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Anomaly of War Pt.4

One of my experiences during the Viet Nam War. Conclusion.

I don’t know why, but the Christmas season with Hanh and Son is very foggy in my mind. I know we spent time at the bar. She was traditional, and, since I had not met her parents, she would not go outside the bar with me on a date. I remember she asked me, through one of her friends, if I would be in town during the upcoming TET holiday, which is the Asian New Year celebration. She wanted to invite me to be with her during the holiday. I told her, with the help of another waitress, I would arrange time off and we would work out something on my next visit.

Now this was just a week or two after Christmas, and, unknown to me, this would be the last time I would see either of them. I had my camera with and took a picture of both Hanh and Son. Hanh and I sat together inside a little while longer and talked while Son was out front playing with his parachute which I had given him for Christmas. I don’t recall what I gave Hanh.

It was time to leave. I remember Son walking away tossing his parachute in the air, and Hanh, standing there and throwing me a kiss and wave as I jumped onto the Lambretta and took off down the street. I was so happy. That last image of Hanh in that white ao-dai, the skirt of it blowing like tall grass in a gentle breeze; her smile that could make you forget where you were, and the thought of being able to see her again soon and hold my hands around her waist with my fingers practically touching in the back, haunt me to this day. I was unable to get into town to see her before TET, and was worried that she would not be working when I was able to get there for the holiday.

Then all hell broke loose …

The Viet Cong attacked. After several days of fear, fighting and worry, I managed to get a pass from my Captain. I won’t go into the details of the TET offensive around Long Binh-Bien Hoa, other than to say it was devastating to a lot of people. I was at a loss as far as what I could do to reach my “family”. I got a three quarter ton truck and, with a friend of mine driving, we went to Bien Hoa. I was anxious and my emotions running wild. Somehow , I felt that Hanh had been somewhere else and that she had escaped becoming a victim of the attack. And yet, deep down, I knew. Hope of finding her faded the closer I came to where she was supposed to be.

The rubber plantation was just about gone. In fact, there was so much difference from the last trip, we really had to watch the road to know where we were. Before we left on the run, someone had said the Viet Cong had held up in the rubber plantation between Bien Hoa and Long Binh. This one group of V.C. had come into Bien Hoa and were making their way to Long Binh (or the P.O.W. camp) when they got trapped in the trees. On the outskirts of Bien Hoa there was a refugee center and orphanage which was also hit. I had a photograph of the church with kids running around outside that I had sent my parents a few months before. When I got home they showed me a photo of the same church as it appeared in a local newspaper after TET. Only this photograph had soldiers running around.

I cannot describe the destruction I saw that day. I did have a camera with me that I borrowed from a buddy and I started taking pictures of what I saw. Unfortunately, there were only three shots left in the camera (which was probably for the better). We made the turn in the center of town and headed toward the bar. I noticed most of the little buildings were crumbled or full of holes from assorted rounds. We stopped where the bar should have been. There was nothing but rubble. The walls were blown outward – a direct hit.

I jumped out of the truck and stood there in disbelief. Around me, on the street, Vietnamese were wandering around in shock, looking for something or someone but saying nothing. The owner of the bar was in the wreckage, bending over, and, I guess, looking for something to salvage. I went over to him and, as I approached, he stood erect and looked at me with a vacant stare as though he were looking right through me.

I looked downward as I asked: “Hanh?” He turned his head side-wards and said: “Gone.” “Gone home?” I asked. He turned with eyes lowered: “Gone. Die.” I asked: “Son?” Abruptly he stated: “No see. Maybe die.” I asked no more questions.

I must have stood there for a long while. I don’t remember. I watched him squatting down in the ruins and shifting the broken concrete and rubbish. I slowly walked toward the back where Hanh and I used to sit. I gazed down and skimmed the debris at my feet. I saw broken bottles, paper shreds, and parts of the bar interior. Then I saw a lady’s shoe. I can’t say it was hers. Probably not. There were quite a few girls who worked there. I didn’t pick the shoe up. I just turned away and went back into the truck.

I never went back to the town of Bien Hoa. I went home the end of March. I had been planning to extend my tour because of my feelings for Hanh, but now…now I just wanted to leave this place and forget. Pretend it never happened. I was twenty-two when I met Hanh and twenty-two when she died. I survived; others did not. I still ask why.

It was eight weeks later as I stood near the runway waiting, with others, for the flight that would take me home. Suddenly, a gust of wind blew a cloud of sand and dirt into the group. Road dust, I thought to myself…cat bui.

Epilogue

In 1989, I asked a Vietnamese friend of mine to translate the words that Hanh had written on the back of her photograph. She wrote: ” My Dear Joe, I give you this photograph to remember me when we are no longer together. Keep it with you always.”

And that I have done.

end

Anomaly of War Pt.3

One of my experiences during the Viet Nam War. Continued.

I think we fell in love. Well, I say that with reservations. Perhaps it was just two people finding each other in a maze of confusion, fear and uncertainty, and, in our youth, clinging to the affection we showed each other. I wish we could have understood each other much better, but, sometimes, just holding hands and looking into each others’ eyes, says it all. I would look forward just to go on a courier run and spend a little time with my makeshift family in Bien Hoa.

She was Buddhist and I was Catholic. And, I knew that would cause a problem with our families if we ever decided to marry! I think what really impressed Hanh one day was that she saw a square little bulge in my shirt pocket, and shaking her finger at me, said: “You numba ten Ba Muoi Lam!” which means I fooled around a lot with women. I realized she thought I had a condom in my pocket, so I reached in and showed her it was a small religious figure in a protective pouch (given to me by my mother). She smiled and came over and kissed me on the cheek.

As far as I remember, she was always there in the afternoons that I came by. And, working at the bar, she made good money to help support her family and school expenses. She evidently came right from school which would explain the white ao-dai and pageboy hairstyle. Although her job was to fraternize and hustle drinks, I noticed if a guy got too familiar with her she would leave him sitting there and move to another. She began to sit with me whenever she could, when it was slow, not requiring me to buy her any tea. This upset the owner, so I started bringing him a bottle of something whenever I came which kept him happy ( a side note is that we learned to tear the label off the bottles so the owners could not refill them with moonshine). It got to the point that Hanh would basically stop working when I arrived and just sit with me. I would walk into the bar, and the other waitresses, seeing me, would smile, welcome me, and call for Hanh. She would come over, gently grab my hands, and we would sit down together. Those times became so precious to me that this beautiful girl, this Vietnamese girl, actually enjoyed being with me, a young man brought thousands of miles to her country to fight in a war. It started me wondering about fate, and how we become involved in other peoples’ lives through a series of unplanned events. We never had the opportunity to be together intimately.

As far as I remember, I was the only guy in my company who was seeing a Vietnamese girl on a regular basis. I had mentioned it to a few of my buddies with mixed reactions. Of course, the biggest drawback was that even if you fell in love with a National, which the army frowned upon, your tour of duty was one year and then you were shipped out. It was extremely difficult to process papers that would allow you to be married, and almost impossible to bring the girl home with you. I decided, since I had eight months left, to begin the procedure necessary to see if I could bring my “family” home with me. I wrote my parents.

Needless to say, it was pathetic. My parents were against the idea. My Captain and the chaplain tried to discourage me by telling me that it was simply an emotional experience due to being far from home and lonely; missing my family and friends, and, if I would forget the idea, once I got home and resumed my normal life, I would see how doing this would have been a mistake. I was told the girl, and boy, would have a difficult time adjusting to American society, that they would be subject to racism, feel disconnected from their culture, and would, eventually, become disenchanted with their new lifestyle. I was told to wait.

Being refused, I sought advise from my buddies. They told me since Hanh was Buddhist, that I could arrange a “limited time” marriage. It seems that some Vietnamese families would allow their daughter to marry a soldier for a period of one year- His tour of duty. This allowed the family to keep its’ status, and the girl, to keep her “honor” intact. This was allowed (but not recognized by the military) since most everyone knew it would be difficult to carry on a relationship after the soldier returned home, and even more difficult to send for the girl at a later date. Or, I could, as one friend suggested, just enjoy the moment; don’t worry, be happy. Well, I wasn’t very happy about my choices. I chose to wait a month or two, and then, if my feelings for Hanh grew stonger, I would try again more forcefully.

Our relationship grew from August through December. When I was off duty, I would try to get as many eight hour passes I could (my Captain was very understanding) to get into town to see her. I could hop in a Lambretta and be there in a matter of minutes, as the town was easily accessible from the base, and, for the most part, considered very secure. It was that false sense of security that would almost destroy the town during the TET offensive of 1968, and cost the lives of many people.

I would bring gifts for Hanh and Son. Nothing much, just the proverbial chocolate bars and perfume. She was my comfort as I was a stranger in a strange land. We tried to teach each other our respective languages and she fared much better than I did (I think she was getting help from her fellow barmaids). Soon, we were able to talk with each other a little : “I like you. You like me?” “Anh yeu em. Co dep lam.” I still remember the phrases. I once asked an ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam)soldier how to say “I like you very much.” in Vietnamese. He wrote it down and I practiced it, and, when I saw her, I used it, and her puzzled look informed me I was not using the proper inflections. I tried again and this time her face broke out in a heart-stopping smile when she understood: “Toi thich co nhieu lam.”

It was that time when as a young man trying to adapt to a totally strange environment ( did you ever go shopping with an M-14 slung over your shoulder?), I met this wonderful girl, my lifeboat in a sea of contradictions. The Army taught me how to fight and survive but it never taught me about the people and their culture whose land we were blowing up. I consider myself lucky because I had contact with Vietnamese civilians, not just the enemy. I got to know these gentle people and some of their history and culture, and that would have a bearing on the way my life would turn out years later.

I was naive back then. I knew she was a bar girl but I also knew some of the reasons why. In a war torn country full of lonely foreign soldiers, it’s a good paying job for a minimum amount of effort. I never thought about what she was doing at work when I wasn’t there. Maybe I was just stupid or very trusting. But I do know that when I showed up at the bar, she immediately came to me and we stayed together until I left several hours later (provided I brought the owner his tribute).

There was a small back room where employees could eat and take a break. She would take me back there and we would sit alone together and eat and drink cola… and hold hands. Sometimes, another waitress would come back there and, seeing us, would put her hand on Hanhs’ shoulder, say something in Vietnamese, causing her to cover her face with one hand in a modest blush. They would giggle and then the other girl would leave.

There was one time when Hanh went out and bought us this fish sandwich. The Vietnamese would place this fish on a platform six to eight feet high and sun dry it. Then they would smother it in nuoc-mam ( a fish sauce) and place it in french bread. Well, I wasn’t used to this, and I took a bite and pretended to chew and when she wasn’t looking I would take it out of my mouth and place it in my pocket. Several times I left the bar with pockets full of partially masticated meat, tossing it out before I reached camp. How I would like, once more, to sit with her like that and this time I would actually eat the sandwich.

One day when I visited Hanh, she gave me a photograph of herself in an outfit that, for her, was unusual. She was wearing a cowboy type shirt and hat, wearing sunglasses; strumming a guitar. She pointed to the photo and said: “You give one for me.” I promised I would, And then, with a lot of pointing and hand gesturing, I explained I would like a photo of her in the ao-dai, the way she usually dressed. She understood, and the next visit, she gave me the photo I wanted and, on the back, had written something in Vietnamese. At the time, I didn’t have it translated, and, after she died, it would not be translated until 1989…21 years later.

end of part 3

Anomaly of War Pt.2

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

Anomaly of War Pt.1

A story in 4 parts about one of my experiences during the Viet Nam War

Prologue

They were called, in Vietnamese, Cat Bui – Road Dust. They were the street urchins, half Vietnamese and half something else: American, French…whatever. Their father unknown and their mother casting them out because of family disgrace. They were unacceptable to the Vietnamese, unknown or unwanted by the ones who fathered them; left to fend for themselves in the streets, sleeping – living – on the ground and roadways; outcasts from the villages, hamlets and towns where they were born.

I was in country about two months before I finally got to spend some time in the town of Bien Hoa located on the Dong Nai River. We were on the major base just outside town and shortly would be moving our contingent ( I was in the 18th Engineer Brigade) to Long Binh where the Army was constructing a new headquarters. Each day we would be bussed between the bases at Bien Hoa and Long Binh, passing the prisoner of war camp and rubber plantation along the way. Seeing the captured Viet Cong working within the confines of minefield and barbed wire, and acutely aware of the steel mesh covering the windowless openings of our bus, there was no doubt that we were potential targets of an unseen enemy in a war-torn land.

His name was Son. He was around eleven years old and his broken English was limited. He was a shoeshine boy in the town of Bien Hoa and I paid little attention to him at first since there were more bootblacks in town than there were boots and he was just another kid hustling the G.I.s for street change He was always there outside the tin-can shack they called a bar that I used to frequent.

Always out front asking: “Shoe shine, G.I.? Your shoes numba ten, I make them shine numba one, okay? Only five “P”.” I saw one soldier shove him down, and that’s when I went over to him and got my first shine. I gave him 10 piasters (the equivalent of nine cents).

Son and I became friends one day as I headed to the bar to visit my girlfriend and caught him in a verbal feud with some other shoeshine boys his age. I came over to where they were squatting and asked what was wrong. Apparently, Son owed one of the boys 100 piasters which he had borrowed some weeks before and was unable to pay back. I interceded and paid his debt. When the other boys left I invited him to come inside with me. He was afraid to do so because bar owners did not want their customers bothered by beggars while inside, but I told him not to worry since he was with me.

Inside, we sat and had a soda, and talked a little bit. The owner came over grabbing Son by the arm, gesturing for him to leave. I jumped up and angrily informed him the boy was with me and to di di mau, get away fast. The owner went back to work and we sat for a while longer until Son left to shine more shoes. I liked the kid a lot and on future trips I would let him come along with me for a while into the different hangouts and I would drink beer while he hustled shoe shines among the patrons. Of course, I always slipped the owner a little something for letting him in. At one point, I wrote home about wanting to adopt him.

It was late December (although it felt like July) when I went to town to visit my girlfriend and Son. It was almost like family, with Dad being gone for a week or two at a time. I brought Christmas gifts for them. Son got sandals, some clothes and what he wanted most of all, a parachute from a M127A1 illumination flare. He had a rubber soldier he played with and wanted the parachute to make an airborne troop since no one else in his group would have one. Needless to say, he was one happy kid that day.

Walking away, tossing the parachute with the rubber soldier attached into the air and catching it, as a passing truck surrounded Son with a swirl of dirt and sand from the road, little did I realize that would be the last time I would see my Em Trai Cat Bui…my Child of the Dust.

It has been said that as long as you remember someone, they haven’t really died; they live in the hearts of those who cannot forget. I would like to introduce you to one such person.

End Part 1