I looked around at the displays, which were mostly photos housed in various stucco buildings, and it was all pretty depressing and sickening: photos of the My Lai massacre, horribly mutilated women and children, deformed infants who were victims of Agent Orange, the famous photo of the naked girl running down the road burned by American napalm, the photo of the South Vietnamese officer blowing out the brains of a captured Viet Cong in Saigon during the ’68 Offensive, a child sucking at the breast of his dead mother, and so on.
There was also a rogues gallery: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, American generals including my division commander, John Tolson, and pro-war politicians, plus photos of anti-war protesters all over the world, and policemen and soldiers knocking college kids around, the Kent State shootings, and on and on. The captions in English didn’t say much, but they didn’t have to.
There were a lot of photos of the major American anti-war figures of the day: Senator John Kerry from my home state, who’d served in ’Nam at the same time I did in ’68, Eugene McCarthy, Jane Fonda manning a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, and so forth.
There was also a display of American war medals sent to Hanoi by the recipients as a protest against the war.
I could hear the Sixties screaming in my head.
I found a particularly disturbing photographic collection with an accompanying text. The photos showed hundreds of men being lined up, shot by a firing squad, then getting the coup de grâce with a pistol. But this wasn’t another American or South Vietnamese war crime. The text explained that the victims were South Vietnamese soldiers, and pro-American hill tribespeople, the Montagnards, who’d continued the fight against the victorious Communists after the surrender of Saigon.
The text described the Montagnards as belonging to the FULRO, the Front Unitié de Lutte des Races Opprimées — the United Front for the Struggle of the Oppressed Races, a CIA-sponsored group of bandits and criminals, according to the caption. These photographs of the cold-blooded executions were supposed to serve as a lesson to anyone who had any thoughts about opposing the government. Actually, these photographs were not much different than the others showing American atrocities. The Hanoi government was obviously clueless about how these photographs would play to a Western audience. In fact, an American woman standing next to me seemed pale and shocked into silence.
As I looked at all this stuff, I wasn’t sure what I felt. This was obviously an unbalanced presentation, omitting, for instance, the Communist massacres at Hue, and the one at Quang Tri City that I saw with my own eyes.
I’d seen enough and went out into the sunlight.
The people around the museum were mostly American, and they were divided by generation; the older men, obviously veterans, were angry, and some of them were swearing about the “one-sided, propaganda bullshit,” to use one overheard phrase. Some of the veterans were with wives and children, and they were a little quieter.
Well, enough fun for one afternoon. I walked toward the exit, and noticed souvenir stands selling pieces of army munitions, flower vases made out of shell casings, old American dog tags, and models of Huey helicopters made from scrap aluminum, like works of origami. I saw old Zippo lighters, engraved with the names of their previous GI owners, along with mottoes, unit crests, and so forth. I spotted a lighter that was engraved with the same thing that mine was engraved with: Death is my business, and business has been good. I still owned the lighter, but I’d left it home.
I went out through the gate onto Vo Van Tan Street and turned back toward the center of the city.
Now and then, out of the corner of my eye, and the corner of my mind, I’d see the remnants of the once proud ARVN — the Army of the Republic of Vietnam; middle-aged men who looked ancient, missing legs and arms, blind, lame, scarred, stooped and broken. Some begged from fixed spots in the shade. Some just sat and didn’t bother to beg.
Now and then, one of them would notice me, and he’d call out, “Hey, you GI? Me ARVN!”
These were men of my own generation, my former allies, and I felt guilty ignoring them.
It was a short walk back to the Rex, and when I entered the lobby, the air-conditioning hit me like a Canadian cold front.
I inquired at the desk for my passport, but no luck; no messages either. I got my key, went to the health club on the sixth floor, and scheduled a massage. In the men’s locker room, I undressed, got a towel, robe, and shower clogs, and took a shower, sweating Saigon out of my pores, but not out of my mind.
I lay on a tatami mat in a quiet room, easy listening music coming out of a speaker. An attendant brought me a cup of sake.
By sake number three, I was feeling a little buzz, and an instrumental of “Nights in White Satin” was coming out of the speakers, and it was 1972; I was puffing on a big, fat joint in a lady’s apartment off Tu Do Street not far from here, and she was lying next to me wearing nothing more than a cannabis smile, and we passed the joint back and forth, her long, black silky hair on my shoulder.
But then the lady began to fade, and it started to come to me that part of what I was feeling, being back here, was a sense of nostalgia for a time that was past; I was not young anymore, but I had been young once, in this place, which for me had been frozen in time. And as long as this place remained frozen in time, then so did my youth.
I must have drifted off because a guy was shaking me gently by the shoulder and saying I had a message, which turned out to be actually a massage appointment.
A receptionist at the health club desk directed me to Room C. Inside Room C was a massage table covered by a clean white sheet. I hung my robe, slipped off my shower clogs, and lay on the table, wearing my towel, stretching and yawning.
The door opened, and an attractive young woman wearing a short white skirt and sleeveless white blouse entered and smiled. “Hello.”
Without too much more conversation, she motioned me to turn over on my stomach, loosened my towel around my waist, and jumped up on the table with me.
She was really strong for a small woman and cracked every bone and joint in my body. She grabbed an overhead bar and walked on my back and butt with her bare feet, kneading her toes into my muscles. I could get used to this.
There were mirrors on each of the walls, but this didn’t seem too unusual, though I noticed that the young lady and I could look at one another in the mirrors, and she was smiling a lot.
Finally, she turned me over on my back and somehow I’d lost my towel. She was kneeling between my legs, and she pointed to a place she hadn’t massaged yet. I had a feeling the shiatsu part of the massage was over.
She said, “Ten dollar — Okay?”
“Uhh…”
She smiled and nodded encouragingly. “Yes?”
Give this hotel another star.
Moral considerations aside, the words “sexual entrapment” popped into my head. That’s just what I needed — Colonel Mang coming through the door taking a video of me getting a blow job in the massage room of the Rex Hotel.
I sat up and found myself face-to-face with my new friend. I said, “Sorry, no can do.”
She made a big pout with her lips. “Yes, yes.”
“No, no. Gotta go.” I slid off the table and slipped into my shower clogs.
Miss Massage sat on the table and kept looking at me, pouting.
I took my robe from the hook and said, “Great massage. Give you big tip. Biet?”
She was still pouting.
I put on my robe, left the massage room, and went to the reception desk where I signed a hotel chit for the ten-dollar massage, then added another ten for a tip. The reception lady smiled at me and inquired, “You feel good now?”