Leaving Vietnam
(concerning May 17, 1968)
[This is fairly long and has actually been published a few times, but it seems a good way to end my “friends among the indigenous population” parts of the blog. I’m making it two blog entries; please put up with it if you’re reading this.]
A night in a cheap bar. Nha Trang, South Vietnam. If I recall correctly, the French had called it Touraine, one of their beach resort cities when Indochina/Annam was their colony. [Remember Bloody Mary and Leah in South Pacific? They were Annamese/Indochinese/Vietnamese].
I am drinking ba-muoi-ba and talking with a young lady who says her name is Thich Duong Dang. I call her Dang (pronounced Zang in Vietnamese). She wants me to buy her another drink, but I know the drink will be very expensive tea with just enough alcohol in it to make it smell like "a drink." You see, Dang is a bar girl, maybe 19 or 20 years old, five years younger than I am. What money she earns she gets from having American GIs buy “alcoholic” beverages for her, hoping she’ll go to bed with them, but she will not and she is paid by the bar management based upon the number of expensive, watered-down drinks she can sell.
I get the impression (possibly mistaken) that she is enjoying herself. Her normal clientele cannot speak Vietnamese and she normally has to talk to them in some kind of pidgin English that resembles baby talk. We, on the other hand, can discuss the war, poetry, art, whatever we like, simply because I can speak in her language. Probably she thinks I am speaking pidgin Vietnamese!
I would like to get something straight immediately: I am not at the Doc Lap Bar for the purpose of leasing female companionship for the evening. Tomorrow, I am leaving Vietnam. I'll take a short flight down to Cam Ranh Bay and board what we have come to call a "Freedom Bird" back to the United States. I am in the Independence Bar ("doc lap" means "independence" in Vietnamese) to have a few beers, my last drops of "33" beer ("ba muoi ba" means "33" in Vietnamese) before leaving country.
Dang rubs the front of my leg with her foot as we talk...about Yeats as I recall. I have just done an execrable, unrhymed translation of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" into Vietnamese for her sake and she does not like all this talk of rising up and going to a wee small island. I know this is hard to believe: quoting Yeats in the kind of military level Vietnamese I have been taught to a young woman who probably doesn’t even like Vietnamese poetry, much less Irish...but there it is.
Dang is, and there is no other word for it, exceptionally beautiful. She wears a deep purple ao dai and white silk pants that fit tight around her bottom and then flows out from her ankles. Her skin is flawless and she has not had that operation some Vietnamese prostitutes get to make their eyes look more western. She is slender, with a small waist and bust that gravity has not yet had time to play with and that, I suspect, nothing else has ever played with. She is not really a prostitute, only a bar girl, and that is, if anything, a less honest profession.
In spite of curfews in Nha Trang, the Doc Lap never really closes; the bartender only turns the light inside down and the lights outside off. The imitation American rock band from Manilla does a heavy, syrupy version of "Satisfaction" and seques into "Feeling Groovy." Dang and I chat quietly. She invites me to her house for the evening.
"Much too dangerous for an American to go back to base so late at night." She kisses me on the cheek, "Plus, I want to talk some more." I give her 10,000 Dong/piasters (a little less than $10) to buy a bottle of Scotch and, at her suggestion, will meet her outside so no one will see her leave with an American. Now, I am not stupid. I know that as soon as she goes through the door she will vanish for the evening. After all, I've already told her I'm leaving Vietnam tomorrow. Actually, this morning, it's already after midnight.
The bartender laughs at me and tells me she is still a virgin and that I have wasted my money on her. But if I want a woman for the night, he has the prettiest in Vietnam, "Ah, choi oi!, dep lam!" I laugh back and tell him I want no other woman than Dang. When I get out into the narrow street in front of the bar, it's so dark I can hardly make out the road. This part of Nha Trang is filled with two-story buildings hanging over narrow streets and it reminds me of nothing more than a poor, older area of San Antonio that has not yet been gentrified.
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