Dragon Lady (2 page)
SAIGON
1965
“LOOKIE, JOEY.
A gift from God,” said Ziggy, a man of almost no words and an atheist to boot.
These days you’d call it a crime of opportunity, but then it was a miracle. Strapped onto a United States Air Force flatbed truck stalled in the other direction was a GE air conditioner for home and office, brand-spanking-new in its box, a sacred offering on a pedestal.
That air conditioner was a perfect chance for Ziggy and I to score brownie points with the captain. Just in the nick of time. As usual, we’d been in the doghouse, skating on thin ice, stepping on our own peckers whenever we laid a foot down. We were duds. We were malingerers. We were serial screwups. We had not subscribed to can-do. We had not gotten with the program.
Saigon
was a steam bath. It had two seasons. We were in the blue-sky humid-hot season. The other was the monsoon humid-hot season.
The netherworld I referred to, where I am nowadays, formally designated as The Great Beyond,
is
a stunning contrast. We have the invariable climate of a suburban shopping mall, with elevator music playing every lounge-lizard classic imaginable, day and night, presumably for all eternity. There are times that I yearn for
Saigon
climes, for
any
uncomfortable extreme. Typhoons, blizzards, flash floods, hailstorms, you name it.
Anything that kept you cool was scarce in 1965 Saigon. Window air conditioners were scarcer than scarce. What was available on the black market was third-hand garbage that had been passed along like a cheap whore.
Traffic wasn’t budging. Bicycles, cars, wagons, trucks, cyclos, armored personnel carriers, scooters―nothing was moving. Heat waves and tailpipe smoke boiled up, mixing with the odors of incense, food, flowers, sewage and intrigue. There was a throbbing, noxious din of sputtering exhaust, shouting and horn-honking. Whoever had named this town the Paris of the Orient had done so long, long
ago.
Ziggy squeezed out of our taxicab, lumbered to the flatbed, and proceeded to undo the buckles securing the a.c. unit. The airman driver opened his door and began raising a ruckus. I hopped out of the taxi and kicked his door shut.
I shook my head as kindly as I could and said, “Don’t do something you’ll be sorry for. I am sincere about this.”
Wide-eyed, he said, “What the hell is this shit?”
He was an airman second class, a two-striper, nearly as low on the totem pole as us.
“It is what it is.”
“You can’t.”
“We are.”
“I don’t believe this.”
“Believe,” I said. “I am sorry.”
“Fuck you.”
“I really am sorry.”
“My ass’ll be grass.”
“No, it won’t. In this traffic, you have ample time to think up a story. Tell them we were Vietnamese gangsters, masked and armed.”
The poor bastard sized me up, then Ziggy through his mirror. I’m no ninety-seven pound weakling. Kick sand in my face and one of us will be hurting. But when you look at Ziggy, the first thing you wanna do is fork over your lunch money.
Ziggy went six-four, six-five and was cone-shaped. I hadn’t
an inkling
what he tipped the scales at. If he was of a mind to shave his chest and back, he’d need a lawnmower.
Ziggy looked as if he should have become extinct during the last Ice Age. And Ziggy was the most brilliant person I would ever know, before and after my dying day.
The Sunday funnies out of a stateside newspaper were on the seat beside the airman.
“You have your folks send them to you, too?”
He nodded morosely, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.
“What’s your favorite?”
No reply.
“C’mon.”
He sighed. “
Dick Tracy
.”
“Yeah, Tracy.
Pruneface
,
Rhodent
, Tess
Trueheart
, all his supporting characters, they’re good too. My all-time favorite’s
Terry and the Pirates
.”
He shrugged.
“All it’d take in
Vietnam
is ten Terry Lees. Parachute them in and we can all go home in a month,” I said, laughing.
The airman did not laugh. He did not answer. I didn’t think he and I were going to have much of a conversation.
Which was just as well.
I couldn’t confide in him that
Terry and the
Pirates
was my favorite comic strip because of the Dragon Lady, and my obsession with her and with her flesh-and-blood counterpart.
I’d had an average number of girlfriends, some serious, some not. Some dumped me, some I dumped. I had never truly been in love, not until my real-life Dragon Lady, whom I knew existed but had not yet met.
Ziggy lifted the air conditioner onto the top of his head and walked off as if the carton was empty. The airman glared straight ahead. This was a scared kid wearing a wedding ring. He was drawing three hundred dollars per month, including family allowances.
Smart kid, too.
No way was he gonna sacrifice life and limb for a piece of government property, which he also was.
We heard a terrible shuddering
ka-boom
. Everything and everybody froze for a second, as if there’d been film breakage in a movie projector. Even the automotive fumes seemed to hang in midair globs.
The Vietnamese stuck in the tie-up looked knowingly at each other, as did Ziggy and I. One of two things had happened. General Curtis
LeMay
had dropped a nuke on Hanoi, as he was itching to do. But the
ka-boom
came from downtown, so it was the other.
We
knew
the Vietcong had bombed the U.S. Embassy. Rumors in
Saigon
spread faster than the clap. The word had been out for at least a week. Everyone and his brother had heard the stories, except, apparently, the people in charge of preventing it.
Another lively rumor was that secret negotiations were underway to admit South Vietnam to the Union as our fifty-first state. Absurd as it seemed to me, this rumor was gathering momentum, gathering it quickly.
Nineteen-sixty-five was early in the war, prior to Uncle Sam shipping over any young male able to fog a mirror to prop up the Vietnam domino. It was ten years before North Vietnamese tanks rolled into
Saigon
, before
Saigon
became
Ho Chi Minh City
.
In 1965, crewcuts and madras shirts reigned. Now, in The Great Beyond, aided by the perspective of time and an undemanding regimen, I look at 1965 as a Bohemian Vacuum between beatniks and hippies.
It was the Year of the Nonconformist Void.
It was the year that Joe Namath signed a gigantic four hundred thousand dollar contract with the New York Jets. It was the year that Spaghetti Os and
Slurpees
hit the marketplace. It was the year that young guys emulated the Beach Boys. It was the year of Selma and Watts. Churchill died and Malcolm X was assassinated.
Gas cost thirty-four and a half
cents
a
gallon. The Dow Jones was under 1000. The year 1965 was two-thirds of the way to 2000 A.D., when we thought we’d be getting around like the Jetsons.
How innocent 1965 was. It preceded the Tet Offensive, My Lai, Vietnamization, light at the end of the tunnel, Kent State, Watergate, unindicted coconspirators, Patty Hearst, emission controls, the Silent Majority, the Moral Majority, Chernobyl, The Falklands War, Iran-Contra, AIDS, SARS, the World Wide Web, the dot.com craze, Y2K, hanging chads, 9/11, Enron, Paris Hilton, Sarah Palin, and the proliferation of consultants.
In 1965, Vietnamese would still stare at us and our round eyes. Ziggy was a sci-fi lover, with a fanatical preoccupation with the planet Mars. We could’ve been Ziggy’s Martians, we were such novelties.
While the adviser bullshit was coming to an end and we were taking over the fighting, if your number was up, you were as apt to have a barstool blasted out from under you as catching a North Vietnamese bullet between the peepers.
We were unable to stuff the box into the little cream-and-blue Renault taxi as is. To make the air conditioner fit, Ziggy ripped the cardboard off like he was peeling an orange. Half the people on the street did the airman’s see-no-evil. The other half gawked, not sure what they were seeing.
That’s what this war did for you.
Gave you fresh experiences every single day.
AFTER ZIGGY and I installed the air conditioner in the window behind Captain Dean Papersmith’s desk and cranked it up full blast, the captain closed his eyes and smiled blissfully. He fluttered his pockets and flapped his shirt against his bony chest. He cooed like a pigeon. Until now, the only man in the outfit with an air conditioner was our commanding officer, Brigadier General Whipple, and his machine was unreliable.
“Private Joe, Private Zbitgysz, I may have misjudged you. Good work, men. A number one, can-do job,” Captain Papersmith said. “I know resourcefulness and possibly heroism was involved, given the nature of this hellhole city. By the way, did you hear? The VC blew up the U.S. Embassy.
A terrible shock.
It caught everyone by surprise.”
Ziggy and I let our jaws appropriately drop. As I did so, I was distracted as always by the photographs on the captain’s desk. The one in the large gilded frame was a professional color portrait of him and his horse-faced wife and their two children, a sullen boy, who had juvenile delinquent written all over him, and a grinning girl, who already knew the score. His missus wore a pearl necklace and a bouffant as tall as Marge Simpson’s would be.
Mrs. Dean (Mildred) Papersmith was an heiress in a clan that manufactured drawing instruments and technical products. Their cash cow was the slide rule, in which they ranked second to the venerable Keuffel & Esser. I’d owned one of Mildred’s family’s slide rules. For my one disastrous quarter as
an engineering
major, I’d had to purchase one.
Little did Captain Papersmith or anybody else in 1965 know that in a decade the pocket calculator would relegate the slide rule to a Smithsonian
relic.
It would obliterate his better half’s family firm and trust fund, a circumstance that would cause the good captain to suffer yet another nervous breakdown.
***
Please allow me to pause here for a moment. I apologize for the boldface type and the italics. It won’t happen again. I have to explain a few things before we proceed. It’s extremely important that I do (at least to me) and that I have your full attention.
I am not clairvoyant, I am not Nostradamus. I am not predicting the future from 1965. I am in the future, in The Great Beyond, or rather, from your point of view, in the present, speaking at the very instant you are reading this, whenever that might be.
The loose definition of “the great beyond” is the afterlife, life after death, and so forth.
Which is precisely what The Great Beyond is.
Is it Heaven or is it Hell?
Beats the hell out of me.
Thanks to the psychological games
They
play with me, one day it’s one, the next day the other.
I do know that The Great Beyond is a municipality. Whether it’s a town, city, county, state, nation, continent, world, solar system, universe or galaxy, I do not know. The people (?) who run this place are probably capable of building a chain-link fence around infinity, so their accomplishments and capabilities are limited only by my imagination.
I’ve already mentioned the non-stop elevator music (“Lady of Spain” now playing) and the San Diego climate, but I’ve broken the narrative flow of this yarn long enough. The travelogue will continue later.
***
Tucked into the picture frame of the all-American household
was
a Polaroid snapshot of the captain’s girlfriend and the woman of my dreams. My Dragon Lady had been inserted as if she were the captain’s car or favorite pooch.
Thus far, sadly, the Polaroid was the extent of my relationship with her. I alone knew her as the Dragon Lady. Beginning then with her inaccessibility, she’d break my heart again and again, till it was a heap of shattered china.
My Dragon Lady didn’t wear the red metallic gowns with high collars as did her comic-page namesake in
Terry and the Pirates
(like the panel I kept in my wallet, nestled next to a rubber and, figuratively, my heart), but rather the traditional Vietnamese
áo dài
, a long silken tunic split at the sides, worn over loose pants.
Unaccompanied by her cartoon counterpart’s long ivory cigarette holder, she projected an innocence that I didn’t swallow for a moment. She was lovelier than the infamous Madame Nhu, sister-in-law of
South Vietnam
’s late president. My Dragon Lady made the Mona Lisa look like a hound dog. Her cheekbones were higher than the
Chrysler
Building
stacked atop the
Empire
State
Building
. She seemed to be gazing beyond the photographer, presumably Captain Papersmith, straight into my eyes.
She was satiny soft and as tough as a hardware store full of nails, a contradiction that simultaneously gave me
goose
bumps and a hard-on. I’d looked and looked for an ideal complement to her visage, a tinge of cruelty in her eyes or at the corners of her mouth, and had found none. But nobody was perfect.
To be so obsessed by a combination of a Sunday comic and a low-resolution photograph was by any definition a psychological illness. I accepted my malady then and I relish it from my present aerie. If I were a sick puppy, so be it. The last thing in the world I wanted was the services of a competent shrink. To be cured would be unbearable.
As I continued staring, Captain Papersmith snapped his fingers.
“Yoo-hoo, Private Joe.
Are you with us?”
“Yes sir.”
He glanced at his watch. “Where have you men been today?”
We shrugged in unison.
“The air conditioner requisition does forgive you for being unaccounted for much of the day. However, I have an important mission for you. It has to be accomplished ASAP.”
Where we’d been was avoiding our duties and settling a bet. I’d told Ziggy about a book I was reading on
U.S.
presidents, on how George Washington had not pitched a silver dollar across the
Potomac River
, but supposedly a stone or a penny across the smaller
Rappahannock
.
“It’s lore,” I’d told Ziggy.
“In the category of chopped-down cherry trees and wooden teeth.”
“Fucka buncha lore,” he’d rebutted. “Anyone can toss a dollar across a river.”
I’d said, “Oh yeah?”
He’d said, “Yeah, we got this river here that’s a pissy-ass little river.”
“Like Cuba’s a pissy-ass little island? Ask the
Bay of Pigs
survivors.”
“Who said shit ’bout some island?”
Well, off we’d gone. In this day and age, we could plead Attention Deficit Disorder for this sort of meandering stunt. Back then it was 24-karat goldbricking.
We’d ridden a taxi through downtown Saigon to the skinniest part of the Saigon River, which was still awfully wide. Ziggy wouldn’t’ve thrown a silver dollar even if we’d had one. We weren’t that flaky. He did fling a flat rock that skipped a third of the way out. Not a bad effort, but I won the wager. We were headed back to the outfit by way of a couple of bars when we’d come upon the air conditioner.
“We were out being heroically resourceful for you, sir,” I said. “Resourceful heroism is time-consuming.
Sir.”
Our company clerk, Private First Class A. Bierce, almost smiled. He sat in a corner, in the shadow of his massive manual typewriter, quietly listening, absorbing all. PFC Bierce had a poker face and a receding hairline. He had a hint of south of the border in him, like Fernando Lamas.
He had a semi-famous name, too, although he didn’t know that I or anybody in the United States Army knew. Bierce worked long hours at the keyboard, but I never saw his work. To a man, we left him alone. Veteran soldiers knew that you did not make an enemy of a company clerk.
Captain Papersmith raised a delicate hand. He had a pencil neck and pale, translucent skin you could see veins through. He was not young, thirty-five years of age at the very minimum. His background was as classified as our duty station, the 803rd Liaison Detachment.
He said, “Indeed you were resourceful, but cease the sarcasm, Private Joe. I do believe that the air conditioner requisition indicates you’re ready to assume more responsibility.”
“Yes sir,” I said warily. In the army, “more responsibility” translated into a dirty detail.
Ziggy didn’t say anything. Ziggy didn’t speak unless spoken to and sometimes not then, unless you got him going on Mars and Mariner 4’s approach to and imminent arrival above the Red Planet. The builders of that satellite guaranteed that, once and for all, Mariner 4 would separate Martian fact from Martian legend, an assurance that tied his stomach in knots.
“Stop pouting, Private Joe. I don’t understand you men, Joe and Zbitgysz. There are two of you, replacing one. Am I overworking you? Is the supply room such a burden?”
Ziggy and I had replaced former Supply Sergeant Rubicon, who had received a compassionate reassignment to Fort Lee, New Jersey. His German war bride, widow of a Wehrmacht lieutenant killed at Stalingrad, had turned out to be the forty-something lawfully wedded wife of an SS officer who’d been stationed at Buchenwald. Simon Wiesenthal had recently thrown a net over him in Argentina.
I’d eavesdropped on Sergeant Rubicon as he’d pled ignorance to a chief warrant officer from the Criminal Investigation Division (CID) named R. Tracy.
Besides having a name from the funny pages that hung around his neck like a five-hundred-pound albatross, CWO R. Tracy bore an extremely strong likeness not to square-jawed Dick, but to Lee Harvey Oswald. The days since November, 22, 1963 must’ve been hell for him, the poor bastard the object of wary stares and the butt of endless jokes.
I’d liked Sergeant Rubicon and believed him even if CWO Tracy hadn’t. He was especially devoted to his stepdaughter, who’d been a preschooler during World War Two. She’d had vivid memories of “airplane skies,” which was her term for B-17 raids, hundreds of the bombers visiting at a time. Rubicon had hoped she’d someday get over her nightmares. I did too.
When Rubicon had said his piece, CWO Tracy had looked up from his notes with an
Oswaldian
smirk, saying nothing. Yeah, Rubicon had gotten a ticket home, but then what for him? The next day, the 803rd was without a supply sergeant.
“Is it a burden, Private Joe?” the captain pursued.
I gave the one acceptable answer.
“No, sir.
Not a burden.”
“You will also assist PFC Bierce with clerical duties as I see fit. Bierce works like a dog.”
Our official MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) was Duty Soldier, so “more responsibility” of any ilk could be piled on us. In effect, we were coolies.
But Ziggy and I as clerks?
That was a crock of guano. The captain was laying a trap.
I looked at PFC Bierce. Pretending to ignore us, he carefully scrolled more paper into his typewriter. The incommunicative Bierce was a mystery man in many respects, materializing at the 803rd from parts unknown.
He had replaced Specialist-4 Cleon, who’d been surprised in the latrine by our super-patriotic executive officer, Colonel Jake Lanyard. A transistor radio to his ear, SP4 Cleon had been masturbating to Hanoi Hannah,
North Vietnam
’s equivalent of Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose.
I’d listened to her, too, to her
Hi, GI Joe. How are you? It seems to me that you are poorly informed about the going of the war, to say nothing of a truthful explanation of
your presence here to die or be maimed for life.
She didn’t sound particularly sexy to me. My image of Hanoi Hannah was closer to Ho Chi Minh than Jayne Mansfield.
But to each his own.
Colonel Lanyard did not drink, smoke or chew. I knew zilch of his love life, here or stateside, but I doubt that he consorted with women who did drink, smoke or chew. Ultra-clean living lent a high level of self-righteous intolerance to the colonel. His only known vice was that he had no known vices.
General Whipple had overheard the enraged Colonel Lanyard bellowing at Cleon, calling him, among other things, a degenerate and a commie punk. His intervention had prevented Lanyard from blowing PFC Cleon’s head off with the .45 that was on his hip day and night. The colonel did manage to get Cleon convicted of misdemeanor treason or some such and sent to
Leavenworth
to pound rocks.
I wasn’t sure where Captain Papersmith came from either and what he did here at the 803rd besides bossing us around. He called himself the company commander and detachment adjutant. His primary duty seemed to be reviewing paperwork and sending it up and down the line.
Which brings me to our 803rd Liaison Detachment in general.
My dictionary defined “liaison” as communication between different groups or units of an organization. To “liaise” was to effect or establish a liaison. A “detachment” was a small unit, created for special duties.
I was unable to detect any duties, special or otherwise, in the
Fighting 803rd
, nor any communication or useful activity whatsoever.
And what of the previous 802 liaison detachments?
Had the original crossed the
Delaware
? Had one established liaisons at
Antietam
and
Belleau Wood
? I’d researched the unit’s history and found no history, let alone any active “liaison detachment,” should there ever have been such an animal.
