If I’d gotten killed onshore, the captain would have had a lot of explaining to do. But I’d been to Vietnam twice before, and back then, it was about as dangerous as the Bronx—you simply avoided certain areas. I thought it would take about two or three days to finish the job.
I went down to the ship’s massive refrigerator and dug deep in the back. The beer I had brought from New York was still hidden in there. Nearly a case of good-old American brands would be a nice start. I transferred them into my pack along with a razor and a pair of socks. A taxi boat took me across Qui Nhon Harbor.
The water taxi dropped off some army military police to guard the Drake Victory, and now it was ferrying a second contingent of MPs to another cargo ship in the harbor. The MPs in Qui Nhon conducted town patrol and guarded POW camps on land. But they also protected cargo ships, which could be taken over by guys with automatic weapons in sampans—small, sheltered, flat-bottomed boats. Or, as in the case of the USNS Card—the “hunter-killer” that had sunk eleven Nazi U-boats in WWII—was itself sunk in Saigon Harbor in 1964 when it suffered a thirty-foot hole blown into it by a single frogman with a sticky bomb, killing five.
I saw that the sides of their helmets bore the distinctive green-and-yellow sword-and-ax insignias of the 127th MP Company. That was Tommy Collins’s outfit.
As we pushed off, I asked them, “Do you guys by any chance know Tommy Collins?” Tom Collins was a common name. “Tommy Collins from New York?”
“Yeah, we know Collins,” one answered. “As a matter of fact, we’re going to relieve him right now. He’s on that ship right over there.”
They pointed to another American cargo vessel.
Were they pulling my chain? I couldn’t be that lucky, could I?
“Well, would you take me over to him?” I asked.
Another answered, “Sure, no problem.”
We sped over to the ship, and to paraphrase the poet, what to my wondering eyes did appear but Tommy Collins, standing right there on deck, waiting to be relieved.
“Hey, Collins!” I shouted up. “Tommy!”
Tommy peered down into the boat and did a double take.
“Chickie?!” He scurried down the ladder and grabbed me by the arms as if to see if I was real. He looked bigger and stronger than when I’d seen him last, and he was full of questions.
“Chickie! Are you kidding me? How did you get here? Are you nuts? What the hell are you doing here?!”
I pulled a beer out of my pack and handed it to him.
“This is from the Colonel and me and all the guys in Doc Fiddler’s,” I told him. “We all talked about it, and we decided that somebody ought to come over here and buy you guys a drink in appreciation for what you are doing. Well, here I am!”
Then I remembered Mrs. Collins, who had been waiting for me that day at the bar. “Oh, and your mother says you’d better write her so she knows you’re okay.”
Tommy threw back his head and laughed. He had this quizzical look on his face, as if he were seeing things. As the boat headed into port, I said, “Go ahead, man, open it. It’s a cold one!” Tommy popped open the can of beer and chugalugged the entire thing. I guess that was the tonic for his shock because he squinted at me and burst into laughter again.
“What the hell are you wearing, man?” he asked. “White jeans and a madras shirt? You look like you’re going on a golf outing!”
Tommy was right: I kind of stood out. I had thrown on clothes I knew would be cool in the ship’s engine room, and I hadn’t really planned out a travel wardrobe for Vietnam.
The launch reached shore, and I went with Tommy to his base camp. We drove in an open jeep through the bustling town of Qui Nhon. I saw the overgrown ruins of the famous Thap Doi Cham Towers with its gargoyles in the image of Garuda—half bird, half man—carved centuries ago by the Hindus, just one more group that had dominated Vietnam only to be conquered by a Confucian emperor.
Nearby, young women in loose, light-colored martial arts pajamas were executing incredibly acrobatic moves. They were practicing a form of self-defense that trains women to leverage much larger opponents. In another courtyard, men in black pajamas were going through their own self-defense moves, wielding every imaginable weapon, like Bruce Lee: broadswords, spears, rakes, hammers, chain whips—even pitchforks. I was hoping the women didn’t have to take on the armed men.
When we got to his barracks, Tommy’s bunkmates couldn’t believe I had come there to bring him a drink.
“Believe it, guys,” I told them, “because I’m buying for you, too.” I felt flush with my overtime merchant mariner cash.
They were all off duty now, so we jumped into a couple of jeeps and headed back into Qui Nhon. The road was thronged with bikes and mopeds, and since there were no traffic lights to speak of, the few cars beeped their horns the whole time. We drove through this cacophony to a bar with a clamor of its own. The place, lit with red lamps and strobe lights, featured pretty young women in traditional silk ao dai dresses that had been drastically shortened from their usual floor length into miniskirts. They were go-go dancing on the bar to American music playing as loud as a BUFF—a B-52 Stratofortress.
We sat down, and at the sight of six MPs and a mystery man, several of the women moseyed over and sat with us.
“You want to buy us Saigon teas, soldier?” one of them asked Tommy’s buddy. Saigon tea was the watered-down Kool-Aid the women sold for four bucks a pop, which they would drink, since the boss wanted them to stay sober. It was your price for having them sit with you. I bought the young ladies Saigon teas, and the guys drank beer and did shots.
The funny thing was, if we were back home, some of them wouldn’t have been legally allowed to drink liquor unless they were from New York or Florida or a couple of other southern states. Until they passed the Twenty-Sixth Amendment in 1971, the federal government also considered these young men old enough to die for their country but not old enough to vote.
Before long, they were roaring with laughter when Tommy and I told them how we used to swim naked in the Spuyten Duyvil and moon the sightseers on the Circle Line boats. They, in turn, told us stories about the far-flung towns from which they hailed. In the military, you meet farmers and ghetto guys, surfers and factory workers, teachers and truck drivers, from Detroit to East Hubcap, Idaho. You can’t believe we’re all from the same country
The women were flirtatious, but the night wasn’t about that. Tommy, the other MPs, and I partied late and closed the bar. We then headed back to base camp and kept the party rolling in the barracks with a “to-go” carton of booze I had purchased from the bartender.
Camped next door were soldiers from the Republic of Korea (ROK) army. South Korea was America’s biggest ally, supplying 320,000 troops over the course of the war. Despite the late hour, the ROK guys were outside, working out: more martial arts. They were really into self-defense; in fact, of the first 140 South Korean soldiers sent to Vietnam in ’64, 10 were tae kwon do instructors.
We were observing them quietly and sipping our drinks for a while when Tommy said, “Hey, Chickie, let’s sing some of the old songs, like we used to in the park.”
In Inwood Hill Park, we would sit on the steps and drink beer and sing songs and tell stories and laugh, reaching a magic point of feeling good together among friends that you can’t alone. In Ireland, they call it the craic, pronounced “the crack.” So, we were doing the same thing here, outside the little barracks, talking and singing the Irish songs:
Ireland was Ireland when England was a pup
Ireland will be Ireland when England’s number’s up!
And on to:
There was Johnny McEldoo and McGee and me
And a couple of two or three went on a spree one day!
We had a bob or two, which we knew how to blew
And the beer and whiskey flew and we all felt gay!
There were so many verses that even the guys from Mississippi were singing along on the chorus by the end. I guess we were a bit loud, because, all of a sudden, a young lieutenant came out and yelled at Tommy and the others, “What’s going on here, soldiers?!!”
They snapped to attention as well as they could, but I sat there.
I don’t know what possessed me, but I said to him in an authoritative voice, “Lieutenant! On what authority are you questioning these men?! We are on a particular mission here tonight, and I suggest you return to your barracks!”
The lieutenant turned toward me as if he were going to tear me apart. But he suddenly clammed up, turned around, and went back inside.
“What the hell?!” Tommy exclaimed.
It was the first of many instances in Vietnam where officers would treat me with the utmost deference, and, at first, I couldn’t understand why. Then one day somebody told me:
“Don’t you get it, pal? They think you’re CIA! Because why the hell else would you be here? In jeans and a plaid shirt, no less.”
Following their Office of Strategic Services predecessors in WWII, Central Intelligence Agency operatives had been in Vietnam since the early 1950s, when it was still under French rule, a situation Graham Greene depicted in The Quiet American. But when the French left after their stunning defeat by North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap’s forces at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, CIA agents began a covert operation to turn the Vietnamese against the Communists. It was led by none other than the CIA’s master of psychological warfare Edward Lansdale, thought to be the basis of The Ugly American. In 1968, CIA agents were still an omnipresent element of the US war effort. I didn’t purposely try to impersonate an agent to the officers, but the “CIA Effect” would help me a lot in the coming days.
The boys were tired anyway and would be able to sneak in only a couple hours of rest, so we called it a night. Tommy gave me a sleeping bag, and I spent the night in their barracks. In no time, it seemed, we heard reveille.
I said, “Okay, Tommy, I’m gonna take off. I’m going to go see Rick Duggan up north.” The last anybody had heard, Rick was in An Khe, somewhere up in the Central Highlands.
“How the hell are you gonna make it up there?”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” I said.
He didn’t know I’d made arrangements with a Texan who’d been at the bar the night before. “You wanna come along, Tommy?” I asked.
“Well, if I could, sure!” he answered, and he brought me to his sergeant major’s office in a Quonset hut.
“Sir,” I said, “I am going up to the Central Highlands to find my stepbrother, as I have to deliver important family news to him. Our family friend Thomas Collins here has offered to escort me.”
The sergeant major looked me up and down; then he frowned at Tommy.
He turned back to me and growled, “The only thing Collins is going to escort is his own ass back to port, and you can go on your merry way, whatever the hell you’re up to. You know, you can’t go anywhere in this country without orders. I’ll give you a pass, but that’s it. You’re lucky I’m doing that.”
We walked out, and I could tell Tommy was disappointed that we couldn’t make it a block party up north with Rick, but he covered with his usual cheer.
“Hey, we gave it a shot, Chickie!”
“Yeah, and we don’t want the sappers to find out the best MP in Qui Nhon is off duty.”
That made him smile. I gave him a big bear hug and took off down the road. I hitched a ride with a Hanjin Shipping Company truck driver, one of the civilian Korean drivers paid by the United States to run ammo up to our front lines. They were incredibly brave dudes.
“So long, Chickie!” Tommy yelled, and the other guys we’d partied with waved.
“I’ll see you back in the neighborhood, Tommy!”
I prayed I would. I felt optimistic, though, because I had found him when I wasn’t even looking for him. Whether it was luck or divine intervention, I still don’t know, but something good had shined on us.