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Tamati Waaka Nene, one of New Zealand's greatest sons. Negotiator, sage, and warrior, his cool reasoning and understanding helped lead, in no small measure, to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.
It's All in the Day's Work
The year was 1963. I don’t remember the month. The war in South Vietnam was in its infancy. The United States had a presence in the form of advisers who carried arms, but lest they create an “incident,” they were not given ammunition. Travel around the country was necessarily by air, as the inconsiderate Vietcong, who carried live ammunition, and explosives, was given to blowing up trains and bridges. But if you didn’t mind sharing your space with string-bagged live ducks and chickens carried aboard by its passengers, Air Vietnam’s service was excellent.
In Saigon, of equal excellency, were the many restaurants, French, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, and a smattering of everything. Until the Vietcong began tossing hand grenades from Japanese motor scooters among the patrons, one could sit at tables on the sidewalk and ogle the passing Vietnamese women.
A surprising number of Vietnamese men were grossly bandy-legged, said to be caused by childhood deficiencies in calcium and phosphorous, as no doubt were as many women, but the ao dais, the traditional female dress, cloaked their bodies with wondrous perfection.
They were tiny women, of regal and upright bearing, small breasted by round-eye standards, but perfectly proportioned. One never tired of watching them pass.
There were several fine hotels in Saigon, the finest by any measure was the Caravelle situated in Lam Son Square, facing the Opera House. On its ninth floor was the Jerome Bar. There were bars all over Saigon and its twin city Cholon, dozens even along Thu Do, Saigon’s Fifth Avenue, tended and hosted by young women who wanted nothing
better than to join you at your table or sit beside you at the bar or on your lap, and quantity drink a concoction known as Saigon tea, for which you were charged hard liquor prices. But no such nonsense went on at the Caravelle. The waiters and bartenders were men of quiet dignity and they wore tuxedos.
Not all the Jerome Bar’s patrons had manners as fine as the bartenders’, but most were notable personages. Not the least among them were journalists from the world’s leading newspaper organizations. The New Zealander, Peter Arnett, who gathered later fame for his controversial reporting from Bagdad for CNN during the Iraqi war, was one of them; and the American, David Halberstein, who--if my memory serves me true--went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam reporting, another. The reporters came into the bar at the end of the day, or after stints in the field, tired and disheveled, ready to unwind and swap war stories. I enjoyed their friendship.
The Jerome Bar opened onto a rooftop terrace from where, in the evenings, enjoying our drinks, we could watch the flash and hear the roar and thunder of a war taking place in the paddies and villages on the other side of the Saigon river, often not 40 clicks distant. Next day I might learn from the reporters that a village’s headman and his family had been slaughtered and their heads spiked on the entrance gate to teach them not to be so nice to the enemy. I served five years in World War II. My war was nothing like this.
My work in Vietnam, funded by the United States Agency for
International Development, involved the establishment of a radio communication network
throughout the country that enabled villagers under attack to summon aid. I had designed
the radios back in Kansas City and trained the technicians, who flew about the country by
Air Vietnam and then to the villages by U.S. Army helicopters, installing and maintaining
the equipment. The Vietcong shot at the choppers. Their descents from height into the
villages tended to be rapid.
Ordinarily, I had no occasion to ride the choppers, but a need arose one day requiring a village site signal survey and I was given the task.
The previous evening, when I had joined the newsmen in the Jerome Bar, they were vigorously celebrating a fellow reporter’s birthday, rather to the dismay of the bar’s manager. To spare his feelings, we removed ourselves to a number of bars along Tho Do, where the standard libation was a locally brewed beer named 33, which probably stood
for the number of devils in it. 33 is ba-ma-ba in Vietnamese. The technicians
pronounced it bammi-ba, the reporters appropriately dubbed it Tiger’s Piss. The price
was right, however.
As the ba-ma-ba consumption increased, so did the war stories and I began to feel out of it. I took my leave. At seven next morning, my company’s agent, Jamshed Fozdar--Jim to all--was to pick me up outside the hotel and take me to Tan Son Nhut, the airport, where I was to board the helicopter. Born in India of Zoroastrian stock, an American citizen, a strict adherent of Bahaism, Jim Fozdar is a story in himself and I must write about him one day.
The helicopter was the renowned Huey. I, its only non-crew passenger, sat next to the opened sliding door, a VHF radio in my lap, monitoring a radio signal from Saigon. The trip was smooth and the crew talked easily to each other via the headsets. They seemed to have no worries and I was enjoying the ride.
All too soon, the pilot, who flies the aircraft from the right seat, not the left as in fixed-wing aircraft, turning in his seat, held up a finger to tell me that we would be over the village in a minute, and, indeed, in about a minute, we began our let down. Returning my mind to the reason for the visit, I paid particular attention to the--by now--scant signal from Saigon.
The change in course came without warning. A sudden application of power, nose
down--the green canopy of the jungle scooted by under me. I could see little ahead.
Whatever was there fully engaged the crew’s attention. A pilot myself--fixed wing--I knew better than to distract them with questions, which they would not have heard anyway, as I had not been given a headset.
We swung around to land and I saw our destination--a village of thatched-roof huts and a cleared area beside a tin-roofed building. We landed. The rotor idled. The pilot called to me over his shoulder that he was leaving me there while he took out wounded.
ARVN* soldiers bringing the wounded men on stretchers converged on the chopper. As it lifted off, there came an explosion from across the compound I deemed was no firecracker. The area was ringed with trenches. En route to them, I passed three ARVN soldiers and two old woman, which allowed me first dibs on the deepest trench. What I didn't know until too late, was that the trench I had selected was a foot deep in slime-covered water that claimed--I didn't realize until later--my left shoe. The second explosion, closer this time, brought me the company of a number of ARVN men, water or no. The third explosion I expected would send me to my fate, whatever that would be.
The third never came, quite obviously, but while I waited, I learned from an English-speaking ARVN man that the explosions were mortars. "Very bad this morning," he said. "Miny peoples dead".
To those of you who have never heard it, let me say that there is no comparable sound like the whump, whump of a Huey. I live in Arizona near a small airport frequented by Hueys. They fly over my house. The sound shivers my spine. On this day, however, I welcomed it.
It seemed I was to share the ride back with a wounded ARVN man. Villagers brought him on a stretcher from the tin-roofed hut.
"Wounded" was not the word. A massive part of his head was gone. His eyes, though open, were glazed and unknowing. The stretcher rapidly filled with blood.
Lifting off, the rotor blades sucked, not only the air from the cabin, but the blood from the stretcher. I took the force of it.
I have no idea how Jim Fozdar, who was then--and still is--the most excitable adult I’ve ever met, knew to meet the chopper, but there he was. I must ask him sometime. (I should explain that Jim gets excited watching a snail crawl over a garden patch.) I believe that at first he thought I was the occupant of the stretcher. He seemed no less relieved when I stepped out of the chopper. Realize, I had no idea until I saw myself in the mirror at the hotel, how convincingly damaged I appeared.
Jim gasped. “Good, God!--quick. To the hospital.”--to his driver.
“Jim! Take it easy. I’m all right.”
He dropped me off before the Caravelle at the very moment the reporter we had feted the previous evening, came down the steps. My memory tells me he was English; he may well have been American. To the point, his reaction to my appearance was not unlike Jim’s. The desk clerk similarly reacted when I asked for my room key.
Later, showered, rested, and changed, I slipped into the Jerome Bar.
“Hey! Les. Join us,” one called across the room.”
Theirs, it seemed, had been a slow day. The news had traveled of mine. They wanted details.
“Did I know the name of the village I was left in?”
I admitted that I didn’t, only the name of the village that was my original destination.
The other was within a few clicks, was all I could tell them.
“But you took a couple of hits?”
"Not that close."
“That's not what I heard. Give the man a drink.”
It was no one’s birthday that day, but we finished up along Thu Do just the same and this
time I stayed the distance.
Two weeks later I left for Kansas City. Some months later, when I returned to Saigon,
new faces peopled the section of the bar I knew as the reporter’s. One nodded briefly at me.
The rest were busy in conversation. I smiled to myself and sipped my rum and coke. I knew
what their conversation would be about. I drank my drink and headed for the restaurant.
*ARVN: Army of the Republic of Vietnam.
end
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