When we landed in Saigon, I thanked the pilot again and headed straight for the American consulate. I didn’t have time for ablutions, so I rode an army vehicle into the densely packed, bustling city of 1.8 million people.
The South Vietnamese capital was as crowded as Manhattan, with Tu Do Street, aka Independence Street, its Times Square. But instead of yellow cabs, you’d see bikes, motorized or not, and every combination of humanity and the animal world balanced on them: guys with rifles over their shoulders, like war commuters; mothers with two kids and a baby; and men and women transporting all manner of goods on the handlebars, including ladders, chickens in crates, crab traps, and huge baskets of vegetables.
They’d whiz by older women whose teeth were stained reddish-brown from chewing betel nuts; people selling meat spread out on mats on the sidewalk with dogs running by; Buddhist monks in saffron robes hustling to their temples; vendors selling everything from songbirds to coffins. There was a beautiful temple with dragon boats and other seafaring symbols atop it, maybe dedicated to an ancient sea goddess; I wished I had time to go inside, but I didn’t.
The brand-new American embassy and its consulate, built on palm-lined Thong Nhut Boulevard, stood next to the French embassy and across the street from that of the British. After a car-bombing three years before at the old embassy on Ham Nghi Boulevard that killed twenty-three people, including a twenty-one-year-old woman working for the CIA, the United States built a modern, six-storied, fortresslike building that looked impenetrable. All it lacked was a moat.
Once inside, I was shuttled from desk to desk until I finally got to someone who would talk to me. Not only did he talk to me—he already had a missing persons file on me! It said that the captain had been contacted by the coast guard in Qui Nhon and that he’d informed them that he would accept me back on the ship if I could catch up with it. But the embassy official didn’t share my sense of urgency about the situation, and in my head, I was soon calling him “Heller,” in honor of Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22, the satirical novel about the absurdity of war and the bureaucracy of the military.
“Passport, please.”
“I have my seaman’s documents. I don’t have a passport. I’ve never had a passport—and I’ve been around the world three times.”
“That’s nice, Mr. Donohue, but we are in Vietnam in the middle of a war right now, in case you haven’t noticed. You need a visa from the Vietnamese government to leave Vietnam, and you need a US passport to obtain a Vietnamese visa.”
“Wait—I need a visa to leave? Don’t most countries require a visa to enter? They’re probably trying to stop the exodus of their own people trying to get the hell out of here.”
“We are guests in their country, Mr. Donohue, and ours is not to question why. Our staff can issue you a passport at the consulate next door.”
“Oh, that’s good!”
“But not today. Or tomorrow. Maybe not all week. You’ll have to have your photo taken and fill out all the forms, and they will be processed, and you will be checked out. When and if you receive your passport, then we can assist you in moving on to the visa process.”
“You’ve just told me that my captain will let me back on ship if I can catch up with it. How am I supposed to catch up with it if I’m sitting here dotting i’s and crossing t’s on your forms?”
“Sorry, fella, this process will take days,” Heller responded. “We’re a little busy here.”
He was not without pity, though.
“How much money do you have?”
I took out the Vietnamese piastres from my pocket and counted them. “About five bucks,” I answered.
“Wait a minute,” he said. He filled out another form and riffled through his desk till he found a business card.
“Here, contact this guy,” Heller said, handing me the card and the form. “He’s the agent for the shipping companies that work with the military. Give him this confirmation from us that you’re not making up this story, however preposterous. You’re going to need food; you’re going to need a place to stay; you need money. We’re not operating a home for wayward seamen here.”
“How long will this process take?!” I asked.
“A while,” he said brusquely.
I heaved a deep sigh, but I took the shipping agent’s name—he was French. I entered the consulate next door and cooled my heels there for a while until they dug up somebody to take my passport photo. I had a beard, and could think of nothing to smile about, so I hoped I would be recognizable. I then walked straight to the Frenchman’s house. As a middleman helping to supply the Americans with international goods in the war effort, he had become very prosperous. He owned a spacious town house with a fancy entrance right on the Saigon River, and servants, including a courtly Vietnamese assistant named Mr. Minh, who spoke French with his boss. He was a thin, elderly gentleman with a dignified bearing who’d be retired if he lived in the States.
The French agent kept me outside as he read my US consulate paper, scowling at it over his reading glasses.
“Wait here!” he barked at me, and I peeked in as he shuffled through the chandeliered foyer and through two big carved doors into a book-lined room. He brought back about $40 in cash. The union required that while a seaman was on the beach in a foreign port, the shipping company had to pay him daily until everything got sorted out. That would be enough for three hots and a cot every day if I was careful. All I had to do was come to the Frenchman’s house each day to pick up my pay. This is one of the reasons I have been a union man all my life. It was union struggles that won benefits for seamen stuck on land. They don’t simply hand that stuff to working people without a fight, and I had the first fighting seafarer, Joseph Curran, who was charged with mutiny for his efforts, to thank for it. God bless the National Maritime Union. It provided a smidge of good news in what was becoming a pretty bleak situation.