One of my experiences during the Viet Nam War. Continued.
Her name was Hanh.
I met Hanh at this bar during one of my weekend excursions into town. Now you have to understand that many bar girls were not prostitutes. Some schoolgirls were employed simply to hustle drinks. “No tea, no talk!” was the vernacular at the time. And for the price of about eighty cents, a pretty girl would sit next to you and drink her “Saigon tea”, talk, and stay with you until you stopped buying or ran out of money, usually both.
What first impressed me about Hanh was that the other girls in the bar wore contemporary and American style clothes while Hanh always wore the traditional ao-dai, that ankle- long, flowing dress, split up the sides exposing the pants underneath, that was so feminine and made her look so beautiful. Her hair was also traditional. Most bar girls wore the beehive style with three cans of hairspray to keep it in place. Hanh had the “Prince Valiant” look, a short cut pageboy style worn by schoolgirls at the time. And, without makeup, she looked out of place in that joint, and that is what drew me to her.
Hanh understood very little English except: ” You single, G.I.? You buy me tea?” and a few other phrases she was no doubt taught when she got the job. So, yes, infatuated with her beauty, I bought her Saigon tea in order to sit with her and try to communicate. When I stopped buying the “tea”, she would excuse herself and go on to the next joe who was in need of female companionship, and I would hop back in the jeep and continue on my rounds. It wasn’t until several visits that it seemed as though she was happy to see me, not because I was a big spender, but rather, a familiar face in all those blurred one time stop-ins she was used to. So it came to pass that I looked forward to seeing Hanh and the shoeshine boy, Son, on my visits so much that I stopped going to the other hang outs in order to spend more time with them. I was becoming attached, something you should never do in a war zone.
Every time I ventured into town it was a new experience. There was no karaoke back then, but, in the bar, if a song was played on the record player that we especially liked,, all the soldiers in the place would, in unison, start singing: “We gotta get outta dis place…” or, “If you’re goin’ to San Francisco…” The waitresses enjoyed the interruptions as long as it didn’t turn into a songfest. We did sound kind of bad, come to think about it. Then there was the flag lady.
One day, I think it was in late July, an older woman came into the bar. Under her arm she carried the folded flag of the Republic of South Vietnam. She started approaching different American soldiers sitting at the tables trying to sell the flag. The story was that her son had died in battle, and the flag was signed by members of his company prior to his death, and it had now been given to her. She needed to sell it as a souvenir to get money to buy some food. She unfolded the flag, yellow with three red horizontal stripes, with assorted writing and signatures in Vietnamese inscribed. No one was interested. I thought about buying the flag, feeling compassion for the woman, but one of the waitresses informed me that it was probably a scam and not to waste my money.
I didn’t purchase the flag, and the woman folded it up and slowly left the bar. To this day I wonder if the flag and story she gave was authentic. I knew there were Vietnamese hawking souvenir Viet Cong “battle” flags for us ” rear echelon” troops who wanted to go home with a war story. They would take a home made “V.C.” flag, stick it in a sack with a chicken, or other unfortunate animal, and shoot through the sack with a shotgun or other weapon, to give it that blood and guts authenticity. But the woman’s flag was South Vietnamese, there was no blood stains, only signatures of soldiers. And I wonder what they wrote on that flag. I never saw the flag lady again after that incident. I did, however, return many times to see Hanh.
End part 2
