Coming of Age Twice, in Saigon
It was 1962. On the way to my father’s assignment as military attaché to Burma we stopped in Saigon. Dad wanted a collegial briefing from old friend Johnny Jones, the last officer to hold that post in South Vietnam before rebellion became war. During that visit we had our first glimpse of the post-colonial embassy life we would live for the next two years.
As a mid-teen my attention went to exotic façades, sounds and smells – to cyclo taxi drivers in khaki shorts, to slim girls in ao dai dresses and black black hair, to white-jacketed waiters on call beside the swimming pool.
While our parents’ reunion followed its gracious course in diplomatic circles, Jonesy junior and I relived mumblety-peg tournaments from boyhood days and tuned to the pop record charts from The States. Geckos patrolled the stucco walls. Peering beyond our youthful horizons we discussed his big sister’s engagement to one of the Embassy’s Marine Guards.
Out on the street Dad practiced his West Point French as enhanced by liberation campaigns in North Africa and Europe during World War II, then only twenty years past. During those two brief decades French Indo-China had struggled on its own road to self-determination. South Vietnam of 1962 found itself a crucible of conflicting dreams. Chauffeured Citroëns, cyclos, and Jeeps mingled in Saigon’s traffic as in its history, the Paris of the East. And it was in 1962 that MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) came into being as the growing American presence superceded the office of military attaché held by our host, Colonel Jones. In the coming decade two-and-a-half million of our uniformed countrymen would form the brief and potent embodiment of MACV.
Within MACV’s mission I earned my next glimpse of Vietnam. In 1971, after three years of service as an Army Engineer in the U. S., Thailand, and Germany, a charter jet delivered me and 180 equally unseasoned young officers to Cam Ranh Bay for distribution to units around the country. The aircraft pulled into a sandbagged parking slip topped with concertina wire and a machine gun tower. The sobering business of war annulled the postcard scenes of my memory.
The sun cast harsh shadows. The air smelled of JP4 fuel. We crossed the tarmac to reclaim our duffel bags inside the Replacement Depot. Swagger and innocence mixed in individual proportions for each of us auditioning at the theater of war. Somewhere in the steps after deplaning I sensed a refocusing of fate. It was becoming personal.
Inside the building we filled in and submitted our ‘Dream Sheets’, our private gamble with duty and self-service in relation to the posted openings. Then it was off to the bar to banter about fate and Army logic. At the center of our fascination were three men in faded jungle fatigues who were on their way home. They chuckled that some of us would be taking their places in the 101st Airborne Division, the ‘Screaming Eagles’ which at that moment, they said, was “getting its ass kicked at the DMZ” (the border with North Vietnam). “We’ve taken so many casualties up there, they’re even plugging in non-airborne types.”
As an Airborne Ranger Combat Engineer and the only one in the group who had actually volunteered for the 101st, I became an object of relief to the others, a statistical improvement on their own odds of avoiding such an assignment. And several of them were indeed sent to the Airborne outfit – but I was ordered to the 525th Military Intelligence Division, a Theater-wide enterprise with headquarters in Saigon. My buddies concluded that if I’d actually been nuts enough to want to go to the 101st, there must be something really special waiting for me in Intelligence, like intercepting infiltrators down the Ho Chi Minh Trail with a squad of montagnard mercenaries.
I hopped a short flight to Saigon and presented myself to the 525th. The personnel clerk, who struck me as having a very low rank for such responsibilities, said “Engineer, huh? We’ll have to put you in Terrain Analysis at CICV (Combined Intelligence Center) here in Saigon.” I was directed to the office where I would spend the next year coordinating geographic intelligence studies for field operations.
At this point the tide that had been drawing me to the battlefront began to recede. I settled into a job with regular hours, surrounded by draftee hydrologists, agronomists, soils experts and the like – men who kept track of the natural and manmade features of the country. I was supposed to maintain my personal weapon, a carbine, in the event of trouble. I went down to the arms room only once. The racks of guns seemed surprisingly alien. Even though I had been the captain of our intercollegiate rifle team at school and earned sharpshooter badges on active duty, the rifles struck me as bizarre in the populous hum of Saigon and the bureaucratic warrens of CICV.
Several weeks later it was my turn on the roster to be Night Duty Officer at CICV. I reported for orientation at 5pm, 1700 hours. Among other things I was given a .45 caliber pistol to wear while making security checks around the building. “Oh yes, Sir,” of course I was familiar with it, proficient marksman that I had been. But my hands shook as I tried to insert the ammunition clip into the pistol grip. Those bullets could have only one purpose, the termination of a human life. I threw them into a drawer, strapped on the pistol belt, and went out into the night, incapable of firing at anything. I never carried a loaded gun that entire year.
I think I lived then in a suspended state. I imagined myself an educated man making rational choices, honed by the Army to perform under the most adverse conditions. But the track had played out unpredictably. Here were my reluctant hands apparently making decisions ahead of my mind. Or was something else at play?
One day, as I perused the revolving paperback book stand at the Army store, I couldn’t help noticing the psychedelic cover of Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, billed as “the best book on the Hippies.” I hadn’t actually met counter-culturists in my formative years, but we had coexisted in the America of the ’60s. I bought the book to start a belated introduction, standing right there in the Stars and Stripes Bookstore of Saigon. This opened a stream of imports from San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore and beyond, mailed by friends and relatives back home.
The Army Education Center offered a course in basic photography, both camera and darkroom work. I signed up for a series of Saturday sessions. One weekend we took a field trip to an outlying village, roamed the unpaved streets. That night I developed my film and left it to dry. The next night I exposed the negatives in the enlarger to paper on the easel. By the dim red safelight I watched the first image begin to appear in the developing tray. An amazing face looked directly back at me. Abstracted from the din and dust of its background it said, “I am from The Family of Man”.
I had in fact previously seen the book by that title, a record of the exhibit assembled by Edward Steichen of worldwide photographs of humanity. At first it was difficult to believe that the same kind of people pictured in that book were right here, all around me, in the bustle of Saigon. For the next several months I went downtown at every opportunity, into markets and temples and parks and barrios, then headed back to the darkroom to process what my camera had found.
On a City bus map I plotted and recorded my explorations. In an evening language course I learned the basics of navigation in Vietnamese. I wandered among humanity with a disarming smile and nonpartisan mission, evidently protected by innocence. The faces became portraits, then a portfolio. The art of it was no more self-conscious than the subjects themselves. Life out there was expressing beauty as Creation intended. The camera was my instrument to pay attention.
One Sunday in my room a poem came to me in the pattern of The Beatitudes.
There are things that keep light from life
like thunder clouds over forests
and fallen leaves over bleached young shoots
and the shroud of a war over a people…
Blessed are the clouds that darken the skies
to renew the blood of the land.
Blessed are the leaves that blanket the earth
to shelter and nourish its flesh.
Blessed a people of blood and flesh,
of spirit
and soul
and laugh
and marrow
numb to the mystery of their shroud
yet living and loving,
to illumine the shadow beneath.
How did these photographs happen? And the poem? Should I have been surprised by my surprise?
Being on the fringe of war resembled standing on the coastline when a great storm passed out at sea. I missed the consuming violence, but the resulting waves churned up gifts as they broke ashore. It was in part a disintegrating process, in part a freshening of materials and memories.
By the chance of that desk assignment I had been pulled back from the horror of the battlefield, from the relentless harvest of death, from everlasting shadows in the life of the survivors. I found the human face of Viet Nam.
I went there to test my manhood and came home to test my humanity.
