Saigon Dazed
Joey was relaxing after a week in the bush hunting down VC north of Saigon. They had come close in the past bombings and they had to circle the wagons. He was shacked up at his girlfriend Nhung’s apartment on the second floor above a local bar floor in the crowded black market district with the constant clatter of chatter below on the streets mingled with the whirring motor sounds of a thousand Vespa motor scooters and the European cars that jockeyed for space on the packed streets. The smell of the fish market on the street two doors down mixed with the scent of marijuana and opium that was constantly being smoked in their apartment.
Sometimes he thought about Olivia back home in the states and was lonely for her and her alone. Then when he thought about leaving Vietnam and going home, he strangely began missing Nhung who was lying naked in his arms. Confusion was tormenting him. Even with all the blood and death he had witnessed, he felt a conflicting sense of self in Vietnam. He felt he belonged here.
He leaned over on the bed and reached for the half pack of Marlboro’s sitting on the wicker table to start the morning with a smoke and then sex with Nhung before taking a shower together. He had to report in by 9 to see where his jungle boots would take him today on patrol if any, and Nhung had to be at work at the bar where she was a dancer. That’s where they met and where he fell in love with her gentle soul, dark long black hair and huge brown almond eyes. She was not a comfort girl or whore, but only danced for money for her family who farmed outside of town with her six brothers and sisters all at home except for her older brother who was in the South Vietnamese army and killed in a skirmish during Operation Deckhouse Five along the Mekong Delta in January.
Joey was getting restless. His initial you’re in the army now patriotism had faded and feelings of being involved in a brutal invasion permeated his psyche. He was an avid reader of the Ally Newspaper, an underground anti-war GI paper that was distributed at great risk by active duty GI’s to others. I also sent him articles from California newspapers and U. S. magazines that told the story that the time’s were changing and support for the war was weak. Too many bodybags showing up on the evening news after dinner on American television along with inflated body counts and footage of wounded GI’s and napalm burned children and villages. Any day that could be Nhung’s family.
Soon Joey would be back in the states , away from the blood and napalm and horrible cries of the wounded screaming “MEDIC!” He once had a dream of being the victorious war hero returning to ticker tape parades reminiscent of V-E Day when war was do or die…
He knew from news accounts things were different now...demonstrations in the streets, changing the clockwork of the pendulum from Pentagon to Peace. The Flower Power Generation was blooming amidst the war and suffering in Asia as by wars end 50,000 plus American lives, not to mention the untold tens of thousands of Vietnamese were spent to feed the hypodermic needle of the junkie needs of an American war machine addicted to “democracy, our way or the highway” delivered by B-52’s.
Democracy is a noble, he thought deep in his heart, but forcing it down a people’s throat it's a diluted illusion, , similar to taking pure grade heroin and cutting its potency in order to stretch the softer product in a further effort to increase volume and thus, street profits. In Joey’s mind and a growing number of jungle rats in uniform, Uncle Sam was the proverbial school yard pusher of low grade democracy to countries who don't want it.
Dick Gregory, Black activist and comedian stated in an interview in the Black Panther newspaper in Oakland regarding Vietnam.."Shit, I don't know why we have to shove democracy down the Vietnamese throat at the point of a bayonet. In my old neighborhood, if something was THAT good, we'd steal it!"
To America, the Viet Minh was a vixen that gave the Pentagon a massive erection. She was explosively sexy in a Pentagon sort of way and was a mighty morsel that fed the wheelchair bound wounded living on giant gulps of morphine and its subsequent dreams. She was a tempting tasty treat of a whore, hard to resist for that crazy uncle from out of town, the one that no one talks about in the family and is the one shunned at familial gatherings.
"Youbetcha! Why, it's jes' my crazy old Uncle Sam. Hell, he had spent decades pimping out Lady Liberty as a soiled dove, and political prostitute in war after war after war from the brothels of Montezuma to the whorehouses of Tripoli," A tip of a Panama Red hat and a bust your balls Panama Canal greeting as Teddy of the Big Stick Tribe yelled "Bully, bully" all the way home. Sans a redcoat revulsion and revolution, sans the twin's WWI and II, America has for the most part been seen, analyzed and concluded by "foreign" eyes, as the Ugly American.
He wrote to me in confidence about Nhung and to see what could be done about getting her to the states. He already applied to the military authorities who were less than eager to help. He also wanted me to track down the War Resisters Organization in San Francisco so he could volunteer his services to the cause. He had misjudged the times and his heart, his compass too was off course and still faced another year in service. Now he said, he would fight the machine and desert if he had to. He heard Canada had opened her arms to draft resisters and army deserters.
He asked for my opinion about how to tell Olivia that Nhung was pregnant by him….I had my own problem trying to figure out telling him Olivia was pregnant by me. While he was in the mud and humidity of the jungle fighting for his life, I was drinking wine and fucking his girl, although I would hardly think that would matter now.
Yes, the times were a changin’ and so were we.
