After I don’t know how many hours, the sunlight filtered through a crack in the door. A spider scurried across it. I got up and ventured out. I looked up and down the street; it was empty and quiet. So, I staggered along the buildings up to Tu Do Street. You could still hear gunfire across the city, and a fleet of choppers was overhead. A lot of South Vietnamese cops were out now, but, still, very few people and virtually no vehicles were navigating the streets.
I was just wandering about, having completely given up any thought of getting to my ship. I assumed I was dead. It didn’t matter.
It was then that I heard, “Ay, Chickie!”
I looked up. It was Martin, one of the seamen from the SS Limon.
I asked him, “Hey, man . . . Are you alive?”
“Whaddaya mean?! What are you talking about?”
“We’re both alive?”
“Chick, are you all right?” Martin asked, and in his expression, you could see he thought I was crazy. “Why don’t you come back with me to the Limon, and we’ll see Johnny.”
“You’re the first guy I’ve seen in days that I know, man!” I told him. I was so happy. “I’m glad we’re alive!”
“Yeah! We’re alive!” Martin said, and he slapped me on the back, but he looked worried. He tried to convince me to come back to the ship with him, and I thanked him and told him to say hello to my old merchant marine friend Johnny Jackson. But I had to head on my way.
By now, it was a certainty that my second ship had sailed, so I had to hunker down and find a plan C. I hiked into the next neighborhood and went up to a South Vietnamese cop standing in the middle of the street. I asked him the status of Cholon, where my hotel was. There had been house-to-house fighting there with VC who were operating out of the Phu Tho racetrack they’d overtaken. Houses were bombed out. Blocks of Cholon would end up shelled flat—maybe in a thousand-year-old vendetta against Chinese oppression, but, ironically, probably carried out with Chinese-made rockets.
“VC are still all over the place in Cholon,” he said in almost flawless English.
I said, “I need to find a hotel.” He looked at me skeptically like, um, tourist season is over, buddy.
But I told him my story (the abridged version) and showed him the hotel voucher I’d gotten from the embassy on a day that seemed so long ago now. He nodded and seemed to be okay with it.
“You see that?” he asked, pointing to a small building across the street. “That’s my father’s hotel.”
He had obviously posted himself there to guard his father and probably the rest of his family. It looked like a no-tell motel—you know, where a couple might go for an hour or so. I didn’t care. I needed to regroup, perhaps for a night, two at the most, before I finally got out of town.
“Do you have any vacancies?” I asked, and at that, he gave me a look. We both burst into laughter. The whole place was empty. It was the first laugh I’d had in days, and it was probably the same with him. Nuong was his name, and we would become friends. I gave him the voucher, he brought me in, his father gave me a room, and I hit the pillow and slept. I hadn’t gotten much sleep in that vestibule. You don’t need sleep when you’re dead.