Jake Fonko M.I.A. (2 page)

Our evening meetings were to become a regular activity, and drinking free Heineken, even with a turkey like Mikhail, I could hardly call hard duty. Being at an age where I was prone to be impressed with myself and the exciting life I fancied I’d led, it never dawned on me that Mikhail might be on duty also. I used to wonder, while plying Mickey Mouse with tumblers of vodka, what I was doing, sitting there expounding on American movies to a nerdish Polack paper-shuffler. Had my motto been with me, I’d have been pondering a different question: What was Mikhail doing, sitting there talking to 
me
?

After he left the table I sat watching the soft tropical sky fade from orange to grey-purple. I had nothing else on for that evening. In town barely long enough to get past jet lag, I hadn’t yet gotten a social life going. Most nights there were gatherings of Embassy staffers, but I’d hardly call them parties. More like circling the wagons, or huddling together as the jungle drums throbbed louder, and certainly not my idea of fun. Goddam civilians, especially bureaucrats, had no idea how to have a good time. I put it down to jockeying for position in the scramble up the ladder—probably afraid that if someone caught them cutting loose a little, it might be the black mark that canned their careers.

In any case, it quickly came clear that the foreign service types had stamped me “Outsider.” I hadn’t paid my dues, I had no worthwhile in-house gossip to peddle, and not only was I CIA, but most unforgivably, I was military. Though invitations were supposedly open, after the first couple get-togethers it was clear I was always going to be a mute and barely tolerated spectator to the same faces, jokes and gripes that pervaded the office. The Vietnamese girls that worked around the Embassy paid me plenty of fond attention, but it had more to do with my American passport than with my irresistible charm. I was a potential ticket out of a hopeless situation and therefore a priceless catch for any local lady lucky, or wily, enough to land me.

I gazed out at the harbor, sipping my beer and tracking the lights of the bustling barges, ferries and sampans. A pair of little pink lizards pursued their version of cops-and-robbers over the grey stone planters alongside my table. Well, the Majestic terrace was fine for meeting people, but no place to hang around alone. I settled the tab, took the lift down to the lobby, strolled out to the river’s edge for a look, then reversed course and started up Tu Do Street.

Little bunches of Vietnamese men in dingy singlets and brown cotton shorts squatted along the curbside smoking and chatting, their butts nearly brushing the grimy pavement behind their frayed sandals. Slender women in white aidos flowing down over their black trousers squatted by the shop fronts passing gossip, scanning for customers and snarfing rice with their chopsticks, bowls cupped close to their mouths. No place to get rich selling tables and chairs. The street-level perfume of spicy food-fragrances triggered my hunger, so I stopped in a soup shop for a big bowl of pho, a Vietnamese concoction of noodles, sprouts, meat and assorted bits of probably-better-I-didn’t-know-what. One of my life’s blessings is my cast-iron stomach: I don’t get sick even traveling on the cheap in Mexico. I’d developed a taste for the local cooking during my first Nam tour, one of the few things I’d missed about the place during my four years Stateside.

I wandered up the tree-lined street, dodging my way through the press of cigarette peddlers, beggars, whores, pickpockets and porters, to the Hotel Catinat. I took a seat in the Pink Night Club against the wall, where I nursed a beer and peered through thick cigarette smoke, checking out incoming faces for possibilities. The rock band was ear-splitting, and the pert little mini-skirted singer gave an aerobic performance, gyrating a bump or a grind per beat, more or less, her silky black hair thrashing to and fro. But it wasn’t the same. Though things had started to wind down by ‘70 when I arrived the first time, Nam still hosted a few hundred thousand GIs. For guys who didn’t mind being there, it could be a fun war back in those days. The occasional firefight kept your adrenalin flowing, and off-base leave meant girls, beer, R&R trips with the nurses at China Beach and those other gals in Bangkok, surfing down at Vung Tau when I could swing it, and a hundred other amusements you’d have a hard time getting away with back home.

Maybe I’d better amend that last statement. When Professor Pflingger offered to take down my story, I promised him I’d be as accurate as possible. So here’s the straight truth: Genuine firefights with the jungle full of concealed Charlies blazing away were no fun at all—scared the dogshit out of me, if you really want to know. It wasn’t until afterward, back at base with all vital organs accounted for, that I could pop open a beer, sit back, swap lies with the guys and relish the rush in retrospect.

But that happened only a couple times. In my unit firefights were the last thing we looked for. I’d been in the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols—LRRPs, the men with the painted faces, the Army’s 75th Rangers. Most of the action I saw involved sneaking into an area with a team or two, slipping through the jungle as unobtrusively as possible, and scouting out the location and strength of the enemy. As often as not, we’d be out a week or more with no contact; which was useful, because knowing where the enemy wasn’t, was as valuable as knowing where he was. When we did sight Cong we might leave quietly and report on it. Or we might call in an artillery or air strike as we were extracted by chopper, then watch the fireworks from back a safe distance. Or we might set up an ambush—our units racked up the highest body-counts, man for man, of any in Nam. Tromping around out in the trees and occasionally shooting up enemy that had no chance to shoot back was thrilling, no denying. The times they did shoot back, well, I can hardly claim we weren’t out there asking for it. If we’d done our job right, Charlie never would have caught us in a position like that. Most of the time we covered our tracks so well that they never even knew we’d come calling.

By ‘75 Americans in Nam numbered only a couple thousand, most of them bona fide civilians, and Saigon teemed with an extra million refugees who’d flocked in from the countryside as the Viet Cong stepped up their attacks in January. With barely enough rice to fill a bowl, the refugees naturally weren’t spreading money around on whores and overpriced drinks. That task was left to the dwindling band of foreigners, American hardcases, drug lords, blackmarketeers, gangsters and South Vietnamese politicos (those last four categories more or less the same guys).

It was a far cry from the good old days of neon overkill, throbbing rock music and the girls at the San Francisco, the Wild West and MiMi’s. The little action remaining seemed wistful, even desperate, the fun of it, along with hopes of victory, long since deflated. It was like waiting out the fourth quarter in the home-side grandstand after the visiting team had sewed the game up, watching the clock slowly tick along while the other side whomped on the scrubs who’d been sent in for seasoning. Of course I was four years older, and an officer not a non-com, and maybe that made a difference too. Young buck soldiers fresh from the jungle and out on the town can have a whale of a time—but officially there hadn’t been an American soldier in Nam for nearly two years.

No familiar faces wandered into the Pink Night Club: I’d run into nobody familiar since my arrival in Saigon. The folks I’d known here previously were either back Stateside, dead or off pursuing bigger hustles. A little before the 10 o’clock curfew the bar closed down. I settled with the barmaid, shot farewell smiles at the disappointed whores and B-girls who I’d shooed away earlier, and strolled back out into the evening air. It felt heavy, hot and sticky now that I was blocks away from the riverfront. The curfew kept the night streets virtually devoid of traffic except for military convoys, a sharp contrast to the daytime tangle of bicycles, scooters and cyclo-rickshaws. I started towards the Brinks Hotel, where they’d housed me along with a lot of Embassy personnel. It was a definite improvement over my quarters last time around, when we sweated out the heat, the mosquitos and the monsoon rains in plywood hooches. I appreciated the upgrade. Now that our part in the shooting was behind us, I didn’t feel even slightly embarrassed to be a REMF.

Night walking through depopulated downtown Saigon wasn’t unpleasant. The city had remained virtually unscarred through a dozen years of war, remarkable when you consider how thoroughly we’d trashed the rest of the country. The urge for sleep hadn’t hit me yet, but I couldn’t face a staff gathering, so I passed the Brinks and ambled the few blocks over to where Sarge stayed. As I neared his building, I could see him lounging on his screened balcony. Like myself, he was “on loan” to a civilian outfit, but standard-issue US government housing would have cramped his style. He liked his privacy and wanted to be close to his customers, so he rented his own flat, price no object.

I trudged up a flight of stairs and knocked on his door. A heap of muddy fatigues lay out on the landing beside it. Sarge answered my knock, all freshly scrubbed in shower thongs and brand new silk skivvies. He had the physique of a Coke vending machine. “Jake, my man!” he exclaimed with a delighted grin. “Come in, come in! How ‘bout a cold one for this hot night?” Through the doorway I heard Diana Ross softly singing “Touch Me In The Morning.”

“Took the words right out of my mouth,” I replied, more out of sociability than thirst. I’d had plenty already, but no sense turning down hospitality. “Looks like you spent some time out in the boonies,” I remarked, indicating the laundryman’s nightmare outside.

“One hell of a thing,” he sighed as he reached a beer out of the cooler. His flat seemed more spacious than it was, thanks to its spartan, “Traditional BOQ” decor. Little graced the living room beyond a shelf of books, a teak desk, a top-quality Japanese sound system, some solid furniture fashioned of wood, leather and rattan, and an assortment of family and service photographs hung on otherwise bare walls. Straw mats lined up along the floor edges precisely. “Took a team down to that Delta, clearing up another mess,” he continued as he brought the beer out to me. “Them M113 personnel carriers can run on solid ground, and they can run in plain water, but why do these local cowboys have to run ‘em into waist-deep mud? It’s enough to make a grown man cry, ‘specially when it’s his job to get ‘em back out.” A pause, then: “It’s a funny feeling out there right now, Jake, a real funny feeling. They say just before an earthquake or before a volcano blows up, all the animals, they get nervous and strange-like. Same way out there. Can’t exactly describe it, but the folks just real edgy right now, acting like something 
bad
’s about to happen. Same kind of feelin’ as just before Tet. We best be keepin’ our eyes open and one of ‘em on our backtrail.”

When Sarge Wallace rendered an opinion on such matters, you’d be a fool not to listen. A master sergeant since forever, he invariably knew every who, what, where, when and why, usually even before 
who
 knew what, where and why. He’d finagled staying in Nam, on loan to a civilian contractor, partly because he liked the place but mostly to keep his current business going. He brought gold in from Macau or Singapore, where duties were low, and sold it for US dollars on the black market to locals, who figured that gold might be more negotiable than greenbacks in some of the scenarios that seemed more and more possible with each passing day.

Not that Sarge was any kind of crook. He was 110% soldier and would never do anything in the least way contrary to the Army’s best interests. He just dabbled in small-time smuggling, like most everybody else in Saigon. His various side businesses, his kid bro Henry had told me, usually netted on the high side of five hundred bucks a week, and Sarge kept to a strict rule never to exceed a thousand. “Get too greedy and you bother the big boys,” Sarge had explained to him, “and in most places that means you messin’ with the government, the police or the army. No amount of money’s worth 
that
 kind of trouble.”

As with his Army duties, Sarge in business dealt fair but tough. “Pay up, or pay otherwise,” was said to be his motto. If he got the idea he was being juked around, his easygoing smile morphed into something suitable for Mount Rushmore. Henry said nobody had ever pushed Sarge far enough to find out what “otherwise” meant.

Henry had alerted Sarge that I was en route to Saigon, so I was in tight with him from the moment I arrived. Sarge took a special interest in me because Henry thought I’d saved his life. Well, maybe, but what else should I have done?

Our teams had been sent to investigate some new VC tunneling reported by a village informant. As a rule, non-coms led LRRP patrols, but we’d brought a new officer, Lieutenant Hanna, along for the experience. A routine mission, we rappelled out of our choppers into the zone with the objective of locating the tunnels and reporting on enemy strength in the area. Of course, as expert as we LRRPs were at staying out of sight, the Charlies could match us. They probably observed us too, as often as not, but usually they didn’t give away their positions. By 1970 they’d sensed we Americans would eventually be departing, so they’d taken to biding their time and playing it cautious. Their style was to stay out of sight, then mass at the site of an attack, hit, and fade back into the jungle before the defenders could get organized. Picking unnecessary fights with us could only deplete their strength and mess up their overall strategy.

That mission had been a quiet one. We knew we were in Indian country, but we’d already walked around for a week with no enemy sightings to show for it. We were about ready to fold the mission and call in a couple Hueys to extract us and return us to base with another report on where the enemy wasn’t.

We were walking a trail through broken woods. A steep embankment came down on our left, and, to our right, ten or so meters of more gradual bank covered with scrub and tall grass sloped down to a stream. Henry’s team, along with the lieutenant, were spread out ahead. My team followed, me at the point, a couple dozen yards back. I came around a bend to see Henry and Lieutenant Hanna standing together in a small clearing, checking out our position on a topo map. The other guys had halted also, strung out along the trail and taking their ease. It was sloppy procedure, but after all we’d seen no sign of enemy for a whole week.