Vietnam (23 page)

However, when the Americans arrived in force in 1965, Diem was dead and Madame Nhu's puritanism was on the retreat. Soon the black market was flourishing, selling everything from jeeps and fridges to hairspray and pantyhose, much of it direct from the US commissary. Cigarettes were another major item on the black market, with some American brands sold at $1 a pack with the tax seal apparently intact: in fact, the tobacco had often been taken out and substituted with marijuana. Other cigarettes were painted with opium and sold singly. Much of the drug supply was brought into the city by the Vietcong, who quickly realised the debilitating effect it had on US morale. Drug abuse was a central theme of 1960s music and culture, and was associated with the hippie movement and its anti-war stance.

By 1967, there were 50,000 US troops stationed in Saigon with huge numbers moving through Tan Son Nhut Airport. Thousands more came into the city on three-day passes from the fighting in the surrounding countryside, and thousands of US and foreign journalists packed into Saigon for what they called the 'five o'clock follies', the regular afternoon press briefings held in the US Information Service auditorium. By then, much of the French flavour of the city had been lost. The US troops brought their own radio and TV stations. Traditional Vietnamese cafés began selling hamburgers, fries, and milk-shakes. Tailor shops sprung up providing safari suits and other American-style civilian clothing so that the troops could get out of uniform, while others specialised in military insignia and other souvenirs of the war. To cater to this huge influx of foreigners, there were bars, brothels, opium dens and massage parlours. Girls came pouring into Saigon from the countryside: a prostitute in Saigon could earn more than a cabinet minister. The streets were full of military jeeps, official Ford sedans, and the motor scooters and Japanese motorbikes of the Saigon Cowboys (pimps) and black marketeers.

There were 'Turkish baths' where a soldier could pay to be bathed by a pretty young woman, 'magic finger' massage parlours, 'steam and cream' joints, and oral sex was freely available under bar-room tables. You could buy a hostess and take her away for sex, provided you paid the mama-san for the number of 'Saigon teas' she would have consumed. You could pay in US dollars or military script that was supposed to be spent only on military posts but was widely traded outside at a 40 per cent discount. Prostitutes were often working for the Vietcong and used to wheedle information out of GIs. This was widely known, but the authorities could do nothing about it. Although US soldiers were banned from carrying weapons in Saigon or wearing camouflage fatigues, many did. The South Vietnamese police were supposed to enforce the law, but few risked their lives trying to disarm a heavily armed Green Beret or prevent him taking his pleasures with a bar girl, even if she was VC. There was a ready supply of new girls among those driven off the land by search-and-destroy missions, but still there was the ever-present danger of contracting a sexually transmitted disease. An especially pernicious strain that was doing the rounds was called the Heinz 57 variety, for which there was no known cure and sufferers had to endure an endless drip.

Servicemen on liberty in Saigon separated largely along racial lines, largely because of music. White GIs went to the bars along the Tu Do where rock music was played. African-American servicemen established a separate quarter, known as 'Soulsville' behind the docks in Khanh Hoi, where soul music was played, and many of the prostitutes were darker-skinned Khmer women from Cambodia or the daughters of Senegalese soldiers brought to Vietnam by the French. This racial division became such a sore point that, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, the Armed Forces TV station screened nothing but his picture for three whole days. The soul singer, Soul Brother Number One, the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, came to Vietnam to perform for the troops; Whitey got Bob Hope and Jayne Mansfield. After the death of King, Brown had to go on TV in the US to help quell the ensuing riots. As a result, he was accused of being an 'Uncle Tom,' but answered his critics in 1969 with his number one R&B hit 'Say It Loud, I'm Black and Proud'. However, he drew more flak in 1972 when he endorsed the re-election campaign of President Nixon.

The racial tensions that were tearing apart the ghettoes back home in the US also infused the armed forces. In July 1969, there was a race riot in Lejeune Marine Camp in North Carolina. The Marines did not admit African-Americans until World War II, and the first black Leatherneck, Sergeant-Major Edgar A. Huff, was regularly arrested for impersonating a Marine – on the grounds that there 'weren't no coloreds in the Marines'. During World War II 'Negroes' were restricted to separate units. Although the US Army had been integrated in 1949, Vietnam was essentially the first war where blacks and whites fought side by side. African-Americans called themselves 'Negroes' or 'colored people' until 1966 when the term 'black' was coined by the activist Stokely Carmichael. After that 'black' as in 'black power' became a political statement, particularly when two African-American athletes at the 1968 Mexico Olympic raised gloved fists on the podium in a black power salute. In Vietnam, fights erupted between blacks and whites. Sometimes guns were used. And the walls of latrines were scrawled with racist graffiti, such as, 'Better a gook [a derogatory term used for the Vietnamese] than a nigger'.

When one African-American patrol leader appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine, he woke up to find a burning cross outside his tent – the traditional warning from the Ku Klux Klan to any African-American who sought to better themselves. The day before Captain Lewis, an African-American officer later caught on film setting light to a hootch in the Kim Son Valley, was due to go to Vietnam he was in a phone booth in Montgomery, Alabama saying goodbye to his wife when he was shot in the back by a Klansman. The army's response was to make him commanding officer of an almost exclusively white unit. This was rare, but as the war dragged on African-Americans in the Marines won the rights to grow their hair in Afros. However, it was noted that there was one time when blacks and whites were comfortable with each other in Vietnam – that was when they were smoking marijuana.

Since the Korean War, GIs had been given a week's R&R (rest and recreation) during a tour of duty. Among the troops R&R was known as I&I – intoxication and intercourse. From Vietnam, troops were sent to Bangkok, Penang, Hong Kong, Hawaii, Taipei or Sydney on a week's pass. Grunts also got three-day passes to Saigon or one of the in-country beach resorts at Nha Trang, Vung Tau, Chu Lai, Qui Nhon or Cam Ranh. The most famous, China Beach, was the Marine enclave just outside Da Nang.

Three-day passes were used as an incentive to capture enemy prisoners. As the war dragged on, the number of POWs being taken dropped off dramatically. GIs were sick of seeing their buddies blown apart by booby traps and mines, mutilated by an unseen enemy and sent home in body bags. As a result, they simply killed any Communist that fell into their hands. But this also wasted valuable intelligence, and orders were issued that more live prisoners were to be taken and, when whole companies were offered R&R as a reward, the POW count quickly improved.

At these beach resorts, the grunts found that sea water was the perfect cure for the terrible conditions they picked up in the jungle. China Beach offered five klicks (kilometres) of white sand, though swimmers and sunbathers had to keep a weather eye out for snipers. There was fresh lobster, fish, beer flown in from the States and Australia. Australian troops got a tinny for every day they spent in the field. The beach resorts also offered beautiful young Vietnamese women in scanty bikinis, discreet massage parlours, illicit brothels that masqueraded as coffee shops, car washes where a grunt could pull over and get a complete service, and a corpsman who specialised in treating the clap. From the old French villas at Nha Trang, Special Forces would go scuba diving, snorkelling, and surfing in the same waters where they dumped double agents in chains from helicopters.

As a result of the American troops' free-spending ways, the Vietnamese economy boomed. Everyone had jobs. Boys shined shoes. Women found jobs as hootch girls, cleaning barracks and, often, reporting anything of interest to the local VC. Taxi-drivers, black marketeers, bar owners, brothel keepers, pimps, shopkeepers, and waiters made small fortunes. But the influx of dollars caused inflation in the Vietnamese piastre that was soon running at 170 per cent, which meant that ordinary Vietnamese struggled with deprivation as they watched Americans living in unimaginable luxury, causing untold resentment. Many Vietnamese felt that if the US government did not spend so much on amenities for the troops there would be more to spend on the victims of war.

The GIs were also largely ignorant of and indifferent to local customs. Despite the widespread prostitution, the Vietnamese had puritanical courtship codes for which the Americans showed no respect, and respectable Vietnamese women were shamelessly harassed. Americans' conspicuous consumption also offended the sensibilities of the fastidious Vietnamese. While bar owners and shopkeepers happily raked in the Yankee dollar, they made only the flimsiest attempt to disguise the contempt they felt for their American customers. After all, they had been educated by the French.

This all took a terrible toll on American morale, with the people they were supposed to be defending looking down on them. As well as defending the people, the GIs were also supposed to be in Vietnam to defend democracy, but there was precious little democracy to defend. The 1966 election for the constitutional assembly was boycotted by the Buddhists and two and a half million people in Vietcong-controlled areas were prevented from voting. When the Buddhists of Hué and Da Nang called for the resignation of Premier Ky's military government, Ky denounced them as communists and used the army to smash all opposition to his government. Even though Ky was persuaded to stand aside and run for vice-president on Thieu's ticket, it was widely rumoured that the 1967 election was rigged. The GIs' own newspapers ran stories about corruption in the South Vietnamese government. The
Grunt Free Press
– an in-country version of the hippy underground press that was flourishing in the rest of the world – carried the story of a man who became a province chief by getting his wife to lose $45,000 at poker to the wife of the party boss. It also investigated the crooked NCO club stewards, smugglers, Indian moneychangers, mafiosi, local gangsters, drug dealers, surplus arms dealers, and crooked contractors who were milking $20 million a year out of Vietnam.

The
Grunt Free Press
began in 1967 as a glossy magazine. It sold in
Stars and Stripes
bookstores as an in-country alternative to the military's official publication. In 1969, it went hippy. The nudes were more explicit, the humour blacker, the op-ed pieces more critical. One article noted that you could bomb North Vietnam back into the Stone Age, even nuke it, but that still would not get rid of the sniper at the end of the runway at Tan Son Nhut, who probably worked as a barber by day, cutting the hair of the US troops.
Grunt Free Press
had only one editorial rule, no-one was ever allowed to die in its pages – not in the stories, pictures, or cartoons. Circulation climbed to 30,000 and each issue contained a double-page centrefold poster, usually with an anti-war theme. They all contained a nude – an Asian girl:
Grunt Free Press
left the round-eyes to
Playboy
. She would be surrounded by peace symbols – the stylised cross in a circle borrowed from the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – and cryptic messages in psychedelic calligraphy.

These posters adorned walls the length of South Vietnam. The principal artist was Tran Dinh Thuc, a South Vietnamese student who had strong peacenik leanings. When the Vietnamese authorities found he was responsible, they tried to draft him, but appreciative readers smuggled him on board a plane to Darwin.

The editor of
Grunt Free Press
, Ken Sams, was chief of USAF CHECO (Contemporary Historical Evaluation of Combat Operations) in Vietnam. His editorial line reflected much of the grunts' disillusionment with the war and brought him to the attention of the authorities, especially as he liked to include items that he thought would give the enemy a laugh or two. MACV made several attempts to ban
Grunt Free Press
and a powerful underground syndicate tried to take it over, but Sams managed to keep it going by having it printed by a moonlighting ARVN Air Force officer with access to a USAID printing press. The magazine also popularised graffiti such as: 'This is a war of the unwilling led by the unqualified, dying for the ungrateful' and the ubiquitous 'IHTFP' [I Hate This Fucking Place]. Vietnam was full of sardonic graffiti. Some simply said: 'Fuck Communism' or 'Fuck Vietnam'. Ho Chi Minh, apparently, was born out of wedlock and was gay and every motherfucker knew 'Ho Chi Minh ain't gonna win'. There were many variations on the grunts' prayer: 'Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the meanest motherfucker in the valley'. A sign appeared in Vietnamese on a pile of four bullet-riddled VC corpses left to rot by the side of Route 13, which said: 'Vietcong meat – 300 piastres a kilo'. As the war dragged on one slogan summed up the grunts' evaluation of MACV's tactics: 'Kill them all and let God sort them out'. And peace symbols and marijuana leaves sprouted on helmets on the sides of APCs, and in other unlikely places.

Units also had their own in-country insignia run up, incorporating the ubiquitous peace signs and marijuana leaves. They also contained their own jaundiced mottoes. The Special Forces' unofficial insignia carried the legend: 'We kill for peace'. Other units considered themselves to be mushrooms – 'kept in the dark and fed on horseshit'. And it was not uncommon to see a soldier wearing an anti-war badge, particularly those provided by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. GIs would also flick peace signs, the two-fingered V borrowed Winston Churchill's, whose 'victory' sign was a simple reversal of the traditional, offensive English V-sign said to have originated at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, where English archers showed the French that they still had their two bow fingers.