I had to find a job. I was essentially living in Saigon now, and I knew how to live on the cheap, but I didn’t know how long this was going to be, and $40 a day wasn’t cracking it. They said there were no jobs at the embassy. But I know how to mix drinks; I went from bar to bar asking the Vietnamese managers for bartender positions. For some reason, they thought that was hilarious. To a man, they laughed, some uproariously, and I couldn’t convince them.
Meanwhile, I was still here, and there was the matter of the other guys on my list, such as Richard Reynolds, a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. I couldn’t miss Joey McFadden, an electrician who would later, in 1974, be found screaming by relief pitcher Tug McGraw after he’d fractured his leg after falling twenty feet off the scoreboard at Shea Stadium. Bobby Pappas was out there, too, in the huge headquarters and ammo base Long Binh, with fifty thousand other GIs who had just been visited by entertainers Bob Hope, Barbara McNair, and Raquel Welch at Christmas. I thought it was unfair that Bobby had been drafted in September at the age of twenty-three; he was married with a kid and had worked for the Army Corps of Engineers to boot. Other guys might have tried to wriggle out of it, but Bobby went. I really wanted to bring him that beer and everybody’s good wishes. I had to check in with the American consulate every day, though, which meant I had to stay local.
Looking for work around Saigon, I saw how colorful it was. I had been in Japan, and that was exotic and civilized at the same time. But wartime Saigon was colorful in a chaotic, more Third World way. There were bustling outdoor markets full of people selling everything from silk dresses to flattened ducks to exotic birds in cages, all hanging from hooks side by side. The French, despite their unwelcome ten-decade colonization of Vietnam, from Napoleon III’s conquering of Da Nang in 1858 until the last French soldier left in 1956, had at least built all sorts of beautiful, white stucco buildings and town houses and churches under a colonnade of giant palm trees. It was like dunking parts of Paris into the tropics.
The French had built the Continental Palace Hotel in 1880 to remind them of Paris. It was a beautiful wedding cake of a place now said to be run by the son of a Corsican gangster. I went in for a drink a couple of times and snuck upstairs to see room 214, where the English novelist Graham Greene wrote The Quiet American while covering the French Indochina War in the early 1950s.
But I received glares for my raggedy appearance—I must have looked even worse than the many journalists who hung out in the bar—so I went elsewhere. There were still fancy colons living in Saigon who’d go there, as well as any bigs coming to Vietnam, such as executives conducting business with the military. They would have stayed at the Continental Palace.
The Caravelle Hotel was more my cup of tea—or glass of beer, if you will. It was owned by Australians and guarded by Australian marines, because their embassy was inside. The Australians, allies of ours, had about 7,500 troops there at the time and 60,000 over the course of the war. Some 3,500 New Zealanders also served.
So that’s where the Aussies, New Zealanders, Canadians, the Irish, the Brits, and other American cousins—people able to have a good time even in the middle of hell—would congregate. They appreciated the view from the Caravelle’s glorious rooftop bar as much as I did. So did many of the journalists from all over the world covering the war. CBS foreign correspondent Morley Safer was living and working at the Caravelle in 1965, when his report on US Marines being ordered to burn down the hamlet of Cam Ne aired on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. A livid President Johnson reportedly called network president Frank Stanton and said, “Your boys shat on the American flag yesterday,” and he ordered that Safer be investigated for Communist ties. When LBJ was told that Safer wasn’t Communist, he was Canadian, the president reportedly said, “Well, I knew there was something wrong with him.”
Most of the hotels had moved their bars to the rooftops following so many bar bombings early in the war—but the Caravelle bar was the best. With so many reporters and displaced persons favoring the joint, the beer and stories flowed for a mighty craic, so that’s where I went for the duration.
Finally, one day at my daily check-in at the consulate, the clerk ran his finger down a list on a page and said, “Donohue, John? Yes, your visa was approved.”
“Thank God.”
“That’s the good news.”
“What?! What’s the bad news?” I asked.
“Well, your ship has left Manila.”
“Now, that’s a surprise!” I yelled sarcastically. “I should have placed a bet on it!”
However, the official continued, another ship in Manila would be loading cargo for a few days, and its captain had agreed to take me on. He said there was an early flight out of Tan Son Nhut Air Base the next day, Wednesday, January 31, 1968.
“Don’t party too hardy tonight,” he advised. “Traffic might be bad leaving the city tomorrow. It’s their New Year’s, you know.”
Oh, I knew it: the Caravelle staff had been hinting about tips all week. It was the Lunar New Year, which lasts for days. They told me it was called Tet, and that it’s a bigger deal than ours. The Vietnamese travel back to their home villages and visit family and honor their ancestors. The reporters hanging out at the Caravelle had told us that Ho Chi Minh and General Giap had sought a Tet holiday truce and that President Johnson had agreed to it. According to the journos, “LBJ’s even going to stop bombing the North.”
I thanked the clerk and hustled over to the South Vietnamese State Department.
“Donohue?”
“Yeah?”
“Happy New Year, man.”