocative and feared. The right book here could start a revolution, and so in the North words were policed, just as in the Soviet Union and China
and North Korea. When a government censored words, censored its people, that was fascism. That was Hitler and the Nazis and mounds of burning books. It pleased him to see the people of Saigon stopping midday to step into a bookstall out of the heat. A lovely thing it was for a writer to witness. No, no, having a series of bookstalls didn’t justify an occupation or killing. That was the writer and historian in him talking, not the humanitarian. He was a humanitarian, wasn’t he? I am a type of humanitarian on a mission, am I not? If that wasn’t true, why would I be here? The historian is in part humanitarian and pacifist. Sure, I have my own selfish reasons, but does anybody have to know that? I could do something good for these people, couldn’t I? And not just by recording history, hence keeping a choir of Americans updated on just how bad we’ve ripped apart this little country. I could report ideas, the very ones people on both sides of this are afraid of. It is my privilege to do so. To be two things at once. The two H’s. H. H. Humanitarian and Historian. And for a revolution to start it took a literate culture. America’s literacy and literary totem pole seemed to have toppled over by the end of the fifties, in the wake of television. Even he read less than he once had.
Saigon was a meditation. It excited him.
He had once been to Moscow on a trip for the State Department in the early sixties on a cultural exchange. There he found Moscow’s sleek political surface majestic, its representatives both kind and disciplined. He thought not of totalitarianism but of human beings getting on, a normalcy to life, a thrill behind the iron curtain. Of course he was wrong about Moscow and the whole of the Soviet Union. He saw only what they wanted him to see, shuffled around from palace to palace, meeting dignitaries and other writers who swore to the Soviet Union’s wide berth for tolerance. It turned out to be all baloney.
Saigon would take time. Its layered surface cautioned him to be careful not to rush to any conclusions.
Eastman didn’t know his way around yet. He had no perspective, he had done no research prior to coming, hoping that his impressions would be enough for his dispatches. But from the little map he had been given at the Continental, he was on the right path. Down Le Loi and on to the Rex Hotel, where he was to meet General Burke. Eastman learned from the notes the general left at the Continental that they had both served in the 112th Cavalry out of San Antonio. They must have been in the Philippines at the same time, but it was a big outfit and Eastman wasn’t betting on recognizing someone from thirty years ago. Burke’s notes were written on Military Assistance Command, Vietnam stationery, MACV, and they had an intimidating look, as if Burke were trying to impress Eastman with his long-term status here.
When he arrived at the Rex he didn’t go in right away. He stood outside on the corner, looking up and around the open city. Women and children, commerce and traffic. The park with its tall trees and a row of neatly parked bicycles. Across Le Loi, a corner café serving hot soup under an awning. It seemed he could get a decent sandwich from one of the many street vendors for a nickel or whatever the equivalent of a nickel was. The air, despite being full of exhaust and tasting of smoke, felt warming.
He was spending too much time on the corner, because a slow-moving rickshaw pulled up to the corner. “Hallo! Give you ride.”
“No. No ride. I’m here,” said Eastman.
“Hallo. How’re you? Give you ride.”
“No, dammit, I don’t need a ride. I said I’m here. I’ve reached my destination. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Get you girl. Grass, get you high.”
“Not interested, little man.”
“Boom boom. Meet you nice girl.”
Eastman had his hanky in his hand, toweling off the sweat on his forehead, and waved it at the rickshaw driver to shoo him off. When the man persisted, he thought he’d have to speak in a language this cyclist would understand. “You’re a pimp.” Eastman spit on the ground. “Shoo!”
The man didn’t move. He still wanted Eastman to get into his little carriage. “I’m going inside. You better not be here when I come out, you understand me?” Obviously he did not. The man stood there on his bicycle, gratified, and something in his stillness told Eastman that the bastard would be there when Eastman came out. He waved the man away with his hanky once again and entered the Rex.
• • •
The situation in the Rex wasn’t all that bad, but he still liked where he was at the Continental better. When he arrived at the restaurant on the roof, he saw the general at once at a table closest to the bar. The general was in civilian clothing, khakis and a tight undershirt that showed off a powerful physique. He kept his sunglasses on until he saw Eastman enter the restaurant, then took them off and placed the glasses neatly on the table. Burke stood and quickly waved him over.
“You’re a hard man to track down,” said Burke. “I left a message at your hotel every day since you got in.”
“I was stomach sick. Something I ate. Two days on the commode, it wudn’t purtty.” He started to use a Texas accent, a parody of the general, but a note below Burke’s twang to be safe.
“You’re drinking plenty of fluids I take it?” said the general.
“Yup.”
“Because you’ve lost a lot of water and you’re dehydrated. You need to stay hydrated in this climate. It takes some getting used to, but you’ve been to the Far East before so I don’t have to tell you.”
“Gen’ral, that was a lifetime ago. I barely remember it. It was hot, wudn’t it?”
“Hot as the inside of an asshole.”
“Humid, too, as I recall.”
“It’s the humidity that builds stamina. Sweat it out a couple days and you’ll be used to it. Sit, have you eaten?”
“I could eat a long-horned bull.”
“You can get a steak here. It’s the best in Saigon. Me, I get the filet min-yone, bloody.”
Eastman sat down at the table, and from his position he could see the Saigon skyline, gray and bright. Burke sat across from him in what seemed like the safest location in the room. From that vantage point he could see whoever came in and out of the restaurant and his eyes were on the door often. He was a safe man, he didn’t seem to take chances, and this made Eastman a bit paranoid. He looked over the menu, pretending really, because he was having what the general was having. They ordered. Two filet mignons, bloody, no potatoes. A side salad.
“I’ve seen you on television several times,” said Burke. “Is it an act? I wonder. You like to run your mouth off about matters concerning this war. Hell, I don’t take offense. Listen, I called you here because I like you. I’m a fan. I’m one of your biggest fans. I thought American War was the best damn book written about our conflict in the Pacific and not that Jew’s, Norman Heimish. He didn’t get on the ground like you did. He took on a bigger picture, perhaps. But yours was about the boots on the ground. The voices heard and not heard. It made me proud. Not only because it was about the 112th. But the war stories it told were true to the reality of war.”
Eastman noted Burke’s anti-Semitism and didn’t take offense. He was used to it and he was used to blending in. He had cultivated himself that way, this was why he was using this Texas accent on and off again. He could change himself, mask his identity, so that people would say things to him that they wouldn’t say to ordinary reporters.
“Why thank you, general, that’s kind. Heimish won the Pulitzer that year. I thought I wrote the better book, too.”
“What have you written since?”
“Not anything that’s come close to my first book yet. I wrote two novels, the most famous of which was called A Heaven Among the Stars. Then I wrote a book of essays called To Each His Own. Have you read them?”
“No, I don’t read novels.”
“Well, they were just unfairly panned by the critics. Scoundrels, every last one of them. And I’m one of them. Unfortunately, where I hail from, not Texas, but New Yawk, people take a
critic’s word literally when it should be taken for shit. Anyway, I began work on another novel about veterans, men like you and me who had been to war, only this time in Europe—Italy. Naples, to be exact. They pass through Italy on their way to a trip hunting boar in Sweden. It’s twenty years later and—”
“Let me cut you off there, Alan. May I call you Alan? I don’t want to know your whole life story. I just wanted a brief summary, maybe talk about some books that I could get my hands on. History, conflict. Real matters. That’s what I read.”
“Then To Each His Own is the book for you. You know, I’m the one who should be asking you some questions. I’m interested in what’s been going on here and your part in all this. I take it you’re a man who knows how this country works. Where could I get the scoop? Where should I stay out of? That’s probably where I should start.”
“I can help with that. There’s fighting, if that’s what you’re looking for—ARVN forces up North.”
“Yes, that’s where I want to go.”
“First I need to know something. Are you capable of writing a true war story? The kind you once wrote before? The kind that spoke to me, and spoke to others? Because your track record tells me different. You don’t like this war, do you? And you haven’t shut up about it too often.”
“No, I don’t like this war and I don’t understand it. That’s why I’m here. Of course, I know the reasons given, but the reasons don’t make any sense to me. There’s a gap in my comprehension, you see. That’s why I’ve spoken out against it time and again. But now that’s all over, we’re past it. America was here, came, fought, and went. I’m not against the military, General. I’m of the military.”
“Discharged, wasn’t it?”
“Honorably. Not the other way around. I threw my hat in because there was an injustice.”
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