I didn’t mind. I enjoyed being a fish out of water, getting things wrong, and laughing at myself. It made me feel like I was living in a movie, a Jack Lemmon movie, say, with a bumbling but well-intended lieutenant at an exotic foreign post. But I was beginning to wonder if it was the right movie for me, the one I wanted to claim for the rest of my life. That feeling grew stronger when Captain Tidd made me an escort officer and sent me out to accompany the brass whose chopper flights I’d been arranging. Tiny outposts in the Delta that had once been pins on a map in my office became achingly specific with their huddles of wood-floored tents and mascot dogs that ran out to greet the chopper with tails wagging. The guys who manned these places were no older than I was, and certainly no higher in rank, but their field greens, faded by sunlight and many river washings, were not like mine at all, where the creases made by Mamasan’s iron were damningly visible on the fabric. These guys sported long mustaches and love beads, like the hippies back in the States, and sometimes, for the sake of irony, they wore medallions around their necks that said WAR in big, blocky, warlike letters.
I know how like a dilettante it sounds to say that I wanted to be one of these guys. I was a staff puke running cocktail parties in Saigon and buying buffies for Mrs. Z, but what I really craved was the instant camaraderie and freedom and, yes, the potential danger of life in the field. I had no desire to kill or be killed, but I yearned for the dusty deprivation of these far-flung riverine kingdoms. When I wrote my parents to express these feelings, my mother wrote back nervously to say that I had a Lawrence of Arabia complex, never realizing how close she had come to the truth.
The vast gulf between me and the guys in the faded field greens was made clear once again when Admiral Z’s son came to Saigon on a short break from commanding a river patrol boat in the boonies. This was Elmo R. Zumwalt III, and, like his father, he had taken the nickname “Bud” to avoid the doofus-y sound of Elmo. Bud had the father’s stalwart looks and already showed signs of developing the trademark Zumwalt eyebrows. He was a nice guy, too, and we liked each other immediately, so the admiral looked pleased when his son and I hit the town together that night. I think he knew that Bud the Third needed the relief of a little hellraising, and I needed the company of someone my own age and rank for once.
We got shitfaced in the bars on Tudo Street and showed up back at the compound at an unmilitary hour, noisy and stumbling. The MP who stopped us was obviously itching to kick some junior officer butt until he recognized the distinctive name on Bud’s ID and sent us on our way with a salute. The admiral never spoke to us about this incident—at least not to me—but I later heard him chuckling about it with some visiting brass. I could tell he was proud of his son’s service and loved him dearly. And, like his wife and son, Admiral Z was calling me by first name now. It made me feel as if I had family in this sandbagged corner of the world.
CAPTAIN TIDD’S DUTIES as chief of staff kept him buried in paperwork. I could see the toll it was taking on him, especially since he couldn’t possibly unload on Admiral Z, his superior officer, or any of the staffers who were seriously career-oriented. I posed no such threat; my appalling lack of military ambition had long been evident to the captain. He could spill out his feelings with me, even reminisce a little, since we shared memories of Charleston and the Mediterranean. Assembling a few staffers, I threw a surprise birthday party for him one night at the Rex, a grand old Graham Greene–ish hotel replete with potted palms and gecko-flickering walls. I tipped the piano player to play “Those Were the Days,” which was sort of our song, oddly enough, and before the evening was over he got drunk and misty-eyed telling me about the time he and his wife and young son had paddled about blissfully in a small boat on the Potomac. It did him good, I think, and I was glad to do it.
It was Captain Tidd who received my request for a transfer to the boonies. He was decent about it, considering the trouble he must have gone to bring me to Saigon. He told me he understood the instinct completely but was worried about my training, or rather, ahem, the abysmal lack of it. I had arrived in-country without the usual survival training in Vallejo, California, where roughneck naval petty officers mock-tortured the newbies in Vietcong “tiger cages.” I had never been especially sorry that I’d missed that experience, but I agreed that it might be useful to learn how to fire the .45 I had worn on shopping trips with Mrs. Z.
So, while Captain Tidd cast about for a field post that might suit my limited qualifications, I spent five days in an Army training camp popularly referred to as Danger University. I was told even before the training began that I would be the first naval officer to graduate from Danger University. They called me “Navy” there, which at least offered a break from being called “Army” in Saigon by guys who felt compelled to abbreviate my first name. I learned how to wear a gas mask and shoot an M16 and set off a Claymore mine. These were all just training games, of course, but I could hear the sound of real gunfire, real war, just outside the perimeter wall, where the Vietcong were active. The letter I wrote to my family contained all this information along with the tellingly gay detail that I was getting a nice tan. I had also lost weight, I added proudly (I was 175 before I went!), thanks to plenty of marching and a deeply unappetizing VD film, in full color no less, they showed us one night before dinner in the mess hall.
There were several false starts before the Navy command settled on the right post for me. For a while Captain Tidd proposed Seafloat, a floating tactical support base that had just been built in the Cau Lon River at the southernmost tip of Vietnam. (My new friend Bud Zumwalt III was commanding a patrol boat down there.) Then there was a dusty village by the name of Moc Hoa (pronounced: Muck Wah) in the Mekong Delta, which seemed so certain for a while that it became my boondocks Bali Hai, the place that was calling me to my destiny, despite the unmusical sound of it.
I went so far as to set free the parrot in my Saigon hotel room, an untamed creature I had bought in a street market that had never much cared for me or the cage I had built for it. I couldn’t blame her. There had originally been two parrots in that cage (Ong and Ba, meaning man and woman) but Ong had died when I was away on an escort mission in the Delta, so my mamasan had shrouded him in aluminum foil and left him on top of the air conditioner in case I wanted to conduct funeral rites. Oddly, once set loose, the widowed Ba seemed to hesitate on the windowsill, looking back at me as if to seek my permission before flying off into the muggy black night. The moment seemed so profoundly symbolic to me that I wrote home about it to my family. I guess even parrots have their Moc Hoas, I told them. I have no idea what that meant, but it surely ranks as one of the more embarrassing sentences I have ever written. My mother, by saving all my letters, gets points—albeit in absentia—for helping me remember what a posturing little popinjay I could be.
EIGHT
I ENDED UP IN A PLACE called Chau Doc, a town on the sluggish Bassac River, near the Cambodian border. It was a combat base for the boats of the Brown Water Navy, which meant that I got to wear a snappy black beret with my now-faded field greens as I manned a radio in a sandbagged communications bunker on the edge of the river. There were only three of us in this naval unit, the other two being enlisted men under my command. Our job was to keep the Army from shooting at the Navy and the Navy from shooting at the Army, and both of them from shooting at civilians.
That was not as easy as it sounds, since our jurisdiction was the Navy boats patrolling the Vinh Te Canal, a muddy trough that linked Chau Doc to the Sea of Siam, eighty-seven kilometers away. The canal delineated the border—still does, in fact—between Vietnam and Cambodia. It was narrow enough that you could yell across it. There were Vietcong on one side, constantly trying to infiltrate, and our ARVN allies on the other. Add to that the roving farmers who were pretty much everywhere and the fact that the vegetation crept down to the water’s edge, and you have what was known, in the naval patois of the day, as a rat fuck. The jittery kids on the boats would see shimmering green ghosts in their n
ight observation devices and call in for permission to fire on them, sometimes relying on convenient racist shorthand. Hey, Sportin’ Life, I got three gooks in the starlight scope crossing the ditch.
What the hell did that mean, anyway? Were they our gooks or their gooks or farmer gooks just herding their oxen at night. It was my mission to sort that out. (Livestock was always good news, since it meant no one had to get fired upon.) I usually consulted a young Vietnamese Army lieutenant who stood watch at another radio in the same room. He would roll his chair over to my side and firmly clamp his knees around one of mine as we discussed troop positions. This meant nothing beyond friendship, I’m sure, but it always made me catch my breath. Sure, the warmth of his legs was bliss, but I was also worried that an American might walk in and see us. Vietnamese men had no issues with being tactile. They would link pinkies while walking in the street along the river, and the sailors out on the patrol boats would spoon with each other to keep out the chill when sleeping on deck at night. I knew this because an American officer told me so, snickering and contemptuous.
Yes, our radio call sign was Sportin’ Life. It was already established when I arrived, and I didn’t know until after I left that it was the name of the African-American drug dealer in Porgy and Bess, the Gershwin opera set in Charleston, of all places. I was Sportin’ Life Actual; Sportin’ Life 01 was a sailor named Olynger who had already seen action in the Delta. We became fast buddies, Oly and I. He was a big-hearted guy with an infectious chuckle, and I liked making him laugh. There was plenty to laugh about, too. I had not cleaned my M16, much less fired the damned thing, since Danger University, so Oly crept into my hootch when I was on watch and broke it down for me, cleaning and oiling it thoroughly. I was the only naval officer in the compound, so he didn’t want me to look sloppy. I was touched by that.
During an overnight visit to Saigon, Admiral Z asked me, over dinner at the villa, if there was anything I needed “up the river.” It didn’t take me long to tell him that a Jeep would be nice, thank you, sir. Three days later a Jeep arrived in Chau Doc on a barge. It looked like it had seen some action, but it meant liberation to me and Oly, since it got us out of the Army compound and gave us a prideful sense of identity as a Naval unit when we emblazoned the hood with our catchy command name (NAVLE-BCCR–III). We privately called her Nellybelle after Pat Brady’s beloved Jeep on The Roy Rogers Show. That’s what Oly remembers, anyway, so I must have called her that, too. I have a faint memory of wanting to call her Olivia Drabbe, in a nod to her Marine-green paintjob, but maybe I kept that joke to myself for fear it would sound too much like a hairpin dropping. Nellybelle was camp enough anyway.
Thanks to that Jeep, Oly and I became those guys from Route 66, forever blazing off in their Corvette to places of picturesque imperilment. It was an odd sensation at first, leaving Chau Doc behind without the use of a helicopter or a river vessel; it was like entering another dimension, and certainly a more dangerous one, since it made us an easier target for the VC. Now, on a whim, we could bounce down that long, elevated road through the rice paddies (with no fear whatsoever of me getting Jeeps Disease). We could stop off at Necco-colored Buddhist temples to shoot the breeze with a resident monk, or buy that roadside lemonade with the huge ice whenever we felt like it. Best of all, we could drive to the top of Nui Sam, a nearby mountain that had already excited our curiosity. We heard about it on our radio when a jovial cowboy voice we knew only as a call sign suggested we come up and visit.
Though it was known as “the highest friendly mountain in the Delta,” Nui Sam wasn’t very high; you could wind your way to the top in half an hour. The operative word here was friendly. The other, much more imposing, mountains along the Cambodian border were fully controlled by the Vietcong, but Nui Sam had an American outpost at the top. Outpost is the wrong word. It was a rudimentary listening station consisting of two sailors under a lean-to cobbled together from scraps of rusty corrugated iron. They monitored a device that was hooked up to electronic filaments disguised as rice stalks in the canal. If anyone crossed the canal, the Nui Sam guys heard it and passed the word to us. To the best of my memory, they seldom detected movement, and no one ever checked up on them, apparently, since they lived there in nonregulation domesticity with their Vietnamese girlfriends. The four of them seemed quite happy in their sandbagged Shangri-La.
They greeted us with the offer of lunch, a pungent stew cooked on an open fire using local produce and “lurps,” the dehydrated food made for Long-Range Recon Patrols. (Ask any old grunt and he’ll tell you that lurps were far superior to those freeze-dried camping meals you buy at REI.) We gabbed merrily for several hours over Ba Moui Ba, the ubiquitous Vietnamese beer rumored to contain formaldehyde, and I fell under the spell of the whole funky Swiss Family Robinson scene. Their kitchen shelf alone captured my heart with its row of spices and tidy implements. And the view from up there! As the sun began to set, I saw the Vinh Te Canal become a fine blue pencil line across the landscape, the rice paddies a patchwork of shimmering green-gold mirrors that stretched all the way to the dark mountains in Cambodia.
I know I’ve said that I went to war to make my father proud, but Nui Sam was strictly for me. I returned to the mountain many times, sometimes by myself, sometimes with Oly or another friend from Chau Doc who could be entrusted with the secret of the contented logical family living up there. Once, on the way up the mountain, I left the Jeep to pose for a photo on a rocky outcrop only to find myself instantly covered in thousands of stinging fire ants. This necessitated the tearing-off of my fatigues and a zany little naked slappy-dance that did my dignity no good whatsoever. Oly, as I recall, tried his best not to smirk.
The fact that Nui Sam was a fragile Eden, doomed to evaporate like Brigadoon when one or both of those sailors returned to the States, made it all the more romantic to me, since these people clearly loved one another. It was Madama Butterfly times two, twice the inevitable heartache. Nothing in my life to that point had ever invoked such a bittersweet sense of love’s fleeting joy.
For a while, when I was still in-country, I imagined writing a novel about Nui Sam. I would call it The Highest Friendly Mountain, but in my version of the tale one of those sailors would be gay. The others would cherish his friendship, and protect his secret when he finally shared it. He would ultimately die in a rocket attack. I was still years away from publicly coming out, or, for that matter, writing anything that might be construed as a novel, gay-themed or otherwise. But Nui Sam held such sway over my imagination that it allowed me to tiptoe up to the subject in combat boots, if only in my own head. The book was never written, of course, and, in retrospect, I’m glad that my first novel was not one in which the gay character, angling for sympathy from the reader, gets conveniently bumped off at the end.
I thought I’d never see Nui Sam again. War, after all, eventually vanishes from a map. Still, TripAdvisor tells me there’s now an elegant lodge on that very spot at the top of the mountain, replete with flowered terraces, a swimming pool, and canopied beds. It’s a perfect place for a hotel, but the fact of it makes me melancholy. The view would still be the same, of course—I do love the idea of showing that view to my husband, Chris—but the sight of shiny brass luggage trolleys and complimentary Aveda products might remind me, soon enough, that you can’t go home again.
THE ARMY COMPOUND where I lived in Chau Doc was next door to the Seabee hut, where the naval construction team was quartered. This was a reddish-brown stucco building from the French Foreign Legion days, a crumbling relic of earlier wars, earlier occupations. The Seabees were famously good at living well. They brought in steaks from a ship in the river and had a full-service lighted bar, with a bartender named Madame Snow. I watched movies there at night, first-run movies like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, or chestnuts like Gone With the Wind. I remember, too, the bats in that building, hundreds of them, who usually stayed folded under the arches but would swoop toward the movie projector as soon as it lit up. Their vampire shad
ows would appear on the screen, flapping toward the white columns of Tara or down the streets of Edinburgh with young Maggie Smith.
I liked the Seabees—what’s not to like about a cross between sailors and construction workers?—so I was thrilled when they invited me and an Army lieutenant to become Honorary Seabees. The ritual went like this: we were told to take off the tops of our fatigues and kneel before a pair of wooden chopping blocks with hatchets in our hands. The goal was to pulverize a piece of paper as completely as possible in the course of a minute. They let us practice this several times before we were blindfolded and the competition began for real. Can you see it coming? I couldn’t. When the blindfolds were removed, we discovered that we had axed our shirts into ribbons, so there was much hooting and hollering all around. To show we were good sports, the lieutenant and I wore the ragged shirts for the rest of the night, or at least until we got drunk and tore the tatters off each other at the bar.