'The Street without Joy' was above us as we raced across a treeless promontory to the Nam Ho Bridge, five dark spans secured against underwater sappers by great rusting wreaths of barbed wire. These were the outer wastes of Danang, a grim district of supply bases that has been taken over by ARVN forces and squatters; shelters – huts and lean-tos – made exclusively with war materials, sandbags, plastic sheeting, corrugated iron stamped U.S. army, and food wrappers marked with the initials of charitable agencies. Danang was pushed next to the sea and all the land around it had been stripped of trees. If ever a place looked poisoned, it was Danang.
Raiding and looting were skills the war had required the Vietnamese to learn. We got out at Danang Station and after lunch drove with an American official to the south side of the city, where GIs had been housed in several large camps. Once there had been thousands of American soldiers; now there were none. But the barracks were filled to bursting with refugees; because there had been no maintenance, the camps were in a sorry condition and looked as if they had been shelled. Laundry flew from the flagpoles; windows were broken or boarded-up; there were cooking fires in the roads. The less lucky refugees had set up house in wheelless trucks and the sewage stink was terrible – the camps could be smelled two hundred yards away.
'The people were waiting at the gates and over by those fences when the Americans started packing,' said the American official. 'Like locusts or I-don't-know-what. As soon as the last soldier left they rushed in, looted the stores, and commandeered the houses.'
The refugees, using ingenuity, looted the barracks; the Vietnamese government officials, using their influence, looted the hospitals. I kept hearing stories in Danang (and, again, in the southern port of Nha Trang) of how, the day the Americans left, the hospitals were cleaned out – drugs, oxygen cylinders, blankets, beds, medical appliances, anything that could be carried. Chinese ships were anchored offshore to receive this loot, which was taken to Hong Kong and resold. But there is a just God in Heaven: a Swiss businessman told me that some of these pilfered medical supplies found their way, via Hong Kong, to Hanoi. No one knew what happened to the enriched government officials. Some of the looting stories sounded exaggerated; I believed the ones about the raided hospitals because no American official could tell me where there was a hospital receiving patients, and that's the sort of thing an American would know.
For several miles on the road south the ravaged camps swarmed with Vietnamese, whose hasty adaptations could be seen in doors knocked through barracks' walls and whole barracks torn down to make ten flimsy huts. The camps themselves had been temporary – they were all plywood panels, splitting in the dampness, and peeling metal sheets, and sagging fence posts – so none of these crude shelters would last. If one felt pity for the demoralized American soldiers who had lived in these horrible camps, one felt even sorrier for the inheritors of all this junk.
The bars, with flyblown signs advertising cold beer, music, girls, were empty and most looked bankrupt, but it was in the late afternoon that I saw the real dereliction of Danang. We drove out to the beach where, fifty feet from the crashing waves, a fairly new bungalow stood. It was a cosy beach house, built for an American general who had recently decamped. Who was this general? No one knew his name. Whose beach house was it now? No one knew that either, but Cobra One ventured, 'Probably some ARVN honcho.' On the porch a Vietnamese soldier idled with a carbine, and behind him a table held a collection of bottles: vodka, whisky, ginger ale, soda water, a jug of orange juice, an ice bucket. Laughter, slightly drunken and mirthless, carried from inside the house.
'I think someone's moved in,' said Cobra One. 'Let's have a look.'
We walked past the sentry and up the stairs. The front door was open, and in the living room two Americans on sofas were tickling two busty Vietnamese girls. It was the absurd made symmetrical – both men were fat, both girls were laughing, and the sofas were side by side. If Conrad's dark re-enactment of colonialism, 'Outpost of Progress', were made into a comedy it would have looked something like that.
'Hey, we got company!' said one of the men. He banged the wall behind his head with his fist, then sat up and relit his cigar.
While we introduced ourselves, a side door opened from the wall the cigar smoker had punched and a muscular black man hurried out hitching up his trousers. Then a very tiny, batlike Vietnamese girl appeared from the room. The black said, 'Howdy' and made for the front door.
'We didn't mean to interrupt your picnic,' said Cobra One, but he showed no inclination to leave. He folded his arms and watched; he was a tall man with a severe gaze.
'You're not interrupting nothing,' said the man with the cigar, rolling off the sofa.
'This is the head of security,' said the American official who had driven us to the place. He was speaking of the fat man with the cigar.
As if in acknowledgement, the fat man set fire to his cigar once again. Then he said, 'Yeah, I'm the head spook around here. You just get here?' He was at that point of drunkenness where, acutely conscious of it, he made an effort to hide it. He walked outside, away from the spilled cushions, full ashtrays, supine girls.
'You took the whatV asked the CIA man when we told him we had come to Danang from Hue on the train. 'You're lucky you made it! Two weeks ago the VC blew it up.'
'That's not what the stationmaster in Hue told us,' said Cobra One.
'The stationmaster in Hue doesn't know whether to scratch his watch or wind his ass,' said the CIA man, 'I'm telling you they blew it up. Twelve people killed, I don't know how many wounded.'
'With a mine?'
'Right. Command-detonated. It was horrible.'
The CIA man, who was head of security for the entire province, was lying; but at the time I had no facts to refute the story with. The stationmaster in Hue had said there hadn't been a mining incident in months, and this was confirmed by the railway officials in Danang. But the CIA man was anxious to impress us that he had his finger on the country's pulse, the more so since his girlfriend had joined us and was draped around his neck. The other fat man was in the bungalow, talking in frantic whispers to one of the girls, and the black man was a little distance from the porch, doing chin-ups on a bar spliced between two palms. The CIA man said, 'There's one thing you gotta keep in mind. The VC don't have any support in the villages – and neither do the government troops. See, that's why everything's so quiet.'
The Vietnamese girl pinched his cheek and shouted to her friend at the edge of the beach who was watching the black man swing a heavy chain around his head. The man inside the bungalow came out and poured himself a whisky. He drank it worriedly, watching the CIA man rant.
'It's a funny situation,' the CIA man was saying..'Like you say this village is clean and this village is all Charley, but there's one thing you gotta understand: most people aren't fighting. I don't care what you read in the papers – these journalists are more full of shit than a Christmas turkey. I'm telling you it's quiet.'
'What about the mine?'
'Yeah, the mine. You should stay off the train; that's all I can say.'
'It's different at night,' said the man with the whisky.
'Well, see, the country kinda changes hands after dark,' said the CIA man.
'I think we'd better go,' said Cobra One.
'What's the rush? Stick around,' said the CIA man. 'You're a writer,' he said to me. 'I'm a writer too – I mean, I do a little writing. I pound out articles now and then. Boy's Life – I do quite a bit for Boy's Life, and um-'
The girls, shouting in Vietnamese and giggling, were beginning to distract him.