Major fighting continued in Hue, Khe Sanh, Chu Lai, and other strongholds, but there was one good sign in Saigon. One day I saw that the USO had reopened. The acronym stands for United Service Organizations. The large hall was totally empty; after all, GIs weren’t exactly taking R & R in Saigon these days. The brave USO volunteers who’d come from the States to help servicemen and women seemed overjoyed when I walked in; they would have something to do.
I asked if I could use their shortwave radio. In that era before cellphones, that’s how soldiers called home: You reached out to ham-radio operators in the States, who would patch collect calls through for servicemen. Ham-radio operators back home were quiet heroes. They worked for hours on their own time in the middle of the night so that young soldiers could hear the voice of their mother or father or their wife or girlfriend for even a few moments for the first time in months. You could close your eyes and feel normal for a while. There was usually a two- or three-hour wait, as all the soldiers in town lined up, but they didn’t care. I hoped they’d let me do it even though I wasn’t a serviceman.
They were glad to. One of the USO volunteers operated the radio, and when he switched it on, that beautiful, scratchy, echoey sound made my heart leap.
“Come in, San Francisco, come in. Saigon USO calling, San Francisco, this is Saigon.”
“Hello, Saigon. Brian in San Francisco. The skip is in.” (The weather is allowing for a clear signal.)
“Can you help us get a collect call to New York?”
“You got it. Be safe. Good luck—and seventy-three.” (Farewell.) They pulled out the chair, and I rolled up to the microphone. The time difference was eleven hours, so it was four o’clock in the morning in New York. You know, the time of night when if the phone rings, you bolt upright in bed and blurt out, “Who’s dead?!”
“Hello?” I heard my father’s voice in the echo; groggy sounding, with a nervous edge to it.
“Hello, Dad.”
A few seconds of silence passed.
“Chickie?!!!!! Where the hell are you?!”
“I’m in Saigon.”
“Saigon! That’s what the Colonel told me, but I didn’t believe it! You’re not supposed to be in Vietnam! Everyone has been looking for you!”
And, then, the clincher:
“Do you know what you’re doing to your mother?!”
I will never forget that. It was as if I were a teenager again, calling him late from Rockaway Beach. I heard my father speak to my mother for a minute, and then he put her on the phone. She was the typical loving mother.
“Are you all right, Chickie?”
“I’m okay, Mom.”
“Are you getting enough to eat?”
“Yeah, Mom, I’m getting plenty to eat.”
I paused. I was trying not to get choked up. She hadn’t heard from me in three months, yet there wasn’t one word of reproach. For my father, the reproach was his form of concern. I hadn’t really taken into consideration how I would worry them should they find out, and with half the old neighborhood knowing my whereabouts, of course they did.
“Chickie?”
“Yes, Ma.”
“When are you going to come home?”
“Soon, Ma. Soon.”