We had three work shifts at the 330th and we rotated those each week: 8 a.m. until 4 p.m.; 4 p.m. until midnight (swing shift); and midnight until 8 a.m. (mid shift). On weeks when I had the swing shift, I would often wander off the hill to Pleiku. That involved walking past the small PX, out the heavily-guarded gates and down the road a bit to Highway 19. When I got down to the road, I had three choices:
1. Keep on walking down into the valley,
2. Stick my thumb out (someone in a jeep, ¾ ton truck or deuce and a half was always willing to give people a ride, or
3. take one of the ubiquitous TriLambretta taxis.
The small, three-wheel taxis were kind of fun and often held up to ten people though they were built for about four plus the driver. They were hot and dusty but everyone on them seemed to enjoy the rides.
I would, not too often, walk the 4 or 5 miles down to the city just for the joy of walking. The problem, though, was that the closer I got to the air force base, the dustier the road got. And, except in the rainy season when I never walked to town, the dust was worse than I used to see in those old cowboy movies about Laredo and Dodge City. I am going to add, very quickly, that there was very little danger in walking those miles because the road was so heavily trafficked. Teams were also sent out each morning to clear the road of possible mines before the first trucks rolled out of their bases to head to other bases. The traffic on Highway 19, mostly military vehicles, could sometimes rival in density the highways through some of our major cities. Most of that traffic went straight through downtown Pleiku and out to 4th Division Headquarters.
When I did walk down to Pleiku, I would often turn off to take the short side trip down to Lake Bien Ho. I rarely saw other Americans there, but always saw Vietnamese families and children. I did not venture much farther than the closest bank of the lake, never tried, as Thoreau did with Walden Pond, to measure the lake’s circumference or depths. And I was often a bit leery of being even that far off the main road. I went to the lake to get away, to pretend for a moment or two that there was no war, to see Vietnamese families doing normal things that had nothing to do with the political and military currents swirling around them. At the same time I was the equivalent, I know, of Shrödinger’s cat: my being there, observing things, brought what they were escaping to them. Einstein wrote to Shrödinger that “Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation.” I suspect that the normalization of the lives of the Vietnamese families at the lake was affected by my own “Act of observation.” Still, though, those few moments out by the lake were amazing to me…even if I were unwilling to try to walk all the way around it for fear of what I could not observe not too far away.
The last leg of the walk or ride was the dustiest, filled with vehicles carrying materials from the air force base to the 4th ID HQ. But a sense of town life also began to show up: women hanging laundry out, children playing in bare dirt yards, a few restaurants, and always, always, always, soldiers buying souvenirs and leasing women. Turning right on Le Loi Street past the school yard, I would get, eventually, to the open air market where men and women sold an amazing profusion of vegetables, fish and meat—all swarming with flies. Entrepreneurs also sold marijuana disguised as packs of cigarettes. They would take a pack of, usually, Salems and empty the tobacco from each cigarette. After that, they would push ground up marijuana into the paper tubes and repack the original container. A pack sold for approximately 500 piasters (approximately five dollars): the same price as an hour with one of the prostitutes.
Just past the market was an artist’s studio/gallery. “Song”—Vietnamese for river; Vietnamese for life. The artist, a young man of maybe twenty-five, drafted neither into the ARVN nor, apparently, into the Viet Cong seemed to exist by selling, mostly, velvet paintings of naked women and fully-dressed Elvises to the GIs. Once, in the back of the shop, he showed me his own work: landscapes and cityscapes of the Pleiku area, paintings of the children, of a war-torn area. The artist was an artist and his shop, when you got past the tourist stuff, may well have been what Vietnam should have been: a place where people could create art or, if not art, their own lives free of what happens when politics gives way to war.
One last stop: a small house farther down Le Loi Street, a tea house, where an elderly Vietnamese lady serves tea and small pastries in delicate china. I always enjoyed going there. The tea was a green, very clear tea and at the bottom of each cup were large poppy seeds. She would always drink with her customers. I always considered those tea-sipping (thus the insult) visits as brief moments of what passed for civilization.
Just a brief sidebar here: In Pleiku, back in 1967, the military tried very hard to get montagnard women to wear clothing over their breasts. Until I left in the middle of 1968, they had still been unsuccessful. As with other people in the province of what is now Gia Lai, the montagnards came to market both to buy and to sell. The only people who seemed concerned with their lack of clothing up top were the Americans.
After what always turned out to be a fairly long day, I usually hopped into a TriLambretta and headed back up to the hill. “The Neon lights Are bright?” Well, no. I didn’t go downtown at night and, should I have done so, there would have been no lights at all. Pleiku pretty much shut down altogether after dark. I mean, why present a visible target to whoever happened to be the enemy on any particular night?
One final note: Until Tet, 1968, I made those treks down to the city in civilian clothes and did not carry a weapon. After Tet, that was officially against procedures.
No comments:
Post a Comment