Dispatches (6 page)

A new correspondent came into the room to say hello, just arrived from New York, and he started asking Dana a lot of questions right away, sort of bullshit questions about the killing radius of various mortars and the penetration capability of rockets, the ranges of AK’s and 16’s, what shells did when they hit treetops, paddy and hard ground. He was in his late thirties and he was dressed in one of those jungle-hell leisure suits that the tailors on Tu Do were getting rich cranking out, with enough flaps and slots and cargo pockets to carry supply for a squad. Dana would answer one question and the man would ask two more, but that made sense since the man had never been out and Dana hardly ever came in. Oral transmission, those who knew and those who didn’t, new people were always coming in with their own basic load of questions, energetic and hungry; someone had done it for you, it was a kind of blessing if you were in a position to answer some questions, if only to say that the questions couldn’t be answered. This man’s questions were something else, they seemed to be taking on hysteria as they went along
.

“Is it exhilarating? Boy, I’ll bet it’s exhilarating.”

“Aw you wouldn’t believe it,” Dana said
.

Tim Page came in. He’d been out at the Y Bridge all day taking pictures of the fighting there and he’d gotten some CS in his eyes. He was rubbing them and weeping and bitching
.

“Oh you’re English,” the new man said. “I was just there. What’s CS?”

“It’s a gas gas gas,” Page said
. “Gaaaaaa. Arrrrgggh!”
and he did a soft version of raking his nails down his face, he used his fingertips but it left red marks anyway. “Blind Lemon Page,” Flynn said, and laughed while Page took the record that was playing on the turntable off without asking anybody and put on Jimi Hendrix: long tense organic guitar line that made him shiver like frantic electric ecstasy was shooting up from the carpet through his spine straight to the old pleasure center in his cream-cheese brain, shaking his head so that his hair waved all around him, Have You Ever Been Experienced?

“What does it look like when a man gets hit in the balls?” the new man said, as though that was the question he’d really meant to ask all along, and it came as close as you could get to a breach of taste in that room; palpable embarrassment all around, Flynn moved his eyes like he was following a butterfly up out of sight, Page got sniffy and offended, but he was amused, too. Dana just sat there putting out the still rays, taking snaps with his eyes. “Oh I dunno,” he said. “It all just goes sort of gooey.”

We all started to laugh, everyone except Dana, because he’d seen that, he was just telling the man. I didn’t hear what the man started to ask next, but Dana stopped him and said, “Only thing I can tell you that might actually do you some good is to go back up to your room and practice hitting the floor for a while.”

Beautiful for once and only once, just past dawn flying toward the center of the city in a Loach, view from a bubble floating at 800 feet. In that space, at that hour, you could see what people had seen forty years before, Paris of the East, Pearl of the Orient, long open avenues lined and bowered over by trees running into spacious parks, precisioned scale, all under the soft shell from a million breakfast fires, camphor smoke rising and diffusing, covering Saigon and the
shining veins of the river with a warmth like the return of better times. Just a projection, that was the thing about choppers, you had to come down sometime, down to the moment, the street, if you found a pearl down there you got to keep it.

By 7:30 it was beyond berserk with bikes, the air was like L.A. on short plumbing, the subtle city war inside the war had renewed itself for another day, relatively light on actual violence but intense with bad feeling: despair, impacted rage, impotent gnawing resentment; thousands of Vietnamese in the service of a pyramid that wouldn’t stand for five years, plugging the feed tube into their own hearts, grasping and gorging; young Americans in from the boonies on TDY, charged with hatred and grounded in fear of the Vietnamese; thousands of Americans sitting in their offices crying in bored chorus, “You can’t get these people to do a fucking thing, you can’t get these people to do a fucking thing.” And all the others, theirs and ours, who just didn’t want to play, it sickened them. That December the GVN Department of Labor had announced that the refugee problem had been solved, that “all refugees [had] been assimilated into the economy,” but mostly they seemed to have assimilated themselves into the city’s roughest corners, alleyways, mud slides, under parked cars. Cardboard boxes that had carried air-conditioners and refrigerators housed up to ten children, most Americans and plenty of Vietnamese would cross the street to avoid trash heaps that fed whole families. And this was still months before Tet, “refugees up the gazops,” a flood. I’d heard that the GVN Department of Labor had nine American advisors for every Vietnamese.

In Broddards and La Pagode and the pizzeria around the corner, the Cowboys and Vietnamese “students” would hang out all day, screaming obscure arguments at each other, cadging off Americans, stealing tips from the tables, reading
Pléiade editions of Proust, Malraux, Camus. One of them talked to me a few times but we couldn’t really communicate, all I understood was his obsessive comparison between Rome and Washington, and that he seemed to believe that Poe had been a French writer. In the late afternoon the Cowboys would leave the cafés and milk bars and ride down hard on Lam Son Square to pick the Allies. They could snap a Rolex off your wrist like a hawk hitting a field mouse; wallets, pens, cameras, eyeglasses, anything; if the war had gone on any longer they’d have found a way to whip the boots off your feet. They’d hardly leave their saddles and they never looked back. There was a soldier down from the 1st Division who was taking snapshots of his friends with some bar girls in front of the Vietnamese National Assembly. He’d gotten his shot focused and centered but before he pushed the button his camera was a block away, leaving him in the bike’s backwash with a fresh pink welt on his throat where the cord had been torn and helpless amazement on his face, “Well I’ll be dipped in shit!”; as a little boy raced across the square, zipped a piece of cardboard up the soldier’s shirtfront and took off around the corner with his Paper Mate. The White Mice stood around giggling, but there were a lot of us watching from the Continental terrace, a kind of gasp went up from the tables, and later when he came up for a beer he said, “I’m goin’ back to the war, man, this fucking Saigon is too much for me.” There was a large group of civilian engineers there, the same men you’d see in the restaurants throwing food at each other, and one of them, a fat old boy, said, “You ever catch one of them li’l nigs just pinch ’em. Pinch ’em hard. Boy, they hate that.”

Five to seven were bleary low hours in Saigon, the city’s energy ebbing at dusk, until it got dark and movement was replaced with apprehension. Saigon at night was still Vietnam
at night, night was the war’s truest medium; night was when it got really interesting in the villages, the TV crews couldn’t film at night, the Phoenix was a night bird, it flew in and out of Saigon all the time.

Maybe you had to be pathological to find glamour in Saigon, maybe you just had to settle for very little, but Saigon had it for me, and danger activated it. The days of big, persistent terror in Saigon were over, but everyone felt that they could come back again any time, heavy like 1963–5, when they hit the old Brinks BOQ on Christmas Eve, when they blew up the My Canh floating restaurant, waited for it to be rebuilt and moved to another spot on the river, and then blew it up again, when they bombed the first U.S. embassy and changed the war forever from the intimate inside out. There were four known VC sapper battalions in the Saigon–Cholon area, dread sappers, guerrilla superstars, they didn’t even have to do anything to put the fear out. Empty ambulances sat parked at all hours in front of the new embassy. Guards ran mirrors and “devices” under all vehicles entering all installations, BOQ’s were fronted with sandbags, checkpoints and wire, high-gauge grilles filled our windows, but they still got through once in a while, random terror but real, even the supposedly terror-free safe spots worked out between the Corsican mob and the VC offered plenty of anxiety. Saigon just before Tet; guess, guess again.

Those nights there was a serious tiger lady going around on a Honda shooting American officers on the street with a .45. I think she’d killed over a dozen in three months; the Saigon papers described her as “beautiful,” but I don’t know how anybody knew that. The commander of one of the Saigon MP battalions said he thought it was a man dressed in an
ao dai
because a .45 was “an awful lot of gun for a itty bitty Vietnamese woman.”

Saigon, the center, where every action in the bushes hundreds of miles away fed back into town on a karmic wire strung so tight that if you touched it in the early morning it would sing all day and all night. Nothing so horrible ever happened upcountry that it was beyond language fix and press relations, a squeeze fit into the computers would make the heaviest numbers jump up and dance. You’d either meet an optimism that no violence could unconvince or a cynicism that would eat itself empty every day and then turn, hungry and malignant, on whatever it could for a bite, friendly or hostile, it didn’t matter. Those men called dead Vietnamese “believers,” a lost American platoon was “a black eye,” they talked as though killing a man was nothing more than depriving him of his vigor.

It seemed the least of the war’s contradictions that to lose your worst sense of American shame you had to leave the Dial Soapers in Saigon and a hundred headquarters who spoke goodworks and killed nobody themselves, and go out to the grungy men in the jungle who talked bloody murder and killed people all the time. It was true that the grunts stripped belts and packs and weapons from their enemies; Saigon wasn’t a flat market, these goods filtered down and in with the other spoils: Rolexes, cameras, snakeskin shoes from Taiwan, air-brush portraits of nude Vietnamese women with breasts like varnished beach balls, huge wooden carvings that they set on their desks to give you the finger when you walked into their offices. In Saigon it never mattered what they told you, even less when they actually seemed to believe it. Maps, charts, figures, projections, fly fantasies, names of places, of operations, of commanders, of weapons; memories, guesses, second guesses, experiences (new, old, real, imagined, stolen); histories, attitudes—you could let it go, let it all go. If you wanted some war news in Saigon you had to hear it in stories brought from the field by friends, see it in
the lost watchful eyes of the Saigonese, or do it like Trashman, reading the cracks in the sidewalk.

Sitting in Saigon was like sitting inside the folded petals of a poisonous flower, the poison history, fucked in its root no matter how far back you wanted to run your trace. Saigon was the only place left with a continuity that someone as far outside as I was could recognize. Hue and Danang were like remote closed societies, mute and intractable. Villages, even large ones, were fragile, a village could disappear in an afternoon, and the countryside was either blasted over cold and dead or already back in Charles’ hands. Saigon remained, the repository and the arena, it breathed history, expelled it like toxin, Shit Piss and Corruption. Paved swamp, hot mushy winds that never cleaned anything away, heavy thermal seal over diesel fuel, mildew, garbage, excrement, atmosphere. A five-block walk in that could take it out of you, you’d get back to the hotel with your head feeling like one of those chocolate apples, tap it sharply in the right spot and it falls apart in sections. Saigon, November 1967: “The animals are sick with love.” Not much chance anymore for history to go on unselfconsciously.

You’d stand nailed there in your tracks sometimes, no bearings and none in sight, thinking,
Where the fuck am I?
, fallen into some unnatural East-West interface, a California corridor cut and bought and burned deep into Asia, and once we’d done it we couldn’t remember what for. It was axiomatic that it was about ideological space, we were there to bring them the choice, bringing it to them like Sherman bringing the Jubilee through Georgia, clean through it, wall to wall with pacified indigenous and scorched earth. (In the Vietnamese sawmills they had to change the blades every five minutes, some of our lumber had gotten into some of theirs.)
There was such a dense concentration of American energy there, American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.

The Mission and the motion: military arms and civilian arms, more combatant between themselves than together against the Cong. Gun arms, knife arms, pencil arms, head-and-stomach arms, hearts-and-minds arms, flying arms, creeping-peeping arms, information arms as tricky as the arms of Plastic Man. At the bottom was the shitface grunt, at the top a Command trinity: a blue-eyed, hero-faced general, a geriatrics-emergency ambassador and a hale, heartless CIA performer. (Robert “Blowtorch” Komer, chief of COORDS, spook anagram for Other War, pacification, another word for war. If William Blake had “reported” to him that he’d seen angels in the trees, Komer would have tried to talk him out of it. Failing there, he’d have ordered defoliation.) All through the middle were the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese, not always exactly innocent bystanders, probably no accident that we’d found each other. If milk snakes could kill, you might compare the Mission and its arms to a big intertwined ball of baby milk snakes. Mostly they were that innocent, and about that conscious. And a lot, one way or the other, had some satisfaction. They believed that God was going to thank them for it.

Innocent; for the noncombatants stationed in Saigon or one of the giant bases, the war wasn’t much more real than if they’d been getting it on TV back at Leonard Wood or Andrews. There was the common failure of feeling and imagination compounded by punishing boredom, an alienation beyond tolerance and a terrible, ongoing anxiety that it might one day, any day, come closer than it had so far. And operating inside of that fear was the half-hidden, half-vaunted
jealousy of every grunt who ever went out there and killed himself a gook, furtive vicarious bloodthirsting behind 10,000 desks, a fantasy life rich with lurid war-comics adventure, a smudge of closet throatsticker on every morning report, requisition slip, pay voucher, medical profile, information handout and sermon in the entire system.