On one such morning our curiosity got the better of us. Ziggy and I flagged down a motorcyclo and said to follow that Jeep. Captain Papersmith drove straight onto Tu Do Street, made a left a few blocks from the Hotel Caravelle, and parked smack-dab in front of the GiGi Snack Bar.
Though “Snack” was commonly in their names, bars in this town that catered to American troops did not customarily serve food, not that you’d care to eat it. Snack, Ziggy and I presumed, was a misspelling of snatch, which they did serve…
That trip with Sally to D.C. and the Vietnam War Memorial? It hadn’t been our final journey together. While I was still able to get around unaided, before the morphine and respirator and canes, Sally had surprised me with a trip to Saigon, tickets already purchased, hotel reservations made. I could not say no and I could not love her enough, though I was no longer able to express my affection physically.
As we know, Saigon is now Ho Chi Minh City, and North and South Vietnam are simply Vietnam. The 17th Parallel that separated North and South is merely a dotted line on a map. Americans can ride a train from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. They can tour the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. If they don’t mind the long lines, they can even have a peek at the old boy preserved under glass.
The GiGi is gone, surely victim of the campaign against counterrevolutionary attitudes that commenced when North Vietnamese tanks rolled into town in 1975. If the GiGi Snack Bar’s girls continued cadging Saigon tea (“You buy me drink, GI, okay?”) and selling short-times, they did so in a rural reeducation camp.
Sally gave me carte blanche to go anywhere, to do anything I wanted to do. I confined field trips to what I knew and where I’d been in Saigon. Like any city after decades, some things are different, some not. We didn’t address it in words, but I knew that carte blanche included a search for my Dragon Lady.
Hell, I didn’t even know Mai’s last name. Before the trip, I’d Googled Mai and gotten 450 kazillion hits, no help whatsoever. Perhaps if I’d pressed Mai harder for a last name, I could’ve narrowed it down. She had so many secrets, a significant component of her allure.
Vietnam’s population is 85,000,000, greater Saigon’s 6,000,000. I don’t know what I’d’ve done if I had her full name and address. And I had Sally’s feelings to consider, too.
Another surprise awaited at a two-day Maui layover on the return leg, to buffer our jet lag. In a Paia watering hole, I met an antique hippie, a florid white man in his early sixties. He had skinny arms, a W.C. Fields nose, and a pot gut. He wore a gray ponytail in braids, a tie-dyed shirt, a doo rag, the whole kit and caboodle.
He sat with a woman who wore earrings in her nose. Forty-something, she had abundant tattoos, stringy blond hair, and no bra under her sleeveless T-shirt.
Coincidentally, the hippie had gone to Vietnam, too, in the past year. It was his first visit. He’d been a draft dodger, sitting out the war in Canada. He wanted to see what he’d missed.
As he prattled on about air pollution and food poisoning and pictures of Uncle Ho all over the place, my instinct was to knock him off his barstool. Sally, reading me, stroked my arm, gently biting my shoulder, whispering, “easy, easy.” I had neither the strength nor sufficient inclination. We spoke further and he turned out to be a fairly decent person. His woman, too. After a second round (nonalcoholic beer for me), I felt no malice. I even bought them a drink.
…Ziggy and I walked into the GiGi and found the captain sulking alone in a corner, his back to the door, not a super-duper idea in that era of plastique. He was chasing shots of Rhum Caravelle with Ba-mi-ba. The girls in their skintight, slit-up-the-side Suzy Wong dresses swiveled at the bar, giving us the onceover. They weren’t hustling the captain to buy them Saigon Tea, which was plain bourbon-hued tea in shot glasses that you paid whiskey prices for. They knew him. Our intrepid commander was a GiGi regular.
Me leading the way, we went to him and stood at attention, sort of. The captain finally looked up and blinked at us.
“Private Joe? Private Zbitgysz? Aren’t you men on duty?”
“Yes sir. We came by to check on how the papers promoting us to PFC and our MOS change to clerk-typist are coming along, sir.”
“Uh,” he said, straining his pickled brain.
“Just kidding. We’re worried about you, sir.”
“Worried about me?”
“Because of your obvious worries. The weight of your responsibilities.”
“Oh, yes, thank you, men. Take a seat.”
I took a seat. Ziggy headed outside in search of a newsstand and the latest on Mariner 4.
The captain raised his empty glass and two fingers. In ten seconds flat, a Suzy Wong’d cutie-pie had drinks on the table. If the ARVN worked as quickly and efficiently as Saigon bargirls, they’d’ve kicked Victor Charles’s ass out of the South by 1961. The Vietnam domino would be upright, anchored in concrete.
I raised my shot glass in toast. “Thank you, sir.”
He drank. I did not, as the locally distilled Rhum Caravelle tasted to me like a mix of Bacardi and kerosene.
He stared at me. “I should be a happy man, but I am not. War is hell.”
It took a moment for it to sink in that he’d actually said war is hell.
“Well, sir, war or no war, you ought to be happy. Shouldn’t you?”
He smiled sadly. “Why is that, Private Joe?”
“You’re a commissioned officer with an important job, sir. A company commander and unit adjutant. You have a lovely wife and family at home. And you have, you know, the lady in the Polaroid.”
“Ah, my assignation. I never did thank you men for your cooperation that day, not to mention your cigarette rations. It’s difficult in an inflated wartime economy for a Vietnamese national to make ends meet.
“Therein lies the crux of my dilemma, Private Joe. Mai has forsaken me, a circumstance entirely attributable to rank being pulled on yours truly by an officer of superior rank, although not of superior character. I do not wish to elaborate. My life is going nowhere and I endure a loveless marriage. Those difficulties are relatively trivial. Have you ever had the misfortune to meet the girl of your dreams?”
I looked over at Ziggy, who was still outside, and said, “Afraid so, sir.”
He sighed. “I have met my romantic Waterloo.”
“Sir, please spit out what’s bugging you.”
He drank as he pondered my request.
Behind the bar, arms folded by the cash register, was the GiGi’s mama-san. The owners and managers pulled sentry duty at the money, that or be stolen blind by the hired help. This mama-san was somewhat older than her girls. She wore heavy makeup and had a beehive hairdo that’d put any sorority girl back home to shame. A little lumpy, she still had a few curves. Mama-san licked her upper lip for my benefit, to let me know the coach was capable of coming off the bench.
Was she the cackler, Quyen, Mai’s mysterious sister or whoever the hell she was? The They-All-Look-Alike Syndrome struck again.
I cocked a thumb toward her.
“She’s an attractive lady, sir,” I said. “The mature ones, they know all the tricks. They’ve written the book on tricks.”
“You misinterpret, Private Joe. I come here exclusively to drown my sorrows. She does not comprehend why I demonstrate no sexual interest in her or the GiGi staff.”
I wondered too. “Believe me, lack of interest in nooky happens to everyone occasionally, sir. Unfortunately.”
Blearily, Captain Papersmith leaned forward on his elbows. “This is confidential, Private Joe. Classified information. The war is winding down in our favor. There’s no guarantee how long any of us will be in-country.”
Had he also patronized an opium den? “Won’t utter a peep, Captain. Is what’s going on in the Annex a factor?”
“Joe. Off the record, there’s a new wrinkle. It comes from the highest level and is accelerating the situation. You can say nothing, even to Private Zbitgysz.”
“Sir, honestly, you can trust my complete disc
retion.” I lied, such a blatant lie that I crossed my fingers under the table.
He whispered, “One word. Statehood.”
Saying “statehood” like the lout and his “plastics” to Dustin Hoffman a couple of years later in The Graduate. Bless you, PFC A. Bierce.
I hoisted my eyebrows theatrically. “Wow! For certain, sir?”
“Shh!” he said, giving me a spittle shower. “I don’t have the fine details.”
“Sorry, sir. Mum’s the word.”
“The process is so advanced that they’ve even selected a state gemstone.”
“Which is?”
“Sorry, trooper. Classified.”
“Of course, sir. But come to think of it, there is a rumor to that effect circulating all over town. Just yesterday, a taxi driver told me that the state insect is to be the tarantula. I thought he was raving. I didn’t understand his context till now.”
“Poppycock! What would a common cabby know of a high-level Pentagon and White House initiative?”
“Excellent point, sir.”
“I require advice, Private Joe. Man to man. I shall elaborate on what I said I did not wish to elaborate on.”
Captain Papersmith paused. This was a struggle for him. Me too. I sure as hell was no Dear Abby.
“Thank you, sir. I’m flattered.”
“You’re a man of the world, Private. Lord knows from your personnel jacket, you’ve lived.”
“I have beaucoup methods of messing up and beaucoup practice at it, if that’s what you’re driving at.”
“Exactly. We learn by our mistakes and we learn from the mistakes of others.” He belched softly. “Colonel Lanyard ordered me to report to a senior chaplain he knows, a lieutenant colonel. How the colonel discovered my illicit love, I cannot imagine. Colonel Lanyard said I was immoral, a degenerate. A degenerate, Joe! I had no choice but to obey and report to the chaplain. The chaplain ordered me to end my illicit relationship and beg my wife for forgiveness. Ordered me.”
How slick. Discover his “illicit love.” The officer corp’s means of eliminating competition. Order the suitor of inferior rank out of the picture. Mai stoking this nutso soap opera, walloping the colonel’s bare ass, she was even craftier than I gave her credit for.
“A chaplain can’t order you in terms of religion and morality. Can he?”
“It may have been a figure of speech. He did, however, make his views crystal clear.”
“Ordering you to behave, sir, I’m not grasping that.”
“This is the army. What is there to grasp?”
I’d learned early on from guys who made the error of confiding their indiscretions to the wrong chaplain. You could bank on one-term chaplains maintaining confidence. Lifer chaplains, not all, but a small percentage, ingratiated themselves to their commanders by snitching.
“How did you leave it with this chaplain, sir?”
“I agreed and thanked him profusely for showing me the light. Anything to terminate the session.”
I was getting pissed. “Wanna know what I think, sir?”
“Please.”
“Basically, sir, the chaplain was telling you to keep your pecker in your pants.”
“Crudely stated, Joe, but, essentially, yes.”
“With all due respect to this godly, high-ranking chaplain, sir, your pecker is your very own pecker, not his pecker, not Jesus’s pecker, not God’s pecker. Your pecker is government property only insofar as what it’s attached to for a given length of time. Your pecker has Constitution-mandated, inalienable rights that are none of the chaplain’s fucking business. He can do whatever he wants with his pecker and so can you within the parameters of the law.”
“Quieter, Private,” Captain Papersmith said, showing his baby’s-ass-delicate palms. “I do appreciate your concern.”
“Ever see the flick, Elmer Gantry, sir? You don’t know that this chaplain isn’t a Reverend Gantry. You don’t know how he uses his own pecker.”
“Granted, but keep your voice down.”
I leaned forward on my elbows. “Sir, impending statehood or not, everybody and his brother is saying the war’s heating up, so the VC may not surrender soon enough for any of us to go home except in a rubber bag, so no one can blame you for living for today. Piss on Lieutenant Chaplain Colonel Fire and Brimstone, sir. Fuck him and the horse he rode in on.”
“Your recommendation has merit, but there is a complication.”
“Yes sir?”
“I wrote Mildred asking if I might bring home a Vietnamese woman as a nanny. Our son has behavioral problems and our daughter is a budding nymphomaniac. The children are nearing adolescence. I argued that it might not be too late for the kids if a woman who has endured any number of hardships took them under her firm wing.”
I resisted shaking my head in disbelief.
“Yes, yes. I know, Private. Having my cake and eating it too. Our two-story home has a basement with a mother-in-law apartment that is suitable for Mai, and Mildred sleeps like a log. But Mildred immediately saw through my subterfuge and is demanding a divorce. To compound my woes, Colonel Lanyard denied my application for compassionate stateside reassignment to iron things out. I have a quandary, do I not?”
All I could do is confirm that he indeed had himself a moral and practical quandary. A woman he thinks he loves versus the slide-rule heiress, he couldn’t have both.
He shrugged helplessly and signaled for refills.
Abby herself couldn’t wriggle him out of this one.
16.
LIKE LAS Vegas casinos, The Great Beyond has no clocks, no defined seasons that I have thus far detected, no encouragement of circadian rhythms. It logically follows that our new life spans are infinite as we’ve already expended our The Land of the Living life spans.
Make sense to you? I hope so. I hope I’m right, too.
The bad news is that my immediate neighborhood has gone to hell, even if there is no Heaven or Hell per se. Factor in the elevator music (today’s selection: “Sloop John B”) and the lifestyle jokes that seem to be at my expense, and I am in a state of limbo.
Smitty has become a full-blown pain in the ass. He has come to regard me as his mentor. Whenever he bugs me, I play along, partially because of loneliness--I haven’t seen Madge outside again--and partially to get under his skin.
Today, he comes to me and says, “Joe, something is wrong with my television programming. Can you help?”
For Chrissake, I can’t even help with my own. The only station running for the past week is Channel 82, the afternoon talk show. LBJ and Ho Chi Minh are having a marathon debate on the War, talking nonstop 24/7. Uncle Ho speaks in Vietnamese, Lyndon in Texan, a drawl that never forms complete words. I have no idea what they’re saying, but they understand each other well enough to interrupt and yell and shake fists.
I tell Smitty, sure, and fish a stack of TV dinners out of my freezer compartment. It’s time for another food swap anyway.
In his living room, he says angrily, “Look. What is this?”
What the black-and-white footage of deserts and tanks is, I think, a documentary on the Six Day War, which took place in June 1967, when Israel duked it out with Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. It was no contest. The Israelis rolled over them and wound up with a bunch of new territory.
Having to raise my voice because the sound is on so high, I summarize the war for Smitty and say, “Yeah, that was a couple of years after I was in Vietnam. There were jokes about Egyptian tanks having a reverse gear.”
He looks at me.
“Where’s your sense of humor, kid?”
He holds his remote control like a club. “I cannot turn it off or change channels or even mute the sound.”
“I have some maintenance issues with my boob tube too, Smitty.”
“What is this language they are speaking?”
Damned if I know. I open his fridge and say, “It’s all Greek to me, but it’s got to be Hebrew. Hey, how’s your bacon and pork chops holding out
?”
***
Ziggy and I were spending our nights in a different breed of limbo. Like children on restriction, we’d been ordered to new quarters: bunks in the 803rd Liaison Detachment’s supply room.
It was not punishment for misbehavior, but rather to keep tabs on us and our strong backs, which were often required on minimal notice, as supplies and machines arrived at all hours, at an accelerated pace. The Annex must’ve been packed to the gills. Cerebrum 2111X and CAN-DO had to be on the verge of being operational.
We were incarcerated slaves, secured by a front-door lock Ziggy could pick in the span of a yawn. The Annex’s stepped-up regimen also demanded our scrounging skills to acquire matériel neither shipped in nor previously anticipated. Our leashes temporarily cut, we filled shopping lists. They were eclectic, as if from a frat house scavenger hunt: copper wiring, plastic tubing, adhesive tape, odd-sized light bulbs, a miscellany of screws and bolts. We came through on these special assignments, with and without the aid of Mr. Singh. Brigadier General Whipple personally issued us the piasters I estimated we needed.
“Seed money,” he’d quip as I stood in his doorway at the position of attention, palm extended. “It is planting season.”
His terrarium/office smelled increasingly pungent and mossy. It was as choked with growing things as the deepest, darkest, triple-canopy jungle. Light from the windows did not filter inward. I swear I heard monkeys and exotic birds.
One evening, Mai knocked on the 803rd’s door and called to me. Mai, who I’d tried and tried to make go AWOL from my every thought. She’d slipped a note under it, saying she’d like to see me, friend to friend, an innocent outing, my choice of where and when.
I carefully analyzed this overture, and its possible consequences of dishonor, a general court martial, the death penalty, et al. I analyzed it for at least a hundredth of a second. My trepidation lasted a full one-thousandth of a second longer.
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