WAITING FOR SAIGON TO FALL

[These are pages from a journal I kept while I was in Vietnam in 1968. Don't know where the rest of it is. Not certain which couple weeks it represents. I'm surprised to be reminded of how torn I was inwardly-not by what was happening around me in Vietnam , but by what I had left behind in Hollywood ..]

*** Last night I was smashing cockroaches with a shower slipper when it came to me all in a flash that I find a smashed cockroach, its insides all mashed out on the yellow-tiled floor, as repugnant as I do a dead and torn up human body. What occurred to me then was to wonder if I don't suffer how shall I put it-some form of ethical maladjustment? But that's just beating around the bush here. What I really want is to write down the one image I can't get out of my mind, the one where the Viet Cong Soldier is lying on his back in the rubble and slop of a blasted-out cafe, his open eyes swimming in blue milk. That's what I can't forget, how his eye-sockets were full of blue milk. It was an absolutely startling, aesthetic experience. It's the most powerful single image I have of Viet-Nam. Maybe it's the artist in me.

That was last month over in the Chinese quarter of the city. About nine in the morning the firemen came with their aluminum helmets and the hooks with the long handles. They were all grins and as they trotted by some of them threw me a snappy salute. Three of them trotted right into the cafe to do their work. A moment later they came out again and put on their gas masks. Some of the happiness had gone out of their faces. The man did stink. He had turned dark and had swollen up. His mouth was open like the mouth of a dead fish and filled to the brim with a black liquid. That was the most difficult part to look at, even his teeth were submerged in that mouthful of black blood and who knows what else. When they dragged him out in the street the tips of his fingers trailed lines of black ooze across the sidewalk.

The Saigon firemen keep up a regular line of patter among themselves and little private jokes as they go about their work. They drag the bodies onto stretchers and throw them in the back of pick-up trucks. It isn't difficult to watch the collection but when the bodies are thrown into the trucks I don't like hearing the thuds. Once I saw the firemen miss the bed of the truck entirely. It was with a Viet Cong who had been killed by tank artillery. He'd been cut nearly in half and the bottom part of him was all chewed up. He was such a mess that even the Saigon firemen didn't like handling him. They'd get a hook in one armpit say and give a pull and the bottom half of the body would start to tear off or some other rotten thing. They finally got the fellow onto the stretcher all right but they were in such a hurry that they fumbled the throw and he splattered on one of the fenders. The firemen got very angry about that and started arguing with each other there in the street while the Viet Cong hung over the fender like two hunks of meat tied together with a piece of fleshy string.

I've got to hand it to the Saigon firemen, though. What impresses me most about them is their almost constant good cheer in the face of their work.

*** This morning when I woke I saw my first infant lizard. There are a lot of lizards in the garage where I sleep, they like it up around the tops of the walls and in the rafters, but I'd never seen and infant one before. It was hardly an inch long, squiggling across the tiled floor along the top edge of my sleeping mat. Its features were so tiny that when it stopped I had to put on my glasses to see that its mouth was open. It seemed to be gulping, as if it were trying to catch its breath. I wanted to hold it in the palm of my hand but I was afraid I might rub something off its skin and it would die or get sick. That's how much I know about lizards when I wake up.

The next time I woke, heavy things were falling on the roof, giving me a start. It was children laughing and throwing rocks. I glanced around for the infant lizard and saw that out in the court a swarm of black ants had lifted him up and were transporting him back the way he had just passed. He ate a couple of them while I watched, but what good did it do? There were plenty more where those two came from. And in response the others twisted two of his legs up over his back then bent him sideways into a circle, which pretty well took the fight out of him. Even more annoying, it would have been to me, anyhow, was how in front they were hauling him along by his lower lip.

Rorkman and I are just hanging around, waiting for the attack to come. The papers say there are fifty-one Viet Cong and North Viet-Namese Army battalions positioning themselves within a two-day's march of the city. Yesterday an American soldier was murdered on the street by two girls riding a motor scooter. The rumors are that the city will be harassed with that sort of thing the rest of the month, and the attack will come during the first week following. Rorkman wants to wait it out because he has bought a new fixed focal-point lense for his camera and wants to get some good photographs before he goes home. He specializes in street kids and refugees and hospitals, subjects like that. For myself, I don't take pictures, what I want is some additional material on the fighting itself, stuff I can use for my book.

That would seem to raise the ethical question again, and while I don't intend to lash myself severely for my failings, I have come to that point in my life where I find such questions interesting. I've always known them to be important, which isn't the same thing at all. The point here is that I know I came to Vietnam for the wrong reasons and have passed my time in the wrong way. If I wanted to right myself in my own eyes I'd have to take up a position against the American military in Viet-Nam and fight it out to an ending. I won't do that, however, I've waited too long and now it's too late. I am going to have to postpone my ethical life. As a matter of fact, I have postponed it.

Rorkman and I both want to go home to America but that isn't at all the case with Houghton. Houghton loves it in Viet-Nam. There are so many things to do . For one thing, he's arranging sleeping quarters for a couple dozen street kids (in my garage) and is in with some people who are founding their own news agency. Houghton came here intending to work as a volunteer in Viet-Namese hospitals out of a sense of guilt for American war crimes. He couldn't leave it at that, however, so he got a press accreditation and went up to I Corps where he was, unfortunately I suspect, terrible impressed with the behavior of the United States marines in the fighting at Dong Ha.

After that, his attitude toward the war became complicated. He decided he could do more good for the Viet-Namese by founding their first Western theater group (Houghton is an actor now, but he was an Eagle Scout through his nineteenth year). He's written a letter to the editor of the New York Times drama department requesting play manuscripts and books on theater, including what I believe is a position paper explaining his new theater and its aims. It's written on such a lofty level I'm not sure I understand it, so it may be about something else. He says it looks good for the news agency to make a profit, but if that doesn't work out something may come from the theater project. If the theater idea falls through he's got a couple monks teaching him guitar and Viet-Namese folk songs, which he sings in a clear true voice. Houghton is certain he'll work something out for himself in Vietnam , and so am I. In the meantime he's a good sort who'll go far out of his way for you, who'll laugh at your jokes and overlook your bad behavior. He really is a decent sort.

The trouble with Houghton, and Rorkman and I both agree on this, is that he is a go-getter.

*** Yesterday afternoon I was drinking beer on the terrace of the Continental Palace when there was a sudden series of sharp cracking explosions. It was the cocktail hour and the terrace was crowded. It took only a moment to realize that the explosions were thunder. Black clouds were rolling in from the north through a milky blue sky. I watched how people turned quickly to each other and laughed. My own intestines and heart were still contracting. The fear, together with the almost instant release from it, made me smile. It was a fine pick-me-up. The very air in the streets became a little brighter.

It isn't easy, just hanging around like this. It might be more interesting if I had some money. I'd lay a few whores then, or go to the movies maybe. I'd get drunk once in a while. The trouble with that is I've done those things for twenty years and I have no more enthusiasm for them. The other evening three women were hanging out the second story window of an old French dancehall waving me up. They looked like good juicy broads, but it was too much trouble to climb the stairs. Maybe if they'd been on the ground floor.

Periodically I lecture myself about how I am wasting my time. You came here to write a book on the war, I'll say, and now what are you doing about it? It's your job to get out in the field and take notes. Even if you don't use them while your here, a year from now they'll be invaluable. Tell myself what I will, it doesn't do any good. There's nothing more I want to see here, nothing more I want to do here. If I were on the other side maybe, if I were with the Viet Cong, I might have more enthusiasm for my work.

*** There was a terrorist bombing at the Vo Tanh movie house this evening. I heard the sirens go by but I was lying on my mat and didn't want to get up. A while later, when I went out to eat, I ran into a couple young newsmen who work with Houghton at Dispatch. They were on their way to the theater so I walked along with them. The street lights were out and it was beginning to rain. We couldn't get a taxi, which is often the case when there's trouble in the city. No one wants to be associated with the Americans, just in case.

The explosion had been in an arcade of shops along one side of the theater. Houghton and Mike were already there when we arrived on foot. The others went inside to take photographs while I waited out in front. I was thinking about the second bomb, the one with the timed fuse that's left behind after one of these incidents. A policeman told me five people had been killed and fifty-five injured in the blast. The police and the firemen had pretty well cleaned up the mess, but they'd overlooked a man's foot. The truth is, these people don't do very many things quite right.

Houghton came out of the arcade looking distracted and .moved.

"It must have been terrible," he said softly.

'Yeah."

"Did you see that foot sitting over there on the pavement?"

"You mean lying on the pavement, don't you? Or standing perhaps?"

"What's that?" he said.

I enjoy correcting Houghton's English. I don't believe he's got enough humility. What sticks in my mind about the foot is how muddy it was, and how the severed place was all shredded and popped out.

*** My razor is gone again. That's the third one in ten days. One of the kids here in the house is carrying out a vendetta against me. They don't steal Rorkman's razor, or Houghton's. Only mine. I don't pay enough attention to them, that's the trouble, and one of them has chosen this way to get back at me. I don't let them blow their noses on the floor and that upsets them too.

Rorkman spent his own childhood in America in orphanages and now he has this thing about homeless boys. He lets them use his shower, and they can sleep over if they want. He's especially drawn toward pickpockets and the ones with sores. They don't have to sleep on the sidewalk any longer, or in the trash on the steps of the movie houses. Rorkman has a place for them. If your house has been hit by a Viet Cong rocket, if the Americans have bombed your mother and father, you can come over here and get a place to sleep. You may even get a handout for something to eat, but for the most part you're expected to learn how to steal well enough or shine enough shoes to make your own way.

We got all the kids into the bedroom and Rorkman told them they had better stop stealing my razor. "You want steal," he told them, "you go down street, steal there. Very bad, you steal this house. You steal this house again, you no sleep here anymore. Viet-Namese boy steal razor, he no fucking good."

Then he slapped four or five of the kids along side the head to show them he meant what he said.

That was last night. This morning my new razor is gone. I believe I know the kid who's doing it but I'll never catch him. He's up and out in the morning before I get awake. He shines shoes for American soldiers in front of an enlisted men's billet on Trung Hung Dao . He makes fifteen dollars a day, sometimes more. I asked him how it is that he makes more money than the other shoeshine kids and he told me he'll throw a blow-job in on the side. The kid's a smart aleck, so I don't know if he's telling the truth or not.

Rorkman and I came in late tonight and there on the corner was Peggy, the neighborhood whore. She's a nice lady but she's terribly slack-assed. Her black trousers just hang on her. Everything about Peggy pleads that you fuck her, or do something to her. The question of money is secondary. On the street she approaches you cunt first, in a manner that with some other woman would be exciting, but with Peggy you're afraid the thing might fall off before it gets to you. She waddles over in her indolent, sway-backed way and shakes your hand and at that moment you half expect her genitalia to drop on the walk. What really disturbs me about her though is what I take to be her submissiveness. I believe she would enjoy being beaten. She would like to lie pliantly unprotected on a bed while fists smash down on her.

*** The kid who was telling me about how American soldiers pay him to blow them has had all his money stolen. He gave it to Houghton to safeguard last night and Houghton, instead of locking it up in the wardrobe, put it in his trousers' pocket and hung the trousers over the bedroom door. It looks now like somebody got up in the dark and snitched the cash. The kid woke me up this morning with his yelling around about the money, and later on he slashed one of the other kids with a razor. That didn't help, so he tried to saw off one of his own fingers. Rorkman put a stop to that. The little cocksucker has a bad temper, you have to give him that much. I watched him go through authentic paroxysms of frustration and rage, his face twisting up like a Kabuki dancers'. He got so angry he was blowing his nose all over the floor and there was nothing I could do about it. After awhile he cooled down enough to cry. When the kids left with their shoeshine kits he stood in the doorway frisking them. Considering how he earns his money, I can sympathize with how he feels.

*** Steve Eckert is back in town. He's been in Hue two years teaching English at the University. Last week he received a letter from the Viet Cong informing him that he was to be liquidated. The letter accused him of sleeping with his girl students and subverting their minds. Eckert didn't receive the letter directly, it was intercepted by the government censors and he was given a copy of it. He isn't sure the police did not invent the letter for their own purposes, it's difficult to believe anything at all the Viet-Namese police tell you, but he's not willing to take any further chances so he's come to Saigon .

An incident like that sets me to thinking about how stupidly I am living my life. Other people come over here and start doing their work straight off. Not me. I can't. Every day it's the same with me. I wake up in the garage to the sun coming through the dirty window. I walk to the Chinese place on the corner and drink French coffee-half coffee and half milk. The owner pours the coffee and hot milk from silver pots into the tall glass at the same time and it is all very sophisticated while a couple tables over a guy is blowing his nose on the floor. I can't decide about the book. I'm not having any luck with it at all. I can't put my mind to the war or to anything else over here.

I have plenty of material, it isn't that. My problem is with my approach to the material, with style. If you agree that style is the man, then you'll see how serious this problem really is. My primary weakness is that I have not been able to make a firm decision about which is the best way to write a sentence in English. For years I have been bewitched by the idea that Hemingway knew how to do it. There were other people, Oliver Cromwell for instance wrote good sentences at times, and people like Ben Johnson and Walt Whitman. Those are the first who come to mind. But Hemingway was the one who bewitched me. I suspect there is something in his prose that appeals to the worst, weakest aspects of my character.

The longer I'm unable to write, the more lethargic I get. I suppose I'm depressed. I'm so lethargic now that except to eat and to check for my mail at the press center, I don't leave the house for days on end. Only one subject excites my interest-when will Saigon be attacked? There's very little news in the papers. The other side is lying low. Now and then one of their intelligence officers is arrested reconnoitering one district or another inside the city and when that happens a spark of hope lights up in me, but then the next three or four days pass with no fresh incidents and I begin worrying that I'm waiting for an attack that isn't going to come. At night I lie on my mat and listen to the artillery. There have been no rocket attacks in a month. I don't know what to think. Some other guy, if the war wasn't coming to him, would go out in the countryside and look for it. That's a reasonable idea, but I've no heart for it. Besides, I've already been in the countryside.

I never met Hemingway myself, but I've met someone who has. Patrick the Peruvian has met him, and more than once at that. The first time Hemingway's name came up between Patrick and me was one afternoon during the fighting in Cholon. We were with a company of Viet-Namese rangers when we got ourselves into a bad spot and had to make a run for it. Afterwards we stood against a shop front wiping our faces.

I said, "It's silly of me to get in a spot like that. I'm no combat reporter. That's not the sort of thing I write about. Anyone can do that. It's not worth it."

Patrick took exception in his rapid-fire English with the French accent.

"Not at all, my dear. Not at all. That experience will flavor everything you write about what you've seen here today. That's what made Hemingway, you know. He always went where the excitement was."

"Did you meet Hemingway?," I asked.

"Of course, my dear. In the Congo. During the war, don't you know? He had a big presence. Very large."

I started to believe then that Patrick had actually known Hemingway. But Patrick and I had only met that afternoon so I didn't know yet what a great liar he is.

My favorite image of Patrick is of him standing on the cab of one of the fire trucks photographing the bodies of the dead as they were thrown up into the bed. He's a fat young man who dresses in baggy blue jeans, a baseball cap turned backwards, and an armored vest. In Peru his family are aristocratic landowners, but in Viet-Nam Patrick has the common touch. He doesn't use deodorants so you can smell the vest at about twenty paces. But then he has this thing also about snapping his fingers at Viet-Namese waiters. The waiters don't know what to make of it, what with the way he dresses and all.

He waves me up on top of the cab with him. "Come along," he calls down to me. "Don't you take pictures?"

"No, I don't, Patrick."

"Well, come on up and have a look. I've never seen them from this vantage point before."

"You go ahead, Patrick."

"No, you must come up. This is smashing. You really must get yourself a camera."

*** When I first got to Viet-Nam I had some crazy idea that it was my responsibility to search out the most terrifying and horrible events and describe them as closely as possible. I found after awhile that I just didn't have the heart for it. I understood that my motives were not clear. Understanding that much, I was suspicious of the reasons I had for almost everything I made an effort to see.

At dawn one morning over on Dong Khanh Street I came across a dead girl lying on her back on the sidewalk. She was about eighteen and dressed in stretch pants and pink high-heeled slippers and a white blouse. She had done her hair apparently and had tied a kerchief around it. She looked perfectly all right except for the little chunk of bone knocked out of her forehead. As I walked past her it occurred to me that if she were more attractive, I would almost certainly be more affected by the sight of her. There was a cruelty in the observation that I could not have defended, but in the moment it defined my reaction.

A couple hours later, after getting making notes on two fire fights I had got caught up in, I was returning along the same street when I realized I was going to pass by the girl with the bone knocked out of her forehead. I stopped where I was and looked around for another way to go but there was a lot of small arms fire and I didn't want to take the wrong turn. In a certain way, I was very alert. At that moment I saw I was standing precisely on the spot where earlier the girl had been lying. Apparently the Saigon firemen had been along and picked her up and now all there was left was a wet spot on the cement a few inches from my feet. Before I understood what was happening, a single sob broke out of me. Then I went on as quickly as I could.

Part of my difficulty has been that I can't choose sides in the fighting. I've been like a fish out of water. I'm against every side equally. I believe we have all behaved with such stupidity and such contempt for human life and values that no one has a leg to stand on. I think that no further military advantage that might be gained by any side could possibly be worth what it will cost in human flesh and spirit. I don't know what to do with that idea, because I doubt the worth of my observations. I am unable to decide on concrete positions to work from. I doubt the value of what I feel about what I see, what I think about it.

Not knowing what else to do, a few months ago I decided to knock around the countryside doing combat stories. I was pretty embarrassed about doing it, but I didn't know what else to do with myself. I wasn't on top of the war. The war was on top of me. I decided to travel roads that everyone assured me I would not be able to travel; in observing and noting down as precisely as I could the different levels of fear I experienced. That sounds just too introverted, everything considered, but there you are. I learned a lot knocking around like that, saw a lot of things, and I was frightened badly a couple times, but it wasn't until I got back in Saigon that I was able to get into a controlled situation and really find out what it means to me, at this time in my life, to be in a dangerous situation.

*** I've got such a bad head cold I can't think to write, and last night I couldn't sleep again. First the bat came inside beeping and darting around. If it'd just come in and hang somewhere, I'd ignore it, but it comes flapping around my bare legs and I don't like that. One of these nights it's going to get knocked in the head with a book.

When I write about such things in this journal I sometimes pause to question the order of importance of the events in my life. But all these commonplace little events, they're what underlie the quality of my day, and I take them seriously. For example, another reason why I couldn't sleep last night (and why this morning I am too tired to think on the great questions of the day) was because a cricket got down in a crack in the brick floor near where I lay my head and rubbed its legs together with so much abandon it made my ears ring. I can't imagine what possessed it to be so intense. I poked around at it with a broom straw, then tried to snuff it out with my footlocker, but it was no use. I was dealing with a cricket gone insane. Viet-Namese boys have the right attitude toward crickets. They throw them against the wall to watch them bounce. A few hits like that and a cricket is too bewildered to make its noise. Rorkman says the crickets probably do not rub their legs together, but against their abdomen.

Typically when I've had a cold I've blown my nose in a handkerchief and washed it out in a washing machine. That was in America. Here I have to do my own wash on the floor of the shower so I've taken a lot to snuffing and spitting. The Viet-Namese are great spitters themselves, so there's nothing improper about it. They spit most any place you can think of but their favorite of all places is on cafe floors. That takes a bit of getting used to if you happen to come from one of the imperialist countries. It's also one of the reasons that American soldiers are contemptuous of Viet-Namese cafes and won't often go in them. If the floor looks like that, they reason, how's it going to be with the soup?

American soldiers are contemptuous of Viet-Namese for a lot of reasons, some of them in part legitimate, but they've got too little sense about when to display it and when not to. One afternoon I was on the Y-bridge during the fighting in the Eighth District when a taxi pulled up from across the canal. The back of the little Renault was packed with hunks of raw pork meat. The driver had just come through an American artillery barrage and a helicopter gunship strike to get his hog to market. In his excitement and gratitude at having escaped with his life he started chattering away in Viet-Namese to an American soldier leaning against an armored personnel carrier smoking a cigarette.

"Get that shit out of here," the soldier said. "It's probably dead G.I." The taxi driver was a simple guy maybe, but I could see he understood the contempt in the American's voice. It made me feel ashamed.

One afternoon during the fighting in the Eighth District I ran across the Cholon bridge and walked back underneath it alongside the green grass to the pagoda where a battalion of American infantry had its command post. The houses around the green were all destroyed, the entire Eighth District of Saigon in fact was in rubble and burning. The artillery was coming in close, exploding in black cracking air blasts while small arms fire came in sporadically through the walls of the Catholic church where the battalion had its supply and aid station.

The American wounded and dead were brought out of the fighting inside armored personnel carriers. The dead were wrapped in ponchos and laid out on the grass in a row. One of the wounded had been hit with a rocket propelled grenade and he was rather a sight. His trousers had been removed and his abdomen and thighs were all mixed up. When they lifted him out of the back of the APC my heart caught, for while he was alive, it looked like his genitals had been blown off. Everything. I wanted to turn around and go away, but at the same time I was afraid I might be wrong, or I hoped I was wrong, and I didn't want to be left thinking it had happened when in fact it hadn't. I went up close and looked over the back of the medic and there in the middle of all that mess, riding high and dry, were the two balls and the little prick all bunched up together in a cluster. They looked as if they were holding onto each other for dear life, but they were perfectly all right. I felt a rush of gratitude flood through me.

*** Everywhere I go I ask if there are any new rumors. I'm growing afraid that the Viet Cong isn't going to attack Saigon again. There hasn't been a truly exciting rumor in more than a month. The attack was supposed to come three weeks ago, then last week. Now it's supposed to happen next week. Who knows what's going to happen or if anything is going to happen? There is a rumor making the rounds that when the attack does come that the government will fall. That's not a rumor exactly that's in a class by itself. I've heard it before, but what a good ending it would be for the book. I'm not wishing a holocaust on anyone, but if there is going to be an attack, if the city is going to fall, I want it to happen sooner rather than later.

Sometimes I tell myself: You talk too much about wanting the attack. You're bringing bad luck on yourself. Even as a joke you shouldn't talk about it so much. Yesterday afternoon it happened to me again. Rorkman and I walked downtown and ran into Steve Eckert and I asked if he'd heard any new rumors about the attack. No sooner were the words out of my mouth than I felt the superstitious fear that I was bringing down harm on myself. Somewhere in the back of my mind I am half afraid that words and their thoughts exist in their own right, that they can do things on their own. Normally I don't believe it of course, only when the pressure is on. Then it's as if sometimes I revert to an older way of thinking. I can recall that when I was a child, when I rode on streetcars for instance, I wasn't sure if the other passengers could read my thoughts or not. I protected myself by changing the course of my thinking onto trivial matters, not letting anyone know where my true interests lay. That was simply neurotic I suppose, but only last month when we were being hit with rockets I found myself doing something very close to it.

We were in the room and I was sitting with my back to the wall listening to the peculiar whirring noise of the rockets as they passed overhead and was picturing in my mind's eye how they were sailing in from the countryside over the rooftops and the streets when suddenly I caught myself. If I were to think on the rockets with too much concentration, they would know where I was and I'd be in serious danger. It sounds too stupid when you put it down in black and white, but I stopped thinking about them and forced myself to think about something else. I don't remember what. The idea was to break the connection, the thought line, between the rockets and myself.

All this has something to do with the question of luck. When I arrived in Viet-Nam I felt unlucky, don't ask why. I had vivid reveries about losing one of my feet, or having an arm shot off. One day it even occurred to me that I might be killed over here. The point is, I'd never had those kinds of thoughts before. All my life I've considered myself lucky, and then without warning I began to feel that my luck had run out. It's no good to say I was having a crises of confidence. I've never felt stronger and more secure in myself in my life. I am methodically focusing on the weaknesses of my character-not weaknesses as bad characteristics, but weaknesses as weaknesses. Something else is at work here.

One morning soon after I'd arrived in Saigon I stopped at a rickety little stand on Vo Tanh street to eat a breakfast. I was reading a book about the revolution in China during the late Twenties. I read again about how Communist prisoners were stuffed into the boilers of locomotives and used for fuel. It's an image I can't get out of my mind. I thought about how impossible it has been for me to commit myself to anything to the extent that I would be willing to risk having by body thrown inside a roaring locomotive (do they close the door?). I sat there on the rickety wood stool thinking about luck and commitment, and when my breakfast was put down before me there were splotches of blood in the yolks of the eggs. I felt the hair lift up off my scalp. For the merest instant I thought I'd received a sign.

*** This afternoon I was walking on Nguyen Hue when it started to rain so I ducked inside the USO to wait it out. I was thumbing through the magazines when I came on an article about war protestors and their demonstrations. There was a time when such demonstrations, where the President was insulted and vilified in a manner that was so consciously cruel and so purposefully demeaning that I didn't really understand how anyone could do it. I thought it so out of place. So coarse. This afternoon I understood I no longer feel that way. I'm not sure how it came about that I changed my mind. Part of it is that in Viet-Nam it has been brought home to me, once again, how men are willing to behave toward one another. It's rather more serious than bad manners.

One evening on the Vinh Long airfield I was drinking beer with some officers from a helicopter assault squadron. They had been on fire missions that day and two of their ships had taken hits. The only man who had not flown that day was a Lieutenant who was still recovering from wounds he'd received the month before. They were telling each other about the people they had killed during the day, including one woman. They'd killed most of them with machine-guns. They'd been operating in a free-fire zone so they could kill anyone they wanted. Some of the stories were very funny. The best of them were running jokes that first one officer would return to then another over and over again. They were really terrible stories and I tried not to laugh but they were very funny too and I couldn't help myself and the more I laughed, the more the officers elaborated on the stories.

While they related the stories they imitated in outlandishly grotesque ways how the people died they had killed that day. I don't suppose the gesticulations were really very exaggerated, but there inside the club it was too funny for words. The imitations were complete with sound effects and crazy Charlie Chaplin gestures as the bodies got torn up and always ended with the statement: "The only decent thing about Viet-Nam is killing V.C."

One of the running jokes was about the Cambodian mercenaries the Americans hire to fight for them. The Cambodians go hunting in the most difficult country in the Delta and get paid "head" money for each Viet Cong head they bring in. That's on top of their regular salary. Well it seems the American advisors began to suspect the Cambodians of cheating. It's difficult to tell just by looking, don't you know, if a head truly belongs to a member of the Viet Cong or to somebody else, and if the hair is shaved off it, the Americans can't always be one hundred per cent sure if the head belongs to a man or a woman. In short, a lot of problems came up so the Americans made a new rule. The Cambodians had to bring in the body along with the head. That meant a lot of extra weight for the Cambodians to carry around, but they agreed willingly enough because that's the sort of guys they are. The new problem however was that the Cambodians were so slipshod that one day they'd show up with seven bodies and eight heads say, and the next with perhaps five bodies but only three heads.

All the officers that night had a story about the Cambodian mercenaries and it really got to be hilarious. I tried not to laugh but the stories were so practiced and so hilarious I couldn't help myself.

Nowadays when I read about how American politicians are being publicly vilified and insulted, I no longer feel the old sense of discomfort and even shame. The question of manners is no longer important to me. In America, the issue of good manners is pretty academic.

[end]

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