Two guys taking fares on their motor scooters drove us to the nightspot, about a half hour down the Saigon River. It was a little place, half wood, half bamboo, up on stilts over the water. Christmas lights were strung around the edge of the thatched roof and, incredibly, the sound of the Shirelles singing “Soldier Boy” echoed out of the place. Johnny’s lady friend jumped with joy at the sight of him and gave him a big hug. I was surprised to hear my friend from Bayonne exchange sweet nothings with her in French, and then she asked, in English, “You bring me some American records, Johnny?”
“Of course, I did, baby—the latest!” He handed her a stack of 45s. Then he started squeezing her and saying stuff in French that made her giggle.
She didn’t have a jukebox, but she did have a little turquoise turntable, and she squealed as she popped on the stack, and down dropped Sam and Dave’s “Soul Man.” She and Johnny, and most every woman in the place, started shimmying. I went to the bar, where there were only two or three guys, and ordered a beer.
I watched the ladies dance with each other in their colorful silk ao dais. Those were the tight tunics with a long slit up the side that all the young women wore over silken pants. I had asked Mr. Minh, my buddy at the French shipping agent’s house, about it. Back home, girls and young women were still getting suspended if they tried to wear pants to school, and such garb was strictly forbidden for any women in the military and frowned upon in the office. But in Vietnam, all women wore this dress-pants combo.
Mr. Minh explained: “One day in the seventeen hundreds, one of the Nguyen dynasty lords—they controlled the South—decreed that every man and woman in his court must wear a silk gown over pants. The ao dai. Lord Nguyen—he was by all accounts a very macho dude, with sixteen sons—wanted to distinguish his court from that of his enemies, the Trinh lords who controlled the North out of Hanoi. Even back then, our slender nation was divided. Up there, both male and female aristocrats wore tunics over skirts. He wanted to be different. But it was also about status.
“We learned in school that King Louis XIV of France declared that both men and women in his court at Versailles should wear red high heels. This was one of the things they did to show off the fact that they didn’t have to work, because French peasants weren’t about to wear such shoes working in the fields. It was the same with the ao dai, because you need a lot of silk to make one. Back then, only the aristocrats could afford silk, and they wore layers and layers of it to show off, no matter how hot it was. They’d rather have sweated like pigs than look poor.”
He laughed, then added: “But even though women are covered from neck to ankle to wrist with this traditional outfit, if you don’t mind my saying so, I still think it’s very sensual. We have a saying: ‘The ao dai covers everything but hides nothing.’”
As the girls danced together to “Soul Man,” I could see what he meant. They looked to be in their late teens, early twenties. They had their hair teased up in bouffants like the Supremes, and a few were real beauties, except maybe a little sad around the eyes. I wondered if they had boyfriends who were off fighting and if their fathers and brothers were gone, too. I knew they were in this joint for the money, but they were young enough that they seemed to actually be trying to have a bit of fun in the middle of the war.
The bright brass section opening of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” blasted out, and a young woman in a blue ao dai came up. She had a limp.
“You buy me Saigon tea, sir?”
“Sure, why not? Barkeep, a Saigon tea for the lady, please.”
Saigon teas are alcohol-free but she tossed it back like it was a shot of whiskey—maybe for New Year’s, they were being beneficent and spiking them. She yelled, “Danse avec moi!” over the music, grabbing my hands. Seeing my quizzical grin, she tilted her head and looked at me with one eye closed. “Hmmm . . . red, long hair. Not soldier. Australian?”
“I do not have that honor.”
“Irish?”
“Well, those are the ancestors I worship. I’m American, but no longer a soldier.”
“Okay, Red! Dance with me!”
I took her hand, and we walked to the dance floor, where I did my trademark stay-in-one-spot, side-to-side double bop. She was smiling, following along, when the next record dropped, and the menacing voice of the Doors’ Jim Morrison intoned, “You know that it would be untrue, you know that I would be a liar . . .”
It really wasn’t a song you could double bop to. I pulled Lady in Blue closer to me, and we kind of rocked each other in a slow dance.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Dao,” she said. “It means ‘peach blossom.’”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen one.”
“I have one here,” she said, opening the slit of her ao dai. A long scar ran up the inside of her thigh. Over it, she’d gotten a tattoo of a branch intertwined with delicate pink flowers.
“Beautiful,” I said. I didn’t ask her how she’d gotten the scar. I wondered if it was a shrapnel wound caused by us or the Commies.
“Yes, it’s considered one of the most beautiful flowers, especially now at Tet time,” she explained. “We lay peach blossoms on the altar to our ancestors, along with five of the most delicious fruits, so that our loved ones who are gone might have the most wonderful things again . . .”
She paused for a minute, and then said, wistfully, “We used to have many wonderful things here.”
I looked deep into her brown eyes. Those eyes reminded me of the line from a poem I read in high school, by the French surrealist writer Andre Breton, and never forgot: She had “eyes like wood always under the axe / eyes of water to be drunk in prison.” It was understandable. I had been singing “Auld Lang Syne” myself a few weeks before.
“Tet—that’s your New Year’s, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said absently.
“What year is it?”
“It’s going to be 4847—almost 5000! We are very old!”
“Wow. Our calendar is half that, and America is even younger. We drink champagne on our New Year’s and sing a song to remind us of old friends and acquaintances,” I said.
“We remember our grandparents, and we give the children new clothes and a little money in red envelopes. Red is the color of New Year’s because the beast Nian, who eats children, is afraid of it and won’t come near if he sees it. So, you bring me protection from the beast, Red!”
“I guess that’s kind of like our bogeyman, but he’s year-round. We make resolutions; do you?”
“Revolutions?!” She gave me a sidelong glance.
“No, ha . . . resolutions. They are promises to yourself to be better. To make good changes in the new year. But we forget about them by Saint Patrick’s Day.”
“Is that when you have those big fireworks shows?”
“No, we have a big parade that day. We have our big fireworks on the Fourth of July. That’s our Independence Day; the day we won our freedom from the British.”
“Like the French have Bastille Day.”
“Yes, except the French gained their freedom by ending their own monarchy. We won our democracy by ousting our colonial rulers, the British.”
“Hmmmm . . .” There was an awkward pause.
“Tell me something, Red,” she ventured. “How come the French and you Americans are so proud of your revolutions and your independence, but you won’t let other people have theirs? Do you know we have been fighting for our independence since Jesus walked the Earth?”
I started to wonder if she was a VC Mata Hari—the exotic dancer who spied for the Germans in WWI. Luckily, I didn’t have any state secrets for her to get out of me.
“Well,” I replied. “I wouldn’t call marching in step with Mao and Moscow ‘independence.’”
“They want to bully us, too. Everybody wants to dominate us, a tiny little country. And you and they are so big and have so much! Sometimes I wonder if we have gold or rubies or diamonds hidden in our hills that we don’t know about, but you do. I don’t get it, as the GIs say.”
I had to admit, she was gutsy. Or emboldened by spiked Saigon tea, who knows? I thought about launching into the domino theory, that if Vietnam fell into Communist hands, then Laos would go, and then Cambodia, and then Thailand. Then Malaysia, Burma, Indonesia, and maybe even Australia would be threatened, and India. But I didn’t feel like it.
“Hey, it’s New Year’s Eve, beautiful. Do you really want to talk politics? Tell me what you wish for tonight.”
“We wish for health and wealth and luck . . .”
“I could use some of that right now: luck.”
“And, if you are not married, we wish you, ‘Chuc mau chong tim duoc nguoi yeu,’” she said, and started giggling like crazy.
“Wow, that must be good. What is it?”
“I don’t want to tell you,” she said, giggling some more.
“Aw, come on. I’ll buy you another Saigon tea.”
“Okay! It means, ‘May you find new love in the new year,’” she said, still giggling.
She took my hand and brought me to the bamboo railing overlooking the river. The fingernail moon cut into the black waters, the road now a charcoal smudge. A thousand cherry bombs convulsed the night.
“Tet—It’s almost here,” she said.
“Well, in that case,” I said, “let’s celebrate.”
In the wee hours, Johnny came out of the room where he had been with his lady friend and said he had to return to the ship. I had to catch that flight to Manila in the morning—only a few hours from now. I probably shouldn’t have been out carousing. The bartender and another guy were hanging around, waiting for us to leave.
“They’re missing their holiday,” I said. “I feel bad.”
“Don’t,” said Johnny. “They’ve been happy to see us, because unlike GIs, they know seamen were paid in American dollars. Dollars are worth five to ten times more on the black market here. That’s why Charlie rarely attacks seamen.”
Johnny asked the guys if they could give us rides back to Saigon, and they were glad for the gig. We said our good-byes. I didn’t want to give Dao some bullcrap that I’d see her again. I might have if I were staying in country, but I was blowing this pop stand.
I told her, “I wish you health and wealth. And, as the Irish say: ‘For every storm, a rainbow; for every tear, a smile; for every sigh, a sweet song; and an answer for each prayer.’”
Dao looked like she was used to good-byes.
“Chuc mau chong tim duoc nguoi yeu,” she said, and she gave me a sad little smile.
“You, too,” I said.
Johnny and I descended the rickety steps, and we hopped on the backs of the bartenders’ motorcycles and took off.
We had asked them to stop at a fork in the road. Johnny headed toward the docks, and I was headed back to Cholon. Chinatown.
Johnny had helped put me back together better than Humpty Dumpty, and now I was shipshape to leave Vietnam. I kind of awkwardly leaned over and gave him a one-armed hug.
“See ya back home,” I said.
“You got it, buddy,” Johnny replied.
We roared off in our different directions. I took another look in the sky. The thin crescent moon was gone.