Dragon Lady (11 page)

We rode across the
Thi
Nghe
Canal
Bridge
to the Dakao neighborhood and had French pastries and coffee at a sidewalk café that was Charlie’s favorite. He’d introduced Ziggy and me to it, and we liked it, too. The place was far from Charlie’s home and his hangouts. Having American buddies wouldn’t set well with his cowboy pals.

When I bit into a rich pastry, I thought of the French. Most had skedaddled to
France
following the Indochina War, but there were signs of them, and not exclusively in the seedy swank of Tu Do. You’d hear their music on phonographs and jukeboxes. You saw their gingerbread on buildings. You’d hear French pop up in the vernacular, like Charlie’s
bookoo
for
beaucoup
. I didn’t know Charlie’s parents, but I’d bet that if they’d gone far in school, they spoke fine French.

The French who stayed behind kept their noses a mile in the air, so superior were they to the natives and us American interlopers. To prove my point, I’d say hello to any I passed in the street.
Bone-sewer Mon-sewer, bone-sewer Madame.

They didn’t once disappoint me by reciprocating.
La-
di
-fucking-
da
.

Charlie immediately began chain-smoking into the carton of Salems I gave him, the carton I’d held out after our black market foray with Captain Papersmith. It’d been a while since he’d enjoyed healthier, tastier American cigarettes. He thanked me up one side and down the other. He hadn’t asked me for them―he hadn’t asked us for
squat,
unlike a lot of locals who cozied up to GIs―so it must’ve been Christmas to him. Charlie’s regular brand was Ruby Queens, so I regarded the Salems as an elixir. I didn’t want his lungs turning into black goo by age forty.

I bought an English-language
Saigon Post
at a corner newsstand. The coup was front page. The new government was wonderful, the ousted government was inefficient and corrupt, blah
blah
blah
. U.S. bigwigs were quoted as “hopefully optimistic and impressed by the new regime’s resolve to eliminate corruption, to establish stability and to defeat communism.”

Charlie was reading a Vietnamese paper that was all Greek to me. Napoleon stuffed in his mouth, smoke exiting his nostrils, he batted my newspaper with his coffee spoon. “
Washington
DC
bosses,
they say our new general good?”

“They love them today. They loved the old generals when they took over from the old
old
generals who they loved when they took over from the old
old
old
generals.”

Charlie laughed. Someday, I’d have to ask him what his real name was. But I never did. He was just plain Charlie to us. We’d ride him on that, asking him if he was a
Charlie
. He’s say, and it made sense, “How can I be a Vietcong with that name? Am I stupid?”

Charlie was not stupid. He was around my age of twenty-four, short and thin as most Vietnamese were. He didn’t have a GI haircut, nor was it Beatles long. Charlie’s hair didn’t attract attention, a wise move on his part. Far as I could tell, the ARVN Draft Board operated solely on wheels, no paperwork needed. The first thing they screened for was curly locks. If you were careless or vain about your coiffure, troops piled out of their trucks and asked for ID.

If your documents weren’t in order or you didn’t have a wallet plumped with piasters to buy invisibility, you’d get a free ride in the truck to Quang Trung Training Center. As the song went, you’re in the army now. I’d witnessed desperate knock down-drag outs on the sidewalk involving guys reluctant to serve their country.

There was a piece in the
Post
on two more battalions of U.S. Marines landing at DaNang. I showed Charlie.

“Okay, good,” he said through a smoke ring.
“Kill VeeCee.”

Charlie and I rarely spoke of the war, except how we were each in our own way avoiding participation in situations such as patrols and punji sticks and live bullets.

I asked, “What’s your opinion, man? We gonna win?”

“Win.”

“How come win?”

“VeeCee and Ho Chi Minh
come
Saigon
,
fini
napoleon,
fini
Honda.” He paused to run a finger across his throat. “No let
that happen
. Fight VeeCee to death.
House to house, alley to alley.
For democracy and pastry.
Fini
Charlie.”
 

I laughed.
“Familiar with Dien Bien Phu?”

He shook his head.
“Dien Bien Phu no same
same
.
Dien
Bien Phu
no nothing to what
me
and you speak.”

“How do you figure?”

“
Dien Bien Phu
was
Frenchie
frog war, not American.
USA
have
more plane, more tank, more chopper, more cannon, more rifle, more
bookoo
money than
France
.”

“Will money win the war?”

“For sure,” Charlie said. “French lose Dien Bien Phu and Hanoi. No lose
Saigon
. Vietminh no come
Saigon
.
France
go
to peace talk, keep Vietminh out of
Saigon
.
America stronger and richer.
America
keep
Vietcong out of Saigon.”

His Honda was on its kickstand at the curb and we were eating goodies.
In Saigon.
Therefore we were winning the war. If he lived in
Hanoi
, there would be no Honda, no goodies, because the French had lost their war. His illogic was logical.

“Know what else, Joe?”

I shook my head.

“South Vietnam to be American state.
Number fifty-one state is number one.
VeeCee no attack America.
No can do.” He tapped his temple.
“VeeCee bad, but VeeCee no crazy.”

Charlie knew that statehood for
South Vietnam
was in the works. Everybody knew. But if the rumor was legit, shouldn’t it be in the
Post
I was reading? Six years earlier, in 1959, Alaska and Hawaii had been admitted as the 49th and 50th states. They’d already been territories, but still had to jump through hoops.

I’d been fiddling with a bottle of
nuoc mam
fish sauce on our table. It was as ubiquitous in their eateries as catsup was in ours. Charlie had told me that a Vietnamese could not live without
nuoc mam
.
 

I finally managed, “Charlie, what if an American GI loves a Vietnamese girl?”

He dropped his spoon on his saucer.
“You?”

“No,” I lied.

“Who?”

“Nobody.
Anybody.
Could the girl love the GI too?”

He looked at me and my flushed face, instantly seeing through my tissue-thin hypothetical boy-girl. “No can do.”

“Why no can do?”

“Boy and girl no same
same
.
Two different planet of friend Ziggy?
Bookoo
book he read on American spaceship to Mars.
Vietnam girl, American boy―Mars and Earth.
This nobody-anybody, if smart he forget love. Love taxi girl, love mama-san girl. Love her for two hundred Ps. When time to go home
America
, go home.
Love American girl.”

Charlie returned to his newspaper. He’d taken offense. I had encroached. I had exceeded limits.
Friendship and sex, yea.
Genuine intimacy, nay.
Kipling’s East-is-East ballad slapped my face yet again.

It was probably a product of my blushing chagrin, but I thought I’d caught a glimpse of my Lee Harvey Oswald facsimile, Chief Warrant Officer R. Tracy. He was on the next corner and then he wasn’t.

I checked my watch.
“Gotta go.
I’m late to work. War is hell, man.”

Charlie looked up from his paper. “War is hell if you in it.”

On my feet, I asked, “What’s on your busy schedule today?”

He lit a cigarette from the one he was smoking. “Stay out of hell.”

12.

DESPITE HAVING an East Indian doorman decked out like a rajah in a Khyber Pass flick, the Hotel Caravelle kept its doors wide open, its air conditioning on full throttle. To walk in front of the Caravelle on a concrete sidewalk radiating visible heat waves was to walk into a glacier.

Its top-floor bar boasted Saigon’s hottest floorshow.
Every night was the Fourth of July. At the horizon, artillery boomed and flares flashed and tracers streaked. Ziggy and Larry Sibelius and I sat quietly through three
Biere 33s
each and a serious barrage.

Make
that
six beers for Larry. He was matching us two-to-one, putting us to shame. I didn’t recall him being such a sauce hound.

“You’re pounding them down hard, short timer,” I told him. “Not that I’m criticizing.”

Larry Sibelius was a buddy from the Tan Son Nhat hootch where we’d briefly billeted. I hated Larry’s guts. I hated him because he was shorter than short. Tomorrow, he was heading back to the World, to the Land of the Big PX. A Pan Am Boeing 707 was lifting off Tan Son Nhat at 11:15 in the morning. There was a seat on it with his name, rank and service number. I hated him doubly because at his final stop, Travis Air Force Base in
California
, Larry Sibelius was receiving his army discharge.

Of course I didn’t hate Larry at all. I just told him I did as we toasted him. Of course I didn’t covet a discharge and a trip home either. Not any longer. I held that to myself, lest anybody overhear and have me hauled off to a loony bin.

Larry was a draftee, a medic at the USARV dispensary here. In my humble opinion, he was the finest chancre mechanic in the United States Army. Come down with a dose of the clap and go to Larry, he’d slip you a bottle of tetracycline, a self-cure that kept the infection off your records. There’d be no punishment if you had a prig for a company commander. There’d be no order to report to a chaplain for a lecture.

To further demonstrate what a terrific fellow Larry Sibelius was…a GI from a small compound in the Central Highlands near where Larry had been stationed earlier in his tour had been bitten by a stray dog. The compound’s doctor had wanted to go by the book and give him the rabies series―twenty-some shots right through the stomach lining. Ouch. Double ouch.

Larry’s friends had caught the pooch and had it choppered down to Tan Son Nhat, where it tested negative for rabies, so the GI didn’t have to go through needle hell.

Larry Sibelius was a war hero up there, too. Charlie had mortared their compound one night. The attack had killed eight and wounded fifty. It had gotten a lot of press, and stateside readers began learning the word “escalation.” Larry had been awarded a Bronze Star for heroism and a Purple Heart for minor injuries. Ask him to elaborate and he’d clam up. The subject was taboo.

Larry hoisted his beer bottle. “I’m too short to take your unconstructive criticism, Joe. Remember what I said I wanted to be when I grow up? Well, that was then, this is now. I’m devoting my life to a career that you gents were instrumental in inspiring me to, a career as a professional goof-off and pseudointellectual. I’m gonna be a beatnik. I’m gonna grow a goatee, recite poetry I don’t like or understand, bathe when I feel like it, drink espresso and funny-colored liqueurs, and bang lady poets.”

In 1965, most
Vietnam
duty was a cakewalk compared to what it would be a precious few years later. But twelve months in-country had changed Larry as it did everyone. When he’d arrived, his lifelong goal had been to go to med school and become a family physician. He had a BS in chemistry, the smarts, and the drive.

I chugalugged my bottle and raised the empty.
“To Larry Sibelius, beatnik.
To his ambition.
To the American dream.”

I was drinking faster, catching up to our esteemed guest. Mai had intruded, drifting in and out of my thoughts.

421 Hai Ba Trung.
Tomorrow night.

“I’m pounding them down? Joe, easy, man, or you’ll be on your lips and we’ll have to carry you from bar to bar,” Larry warned.

“Not me,” I said. “I’m perfectly capable of crawling on my own.”

“Joey’s drowning his sorrows,” Ziggy said, looking up from his magazine. On the cover, Sonny and
Cher
doppelgängers
were in spacesuits with fishbowl helmets,
strolling
a moonscape that resembled green cheese. “Joey didn’t get to see ’em shoot some Chinaman.”

I told Larry of my morning tardiness.

Sympathetically, he patted my back. “Cheer up, man. There’ll be other public executions. Corruption ain’t going away.”

I said that really wasn’t it. Tongue loosened by the suds, I spilled my guts about my Dragon Lady.

Larry Sibelius listened intently and said, “How long’ve you been in
Vietnam
, Joe?”

“Eight months, four to go.
You know damn well,
Lar
’, and I know goddamn well where this’s heading.”

“How long since you been in the same room with a nice girl?” Larry asked.

Insinuation that Mai was not a nice girl came within an eyelash of getting the table tipped over on him. But I accepted and appreciated his context and his concern for me. Compared to Charlie’s racism, Larry’s was benevolent.

“That’s got nothing to do with it,” I said defensively.

“Zig, talk sense into this boy.”

Ziggy had as many dead soldiers lined up on the table as me, but there wasn’t enough ethyl alcohol in the city of
Saigon
to move him beyond a mild buzz. After twelve beers, he might belch, emitting visible shock waves.

“Joe, she ain’t
no
girl. She’s Vietnamese.”

Larry said, “Well, if she is the Dragon Lady you’ve obsessed over to wretched excess, congratulations. I read
Terry and the Pirates,
too. Everybody who has comes here with the notion of finding his very own Dragon Lady. The exotic East, you know.”

He tapped his temple. “As long as you separate creation from flesh and blood, you’ll be all right.”

He paused, waiting for my assurance. I didn’t respond.

“You’re not alone, Joe. Let’s put it that way. The outcome may not be as important as the hunt. I envy you. You’re
persevering,
you’re maintaining your standards. Best of luck, whichever way it turns out. The flower-exchanging business is neat. You may have something going, but if your girl is like Terry Lee’s, you’ve got a handful. I gotta worry about you boys in general when I’m not here to keep you off the straight and narrow?”

We
clinked
beer bottles and conversation petered out.

Skinny and intense, Larry Sibelius had thin hair that presaged cue-ball baldness by age thirty. If he had a family, dysfunctional or otherwise, I didn’t know the details. Nor was he forthcoming about a stateside love life. Was he estranged? Had he been Dear
John’d
?

He was oddly sober, too, fidgety, picking at the label on his bottle. I asked, “What’s wrong?”

He took a swig and said. “What I’ve missed in the Mysterious East is what’s wrong. You and your Dragon Lady reminded me.
Brought it to the surface.
I’ll never return to this country. Years from now I’ll kick myself for not savoring the experience to the fullest.”

“You missed getting killed.
Barely.”

“Besides that.
I’m talking exotic and not only dragon ladies. No offense, Joe.”

“None taken.
Give us a hint?”

He gazed at the fiery horizon. “How much you think Madame Nhu would charge for a short time?
How much for all night?”

I said, “I’ve asked myself that very question. More than you and I will ever earn in a lifetime.
More than the Gross National Product of Vermont.
Plus you’d have to fly to
Rome
, where she is with her daughter, conveniently abroad when Diem and Nhu were popped. Have you seen that little girl of hers? She’s a doll.”

Larry smacked his lips in agreement.

“They’re irrelevant, too. They’re not likely coming back to
Vietnam
, sure as hell not to have a ménage à trois with Larry Sibelius.”

“Yeah,” Ziggy offered. “You ain’t got a Chinaman’s chance with them.”

“What else?” Larry coaxed with his hands.
“The inscrutable Orient.
A symbol thereof?
C’mon, guys.”

“What you dole out tetracycline and penicillin for?”

“Opium dens.
Haven’t you seen those pictures? These emaciated duffers flopped on bunks. Cribs, they call them. They’re smoking pipes, a million miles off in the enchanted kingdom. Man, I haven’t even smoked a reefer. How am I gonna be a respectable beatnik if I pass up this chance?”

“You can fake it.”

“Karl Marx said religion is the opiate of the masses. Millions throughout the world use opium. If you ask me, opium is the opiate of the masses.”

“Marx and Engels.
Das
Kapital
,” I said. “Workers exploited by capitalists so badly they can’t afford to buy opium.”

Larry said, “An Englishman in the last century wrote that when he took opium, it was music like perfume. He lived a hundred years in a single night.”

Eyes locked on the travails of Sonny and
Cher
, Ziggy said, “In China, the struggle to consolidate the socialist system, the struggle to decide whether socialism or capitalism will prevail, will still take a long historical period.”

Larry looked at me.

“Long story,” I said. “What the hell does music like perfume mean?”

“Damned if I know, but it sounds cool, doesn’t it?”

“What happened to the Englishman?”

“I think he died in the gutter, dreaming deranged dreams of crocodile kisses that gave him cancer.”

“Swell.”

“He’s not the point. The experience is.”

Ziggy and I hadn’t gotten Larry a going-away present. We’d planned to surprise him with a massage and all the trimmings. So why not paid admission to an opium den? By God, like Doug Hooper and us lemmings
hassling
the frat rats after our induction physicals, I wasn’t chickening out. I wasn’t gonna be a pussy. I said to drink up and signaled our waiter for the check.
 

I’d thought finding an opium den would be a challenge, but the first cabby we asked said, no sweat, GI, he knew a good opium den.
Number one.
Best in town.

I wasn’t too drunk not to cop a feel of the 25-caliber peashooter in my pocket.
Saigon
had no shortage of dangerous neighborhoods, and I doubted if your average opium den was on the same tree-shaded stretch of walled villas where MACV brass and foreign ambassadors resided.

The taxi halted on an unlit street.

I said, “Do we wanna do this? Sincerely wanna do this?”

No reply.

“Boys, this is not a rhetorical question.”

The taxi driver broke the silence.
“Uncle me.
Two times week, go to den, smoke three
pipe
. Do for forty year.”

“How long ago did he die?” I asked.

“No die. Healthy,” he said.

“That’s encouraging,” I said without conviction.

The cabby
drooped
an index finger. “Uncle me, no can go boom-boom.”

Okay, what the hell. There were worse things than winding up as an impotent dope fiend. But outside the taxi, Larry stood, not budging.

“Sorry, guys. I’ll have to pass. I know I’m sobering up and chickening out and it was my bright idea. I’m afraid they may make us piss in a cup at Travis.”

“No problem,” I said, figuring that we had an out too. “It’s not worth stockade time when you oughta be home and learning to be a civilian beatnik.”

Larry took a deep breath. “I need to unload, gentlemen. I have to tell this to somebody or it’ll explode inside me. My Bronze Star is bullshit.”

“How so?”

“The VC who mortared us
were
damn accurate. It was the middle of the night and all personnel were asleep and unarmed except those on guard duty. The guard hootch was next to ours, where off-shift guards snoozed. They missed them, but killed three in ours, wounding the rest of us.

“I got off lucky. A few nicks, a little shrapnel. With the other ambulatories, we were airlifted to the hospital at Nha Trang for surgery either there or on to Clark Air Force Base. The second day I was at Nha Trang, a four-star general and a high Saigon diplomat and a big-shot civilian presidential advisor from D.C. came through our ward. You know who they are. They’ve all been on the cover of
Time
, even the arrogant, four-eyed asshole advisor.

“This general was warm and fuzzy. I think he genuinely cared about us. He shook our hands and said they got the VC who did this to us. They chased them down and made mincemeat out of them. True or not, we felt better.