Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire

In the nearly fifty years since the Vietnam War ended, Vietnam has evolved from ecological and economic devastation into a must stop for American tourists. Ukraine recently approached Vietnam as a mediator in its “dispute” with Russia.[1] America, meanwhile, continues to suffer from the Vietnam Syndrome, as discussed in my book Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire from which the following seven chapters are excerpted.

When I visited Vietnam in early 1991, the US and Vietnam did not have diplomatic relations. I had to get my visa in London through my perfidious employer the BBC. The BBC had hired me the summer before, based on my book The Phoenix Program, as a consultant on a documentary series it was making about the CIA’s activities in Southeast Asia. It was a simple deal: in exchange for all my CIA contacts, I received an all-expenses paid trip to Vietnam, via London and Bangkok, with a two week stop in Thailand on the way home.

The first quarter of Pisces Moon deals with the five days I spent in London as a guest of independent film director David Munro. In 1979 Munro and his partner John Pilger journeyed into Cambodia, as guests as the Vietnamese government, to film the horrifying conditions in Phnom Penh. Their documentary “Year Zero” was available at Pilger’s website. Munro and Pilger’s follow-up documentary “Cambodia – The Betrayal” (1990) told how the US and British secret services employed the Khmer Rouge to attack Vietnam.

In exchange for his hospitality and sage advice, I agreed to do a favor for Munro in Bangkok. For its duplicitous part, BBC asked me to carry $10,000 in cash to its film crew in Saigon.

After five days of intrigues, surprises and meeting new people in London, I spent a surrealistic week in Vietnam, including a memorable day near the Cambodian border. All that is the subject of this excerpt.

The last leg of my journey was spent in Thailand interviewing retired CIA officers. Throughout the book I feature significant CIA officers I interacted with while conducting my Phoenix research. I use them as case studies to illustrate the type of people the CIA employs. The book highlights the “dark arts” of empire, including the CIA’s support of drug, sex, and artifact traffickers, as well as the psychological warfare tactics it uses to play upon the beliefs of people to shape their political and social movements. I pay close attention to the CIA’s use of missionaries, academics, writers, and filmmakers in assisting and promoting American imperialism.

Along with surrealistic experiences, intrigues, surprises and interesting people, Pisces Moon is a critical analysis of Western colonialism; its foundational beliefs in militarism, patriarchy, Christianity, and white supremacy; and its destructive impact on the nations of Southeast Asia and, ultimately, America – what Bill Burroughs called “the backlash and bad karma of empire.” It outlines how decades of military, business and religious propaganda poisoned our collective unconscious and resulted in the national identity crisis that elevated venal Donald Trump and his reactionary MAGA movement, with their divine, corporate-backed plan to return to a time before Liberalism emasculated America.

The book is written as a daily journal. As autobiography, it reveals why investigating the CIA was both a social quest to understand the dark side of the American psyche, and a personal quest to better understand myself and where I fit within my country. I embarked, fittingly, as the sun was about to enter Pisces, the astrological sign ruling deception, espionage, foreign things, prisons and religion.

The Runner’s Fee: Saturday, 23 February 1991

“Calm before the storm: develop psychic powers and study metaphysics.”

I arrived at Don Muang Airport, thirty miles north of Bangkok, at 7:20 am. It was a rocky landing. The day was overcast, blazing hot. The humidity vaporized on the tarmac. As I walked into the terminal, I saw a tall thin dark man in a white suit at the end of the ramp holding a sign that said “Valentine” in front of his chest. I went over and he handed me a note from Julie, my BBC contact in Vietnam, then vanished. Julie was hoping I had arrived safely with the $10,000 cash and that I’d be arriving in Vietnam on the scheduled flight.

I had declared the ten-grand and was waved through Customs without a glance. But other problems loomed. Announcements over the PA system, for example, were in Thai so I had to study the board to find my connecting flight. I saw Seoul and Singapore, Taipei and Kathmandu, but nothing for Ho Chi Minh City. Lost again.

Don Muang was the busiest airport I’d ever been stranded in, swarming with tall dark Indians in white trousers, Japanese businessmen draped with cameras, Western backpackers and gaping tour groups. I started to panic when I couldn’t find the domestic terminal building. I had two hours to make my connection and time was accelerating. Finally, accidentally, I stumbled on the Vietnam Airlines office, exiled out of sight at the furthest end of the airport. Thailand had been allied with the US during the war and Vietnam was still paying the price. And when I got to the office, which seemed like a mile from everything else, no one was there. I sat outside with my legs on my luggage, exhausted and sick. Eventually the office manager arrived, a good guy, a former soldier from North Vietnam. He let me lie down on his couch and gave me a few cigarettes. When I felt a bit rested, I used the bathroom to shave and brush my teeth.

There was still an hour to go, so I observed my fellow travelers to Vietnam. No visible Westerners. One hour stretched into two and a half – time elongates in the Far East, there’s never really a delay – then we passengers, we few, we brave, piled on a bus. The attendants at the plane we were supposed to board waved us to another plane. The name on the side said Hang Khong Viet Nam (with diacritical marks). We lined up on the sweltering tarmac. The ground crew rolled over a staircase and we boarded. The pretty flight attendants in light blue “ao dais” served warm Pepsi and food I didn’t recognize. My stomach did a backflip.

It only took a second to realize I was seated beside a woman in her mid-sixties, with vibrant lilac eyes, short practical hair, pretty summer dress. Matronly, like Angela Lansbury. I watched in awe as she greedily gobbled her food. She was obviously acclimated. But why was this older American woman flying into Saigon, unaccompanied, unafraid. Who was she?

She introduced herself as Lillian Morton, said she was going to spend a few days delivering glasses to people in Saigon, then touring Hue and Hanoi. I said I was an author, a consultant to BBC, which was in Vietnam making a documentary about the CIA. I mentioned there was a famous CIA officer, George Morton, who’d been in Vietnam and Laos for many years.

Lillian smiled sentimentally and said George was her husband. They’d met while she was with the US Information Service in South Vietnam. She gasped slightly when she said he’d recently died of lung cancer. I placed my hand lightly on her forearm for a moment and expressed my condolences. I said my father had been a POW in the Philippines, that I wrote a book about him, and that he’d died a year ago. We were both still feeling the effects of loss, which seemed to connect us on some deep emotional level.

I marvel at how easily strangers far from home share intimacies. Later I wondered if our being seated side by side was coincidental – we were the only white faces on the plane – but at the time I was glad simply to enjoy her good energy and learn a little about her. I said I knew a bit about her legendary husband, that people I’d interviewed had talked about him with respect. She wasn’t surprised. She was proud of him. Shelby Stanton, she said, had dedicated his book The Green Berets at War (1985) to him.

I’d read the book. George Morton had been an infantry officer in Europe in WW2 and later fought on the Island of Luzon in the Philippines. Most American soldiers hated jungle warfare and the debilitating diseases that come with it. They were glad to go home. But Morton enjoyed it and stuck around. In 1946, he was promoted to major and assigned to an infantry regiment in the Philippine Scouts. A creation of the US colonial army, the Scouts consisted of Filipino soldiers commanded by US army officers. Originally directed against rebels fighting the US occupation from 1899-1902, the Scouts were re-directed against the Hukbalahap communist insurgency after WW2. Like their rural rebel forefathers, the Huks wanted land reform and the Americans to go away. No such luck.

Air force pilots drop bombs on people. Commandos jump out of planes, slither around, set booby traps, kidnap, torture, ambush. As a result, not many professional soldiers choose the dark art of guerilla warfare as a career path. Cutthroat is a job skill few possess. But Morton was a pioneer in guerrilla warfare which in 1947 was a function of the army’s fledgling Psychological Warfare Branch. Morton in 1953 was assigned to Athens as the senior Special Forces advisor to the Royal Hellenic Raiding Forces. In this capacity he was involved in Gladio, the CIA-NATO operation Allan Francovich was researching when we met a few days earlier. In anticipation of a Soviet invasion of Eastern Europe, Gladio operator Morton formed secret militias and concealed arms caches inside Greece along the Bulgarian, Yugoslavian and Albanian borders.

When he departed Greece in 1956, Colonel Morton was an unconventional warfare guru. And in 1962 he was selected to serve as chief of special warfare for the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). By mid-1963 he was in charge of all Special Forces in South Vietnam. The mission was to indoctrinate and train mountain tribes in the Central Highlands, Khmer mercenaries, and the various cults and sects that had been persecuted by the paranoid Diem regime, and then direct them against local Liberation Army forces, as well as against North Vietnamese soldiers slipping into South Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia.

       Morton looked like Pat Ryan in Terry and the Pirates. But behind the bodybuilder good looks lurked a master of black propaganda, of hiding war crimes under the guise of good deeds. And like Milton Caniff’s legendary comic books, all the disinformation surrounding his Special Forces mission was aimed at the American public – the same way Colby packaged Phoenix for sale to the American public as a program designed “to protect the people from terrorism.”

       In 1966, Morton retired from the army and joined the CIA as a paramilitary officer in Vietnam. In 1968 he became chief of operations at the massive US military base in Udorn, Thailand where, as I mentioned to Lillian, I was heading to interview Tony Poshepny. She wasn’t surprised. Indeed, she said she had a dinner date with Pat Landry on March 1st in Bangkok. She gave me the address of Landry’s Lone Star bar and said, “Tell him I sent you.” I jotted down the address. I’d been jotting down my thoughts and observations every day, of course.

       A lot went unsaid between me and Lillian. Somehow, she knew that I knew that Lloyd C. “Pat” Landry had been a CIA boss at the Udorn base, and that George, as Landry’s chief of operations from 1968-1973, had overseen the CIA’s 50,000 “Meo” guerrillas spread across Laos. Having interviewed John Muldoon, Richard Secord, Tom Clines and Ted Shackley, I knew a lot about Udorn. Let me briefly review my interactions with these four characters, starting with Muldoon, whom I met through his good friend Lou Conein.

***

       As mentioned in Day 3, Conein in 1974 had used Muldoon’s private investigative firm to provide cover for the DEA’s “Dirty Dozen” – thirteen CIA officers I was trying to locate and interview – who ran secret operations against drug traffickers using Phoenix program methods. When I interviewed him at his stately home in McClean in the spring of 1987, Conein sat on a straight-backed chair in front of a leaded window in a well-appointed library. His elegant wife stood in the wide doorway and looked at him impassively, then vanished. I wore a herringbone jacket, black wool slacks, black loafers, a conservative tie. Casually dressed, Conein offered me a Camel cigarette which I graciously accepted. He struck a match, we both leaned forward, he lit mine, then his. He smiled and his eyes sparkled. Ed Lansdale had died in February and, Conein said mischievously, I’d been the hot topic at the funeral. Which is why he’d agreed to talk to me.

       I asked him if he’d negotiated a truce with Corsican drug traffickers in Saigon in 1965, like Al McCoy said in The Politics of Heroin (1972) and he said no, that he’d met with the Corsicans because one of them was threatening to murder Dan Ellsberg over a woman they were both romancing. It was a good story and I wrote about it a few years later. [1]

       Then he told a joke. “When a Corsican has a son, he flips a coin. If it’s heads, the son becomes a smuggler. If it’s tails he becomes a Customs official. And if it stands on its edge, he becomes an honest man.” Telling a joke was Conein’s style. He was a conman, like Lansdale and all the rest. It’s impossible to tell if what they’re saying is a lie or a half-truth. But it’s never truth.

       Conein had had a stroke and I didn’t want to tire him out. But he was helpful and when I asked if there were any people I should contact about the Dirty Dozen, he went upstairs with considerable effort and returned moments later with three names and addresses he’d jotted down on three-by-five cards. As we were saying goodbye, I asked if he knew where I could find Muldoon. He chuckled and said, “He’s drinking at the Tenley Square Bar, as usual. Get there at midnight and when you see him, tell him I said he’s the worst private eye in the world. Tell him I said he’d lose a guy he’s tailing halfway across the street.”

       I got to the bar at midnight. It was dark as a cave. A dimly lit hallway led to the barroom. A big bartender in a white apron was cleaning a beer glass. “Is Muldoon here?” I inquired. He gave a look and nodded down at the far end of the massive wooden bar. A hundred tiny lights reflected off the multi-colored liquor bottles in front of a mirror as long as the bar. About twelve empty stools stood between me and a huge man sitting hunched over a beer. We were the only people in the place. I walked over to him and asked, “Are you Muldoon?”

       He turned with a lethal look and in a low gravelly Robert Mitchum voice said, “Whaddaya          want?”

       “Conein says you’re the worst PI in the world. That you’d lose a guy halfway across the street.”

       The six-four, 250-pound beast was taken back. Then, on cue, he said, “Conein’s the biggest liar in the world. I wouldn’t lose the guy until he got all the way across the street.”

        And with that I was in. Muldoon and I drank scotch and talked into the wee hours of the morning. The next day we met at his brother’s ante-bellum polo club in Poolesville, Maryland, with its infinite white fences, green fields and prancing ponies. Our interview can be found at the National Security Archives and several places online.[2]   A chapter in The Phoenix Program is devoted to Muldoon’s account of how from 1964 into 1966 he built a CIA interrogation center in each of South Vietnam’s 44 provinces. In 1966, Muldoon was transferred to Udorn where he supervised the construction of a huge interrogation center. In 2002, the Udorn interrogation center housed the infamous “black site” where erstwhile CIA Director Gina Haspel, then an up-and-coming operations officer, video-taped two contract psychologists torturing Al Qaeda suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

        Through my patron saint, William Colby, I met Ted Shackley at his office on Wilson Blvd in Alexandria, VA. Shackley had been the CIA’s station chief in Vientiane, Laos from 1966 to 1968, working hand in glove with agency operators in Udorn. In December 1968 he became station chief in Saigon. You can read my  interview with Shackley in The Phoenix Program. I was the first author to interview him and the start of our interview was as bizarre as my introduction to Muldoon. He was extremely paranoid. I’d gotten there early and had to wait in the lobby until he arrived with his secretary. Shackley was tall, wearing glasses, and glanced at me wordlessly as he walked into his office. Minutes later he invited me in. I put my $25 Radio Shack tape recorder on the sofa beside me. Very seriously he said, “You can’t have that in here.”

       I said, “It’s a twenty-five-dollar Radio Shack tape recorder. It hasn’t got any secret devices in it.”

       I refused to move it on principle, so Shackley walked across the room, grabbed it off the sofa and carried it out to his secretary. My hopes sank, but after that everything went well. It was a great interview. On one wall was a huge aerial photo of the secret Long Tieng base in Laos.

        Richard Secord, as I mentioned earlier, had asked me to work with him, based on Shackley’s recommendation. Secord had been the chief of CIA air operations at the Udorn base from 1966 into late 1968, concurrent with Shackley’s tour in Vientiane. The pilots Secord managed in Laos were provided by the CIA proprietary companies Air America and Continental Airlines. The CIA had divided Laos into five regions and when a regional commander requested air support, Secord would provide it. The commander of the Royal Lao Air Force (RLAF) from 1959-1966, Brigadier General Thao Ma, tried but failed to murder his boss, Major General Kouprasith Abhay in October 1966, after which Thao and his loyal pilots flew their T-28s to exile in Thailand. The loss of a third of its T-28 pilots was a serious setback for the RLAF, and Secord’s office took up the slack, along with Colonel Harry Aderholt’s air commandos in Nakhon Phanom, up the Mekong River from the RLAF base at Seno near Savannakhet.

       Secord was a short man. I remember him lying on a couch in his living room – his head and shoulders propped on pillows and his Hobbit legs stretching only halfway across the couch – bragging about how, while working at the Pentagon, he planned and oversaw the 1972 Christmas bombing of Hanoi. After two weeks of relentless bombing, the US had destroyed thousands of houses and public buildings, including hospitals, and killed thousands of civilians. I gagged.

       Secord in turn referred me to his friend and collaborator in the Enterprise, CIA officer Tom Clines. In 1966, Clines ran CIA ground operations out of Udorn. A year later he was reassigned as chief of operations at Long Tieng, the CIA’s main base inside Laos. He reported directly to Shackley, with whom he had worked in Miami in the early 1960s. While at Long Tieng, Clines was also an advisor to General Vang Pao, commander of the CIA’s “secret army” of opium growing Hmong tribesmen who comprised most of the CIA’s expendable secret Meo army in Laos, and about whom more remains to be said.

       My interview with Clines was incredibly disturbing, which is saying a lot considering the horror stories I’d heard while researching Phoenix. He was a large, blubbery, repulsive man, smoking a big cigar and sipping a cocktail while plopped in a lazy boy, bragging about the CIA operations into Cuba he had managed. He said the CIA had a Phoenix style program in which anti-Castro Cuban commandos used blowtorches to burn the faces off communist mayors and cadres in rural Cuban villages.

       I was nauseous riding home after my visit with Clines; literally had to stop, get out and puke. I had a bad case of PTSD and a guilty conscience for years as a result of being in the company of such monsters. All four – Muldoon, Shackley, Clines and Secord – were proud of the horrors they visited upon Vietnam and Laos. Becoming inured to monsters is a kind of illness too.

***

       I looked at Lillian sitting beside me. She could be anyone’s grandmother. And yet, she knew all about the dirty war and the CIA’s godfatherly oversight of drug trafficking out of Laos. She knew that the drugs reached “our boys” in South Vietnam, and that traffickers brought the heroin into America. She knew all about the vicious nature of guerrilla warfare and how it transforms men into monsters.

       Making the American empire is an egalitarian family affair, however, and Lillian smiled sweetly as she spoke glowingly of her daughter serving in the US Air Force’s Human Factors branch. For a Graham Greene fan like me, the comment was impossible to ignore.  Human Factors is the behavioral sciences branch of the air force that determines how best to indoctrinate its employees so they can obliterate civilians without remorse in cities like Hanoi and Baghdad, or the Laotian and Cambodian countryside, and afterwards reintegrate seamlessly into civilian society.

       Lillian seemed to know a bit about me. She said she’d met Frank Scotton in China while working as a tour guide for the US/China Peoples Friendship Association. I interviewed USIS officer Scotton extensively for my book The Phoenix Program. (Lou Conein told me that Scotton was really CIA, but who knows?)  Lillian said she’d been an English teacher in Cambodia and, I guess, she may have known him there, too. It’s all in the family and as noted in Day 5, Scotton told me that he’d taken his teenage son on patrol into Cambodia.

       In the next breath Lillian said she planned to meet Jean Andre Sauvageot in Vietnam. I’d also interviewed Sauvageot for The Phoenix Program. In 1967, he and Scotton were chosen to lead a delegation to meet representatives from the National Liberation Front (NFL) of South Vietnam in Tay Ninh Province astride the Cambodian border to arrange a prisoner exchange, including three American POWs held inside Cambodia. From 1987 through 1991, Sauvageot was the official translator for US delegations to Vietnam to discuss MIAs and POWs. A year after my return, while watching the TV news, I literally jumped to my feet when I saw him standing behind Senator John Kerry at a news conference in Vietnam announcing the normalization of relations between the two nations. Sauvageot had been Kerry’s interpreter.

       When I interviewed Sauvageot, he was a vice president at Northrop. An energetic, athletic man who pedaled his bike to work, he was proud of never having killed anyone during his many years of service in South Vietnam. His self-deception was breath-taking. Case in point: in 1976, George Morton went to work for the international private military company Vinnell, which specializes “in military training, logistics, and support in the form of weapon systems maintenance and management consultancy.” Vinnell is a subsidiary of Northrop. As a Vinnell employee, Morton advised the Saudi National Guard while covertly helping create the CIA and US military’s underground mercenary army. Established in the waning days of WW2, that secret network is the bloodstream of the deep state.

       Lillian said she’d worked in Thailand near Udorn with Earth First, the radical environmental advocacy group. Had she been sent to infiltrate and report on the group? Was she spying on me? As we prepared to deplane, she said she was staying at the old Caravelle Hotel, which had been renamed the Doc Lap, where the BBC was based. She invited me to visit her there.

***

       A lot had happened on the 90-minute flight from Bangkok to Saigon. Looking out the window as we flew low along the green Cambodian coastline, I set my camera on macro in a futile attempt to capture the tropical beauty. Lillian was still pointing things out as we landed at Tan Son Nhut, an experience akin to landing on the face of the moon. The flight attendant said we weren’t allowed to take photos. The airfield was littered with burnt-out hulks of airplanes, pitted concrete bunkers and bomb craters. Everyone applauded when we stopped. Three employees dragged a staircase to the plane and we walked across the tarmac to the dilapidated terminal. Lillian raced ahead of me. An old hand, she’d already filled out the Customs forms. She vanished into the crowd while I filled out mine. I had to declare my camera. The Customs officials laughed merrily over the ten-grand. The economy needed the boost.

       I was the only person in a suit. I took off the jacket and looked around. The place was mobbed but I felt someone’s eyes on me. It was a Western woman and she looked familiar, like someone I knew from school. “Melanie?” I said. She looked embarrassed and looked away. Could it be? I was too exhausted to care and walked through the glass doors into the crowd waiting outside.

       Julie was waiting in a taxi and her driver spotted me. He extended his hand and I shook it, but it was my baggage he wanted. Julie poked her head out of the cab and invited me in. “You shouldn’t shake their hands,” she said. “They have dirty hands.”

       The irony of a Brit accusing anyone of having dirty hands did not escape me.

       She looked anemic, frightened. She asked if I had the money. I said I did. As the cab swung into the swim of traffic, Julie said she hated Vietnam. She couldn’t wait to leave and get home. On the ride she reiterated that BBC had nothing for me to do and that the Caravelle, where the BBC crew was staying, was filled. So I’d be staying by myself at the Majestic. I had no idea where either place was. She asked for the money and I said, “Let’s wait until we get to the hotel.”

       The ride through Saigon was a blur of people camped on the sidewalks, sleeping, eating, cooking in the open. Life was over-exposed; the poverty was as heart wrenching as Ben had said. I smelled charcoal fires. There were no emission laws and it was hazy and smoggy. It got into my lungs. Julie periodically held a kerchief over her mouth. It was fascinating. People were enjoying themselves. The admired the pretty girls in ao dais sitting side saddle on motorbikes.

       The not-so Majestic Hotel (Cuu Long) is located at 1 Dong Khoi Street, formerly Rue Catinat, astride the Saigon River. A man and wife were selling postcards outside. “Remember me!” he shouted. Cyclo drivers were posted across the street watching everything like informants or caddies waiting for a loop. A man was selling his translation services. “Very good!” he declared. He looked like a lost puppy.

       Julie asked again for the money. I said I’d prefer to wait until we were inside. I was suspicious of BBC and wanted to make sure there was, indeed, a reservation. There wasn’t. They weren’t expecting me. Julie and her cab driver-translator booked me in at $49.50 per day in US dollars. She waited impatiently while I filled out the required forms. I was given a little card with rules. The top floors were under reconstruction due to a recent fire and were off-limits. The desk clerk, through Julie’s cab driver, told me that people were coming that night to talk to me. I asked Julie to please arrange to postpone the visit until I felt better. She scoffed. I thought it was a small favor to ask for having brought the ten-grand, but she wouldn’t even try. She asked for the money. “Let’s go to my room,” I replied.

       Room 229 was unmemorable save for a stationary green lizard on a wall. I put my bags on the bed, took out the money pouch, and asked Julie, “Have you ever heard of the runner’s fee?”

       “No,” she replied. “What’s that?”

       “It’s usually ten percent,” I said, “but I’ll just take three.” I peeled off three one hundred-dollar bills and gave her the pouch. Then added, “Please tell Molloy, ‘Thanks for nothing’.”

       My war with the BBC had begun.

       I turned my attention to my present circumstances. My room had twin beds, a closet and two chairs in one room; in the other room there were two black leather chairs and a sofa, a tiny fridge with Heineken, cola, and water bottles. I gobbled down the gratis candy bar. I needed sugar badly. The TV had two stations. The bathroom had a hand shower. There was a phone in each room.

       I laid down on one twin bed but soon dragged the other mattress into the bathroom doorway to be nearer the toilet and to escape the jackhammer noise outside. What in the world was going on out there? Construction? Was there a sawmill next door and if so, why was it operating at night? I was too tired to look. Hugging the toilet I wondered if my old, perforated ulcer had erupted again and was producing the stinky black blood bile I was vomiting? Dysentery? Malaria pills? I decided to take my chances with the mosquitoes from now on. The phone rang but I couldn’t get up to look for it. Later I heard a knock at the door but couldn’t get off the floor. I blacked out.

An Unreported Accident: Sunday, 24 February 1991

“Moon enters Cancer, Mercury enters Pisces. Be rational. Play it safe.”

That first night at the Majestic was the worst night of my life, except for the night a bleeding ulcer had erupted 14 years earlier. The ulcer put me in the hospital and required whole blood transfusions for days. I was working for a tree service in New Hampshire, suffering from a broken heart and the stress of unpaid college loans. I was drinking too much and doing too many drugs. I nearly died.

       But unlike with the ulcer, I didn’t lose a lot of blood that night at the Majestic and at sunrise I dragged the mattress back onto the bed frame and flopped down in a daze. Every muscle in my body was taut with an uncontrollable urge to experience every minute of the day. To try, as someone famous once said, to change the course of life for the better with one lightning surge of will. Wasting a single moment would be like squandering a fabulous inheritance.

       It was early when I stumbled downstairs to the lobby for breakfast. From the buffet table I grabbed a soggy sweet roll, tepid scrambled eggs, and a cup of syrupy coffee. The meal didn’t sit well so I popped a few Peptos. I was taking Septra now, the antibiotic my doctor prescribed before I left for the inevitable intestinal infection. I changed money at the front desk. For one hundred American dollars, I got 730,000 Dong in mostly 5,000 denomination bills. Three wads of re-cycled paper in thin red rubber bands. It would have taken an hour to count it so I stuffed it in my day bag and pockets and headed out the door. My plan was to follow my map around town, see places I’d read about, then drift up to the Post Office to mail postcards.

       “Play it safe,” my horoscope advised, and that would have been the smart thing to do. Take it easy, give my body a chance to recover. But exploration and observation are never enough. I need to get involved. Today was fated, anyway; Moon in Cancer foretold emotional rather than intellectual responses – a day ruled by the heart not the head. Plus Mercury was entering Pisces, meaning my thoughts would be fuzzy around the edges, my communications with others subject to more than the usual misunderstandings. Not a surprising forecast considering I didn’t know the language and was alone in a weakened conditioned, pockets full of cash. What could go wrong?

       The day was hazy and hot. It hadn’t rained for weeks and there was an ominous sense the sky might open at any moment. The air was thick with humidity and exhaust fumes. My head swam, my chest ached, valves opened and shut automatically in my stomach. I stepped out gingerly, map in hand, “tourist” tattooed on my forehead, and was immediately surrounded by a swarm of vendors.

        Watching from the street corner, the “Remember me!” cyclo driver waved and smiled broadly. Catty-corner across the street, another cluster of pumped-up cyclo drivers cast expectant glances. Standing by the hotel door, the tenured cigarette and postcard vendors were relaxed, poised to pounce. I felt like the proverbial lamb heading to the slaughter.

        I gravitated to a guy I recognized from yesterday and bought a dozen wilted, dog-eared postcards with faded pictures of pretty Vietnamese girls in white ao dais (silk trousers with long tight jackets slit up the thigh) in various urban and rural settings.

        Shaking off the beggar kids, I ducked down one side street then another and emerged into a park across from a hotel that’s literally floating on the Saigon River. The Floating Hotel. Tugged up from the Great Barrier Reef, it was a joint Australian-Japanese venture seeking to cash in on economic reforms; it was reportedly the most modern and well-equipped hotel in Saigon. Certainly the biggest and most conspicuous in a city of mostly two-and-three story buildings, like a tractor trailer in a parking lot full of compact cars. I reeled in wonder.

       A middle-aged woman in black pajamas appeared with a stack of postcards and a pack on her back. She introduced herself as Li Li and asked in broken English if I was American. When I said “Yes,” she undid her backpack and fished out a folder. Inside was a bundle of letters tied with a piece of string. With the familiarity of an old friend, she asked if I’d please deliver them to a soldier in America. They’d been together during the war. She was sure he’d come for her and take her to America if I would only deliver the letters to him.

       Li Li made sure I looked at his name and photograph and asked if I knew him. I told her no.

       “But you’re an American!”

       She stared expectantly at me. Her story was a black hole, sucking me in. Forlornly, she asked again if I would please try to find him in America. As gently as I could, I said that that would be impossible. To ease my conscience I bought a dozen postcards. She was glad for that and posed for a photo.

       “The world does not permit report of them,” Virgil told Dante about the lost souls gathered at the Gates of Hell. “Let us not speak of them. Look, and pass by.”

       With an immense effort I pulled myself away. I walked into the park between Bach Dang Street and the pungent Saigon River. Passengers wearing conical hats and carrying chickens and fresh produce were streaming off a ferry docked at the quay. An animated crowd. In the park, people flew brightly colored kites, played badminton, and practiced tai chi. I watched from beneath an archway draped with fragrant, flowering Bougainvillea. Attached to a trellis beside me was a life-sized doll of a merry old man dressed in a red suit with white fur cuffs, sporting a thin white beard trickling down his chin like a frozen waterfall in February. Santa Claus? There were on-going celebrations in honor of Tet, the Chinese New Year, so maybe he was the Buddhist or Confucian equivalent of Father Time? Not the Saturnian grim reaper with a cowl and a scythe slung over his shoulder. A happy chap, bearing good fortune. My spirits rose.

       My exploration, as Eliot predicted, had taken me back to where I had started – the Majestic –knowing the place for the first time. I nodded to the doorman as I turned up Dong Khoi, a busy one-way street heading from the river into the center of town. Named Rue Catinat by the French, renamed Tu Do (Liberty) by the Americans, tree-lined Dong Khoi is a tourist’s delight. I passed jewelry, ceramic and clothing stores, and bought T-shirts for Alice and me. There were food and cigarette stalls, carpentry and motorbike repair shops, people eating on parked motorbikes, sleeping on the sidewalk, sitting on chairs under umbrellas, all watching me watching them. I was the oddity.

       What stood out were the numerous book stalls – and the assumption the shopkeepers made that I was American. “You American!” they said. I’d been told that book stalls had served as fronts for black market money changers during the war. Maybe they still did. There were many books in Russian and Hungarian and French, as well as in English.

       Five blocks up from the Majestic, I entered sun splashed Lam Son Square where Le Loi Boulevard ends at Dong Khoi Street. This is the square in The Quiet American where General Thé of the Cao Dai sect set off a bomb supplied by CIA officer Alden Pyle. The square is framed by the Continental and Caravelle hotels. The National Theatre sits like an island between the hotels, a large, pale-yellow building with brightly colored banners advertising upcoming events. There are concerts at night. The local kids gather and gossip on the front steps.

       Hundreds of vagrants exposed to the blazing sun were camped on the wide meridian that divides Le Loi Boulevard. As in any city, the homeless settle where they’re allowed. Here they’re in full view. One man, filthy and dressed only in shorts, leaned over and kissed a baby laid out on a rag on a bench. Beneath the bench a tiny charcoal fire burned on that blistering day.

       If you stand still long enough in Saigon someone will approach you, especially if you’re a bewildered tourist. The person who approached me was a phantom from Phnom Penh. A tiny woman not even five feet tall, wearing a red silk vest and black silk pants. She walked up to me, put her hands on her hips and demanded in English to know if I was an American.

       I thought she was a prostitute. She wasn’t. She asked what my occupation was and when I said “writer,” she said she’d written three books about “the holocaust” in Cambodia. One was titled We Are Not the World. An autobiography, it told how her father, a Vietnamese military man loyal to the American anti-Communist crusade, had taken her family to Phnom Penh when the war ended in 1975. Escaping to Cambodia was like jumping from the pan into the fire.

       For half an hour she lectured me and the audience that had gathered on the unspeakable horrors she had endured – the torture, the forced prostitution, the murder of everyone in her family – and how she alone survived. Hands still on hips, she demanded I tell her why the Americans had abandoned the Vietnamese. What could I say? Furious, she stomped away. Swooning in the sizzling heat, I realized a beggar kid had his hand on my hip pocket. I slapped his hand away and started up the street. He glared at me.

***

       Saigon is like North Beach was in San Francisco: the moment you step out on the street, you’d better be prepared to justify yourself. After two hours in town, I was already wondering when the next drama would arrive. It happened soon on Dong Khoi on the way up to the post office near the Notre Dame Cathedral. Foreboding vibes emanated from a dilapidated wall, as if it enclosed a prison – and it had; I’m pretty sure it was the old prison Graham Greene described as “smelling of urine and injustice.” The hair on the back of my neck prickled with a sense of physical danger, like I was about to pay a karmic debt.

       I noticed a large Asian man staring at me from across the street. He came over and said in English that he’d give me 7,500 Dong to the dollar, for 50 American dollars. I said no thanks and walked away. He followed by my side and upped the ante to 8,000 Dong per dollar. Again I said no and started walking faster. The guy acted like I was dickering. Every time I shook my head he increased his offer, until finally as I entered the Post Office he reached 9,000 Dong on the dollar. It didn’t matter what I said. He could smell the cash in my wallet and seemed about to grab it. He stood in front of me, arms akimbo, while I sat on a marble bench scribbling postcards to Alice and my mother and friends. On my card to Helen my astrologer friend I wrote, “No ruby slippers in this Emerald City.”

       The money changer demanded I go with him to his apartment where, it went without saying, he intended to mug me. He had put a hand on my shoulder when suddenly a Vietnamese man raced across the lobby yelling loudly in Vietnamese. He pushed the thug away. The Post Office is wide and long with a towering ceiling and acoustics like an auditorium. My savior’s voice filled the room. Everyone turned and looked. More perplexed than frightened, the money changer slunk away, casting angry glances over his shoulder as he disappeared out the door.

       The Vietnamese man standing in front of me relaxed and introduced himself as Allan. He asked if I was an American and when I said yes, he shook his head incredulously and asked what the hell I was doing all alone in Saigon. “You gotta be careful here!” he exclaimed. “There are people here who’ll lure you down an alley, hit you on the head and take your money!”

       “Thanks for your help,” I said. “I’m Doug and I really appreciate it. It’s been a wild morning. People keep coming at me. Everyone’s right in my face.”

       Slightly offended but sympathetic, Allan took a step back, folded his hands in front of his chest as if in prayer, bowed, and said, “Believe me, Doug, I only want to help you.”

       I calmed down. I looked good luck in the eye. Fate had beckoned and I’d blindly followed it to this place and time precisely to meet Allan. I believed him. I stood and we smiled and shook hands. Synchronicity.

       The first thing I learned was that Allan was not his name. It was Tran. The second thing I learned was that Tran had been born on my exact birth date, 12 December 1949. Synchronicity, indeed. An adventurous, intelligent man, Tran was slim, slightly over five feet tall, with tawny skin and glasses that slipped down on his wide nose. He was in the Post Office using the international phone bank to call his family in Los Angeles where he worked for a computer company. He was in Saigon arranging for his wife, Giau, to return with him to the States. He then introduced me to Giau, who was sitting primly beside me on the other side of the bench. Petite and pretty, she blushed and offered a hand as light as a bird’s wing. In a sweet avian voice she said, “Hello.” Which was one of the few English words she knew. Which worked to my advantage. Tran wanted her to learn English and, he said, spending time with an American seemed an ideal way to accomplish that. He asked what my plans were. When I said I had none, he graciously offered to be my guide around town.

       It was an offer I could not refuse.

       Outside the Post Office, Tran hailed a cyclo driver and instructed the guy to pedal me to the US Embassy, which I wanted to see. Tran and Giau climbed on her motorbike and followed. Cyclo drivers do not speak English and left to my own devices, I never would have hired one: but there I was breezing along, utterly dependent on a stranger I’d just met. Tran and Giau shot by on her Honda waving and smiling like long lost friends, Giau in a white T-shirt and blue jeans, Tran in a light blue T-shirt, Levi’s, white sneakers. I felt a surge of relief.

       The ride was short but sensational. Saigon’s cyclos have bells that tring-a-ling and the passenger seat in front while the driver sits behind and above; it’s like being pushed around in a musical wheelbarrow. Lined with flowering trees and walled-off villas, the streets were teeming with motorbikes, bicycles and cyclos but few cars or trucks. Some neighborhoods were packed with market stalls and squatters camped on the sidewalks sitting on their haunches washing pots and pans, cooking meals. The city stank from garbage and sewage and was a madhouse of confusion. No traffic cops or traffic lights. Pedestrians, cars and bikes wove non-stop through intersections.

       A motorbike lay on its side in the middle of a busy intersection, wheels spinning, traffic converging from every direction, honking and swerving around it. There was no sign of the driver. Saigon in February 1991 was an unreported accident – an impoverished, surrealistic, glorious free-for-all that teaches you to float like Buddha on a cloud.

       At the dilapidated US Embassy I paid the cyclo driver and, at Tran’s suggestion, climbed on the Honda behind him. With Giau driving we motored over to the Ving Nghiem Temple, the first of about a dozen Buddhist temples I’d visit over the next few weeks. The Ving Nghiem had open doors and birds nesting inside. Wind chimes make a silvery sound and brightly colored pennants flapped on the breezes circulating inside. On a glittering altar sat three bronze statues of Buddha surrounded by lacquered vases filled with fresh flowers. It was flush with candles and incense, exotic totems and statuettes; ornate windows, golden columns, while the ceiling and moldings were etched with blue lettering and reverse swastikas. Mementos to departed souls were everywhere. And what is religion, other than our fantastical way of dealing with death?

       Outside the temple, tented food and souvenir stalls did business in the shade of trees. Beggars, many of whom were amputees, camped by the gate. Three emaciated men with shaved heads and sunken cheeks, wearing striped pants and shirts, looked like they’d just been released from Devil’s Island. They smiled at me as if I were “a dumb leper who’d lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm,” as wizened journalist Thomas Fowler referred to innocent CIA officer Alden Pyle in The Quiet American.

       Giau was hungry so we climbed on her Honda and drove to a French-style Vietnamese restaurant that served noodles, pink rice, spiced beef and cokes. After lunch we smoked cigarettes and talked about ourselves. I said I’d authored a book about the war and was in Vietnam as a consultant to the BBC. We agreed there was something magical about the way we’d met. Giggling, we agreed we had no choice but to spend the next few days together until it was time for me to leave. When I expressed my desire to visit the Cao Dai Temple and Nui Ba Den Mountain in Tay Ninh, Tran bowed and insisted we all go together and that I spend the night at Giau’s home in Thanh Ta on the way there. The hotel provided a car rental service, he said, so we headed back to the Majestic to check out prices. The concierge told Tran the price, but Tran said it was too much.

       I suggested we think it over in my air-conditioned rooms over Heinekens and candy bars from my tiny fridge. Tran wanted Giau to test her English so we inquired about each other in a friendly way. It was fun. She sat with her hands folded in her lap. There were mauve and pink flowers on her scarf.

       Tran said he’d read Morley Safer’s book Flashbacks: On Returning to Vietnam (1990) and had enjoyed it immensely. Safer had said soothing things like “they died for democracy” that appealed to Tran. His father had been a province chief (the equivalent of a governor in the US) in the province where the CIA had built a sprawling training facility for its political cadre, and Tran was an American ally through and through. Tran especially liked Safer’s explanation that the war was lost due to language; a war lost in translation, so to speak.

       Lies and secrets and ill-intentions were better reasons why America lost the war it started. The North and South Vietnamese certainly understood each other. And (as I’ve written about elsewhere ) I didn’t know at the time that Safer owed Colby a favor from their days together in South Vietnam and that, in repayment, he slammed my book in The New York Times – which had not given me the opportunity to review Safer’s book, which had debuted a few months before mine. The race is fixed no matter what country you live in, but I had no intention of breaking the spell we were under by arguing politics with my newfound friends.

       We were tired and it was time for Tran and Giau to go home, so we arranged to meet the following morning at the hotel. Giau was scheduled to get an inoculation and Tran thought it would be smart to go to Saigon Tourist and check out their rental car and driver prices. We parted with hugs and kisses and high voltage hopes for electric times together.

***

       I took my Septra for my chest infection, and Lomotil for diarrhea, then wrote some notes and stepped out onto the veranda to survey the scene. Fowler had an apartment on Rue Catinat. His Vietnamese lover Phuong prepared his opium pipe every evening. He smoked four pipes before bed. He said the opium made him more alert. It also helped him forget his failed marriage. When Greene wrote the book in the early 1950s, it took two days to fly from Saigon to London.

       Forty years later the Majestic still had iron grills to repel grenades. In lieu of opium, I walked to the Continental for dinner. It was one of the personal things I wanted to do to soothe the ancient ache. Along the way I noticed how the Vietnamese girls stood close together holding hands, their slender wrists entwined. The cyclo drivers napped in their passenger seats, thin bodies sprawled in odd positions. A kid wanted to sell me something; he put his hand on my arm and rubbed his belly. I told him to scat. He tapped my back pocket. I pushed his hand away and he made a fist and an angry face. A cyclo sped by, its bell tringing.

       The evening was settling when I crossed the square where CIA Officer Alden Pyle had stood with blood on his shoes while parked cars burned in front of the National Theatre. The grand dining room had chandeliers and four gilded columns, and I was the first person seated. I ordered onion soup, chicken and potatoes, and a Heineken. While waiting for my meal, I imagined dashing CIA officers charming Vietnamese girls on the veranda. As I sipped the warm beer from a can, a black jacketed waiter tore toast into pieces and dropped them in a cup, scattered crushed onion on top, and added broth. Looking at the food nauseated me. I put my fork in it and pushed it around. The waiters stared, a trifle concerned.

       Two plump Western men in white linen suits were seated beside me. The soup tickled my throat. The chicken wasn’t boned and came in a brown sauce. For dessert I had tea and lime. I recalled what the guidebook had said: Wash hands before and after eating. I toweled off with a Wash & Dry and noticed a red blister on the top of my hand. It looked like an infected insect bite. Along with my appetite, I was rapidly losing weight and preconceptions.

       My check arrived: 47,637 Dong including tip. The men beside me had guzzled a bottle of red wine and their meal had yet to arrive.

       It was dark as I walked back to the Majestic. I walked for a while behind a woman who held a pole over her right shoulder, a basket dangling at each end. In the front basket her dinner roasted slowly over a wood fire; the basket behind held plates. People cooked meals on the sidewalk. The air was thick with charcoal smoke. “You. You,” someone whispered in my ear from a flickering shadow. I sniffed opium smoke. Two men sitting on motorbikes watched me curiously. Firecrackers popped for Tet. It was the year of the monkey.

       Riding upstairs to my room on a Nippon elevator reminded me of the trade embargo that was strangling Vietnam. A leg fell off a chair as I moved it in front of the two-channel color TV. A suited official surrounded by a rapt audience was being interviewed by a reporter while being serenaded by five girls in ao dais and a boy on a flute. Not the boy in the subway in London.

       I turned the TV off and went out on the balcony into the night. A mother with two kids, one an infant, the other crippled, camped across the street. A stream of lights was passing by, a parade of motorbikes, horns honking, engines sputtering, all turning right and heading up Bach Dang, then right onto Nguyen Hue, then right up Le Loi. Round and round all night, cruising Saigon’s mobius strip. The crippled child rose on crutches and hobbled down the street dragging his legs behind him. His mom turned the infant on its back on the pavement, knelt over the child, kissed it several times, picked it up and moved off after her other child. Was it possible her child’s whims determined where she went?

       Four people passed by on one scooter. Was that some kind of record? Everyone moved at the same pace, cruising the strip, making the jackhammer sound that made it impossible to sleep. There were Christmas lights and yellow blossoms on the mimosas. A few cars were parked in front of Maxim’s, the nightclub below. A cloud of carbon monoxide rose from Dong Khoi. Gasping, exhausted, I went downstairs to buy a few bottles of Apex drinking water for my voyage into the countryside. I had the strangest feeling that I’d become a disembodied spirit.

The Curse of the Puer Aeternus: Monday, 25 February 1991

“Tomorrow, Saturn is conjunct your natal Jupiter retrograde.  You begin to feel the effects today. Discipline is required to achieve your goals.”

Between the jackhammer motorbike noise on Dong Khoi, a leaky stomach and my excitement about the trip to Thanh Ta, I couldn’t sleep last night. Kept wishing I had a pipe of opium or a sedative to knock me out for six or seven hours. I’m not great at waiting or staying in the box. It’s been this way since grade school, staring out the window, fidgeting until the bell rang, then making my mad dash to escape the oppression of teachers and classrooms. It’s why I gravitated to outdoor work, climbing around in trees.

       According to Helen Poole, all this restless psychic energy is the result of having Uranus at the top of my chart. Tumbling head over heels, not spinning like a top, Uranus represents rebellion against authority. Mercury, the planet associated with creative expression and the Jungian “puer” (Peter Pan) archetype, is opposite Uranus at the bottom of my chart. This powerful aspect means, according to Helen, that I’m a wise-cracking trickster troublemaker who requires massive amounts of self-discipline to achieve my goals.

       What else is new?

       Helen calls it, “The curse of the puer aeternus.”

       I stepped onto the second-floor balcony, filling my lungs with urban emissions and odoriferous emanations from the Saigon River. Dong Khoi was shaking awake in the mottled light of dawn. An old woman swept the sidewalk with a straw broom. Two men jogged down the street toward a park where a crowd was practicing tai chi, their fluid moves prompting me to do my own stretching exercises, fingers interlocked, palms pushing up above the head, hands behind the back pulling up to relieve the strap of tension across my shoulders. Bending and twisting and moving the qi energy in my body into the flow.

       Twenty minutes later I felt alive. Took Septra, Lomotil and Pepto in preparation for breakfast. I wore black slacks, a checkered shirt, sneakers, a baseball cap. Stuffed a change of underwear and socks in my day bag with a clean shirt and pants, the obligatory bottle of water, camera, notebook. Made sure I had plenty of Dong and the three Benjamins, one each in my money belt, shoe and wallet. Passport, visa, medicines. Enough for three days.

       Ready to go, I stepped again onto the balcony above a sign that said Maxim’s Dancing and Restaurant; a man with a view, hoping to become a part of the world. A thin Caucasian in a white shirt with a briefcase darted by on a motorbike. A spotted dog hustled down the street on an urgent canine mission. In Saigon, dogs run free. The homeless were setting up camps and the cyclo drivers edging into place on the corner across from the hotel. One of them, sporting a New York Yankees baseball cap, saw me and waved. They probably make wonderful informers for the police, though there’s never any sign of authority; no dog catchers, traffic cops, patrol cars to be seen. No need. Everyone’s waiting, watching, hoping you’ll erupt in a geyser of cash.

       The buffet table was piled with fresh fruits, juices, meats, breads, rolls, and toast. A chef was ready to cook eggs to order. I chose scrambled eggs, coffee, toast, and a few scraps of fried beef. The other guests wisely went for the papaya. It was strange being hungry but not having an appetite. I poked my fork in the food and stirred it around the plate. The coffee was strong and thick.

       After breakfast I sat on the veranda sipping coffee and watching the action on Bach Dang, the street running parallel to the river. What a show it was, a three-ringed circus on wheels. More going on than one person could possibly follow. A man on a customized motorbike breezed by peering through the feathery leaves of four huge potted bamboo plants on his handlebars, followed by a kid with an electric guitar slung like a rifle across his back, ready to rock ‘n’ roll. Next came a guy with an alert black dog sitting properly (ears pricked up) in a wicker basket on the handlebars. A man zoomed by on a bike piled high with huge blocks of ice, followed by a man whose bike held a rack of pineapples and a pretty woman in a white ao dai, legs crossed, sitting sidesaddle atop the fruit. A succession of lithesome girls scooted by wearing conical hats and long blue, red and black gloves that stretched to the elbow, each one an individual fashion statement.

       The tai chi and badminton crowd packed the park. The badminton players went at it with gusto.  A car with the radio blasting pulled up in front of the hotel, catching everyone’s attention. The dining room was filled with guests, mostly groups of men piling food on their plates. I could overhear German and French, some English and languages I didn’t recognize, Russian or perhaps Hungarian? Everyone exchanged glances, wondering the same thing.

        The Majestic hotel chain has quite a history. The Americans who formed the Foreign Relations Council met at the Paris branch in 1919. This particular hotel, built in 1925 and purchased by a Corsican entrepreneur after WW2, was a favorite watering hole for the American bureaucrats, spies and correspondents who orchestrated the Vietnam War.[3]Fulfilled after a tasty meal at Maxim’s, they’d relax at the rooftop bar and cast their inebriated gaze over the lantern lights rippling on the river and watch the aurora borealis of rocket and mortar attacks in the suburbs. A thrilling show, the Fourth of July every day, well worth the investment.

        The two top floors had been gutted in a fire of suspicious origins a few months prior and were closed to guests. And though the vigilant bellhops could tell if anyone went up the elevator, I planned an excursion to the rooftop on the night of the Pisces full moon. I planned to bring a few beers and curse the warmongers who still glorify themselves for destroying Vietnam.

       After eating, I sent a telegram to Alice, telling her I was off to the countryside and might be out of touch for a few days. Near the front desk was a bank of phones for international calls and a clerk selling stamps if you wanted to mail a letter. The language barrier, however, turned simple tasks into an ordeal. It took ten minutes before I understood the rate: 87 cents per word. Trying my hand at the economical language of telegram prose, I said: Greetings. BBC in another hotel. Being ignored. Made Viet friend. Hope to visit countryside today. All’s well. Doug.

        If you’re going to toot, toot sweet.

       Five minutes later Tran and Giau arrived. We were glad to see each other and our enthusiasm grabbed the attention of everyone in the room. Tran and Giau were the only Viets, other than staff. I invited them to have a bite to eat, my treat. We took a table and they grabbed soup and noodles. It was interesting how they held the bowl in one hand and sucked the noodles or rice from chopsticks with the other. After eating, Tran cleaned his teeth with a toothpick, cupping it behind one hand.

        Tran said my digestive problems were because the Vietnamese cook with animal fat, not vegetable oil. He said it always took him a few days to adjust, but that he’d been in Vietnam for over a month and all was well. Then he said that he wanted Giau to practice her English. She blushed when she spoke, looking down and biting her lower lip. Tran encouraged her and I did my best to engage in formal pleasantries: “How are you this morning? How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

       Her voice was a soft soprano like silver wind chimes. Her eyes sparkled. Meeting an American author and having a meal in the Majestic were new experiences for her.

       Giau and I were uncomfortable with the forced conversation, but Tran insisted. For two years he’d been arranging her passage to America and it was crucial for him that she fit effortlessly into the scene. I watched their interaction: Tran’s urge to control; her resistance and annoyance with his constant persuasion. She looked at him sideways, made subtle gestures and sighs to try to get him to stop. But he persisted.

        Everywhere you go it’s the same thing. It reached the point where Giau clenched her fists and refused to say anything more.

       After several awkward minutes, in which Tran smoothed things over, the conversation went back to normal. We reaffirmed yesterday’s decision to get a car and driver, see some sights, then head to Giau’s house. Planning the adventure got our spirits soaring and after retrieving Giau’s Honda motorbike from a curb-side parking lot, we headed to the Saigon Tourist office a few blocks up the street. Giau was driving, Tran squished behind her, me squished against Tran, my hands on his hips for balance as we bobbed and weaved through the maniacal traffic. Luck was with us and the rates were much cheaper at the tourist office than at the hotel. Through Saigon Tourist, 200,000 Dong (forty dollars) covered everything up to 100 kilometers including driver and gas.

       Tran kept the process moving but it was slow going. Before Saigon Tourist would give us the car and driver, we had to get a travel pass at the local police station. We were required to notify the police that we were traveling to Thanh Ta and Tay Ninh and we had to complete some forms upon our return to Saigon Tourist.  It was after ten by the time we were done.

       Next, we took Giau to the clinic where she was scheduled to get her immunizations. There was a ton of red tape, so Tran decided it would be easier if they handled that process alone. I agreed. He hailed a cab and directed the driver to take me back to the hotel. Along the way the cabbie offered to take me to a place where I could get a massage. In every city in the world, it’s always the cab drivers who know where you can get a massage.

       Back at the Majestic I broke the news to the clerk that I would not be using the hotel’s car rental service. I got a dirty look. As I retrieved my room key at the front desk, the disappointed clerk handed me a message from the BBC boss Peter Molloy asking me to call him at the Caravelle. I did. He asked how I was doing and I said fine, and then he asked for names of any Vietnamese I thought he ought to meet. I read the list of revolutionaries Don Luce had referred me to. Luce, incidentally, was the civilian aid worker who in 1970 had revealed the existence of the “tiger cages” in which the most recalcitrant political prisoners were kept for reeducation on an island off South Vietnam’s southern coast.[4]

       Molloy, of course, wasn’t impressed, which was fine by me. I didn’t want to get bogged down in BBC business. I wanted to venture out with Tran and Giau. My indifference, however, aroused his curiosity, so he asked what my plans were. I told him I’d met some Viets and that we were planning to take a trip together. He suggested we meet for dinner at 7:30 on Wednesday evening, the day after I got back. I agreed and we said goodbye.

       By 12:30 there was still no sign of Tran and Giau. I was surprised at how dependent I’d become on Tran. His friendship allowed me to communicate, travel, get involved. Without him I was lost, a babe in the woods.

        In a futile attempt not to do something stupid, I wrote down some thoughts and impressions, which made me feel like I was accomplishing something. Then I watched some TV. But soon I was standing on the balcony and obsessing about wasting away in a hotel room while Saigon thrashed around outside. By 2:00 I went down to the bar for a sandwich and a beer. Watching the traffic, I felt like life was passing me by.

       At 3:00 I left a note for Tran at the front desk, saying I’d be back in an hour, and took off for the Caravelle to see if Lillian Morton was there. It was risky, yes. The chances of the note being delivered were slim but that’s how it is in Saigon: a letter sits in a pigeonhole until someone asks for it. If I hadn’t asked at the desk if there were any messages for me, no one would have mentioned Molloy’s note. But at least I was back in the swim of things.

       I was blithely walking up the street when, through the din of traffic noise, I heard my name. It was Tran calling me! The place where Giau was getting her inoculation was only a few blocks from the hotel. They had just completed their business and were walking out the door when they spotted me passing by. Five seconds later and all would have been lost. Another incredible coincidence.

       Amazed and perplexed, Tran asked me what the hell I was doing! “You’ve got to be more patient,” he said. “Dealing with the bureaucracy here takes forever.” As Tran explained, the emigration officials had held up Giau’s paperwork until Tran sweetened the pot. They could tell he had money and knew they had the upper hand, so nature took its course. Tran was steamed but Giau was accustomed to the system and had taken it in stride.

       But we were back together, on track, and the prospects of adventure in the face of oppressive bureaucracy and planetary alignments had our collective spirits soaring. We walked over to Saigon Tourist and, while we waited for the car and driver to meet us out front, we bought coconuts from a vendor and sipped the milk through straws. I mentioned to Tran that I had promised to buy a pair of black silk pajamas for Alice and he said we should stop off at the Saigon Market to buy some material before we headed to Thanh Ta.

       The rental car, meanwhile, pulled up. It was a sub-compact driven by an older woman. A crowd rubbernecked while Tran examined the car, deemed it too small, and sent it back. Fifteen minutes later the woman returned with a larger model, which Tran accepted. Tran and Giau got in the back, I sat in front beside the driver,  and we headed down Le Loi toward the Saigon Market. Upon arriving at the Market, Tran checked the odometer and discovered that the woman driver had tacked on fifteen extra miles! Tran was furious and insisted that she take us back to Saigon Tourist where he reported her indiscretion. We were given a new driver, a reliable fellow named Tuan who would later save my sorry ass.

       It was late in the afternoon when we finally arrived back at the Market. And what a spectacular place it is. We entered through a pale-yellow archway upon which is drawn a painting of a fish beside a cow that looked remarkably like Elsie. The place was packed with people including a dark army of pickpockets. Tran warned me to hold tight to my travel bag.

       Inside the arcade was a labyrinth of narrow, crowded aisles winding through hundreds of stalls overflowing with a dazzling array of commodities. Familiar with the layout and excited to be of service, Giau led me by the hand to a stall brimming with rolls of brightly colored fabrics, solids, stripes, and polka dots. While everyone stopped and stared at me, as usual, Giau had the vendor show me a selection of black silk. On her suggestion, I agreed to buy the best of the lot. She then asked for Alice’s measurements: one does not buy premade pants in Saigon; one buys the material and has the pants made to order. As a personal favor, Giau offered the services of her younger sister, who, by great good fortune, was a tailor in Thanh Ta. I bought enough material for two pairs of pants.

       I told Tran I wanted to buy a gift for Giau’s mom, maybe some flowers. But when Tran told Giau what I had in mind, she gave a disapproving frown and said in Vietnamese, “No, no! Something practical!” Fruit, she suggested. So off we went to the grocery section of the Market.

       The food stalls were located in the rear by the railroad tracks. The place is unsanitary by American standards. There’s no refrigeration and you see sights that you’d never see at Stop and Shop: a guy cutting up fish while picking his nose; a guy squatting barefoot beside an array of silvery plates piled high with squirming eels; women squatting on the floor cutting up fish or meat or vegetables while their naked kids play amongst the scraps of discarded food.

       While Giau bought bananas and papayas and oranges for her mom, I reflected on the irony: the sight of all the food made me hungry, but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t force myself to eat. I’m thin to begin with but as I stood inside the market, taking pictures of two tiny waifs, I realized my pants were sliding off my hips. I had a visceral feeling that whatever nutrition was stored in my body was gone. I was operating on psychic energy alone. It was frightening and exhilarating.

       Tuan, our driver, was smoking a cigarette and waiting for us when we emerged from the market. It was late and Tran decided it would be faster if he drove the Honda while Giau rode with me and Tuan. I sat up front, Giau in back leaning forward and giving directions to Tuan in Vietnamese. I contented myself with observing and taking notes.

       Driving through the northern outskirts of Saigon was like driving through a chaotic swap meet. The blacktop road wound through the urban sprawl past an endless succession of hovels, boney animals, sad palms and congested traffic belching exhaust fumes and kicking up clouds of dust. It was the dry season and everything seemed coated with layers of grime. No plush green lawns with inlaid sprinklers. What water there was stank in shallow stagnant pools. People weren’t standing in driveways holding garden hoses watering flowers or cleaning cars. They sat around with an expression I couldn’t read –  maybe stoically waiting for May to bring the rain and wash everything clean.

       Twenty minutes into the ride we turned off the paved road and drove two kilometers down a dirt road which ended at a neighbor’s house. Tran was waiting. He showed Tuan where to park, then he put me behind him of the Honda and we took off down a narrow path. We were in the pristine countryside now, twisting and turning in between palm trees, bumping over roots and loose rocks, Tran struggling not to spill over. Soon the path was passing along a rice paddy. Two young women dressed in black pajamas and conical hats were bending and pulling clumps of rice out of the mud. I was overwhelmed.

       Minutes later we arrived at Giau’s house. There was a sense of being at a campground in a national park. The family was expecting us, but they were overwhelmed too. Her mom was speechless as I handed her the bag of fruit. Like young boys anywhere, Giau’s brothers circled around me, beaming with curiosity. In a gesture of goodwill one of them climbed a palm tree in the front yard and descended with a coconut. Then he harvested more edible fruit from another type of tree. Another brother soaped himself down in the four-foot-wide canal that separated the front yard from a small square of solid ground upon which sat an enclosed stone Buddhist shrine surrounded by cultivated fruit trees. Beyond the shrine was a stretch of rice paddy ending in a tree line. Behind and on both sides of the house was forest.

       Ten feet of front yard separated the canal from the family’s rectangular, tiled front porch. The front of the house was open like a lean-to, the tile roof supported by wooden posts. The house was wood stick construction. Inside, the living room was paneled with blue boards on which hung paintings of the Last Supper and the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus. At night, the Honda was parked in the living room.

       Within five minutes of arriving I was feeling otherworldly. Tran had taken off his dungarees and shirt, stripped down to shorts. Also in his shorts, Tuan was sitting bare-chested on the floor laughing and playing cards with Giau’s brothers like they’d known each other forever. Giau’s mom was busy cooking dinner on an iron grill over a charcoal fire. The kitchen had a ventilated straw roof and a clapboard wall to let out the pungent smoke. The family’s prize pig lived in a small pen adjacent to the kitchen; inside the kitchen, chickens clucked inside two huge red earthen crocks. Behind the kitchen, abutting mom’s bedroom, was a cement slab and a bucket of water. The brothers slept on the wooden cots in the living room. Giau had her own tiny bedroom.

       The ingredients for supper came from their surroundings. Giau’s family practiced Deep Ecology, taking only what they required from Mother Earth, returning whatever was left. Roughage came from broad-leafed shrubs beside the house, fruit from the trees, rice from the paddy, meat from domesticated animals. Pork intestines came from the family pigs, flavored with nuoc mam. The piece de resistance, fried fat frogs, were captured out back by one of the brothers.

       We ate on the porch and, as the honored guest, I did my best to show respect by sampling a little of everything. But tasting was all I could stomach, much to mom’s disappointment. She hardly spoke a word, other than to inquire about my squeamish lack of appetite. Giau’s brothers, however, had a few questions for me, which Tran passed along and I did my best to answer. Was I married? Did I have children?

       After dinner we shared cigarettes and Tran made a point of explaining that Giau’s family was middle class by Vietnamese standards. Her deceased father had been an official and the family had status. But without the father’s support the family fortunes had declined – until Tran married Giau. Having accepted responsibility for her, he had taken on her entire family as well. As he explained it, her mother was now his mother and her brothers (he had ascribed each a number) were his brothers.

       Tran regularly sent money from America and while in Thanh Ta, he did what he could to make life easier for Giau and her family. Thanks to Tran, the household had electricity. It was the old-fashioned double wire type (the insulation was hanging by strands and falling apart), which Tran had installed himself, but it enabled the family to enjoy television and other amenities. The household also had disposable cash provided by Giau and her sister, who co-owned a beauty and tailor shop in Thanh Ta.

       As we relaxed after dinner, Tran told me more about himself, most of which I’ll keep private. What’s important is that after the war, different members of his family chose different paths. While Tran wallowed in a succession of refugee camps waiting to enter the US, one of his sisters became a Party member and was currently a high-ranking official with the Saigon Bank. Such divisions and suspicions existed everywhere but were too subtle to be seen by outsiders. The situation was reminiscent of the border towns in Northern Ireland I’d been in five years earlier, where a tourist feels the conflict’s breath on his neck, but rarely sees its face. As a US citizen, Tran was under surveillance by the policeman who lived next door.

       After showing me the family’s photo albums, Giau and her mother cleaned up and I stepped onto the patio. The rationality had been wrung from my right-brained Western mind and my nervous system was open to every sensation. A surge of Kundalini energy shot up my spine; for one incredible moment, I was super aware of the multidimensional, mystical nature of the cosmos.

       Tran emerged and suggested we close the evening with a walk around Thanh Ta. We headed down a narrow path, Tran and I on the Honda, Giau and one brother on bicycles, another brother happily running behind. We parked at the end of the path and walked together up a black-topped road through the forest. It was pleasantly warm, the night closing in, when I walked under the tall gilded wooden archway into the village. I was on the other side of the world and yet that rural Vietnamese village felt strangely familiar. It had the feel of a tight-knit community anywhere; intimate, self-contained.

       The center of town was packed with people, many of whom were doing some lazy, last-minute shopping at the open-air market stalls. All was suspended in time, illuminated by the level light of the setting sun. The shadows gradually covered the village in cool, silent darkness. No streetlights, no cascade of noisy cars with glaring headlights. Just serenity. I walked among the subdued glow of lanterns, listening to and looking at everything. Fish with whiskers in a flat pail, eels, stacks of fruit on tables, a small child butchering meat, people squatting near the food. The eerie glow of TVs from wide-open houses on stilts.

       The curious villagers watched me intently. They were talking about me. One man shouted to Tran, asking if the fair-skinned foreigner was a Russian.

        “No,” Tran replied triumphantly. “American!”

       Tran whispered that I was the first American to enter their village in sixteen years. The news spread fast and soon a crowd was following us. Never before had I been the object of such scrutiny. Three young girls linked arm-in-arm and giggling uncontrollably shyly approached and cautiously touched my arm, just to see if I was real. And I was. Never before had I been so keenly aware of my humanity. How strange, I thought, that I must travel halfway round the world to awaken to that most fundamental fact.

       At the same time I felt detached, an actor in a play. I was amazed at the marvelous novelty of me being there. And every step added to that disembodied fascination until I stepped into a café and, seeing a Madonna poster on the wall, was shaken from my dream into the moment.

       We sat for half an hour in the café, sipping tea, ebbing with the day. Young boys played nine ball on pool tables out back. Then we returned to Giau’s house and watched a video of Tran and Giau’s wedding. Giau sat close so that our arms touched. Her smile radiated affection.

       Love opens the heart and cleanses the soul. But it doesn’t solve problems. Giau’s commitment to Tran was shaky. He was twice her age, jealous, possessive and fraught with anxiety at their long separations. Giau was attractive and impatient with Tran, who could not move her through the bureaucracy fast enough. There was a lot of tension between them.

       To her, I may have represented liberation. Or romantic adventures. Who knows?

       The boys and Tuan shared the cots in the living room. Tran and Giau moved into mom’s room. Where mom slept, I don’t know. I was assigned to Giau’s room, which was about the size of a walk-in closet. I put my day pack on the floor, took out my medicine and water bottle and set them on her tiny vanity beside her teddy bear, cosmetics, and cassettes. On the bedpost was a photo of Marilyn Monroe. I undressed, changed my underwear and slipped under the mosquito net. The bed was barely big enough to hold my body.

Nui Ba Den: Tuesday, 26 February 1991

“Saturn (karma) is exactly conjunct Jupiter retrograde (dharma). It’s a challenging day.”

Last night, after everyone else went to bed, I thought about my father. What would he have thought about me being in Vietnam? Was I finally getting a sense of what it was like for him in the tropics, minus the combat and imprisonment?

       My father was captured while on patrol in New Guinea and spent two years in a Japanese POW camp in the city of Tacloban on the island of Leyte in the Philippines. The prisoners, naturally, called the place The Hotel Tacloban. But when my book The Hotel Tacloban was published in 1984, the Australian military establishment immediately called my father a fraud.

       It’s wrenching to watch someone you love publicly smeared. But sadism is the essence of the military and after the Tacloban camp was liberated, the army gave my father a choice: sign a non-disclosure agreement or be tried for mutiny and murder.  Along with the combat horrors he relived every night, being forced to internalize his POW trauma led to a coronary thrombosis in 1972 at age forty-seven.

        When a member of the medical team that evacuated my father, Elmer Voss, sent me a letter corroborating my father’s story, the military made him retract his statement.[5] But that’s the military; it imposes blind obedience on soldiers so it can use them as cannon fodder. It coerces civilians too, spending billions to propagandize them into believing that people who drop bombs on cities are heroes. And people do believe in the myth because to do otherwise would diminish the sacrifices made by their active-duty and veteran family members. It’s why so many MAGA Southerners continue to wave the Confederate flag and venerate their slave owning ancestors; that and hereditary racism.

       What was meaningful to me was that my father tried with all his heart and soul to shed the mindless bravado so many American males are imbued with from birth; the abusive stud routine that, with practice, calcifies into an impenetrable shell around a false self. My father transformed himself before my eyes into a human being, so we could heal. That’s what mattered. Which is why my father’s POW experience is an allegory that recurs in my books: all Americans are prisoners of war – of the relentless military propaganda that glorifies warriors and war.

       Sometimes at night I see my father as clearly as when he was alive: the crinkled lines around his grey eyes and his clipped white mustache – but never his cocky, reassuring smile. A gaunt troubled ghost, he stands mournfully at the foot of my bed. It’s chilling. At times I forget our reconciliation and hate him again for projecting all his pain on me, my mother and my sisters.

       When I conjured him that night in Giau’s bedroom, it had been one year exactly since he’d passed away. My mother would pass away on the same day – February 26 – thirteen years later. It was a joke between my sisters and me that we ought to stay on the couch on that inauspicious day. But there I was in Vietnam.

       At dawn, the family dog started barking and a helicopter hovered overhead. I didn’t hear it approach – it was just there, whirling loudly. Why? While I waited for it to buzz off, I wondered how it affected the locals. It occurred to me that an unlucky squad of American soldiers might have been ambushed in the rice paddy across the canal. I envisioned their ghosts drifting across the misty fields, mingling with the ghosts of Giau’s neighbors killed by Americans in helicopter gunships. The hairs on my forearms tingled.

       A few minutes later a neighbor set off a barrage of firecrackers in honor of Tet. The roosters started crowing. The spastic muscle in my stomach twitched provocatively. Exhausted, I laid in Giau’s tiny bed under her gossamer mosquito net, watching the first rays of sunlight filter through the cracks in the pastel blue boards in the roof above my head. My only concern was that I might miss some new sensation or experience.

       I rolled up the net and poked through my day bag for my horoscope. The full moon was 36 hours away and I could feel it coming. Transiting Saturn the disciplinarian was exactly conjunct my natal Jupiter (my benevolent ruling planet) retrograde in Aquarius. “Opportunity and over-confidence,” Helen said, then added ominously, “leading to a confrontation with authority and a crisis of values.”

       I tightened my belt to the last notch to keep my pants from falling off. I hadn’t felt this wasted since I was starving, selling blood and living on uppers and downers in San Francisco in 1973. I took my morning meds with a slug of bottled water, combed my hair in the mirror on Giau’s tiny vanity, said “good morning” to Marilyn Monroe, packed my gear and walked outside.

       As the family emerged, I lined them up for photos on the patio. Everyone was excited about the trip to Tay Ninh, especially Giau’s mother. In yet another amazing example of synchronicity, she had long desired to visit Nui Ba Den, the sacred Black Virgin Mountain outside Tay Ninh City, five miles east of Cambodia – the place I’d promised my Vietnam veteran friend Jack Madden I’d visit and say a prayer for him. She needed time to fuss and dress in her finest white outfit. While she prepared, Tran, Tuan, one of Giau’s brothers and I motored into Thanh Ta for breakfast at Tran’s favorite café, where, to his immense satisfaction, we were the center of attention. As we ate cakes and sipped coffee, Giau’s brother told Tran that their police officer neighbor had walked by the house on the path along the canal, which is why the dog barked.

       I was glad to get a closer look at the village. On the other side of a low sesame colored wall separating the café from a private residence, a family was cooking breakfast over a wood stove. They eyed me intently. A young girl tried to appear nonchalant while she squatted and sucked up her noodles, but her head kept turning in my direction and when we finally made eye contact, she smiled. People on bicycles pedaled by on their way to work; they all turned and looked. A parade of girls in smart school uniforms marched by in single file like ducklings behind a mother duck. Across the street a sad dog sniffed around a lumber mill. A shop owner lined up dozens of tiny blue, orange and red wooden dolls on a countertop. I picked at my food.

***

       Half an hour later we assembled back at the house. Before we departed, Giau handed me two pairs of black silk pajamas. Her sister had worked on them late into the night and had dropped them off while Tran and I were eating breakfast. Feeling an incredible sense of gratitude and good fortune, I folded them into my bag. I promised myself that whatever else I had to leave behind, my notebooks and those two pairs of black silk pajamas would make it back to Massachusetts.

       Tuan took his seat behind the wheel in a workman-like manner. I was riding shotgun, pen and paper in hand to the amusement of the others. Tran sat behind me with Giau on his lap. Mom and two brothers also piled in the back, animated, chatting away. I kept having to turn and ask Tran what they were saying. He carefully selected which of their observations to relay to me.

       We crossed a river on a bridge paved with wooden planks and, as we motored west, I was thrilled to be following journalist Thomas Fowler’s footsteps to the Cao Dai Temple. I’d never expected this to happen. I looked for the mud watch-towers Graham Greene described in The Quiet American as lining the road every kilometer. He said they “stood up above the flat fields like an exclamation point.” They were nowhere to be seen, nor were the larger forts spaced at ten-kilometer intervals and manned by Moroccan and Senegalese Legionaries.

       As we drove along, we listened to the radio and Giau sang sweetly in my ear the words to a popular Vietnamese song. “Mister, Mister, you are my everything.”

      I asked Tran to identify the red and purple flowering trees and shrubs and vines I saw, and he deferred to Giau’s mom. She knew them all: paper flower, mango, bougainvillea.

       The two-lane, blacktopped road teemed with motorbikes, cars, bicycles and dilapidated trucks flowing in both directions. Tuan passed them all, honking the horn and muttering curses. The horn is the most important feature on a car in Vietnam and Tuan used it abundantly. Swerving is also crucial; the road is wide enough for three vehicles to pass simultaneously and Tuan often hugged the shoulder on either side while he passed, say, a truck piled high with day workers which itself was passing an ox cart piled with vegetables, while traffic came at us head on.

       Tuan was conscientious and maintained a steady pace while deftly avoiding the occasional buffalo, ox, horse. Life abuts the road in Vietnam. People waiting for rides stand with one foot on the road, chatting casually. Lazy dogs stretch in their sleep, their tails flapping close to the wheels of passing vehicles. Reckless chickens scratch for seed on the edge of the road. Houses and shops are pressed close; as we breezed by, I could see a man lying on a cot with his head in a barber’s lap; a young girl lying with her head in her mother’s lap, her mother picking lice from her scalp; two young girls holding hands while riding their bikes side by side.

       The car didn’t have AC, so after a bit we stopped in Cu Chi for a cool drink. Cu Chi was a trap for tourists who wanted a look at the famous tunnels where the Liberation Army maintained an underground headquarters. I wasn’t interested. I wanted to get to the Cao Dai Temple and Nui Ba Den.

       At a fork at Go Dau we got on Route 22 B, while 22 headed west to Phnom Penh in Cambodia. The further north we traveled, the fewer people we saw. There was a visceral feeling of desolation. A vast steaming plain stretched on either side. The backseat chatter subsided. Only Giau’s mom spoke; everyone listening intently to her words. I asked Tran to translate.

       Giau’s mother knew everything that happened within a fifty-mile radius of her village. In a country with two TV stations, gossip was the primary source of entertainment and mom was a champion. She and her clique made it their mission in life to process every juicy tidbit that made it into Thanh Ta’s rumor mill. Like soap opera fans, they never missed an episode.

       As Tran explained, it was known that two Americans were living in the vicinity. “Former soldiers who went over to the Vietnamese during the war and now want only to live peacefully with their families.” The locals knew that powerful US interests wanted them dead as a prerequisite for normalized relations. According to Giau’s mother, Americans periodically appeared and offered the locals hefty “rewards” to produce evidence that the deserters did indeed exist – and more importantly, where they lived.

       “Find the MIAs and the US will bring your family to America!” Tran said with a wry smile.

       To keep the rumors alive, US spies would give GI dog tags and ten dollars to anyone willing to turn them into the authorities. The idea was to provide the official US delegation of MIA and POW investigators with a plausible and politically correct pretext for being in Vietnam. By 1991 it had become a cottage industry. People accepted the money and thew away the dog tags. Everyone knew that the US spies – who, Giau’s mother laughed, all looked like me and, like me, pretended to be tourists or journalists – were playing a double game; while passing out dog tags, they were also trying to hire Vietnamese gangsters to locate the deserters and murder them – like in the novel The Parallax View by Loren Singer. It was chilling and ridiculous at the same time.

As we neared Tay Ninh City, we passed a series of French owned rubber plantations which had been guarded by US soldiers during the war. Next came the Tay Ninh cemetery and then the outskirts of Tay Ninh City. It had taken two hours to travel 60 miles.

      Circling the city we headed straight for the Cao Dai Temple. The sky was blue with puffy clouds. A sun-scorched promenade leading to the temple was packed with hundreds of people; I didn’t see any Caucasians. The grounds were expansive. On one side was a park with picnic tables under shade trees and stadium stands for loungers. Behind the temple were gardens withered after weeks of drought. The temple was beautiful to behold with two tall pastel yellow turrets in front and three levels of elaborately decorated, sloping roofs. Between the turrets was a curved portico with gilded sky-blue columns flanked by carved statues of armed, scowling, brown skinned warriors. Over the portico hung a huge yellow, blue, and red striped banner with the Eye of God casting its omnipotent gaze upon all who entered.

       As with any temple you remove your shoes before you enter. Inside are twenty-two pink columns, each with a multicolored dragon wrapped around it. Glorious stained-glass windows with red and green flower designs amplify sunlight that reflects off a polished floor. Open doors let in air. Visitors circulate quietly while worshippers pray on their knees to a huge star-speckled, beryl blue ball – the all-seeing Eye of God – on an altar appointed with red and gold chairs, a throne for the pope and a cluttered shrine decorated with flowers, vases and other objets d’art.

       Priests and priestesses in white robes guide tourists and explain the eclectic practices and principles of the Cao Dai religion. It’s a syncretic combination of fin de siècle spiritualism and the political quest to unite East and West. The Cao Dai pantheon includes Jesus, Buddha, Joan of Arc, Confucius, Victor Hugo and Sun Yat Sen. Something for everyone. God-lite for the masses. Fowler found it fraudulent and scoffed when a spokesman told him that within the Cao Dai religion, “All truths are reconciled and truth is love.” And not even the most devout Theosophist frolicking naked on the slopes of Mt. Shasta could have conjured up a religion whose mysteries are divined on a planchette.

       For me there was no incongruity, only a synthesis of symbol and substance with an underlying eroticism that evoked the shadow from the man. I found it provocative. Or perhaps it was the graceful girls in black pajamas and white conical hats sitting erect on bicycles, gliding by like elegant fairy queens. Then again, I feel the great spirit everywhere, from the New England forests to dolmens in Donegal. I never sought faith, not even in my father. Least of all in religion or nationalism. I just want mystical experience.

       Eventually our party put its shoes on and ventured outside to take photos. Then we sat in the stands and had a bite to eat. An adorable waif in a gigantic black knit hat served rice cakes while Tuan got directions to Nui Ba Den, which is where Giau’s mother wanted to go. For her, the Cao Dai Temple was all glitter and glitz; what she wanted was the animistic rush of the mountain. Tuan returned and we set out for our final destination.

***

       On our way north to the mountain we passed through northeast Tay Ninh City and stopped so Giau’s mother could buy souvenirs for her friends. While wandering around the market, Tran, Giau and I saw a squad of soldiers arrest a pickpocket. They were the first uniformed soldiers I’d seen in Vietnam since the airport. They stood in clumps in ragged green uniforms. There was a sense of being at an outpost. Dodge City. Cambodia was just a few miles away.

       We sipped on cokes, took photos, climbed in the car. It was mid-afternoon. As we drove we could see Nui Ba Den looming above the palm trees, solitary in that vast steaming plain, dark and mysterious. The tension started to build. Giau’s mother was rapt. Tran spoke reverentially of the Black Woman (Ba Den) who died on the mountain (Nui) after being betrayed by her lover, a faithless soldier. Tran said the mountain was haunted by ghosts.

       Ghosts, indeed. I thought about Jack Madden sitting in a cell in Greenhaven Correctional Facility, serving a life sentence for the torture/murder of a rival motorcycle gang drug dealer. Jack had been an introverted boy with an abusive father who set impossibly high standards. In an attempt to win his dad’s approval, Jack volunteered for Vietnam and joined the vaunted 82nd Airborne Division.

       Jack arrived in May 1968 and was assigned to a Long-Range Recon Patrol trained by a Special Forces unit in ambush and reconnaissance. On patrol, Jack sat so close to enemy soldiers he could smell them. After an ambush, the Lurps would hack-off the limbs and heads of the people they’d killed and hang the trophies from the barbed wire fence around their camp. Jack’s psychiatrist summed it up like this for the parole board: “His contact with war stressors encompasses numerous traumatic experiences which converge in his post-traumatic stress disorder.”

       At one point Jack and several comrades were detached to a Special Forces unit that provided security for a radio relay station on top of Nui Ba Den, a 3,300-foot peak honey-combed with Liberation Army tunnels, some of which extended into Cambodia where the Ho Chi Minh Trail ended. Augmented by Cambodian mercenaries, the Americans occupied a football field-sized base atop the mountain. Troops were deployed in bunkers and supplies were choppered in. No one could go up or down other than by helicopter. The Americans controlled the top and bottom, the Liberation Army controlled everything in between.

       The guerrillas probed the camp every morning, which was a slap in the face to the imperious US officers. Orders were issued. A team of twenty soldiers, including Jack, was ordered to walk from the top to the bottom to prove it could be done. The trip would take two days. But on the first night the unit was surrounded and attacked and when the guerrillas began to overrun their position the team leader called in mortar fire from above. Alas, he gave the wrong range and the mortars landed on the Americans. Jack told of a boy hit by a piece of shrapnel that entered his buttocks and exited his stomach. Of trying to patch the wound, hands full of intestines. Of a boy dying horribly so an officer could get a medal and a promotion.

       They made it through the night and in the morning helicopters came for the dead and wounded. The survivors walked to the bottom. It was one of those pyrrhic victories that symbolizes the Vietnam War and fueled Jack’s rage toward authority.

***

       In 1991, Nui Ba Den was still a dangerous place due to its proximity to Cambodia with its US and British trained anti-Vietnamese guerrillas. There were two checkpoints along the dusty road to the base of the mountain. The first consisted of a swinging gate manned by half a dozen plainclothes military police. A poker-faced cop demanded to see my papers. The sky had started out clear but now it was cloudy. I remember the furtive looks of the religious pilgrims waiting to get through the gate. Like Giau’s mother, their intent was to climb to the summit and pay homage to the Black Virgin.

       The cops huddled together to scrutinize my passport and visa. I could feel the fear building in the back seat. The cops were uncertain about what to do because I lacked a travel permit. Sensing all was not well, Tran went over and talked to them. When he returned he handed me my papers and spoke to Tuan. Tuan turned the car around and started to drive away.

       “What’s wrong?” I asked. I’d promised Jack I’d go to the top and say a prayer for him and all the other victims of the war. It was a solemn vow.

       “This is no good,” Tran said nervously. Giau’s family and Tuan agreed; not good.

       Again I asked why, fully expecting a more detailed, Western explanation. Instead I received a response that jolted me.

       “It does not matter,” Tran replied solemnly, folding his hands in front of his chest as if in prayer, bowing slightly. “If you wish to go back, we will go back.”

       I was shocked to realize how deferential he felt toward me. Tuan gave me a look that pleaded, “Please don’t send us back there, you crazy fool!”

       Giau’s family sat passively, resigned, as Tran told Tuan to turn around. With a look that said, “I will never forgive you,” Tuan did as told. The cops waved us through.

       We drove about a quarter of a mile to the second checkpoint. No gate this time, just a man who waved his hand in front of the windshield. We were at the end of the road in an area with food stalls, souvenir shops and pilgrims squatting in solemn groups before their ascent. In the distance I saw guided tours snaking up the spine of the mountain among scrubby trees, boulders and jutting rocks. The point of departure from my past.

       To our left seated under an umbrella at a card table were a grim-faced uniformed army officer and three plainclothes cops. Each in turn scrutinized my papers. The army officer looked at them angrily. Tuan slumped behind the wheel. The officer stood, sending a shock wave through the crowd. He barked orders to the police and to Tran. He walked quickly to a parked car.

       Tran said, “We must go with Captain Nam.” As I climbed out of the car, Tran got out too. Speaking over the roof he said, “You are being taken to police headquarters for questioning.”

       I was mortified at having put Giau’s family in danger. And worried. Vietnam was exciting but I didn’t want to spend a month in a backwater jail. I got in the back of the police car. Tran sat on my right. A young cop sat on my left. Another got behind the wheel while Captain Nam sat stoically in the passenger seat. We took off fast, tires kicking up clouds of dust, leaving behind a commotion at the base of Nui Ba Den. Tran seemed to float above his seat. I’d been studying his face for two days and thought I could read him pretty well. He was shaken. Under his breath he muttered, “Jungle law.”

       “Jungle law,” he repeated. “From now on there is only jungle law.”

       Hearing him speak made me think it was okay to talk. A glimmer of hope. I asked if anyone in the car spoke English.

       “No,” he said. “We can talk.”

       I asked where we were going. He said we were being taken to the police station in Tay Ninh, that Tuan and Giau’s family would meet us there and that we had to be careful how we handled ourselves.

       “Tran,” I said quietly. “I have a one-hundred-dollar bill in my wallet.”

       “Oh!” he said with a big sigh of relief. “That is very good. That will be very useful at the proper time. But don’t say anything now.”

       Tran said the only reason I’d been arrested was so Captain Nam could impress the locals with his power. All cops everywhere love having people look at them in awe. Tran was sure my arrest was a big show designed to break the boredom. He winked conspiratorially.

        It was exciting and I wanted to take out my notebook and write down my impressions. The feeling intensified moments later when we arrived at the police station. I wanted to ask Captain Nam and the other cops what their impressions of the Phoenix program had been. But it wasn’t the time to ask questions about the CIA so I sat submissively, waiting to be invited inside.

       A cop opened the car door. I stepped onto the dusty street. Giau stood bravely by the front door to the station and as I passed, she smiled and whispered in my ear, “Be careful. Please.” She touched my arm electrically.

       The station was sweltering hot. No AC or refrigerator packed with ice-cold beers. No blue suited cops with gadgets galore and the latest in Public Safety chic. Just concrete walls cracked with peeling paint, a tattered girly calendar, and barred windows with broken glass. We were told to sit in lumpy old easy chairs across from a sagging sofa upon which sat Messrs. Luan and Cong. In between us was a coffee table. Mr. Luan poured tea. “Yesterday’s tea,” Tran muttered disdainfully under his breath.

       Captain Nam wandered in followed by a pretty little girl, maybe five or six years old, in a pretty flowered dress. He casually took off his khaki army jacket like a businessman home from work. Underneath he wore a white T-shirt. He picked up his daughter, gave her a hug and kiss, carried her into the back room, ignoring me but sending a message: “We are not monsters here.”

       I appreciated the gesture. His casual behavior did a lot to reduce the tension. My major concern was remembering every detail while appearing repentant. All the experience I gathered serving detention in the high school principal’s office was finally paying off.

       Mr. Luan offered me a cigarette, which I graciously accepted. Mr. Cong reached across the table with his lighter and gave me a light. Smiles and nods all around. We sipped our tepid tea, puffed on Vietnamese cigarettes and the questioning began. Mr. Cong spoke to Tran while Mr. Luan stared at me with predatory curiosity, as if he’d captured a rare specimen and was debating whether to throw it back, eat it, or save it for later.

       When Cong finished a question, Tran repeated it in English. The cops had no way of knowing what Tran was saying. They judged if their message was getting across by observing my body language. I was sincere. Sat straight and looked alternately at Tran, Cong and Luan. Frowned politely when responding to questions that suggested I was up to no good, relaxed when speaking of my innocent intentions. By their responses, the performance seemed to work.

       They said that Captain Nam, a former VC military commander of the region, wanted to know why I didn’t have the proper papers authorizing my travels outside Saigon. Naturally, he would call police headquarters in Saigon to find out if I was a fugitive. But first he wanted to hear from me why I was in Vietnam.

       “I’m a tourist,” I said, Tran translating with authentic emotion, “and a consultant to the BBC. But BBC has no work for me, so I took the opportunity to visit the Cao Dai Temple and Nui Ba Den.”

       The cops left to report to their bosses, Tran explained, and to check my story. The part about the BBC interested them. Tran and I smoked cigarettes and chatted softly about nothing while we waited for the verdict. The ceiling fan squeaked overhead.

       Forty-five anxious minutes later a higher-ranking cop returned with Messrs. Luan and Cong. They were angry and sat down in a perfunctory manner with none of the friendliness they had before. The new cop looked hard at Tran and spoke harsh words. Suddenly on the defensive, Tran said the cops had placed a call to headquarters in Saigon. Headquarters located the BBC and sent someone to speak directly to Molloy. When asked if I was a consultant, the Bloody Brit said I had nothing to do with the BBC. At all.

       The angry eyes in the room fell on me. More unfriendly words were spoken and Tran, visibly shaken, said, “You’ve been officially arrested.” He snuffed a cigarette in the ashtray. “You’re going to have to stay in Tay Ninh for as many days as it takes to resolve the situation. You will be put up in the local hotel. You have no choice but to do what you are told.”

       Dramatic pause.

       I sat there wondering how I’d occupy myself in Tay Ninh while confined to a hotel room with no change of clothes, no bottled water, a dwindling supply of Pepto. I was upset at the thought that I’d miss my interviews in Thailand. And the more I thought, the madder I got at Molloy.

       Then the other shoe dropped. As I sat there stewing, the top cop looked menacingly at Tran and asked for his papers. Until then, Tran had believed that he and his in-laws would be allowed to go home unmolested. His only concern had been for my welfare. His priorities quickly shifted. His face drained of color as he handed over his passport and visa. Seeing that Tran was an American, the top cop leaped to his feet and blurted harsh words.

       “He is accusing us of being conspirators,” Tran sputtered. “CIA conspirators.”

       With that, the cop left the room in a huff. Tran was stunned speechless. His hands trembled as he lit a cigarette. He didn’t offer one to me. Framed in the iron-barred window above and behind him, Giau peered in. I gave the thumbs up sign. She smiled and waved back. Tran turned and looked at his wife, hopelessly defeated. He couldn’t look at me. I knew what he was thinking: that as punishment for his association with a suspected CIA agent, the authorities would not allow Giau to leave Vietnam.

       Our wait this time was shorter but harder. Ten minutes later Messrs. Luan and Cong returned with Tuan, our driver. Something unscripted had happened. Something magical. I didn’t know what but sensed the situation had turned in our favor.

        Mr. Cong spoke to Tran and asked him to translate. Tran listened submissively then turned to me. With a barely discernable, ever so cautious trace of optimism, he said, “You’ve been arrested, yes. But…,” and here he paused for dramatic effect, “you are no longer accused of being a spy.”

       I looked at Tuan, who’d taken a seat beside me. Tuan gave me a dirty look, looked away, busied himself with a cigarette. Clearly, he blamed the whole nasty and thoroughly avoidable situation on impetuous me. Who could blame him?

       Tran listened to Mr. Cong and translated his next words with guarded relief. While the police were busy checking my story, they were grilling Tuan in another room. Tuan had been in the army and had served honorably in Cambodia. The cops held him in high regard and believed him when he said about me, “He’s too stupid to be a spy.” As a result, we were going to be released. Tentatively.

       We were also entertainment and so, for the crowd-pleasing effect, Tran let the good news hang in the air. His adventurous spirit was visibly reborn. He was off the hook and back in character. “However,” he added reproachfully, “there is still the matter of your traveling without proper authorization. That problem must be resolved.”

       Tran nodded to Mr. Cong, indicating the message had been delivered. Mr. Cong spoke. Tran turned to me and, ever the honest broker, said: “The police have asked you a question. I must translate your response directly, so choose your words carefully.” I looked at Mr. Cong then Mr. Luan, and they looked at me. I nodded that I knew my lines. They smiled.

       Tran looked intently at me and said, “Do you know why you were arrested?”

       “Yes,” I replied, full of penitence. “This whole misunderstanding is my fault and I take full responsibility. I should not have traveled without the proper authorization. Tran and his in-laws were just along for the ride. I am entirely to blame.”

        The policemen smiled broadly and spoke more words.

       “Okay,” said Tran. “You agree that you broke the rule?”

       “Yes,” I replied earnestly. “I broke the rule.”

       Then the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. “Do you realize that you must pay the fine?”

       “Yes. I must pay the fine.” Twice more I was asked the question and twice more acknowledged I must pay the fine. After which our papers were handed to us and we were invited to leave. Ushered by our newfound friends in the Tay Ninh police department, Tran and I walked through a huge crowd of gawking spectators to the car, where Giau’s family had been sitting and waiting for over two hours. In a few minutes we’d be allowed to leave. There was only one thing left to do.

       I took one last look around dusty Tay Ninh, knowing I’d never see the place again. I’d never reach the top of Nui Ba Den to pay my respects to Jack Madden, as promised – and symbolically to all the America and Vietnamese victims of the utterly avoidable war. I felt a twinge of regret.

        Tran broke off a conversation with Captain Nam, who stood in a cluster of cops by the station’s front door. Tran walked with dignity through the crowd of spectators to the car. I rolled down the window. Everyone was watching eagerly. Tran said, “Now. Give me the money, now.”

       I handed Tran a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill. In the final analysis, it is all about the Benjamins. Moving deliberately, Tran held it between his thumb and forefinger in front of him, high and at arms-length, so everyone could see. At the station door he handed Mr. Franklin to Captain Nam. The old revolutionary smiled broadly and sincerely. How the money would be divided, I had no idea. But it was more money than any of them made in a month.

       Elated, Tran ran back to the car amidst the wild applause of the jubilant crowd. Tuan had the motor running like a getaway driver and by the time Tran climbed in the back, we were halfway out of town. We were free!

***

       Everyone loves a drama with a happy ending and no one in Tay Ninh had been disappointed that fateful day. Driving back, everyone agreed that what had happened was the biggest thing since the war. Everyone was singing and laughing, even Tuan. The mole on his nose was glowing.

       I started writing everything down, which brought peels of laughter from the back. I’d lived up to the myth of the American cowboy. I’d very likely exceeded expectations.

       While I scribbled, Tran described every detail of what had transpired, translating for my benefit. His rendition was wildly embellished, our courage and cunning – and unshakable comradeship –reaching legendary proportions by the time night had fallen and we’d arrived somewhere near home. There’d been a power outage, so we feasted that night (my treat) under lantern light at a fancy restaurant, amid laughter and warm breezes, our table set on a wooden bridge with a gentle stream trickling beneath it. It was a memorable meal, food piled high on platters; fish, pork intestines, potent nuoc mam, noodles, a grilled buffalo steak (which I devoured) and four cold beers for me.

       Everyone’s spirits were soaring, especially Tran’s. He wanted to prolong the moment, squeeze the most from the mood. Looking at me affectionately, he said that he felt we were spiritual brothers. “Sagittarians, born on the same day!” Fate had thrown us together, had bonded us for life for a reason. And because of that, with my permission, he desired to open his heart to me.

       Humbly I said, “Absolutely.”

       Tran confessed that while he enjoyed the freedom and amenities available in America, he only felt at home in Vietnam. Here he had respect. He never felt welcomed or accepted in America. He felt terribly alone because Americans are so god-damned judgmental. Most Vietnamese in America, he said, felt that way.

       “But not you, Douglas,” he said. No other American he knew would have gone to Giau’s village, slept in the house, eaten the food, treated everyone with respect. Any other American would have been offended by the lack of amenities and customs. “But not you, Douglas,” he said. “You are different.”

       I was glad to be back in his good graces. For the few moments it lasted.

       “I value your opinion, Douglas, more than anyone else’s I know,” he continued. “So I must ask your advice. I want you to tell me if I am doing right by Giau?”

       I looked at Giau. “Why don’t you ask Giau?” I replied.

       Tran was in shock. And before he could stop her, Giau stood up, looked me in the eye and said matter-of-factly, words I’m not at liberty to repeat here. Then she frowned defiantly and asked in perfect English, “Is it right for him to do that?”

       Her comments, delivered in perfect English, brought the conversation to a screeching halt.

       Now I was speechles. Talk about a crisis of values. I didn’t want to hurt Tran, but I felt an obligation to defend Giau. So I said, “No. It isn’t right.” Her frown melted and she smiled at me lovingly.

       Exhaustion and four beers had made me lightheaded. But I could see that Tran was devastated. One look around the table and it was obvious that Giau’s family understood perfectly well what had happened. A sad silence descended on our party.

       Tran sat sullenly on the drive back. At the road to Thanh Ta, he gave Tuan instructions to take me to my hotel. He walked away without a word. As Giau followed her husband and family down the country path to their home, she stopped and turned and blew me a kiss. They disappeared into the night, never to be seen again.

       Some things can’t be finessed.

***

Half an hour later I was at the front desk of the Majestic Hotel, reading two notes from Julie. In the first, which had been written before my arrest, she expressed her hopes that I was feeling better and asked me to fill out the form I needed to travel outside the city. She asked that I return it to her with three photos (which I did not possess and had no idea how to obtain) and my passport. She added that I should call her first thing in the morning to arrange to settle the hotel bill.

       The second note, delivered after my arrest, said I should not leave the hotel and that I should contact her immediately upon my return.

        The stage was set for the next drama.

Notes.

[1] Will the Real Daniel Ellsberg Please stand Up” (Counterpunch, May 2024)

[2] “The ABCs of American Interrogation Methods” (Counterpunch, May 2004)

[3] JFK stayed at the Majestic while in Saigon in 1951.

[4]   The My Lai Massacre and The “Tiger Cages” excerpt from The Phoenix Program by Douglas Valentine at

[5]   Elmer Voss letter: