US military forces had regained control of the American embassy within six hours, and the South Vietnamese had regained President Thieu’s palace by the next day. But the Vietcong still controlled cities all over the country, and they still had the airport outside Saigon and some sections of the capital. In the ensuing days, the city was shut down. You’d hear sporadic gunfire during the night. There were refugees in the streets. Garbage was piling up.
Worst of all, there was no food. Saigon wasn’t getting any truck deliveries, and the port was closed. Word was that the longshoremen were Communist sympathizers, and so they had called a phony strike to stop supplies from getting in. They must have paid off the corrupt South Vietnamese officials, if that’s not redundant.
The city was blockaded. Nuong’s father didn’t have any food at his little grey hotel, so I soon used it as a place to sleep and would forage for food at the bigger hotels serving the Western press. I found food, and kindred spirits, at the bar on top of the Caravelle Hotel. But as the Tet offensive raged on through February, they ran out of food everywhere. All they had at the Caravelle was rice and a few vegetables, and, occasionally, some shrimp.
But because the port was shut down, the SS Limon, Johnny’s ship, was still loaded and anchored in the river. It was filled to the brim with frozen spareribs and hams, and I was having visions of hamburgers, like the burger-obsessed moocher Wimpy in the Popeye cartoons. Even though the port was closed, I headed down there because, to paraphrase bank robber Willie Sutton, that’s where the grub was.
The dock was heavily guarded, but I casually flashed my seaman’s ID and barely slowed down. The White Shirts stopped me, looked at the card, looked at me, and waved me on.
I got to the ship and asked for Johnny. He came to the gangway and took a hard look at me. “You all right, Chickie?” I guess his mate had filled him in.
“I’m okay, I’m okay. A little hungry is all.”
Johnny brought me right down to the galley, where we had eaten before, and he and the seamen gave me another big feed: barbecued chicken, corn on the cob, baked potatoes. I don’t think food has tasted as delicious to me before or since. They had plenty of it, and they sat there happily watching me chow down. They had nothing else to do. Johnny and the other mariners of the SS Limon had orders to remain on ship. The captain was not being overcautious: two seamen from the SS Express Baltimore had disembarked to find their captain in Da Nang a couple of years before, when orders came down to ship out. They never came back. And a young merchant mariner from the SS Columbia Banker, Michael C. Miller, had been killed in front of the American embassy the very day I was there hiding behind the palm tree. Maybe he was one of the ones I saw taken away by the soldiers in the jeep, I don’t know.
It wasn’t any safer on the ship. Johnny and the other mariners were targets on the Limon, which I felt was one big bull’s-eye at the dock. On August 26, 1966, another merchant marine Victory ship like the Limon, the SS Baton Rouge, was sailing to Saigon on the Long Tau River up from the South China Sea, when a mine blasted a forty-five-foot hole in it. The entire seven-man engine crew of mariners was killed.
I tried to keep the seamen entertained and finally thanked them profusely and got up to go. I said to them, “Listen, there’s nothing moving in Saigon. The stores are shut down, and there’s no food in the hotels. Do you mind if I bring some food back to the guys who work at the Caravelle bar?”
No problem, they said. What the hell did they care? They had tons of food, and for all they knew, they’d have to bring it all back to Manila if the Tet offensive went on and on. So, they loaded me up with a big duffel bag bulging with burgers, whole chickens, and corn on the cob. They snuck me out when the chief mate wasn’t looking. By the time I passed security, the guards had changed shift, so I showed them my US passport. I would go back and forth: seaman’s documents to enter the port, and a US passport stamped “US Embassy Saigon” to leave.
At the Caravelle bar, I walked over to the manager, clutching my bag of contraband.
“Come back into the kitchen with me,” I said with a smile.
When we got to the steel table, I dumped it all out, and a cry went up. The manager said I was like Santa with his big bag of presents on his back. The chefs and the bartender, they all scrambled and grabbed the stuff and immediately started cooking it—not for the guests but for themselves. The chefs were starving. I told them that if any seamen from the SS Limon were to come in, drinks were on the house.
Out front, the journalists were shaking their heads over President Thieu’s announcement that he would institute a military draft for eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds. They felt bad for these kids, as they did for our own, of course, but were incredulous that conscription hadn’t been in place already, given that American boys had been drafted into the Vietnam War since 1965.
I kept checking in at the US consulate each day to see if I could board any ships headed back to the States. I would have worked free to pay for passage, but nothing was moving. Then I would go to the French shipping agent’s house. I never saw him again. Mr. Minh, his gentlemanly servant, said he had gone to the country, and I thought, Which one? Bali? France? I’d stay and talk to Mr. Minh, who was probably more educated than his boss, and after a while, he would give me a couple days’ advance on the money.
I went back to the Limon each day and hung out with the guys; they felt trapped on the ship. I gave them reports from the outside world and told them the different ways the chefs—some of them French trained—had prepared their cuisine. Then, like Santa’s elves, they’d load me up, and off I’d go. They’d think of all kinds of ways to sneak me and this cornucopia past the captain and off the ship. They liked doing something of value instead of twiddling their thumbs.
I soon started bringing food to my friends such as Nuong, the South Vietnamese cop, and his father, who owned the little hotel where I was living. They started divvying it up with their relatives and children, and then their neighbors started showing up with their children. I will never forget the looks of joy on those kids’ faces when they were served vegetables. I tried to remember to stash cookies in the bag on future trips.
When it was too hot to sleep, Nuong and I would sit out back, and he’d have a little dinner, and we’d talk politics into the wee hours. He told me about the long, sad history of his country, including about 1,800 years of Chinese domination, its conquest in the thirteenth century by Kublai Khan at the same time that Marco Polo was in Vietnam marveling at the totally tattooed men and women of the kingdom of Tonkin. Nuong said that over the centuries, various revolutions had been attempted, like the one led by the legendary Trung sisters, Trac and Nhi, who, in AD 40, led an army of eighty thousand against the Chinese invaders. They were like Joan of Arc times two.
We Americans had stepped into a region with enmities as old as in the Middle East. Now China was supplying the North Vietnamese army with Shenyang J-6 fighter jets, Russian machine guns, Type 56 assault rifles, and Chicom stick grenades. When I told Nuong that, like myself, Ho Chi Minh had been a seaman, and he had lived and worked in Brooklyn in the early nineteen hundreds, he couldn’t believe it.
Soon I was carrying two duffel bags off the ship every night. When I told the seamen on the Limon that even the hotel chefs were skipping meals so they could bring food home to their kids, they doubled my load. The Caravelle chefs were feeding more and more folks each night, as word must have gotten out about their secret supply. In order to feed everybody, they became masters at stretching the ingredients I brought them by adding rice, and vegetables they were growing themselves on the roof. It was like the loaves and the fishes.
I needed to feed a Caravelle regular named Ben, whom I called Ben Hur. He said he was part Russian, part Jewish, part Asian, and part Native American: a man of the world. He spoke about seven languages, a perfect combo for doing business around the globe. Ben was a big shot at a company that was bringing computers into South Vietnam at US taxpayers’ expense, and he knew a lot of connected people in Saigon. Just like I had to bribe the South Vietnamese State Department official to let me out of his country, Ben Hur had to bribe South Vietnamese government bureaucrats to accept our free gift of millions of dollars’ worth of mainframes.
Ben thought nothing of it; he was used to paying graft all over the world. A cost of doing business, he reasoned. I, on the other hand, was incensed that we had to pay them to take our gifts while we were also helping them to fight their enemy. I made sure he got first dibs the next time I brought food back. Ben chose the lobster, and when he tasted it in butter sauce, I could swear his eyes welled up a little with tears. Feeding the kitchen and bar staff every night, we drank free. So, Ben and I would sit up there and talk and watch the choppers fly over the cathedral spires of Notre Dame and the old Saigon Opera House. We could hear gunfire in the distance and even hear B-52s dropping bombs. It was a lovely place to watch a war.
Looking over the horizon, I was worried about my buddies out there, where in many places the fighting was still fierce. Rick and the rest of the First Air Cav Bravo Company had been sent to attack a newly built North Vietnamese base in the hills—and that was just the beginning for him. Kevin had been sent with the Americal Division to Chu Lai, which was rocketed by the VC for a month. I had no idea where Richard Reynolds and Joey McFadden were. Tommy Collins was in Qui Nhon when the VC blew up part of the ammo dump and took over the radio station and train depot. There was street fighting everywhere.
Tommy told me later, “In the weeks before Tet, the Mamasans in the villages kept telling us, ‘Beaucoup VC, beaucoup VC’—many Vietcong—were coming into the area. We reported it to intel [army intelligence], but they told us it was ‘unconfirmed.’
“The first night of Tet, our ambush patrol got wiped out. Then the VC killed the mayor, and they killed the tribal chieftain.” They still had ethnic chiefs in Vietnam then, like the real ones filmed in Saigon for the 1958 film adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, starring Audie Murphy, the real-life World War II hero turned Hollywood actor.
Tommy’s 127th Military Police Unit and the 93rd Military Police Battalion were ordered to fight off the VC, and one of Tommy’s friends, a fellow MP, was killed trying to flush out a sniper. Tommy was sent to guard the POW camp, which was a big target for the Vietcong, who kept trying to free the prisoners. Tommy’s unit had suffered a number of losses.
Yeah, I wondered what was going on with my old buddies and with their fellow soldiers I had gotten to know on my journey, out in that terrible, torn-up terrain.