war

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

Freddie, Jose, Rich and I would play “war” at least twice a week after school. We played war in two different ways and the question we asked before starting was, “Do you want to play little or big?”

If we played “little,” the rubber toy soldiers were gathered out of their bag or box and assembled in the battlefield of dirt, rocks and popsicle stick fences near the old apple tree in my back yard. Back then, we could buy assorted soldiers in various poses in a bag of 50 for around a dollar. You could buy them in green or grey and sometimes other colors so you could tell which soldiers belonged to whom. They were the same soldiers and the only difference were their color, and we had hundreds of them ready to engage in battle in a designated area along the fence line where there was more dirt than grass.

There were rules when playing “little.” As we tossed small clumps of dirt or pebbles at each others forces, they toppled over when hit. If the soldiers landed face up, they were only wounded and could engage in the next battle. If they landed face down, they were out of the action and laid there until one or the other army was still standing. There is a toy cemetery in the backyard near the tree which still contain the rubber bodies of scores of rubber soldiers who no longer could stand on their own and were given burial.

When we played “big,” the yard became “no man’s land.” We used our cap pistols or Mattel tommy-burp weapons to dispatch each other. Our parents preferred our playing “little” instead of “big” because of the running and shouting and noise we would make as we yelled, “I got you!” and “No ya didn’t!” and, of course, the verbal and guttural attempted sounds of the weapons we were firing.

Getting shot and having to fall down in Jose’s yard was difficult because he had an old dog named Sandy whose only outdoor activity was crapping anywhere in the yard she felt like. Many a time a truce was called while one or more of us went home to wash the dog poop off our arms and hands. We died in battle many times over and, in the end, when our mothers called us in for supper, we would resurrect ourselves from the battlefield, prepared to fight another day. After all, it was pretend.

Ten years later I was in Viet Nam. A real soldier in a real war.

We had uniforms, helmets, flak-jackets and weapons. I carried and fired a single barrel double-aught buck shotgun, an M-79 grenade launcher, an automatic M-14, several hand grenades and a boot knife. My playmates would have been impressed. I could cause some serious damage!

This was real war. Dog poop was replaced with feces covered punji sticks, soda pop cans we used as kids for grenades were replaced with cans filled with explosives for booby-traps. Tommy-burp guns were replaced with 7.62mm rounds of ammunition, AK-47s and M-16s. And when people got shot it hurt. When people died, they stayed dead. No one’s mother yelled out a window telling them to stop and come home for supper.

I wondered if any of my fellow soldiers, and even the enemy, played with toy guns and rubber soldiers when they were 10 years old. Were they the backyard heroes and platoon leaders who led their men to victory with water balloons, wooden swords and clumps of dirt?

Today, you don’t see kids playing war in the neighborhood. They can’t. People would be calling the police if they saw half a dozen kids chasing each other with (toy) weapons. And there is always the fear that someone would shoot back, only it would not be playing around.

Maybe it’s time we stopped playing war altogether.

Anomaly of War Pt.2

Toy Soldiers