Adapting To Life In Vietnam

We were very well looked after by the Americans but I have always felt that one should try to be a part of whatever community one was living in. It was not easy in Vietnam. There were many barriers. Language for one. I spoke some French which was useful and I was able to improve it a little. The Vietnamese language is tonal, and although I enjoy music my ears are not tuned to the different tones as a singer's would be. It is a language I have always struggled with. To start with I could just learn to function in it, but I always felt it would have been better to begin in the cradle. We were not helped by the Vietnamese who tended, not necessarily maliciously, to double up with laughter at our attempts to use it.

I started to use Vietnamese restaurants. The sea food was beautiful in Vung Tau. I would go in to the restaurant and then enter the kitchen and point to certain food items. Unfortunately instead of giving me the lovely dishes served up to the locals they made a hash of it trying to serve up some western concoction. There were perfectly good French restaurants if I had wanted western food. Running out of tomato juice they would mix tomato paste or sauce with water and serve that up. I had to master using chop sticks fairly quickly. The first time I was out to dinner with some people in Saigon was very, very embarrassing. The simplest way to eat local food was to eat in the street at the stalls. It became a very agreeable habit. There were two local beers. A beer called Larue, in large bottles. Rather weak and tasteless. And 33 or 'ba muoi ba' usually pronounced bummyba. I can't put the proper accents on any Vietnamese words I might use with this computer. It's the only beer I've ever seen ice put into. Very strong, the foulest hangovers but rather necessary to life. The US beer was rarely available out of their bases or clubs. That was rather gassy and weak . Frankly there was no really good beer anywhere. The Australians? That was for later.

Apart from adapting to the heat and humidity one's stomach had to get accustomed to the local bugs. Ten years later I felt the battle had never truly been won. In the provinces though I never really had any trouble but Saigon was another matter. There, there was an acute sanitation problem and I sometimes got very sick , particularly from mussels.

I decided to rent a house. It was in an area full of former refugees from the north. I hired a maid who washed my clothes and cooked for me when I was off duty. She only had two little charcoal stoves to cook with, electricity was intermittent. According to the season the water came off the roof or out of the well or from a public tap some hundreds of yards away; she would send a boy with a bucket to collect it. I showered with an empty coffee tin. My clothes were perfectly pressed. I used two or three shirts a day. We had another maid at the camp at Van Kiep.

I probably got off to a bad start the first night as the dogs kept me awake and I fired my revolver in the air two or three times to quieten them. Mind I never had anyone try to break in. Rats were a headache I would have to learn to live with. They utterly revolt me. Much more on them later if I can stomach it.

She was quite the most marvellous maid I have ever had. Utterly devoted, she would also clean my pipes, my shoes, serve me a beer in bed when things were rough and was a superb cook. Going to the market every day to buy fresh food of course helped. I had a small fridge which sometimes worked, but usually the maid bought great chunks of ice from vendors. She lived twenty yards away on the other side of a pond I hoped my sewage didn't enter. I also hoped that was not the source of water for my well. I had a fish swimming around the bottom of the well which gave me hope it was not too poisonous. I drank beer. Her husband was a draft dodger and she would sometimes appear with a black eye. There are certain people one meets in life who leave lasting impressions on one.

There was a pounding on the door which woke me up out of a very deep sleep. In fact I wasn't properly awake when this pounding spread to the back door as well. I got up, still half asleep, picked up my revolver which I kept loaded under the bed and went to the front door. I forget the time but it was probably some ungodly hour of the night. I called out something, someone answered. Neither party understood the other. I decided they couldn't be robbers making so much noise and opened the door. They were a rag tag bunch of I don't know what, all armed, but I seem to remember hearing the word police. I kept my revolver bracketed on the one I thought was in charge whilst they searched my house. It occured to my somewhat befuddled mind that I was living in a police state.

The next day I discussed it with my Decca friends. They explained that in theory the police were searching for deserters. They did this regularly and it was a fairly acceptable activity in a country at war. My maid's husband was a draft dodger, (she lived the other side of the pond), which was the same thing. However it was also harassment against foreigners who had more money than they did and therefore more girl friends etc. The object was to arrest said girl friends and to have the foreigners bail them out the next morning thus augmenting their meagre wages.

They couldn't touch us; well not usually. They were under a great disadvantage. All this was to change after 1968, but more on that later. This went on for sometime when I decided I had had enough. Anyway my landlord was a police officer and we came to some agreement and the raids stopped. In Vietnam at that time each household had a family book. In this book was listed everybody living in that house, vetted by the police. All overnight visitors had to be vetted too. In Vietnam you could be stopped if you were travelling with a girl in a taxi and she was not your wife. This was on grounds of morality (or rather lack of it) in public transport. It did not apply to private cars. (This was largely limited to Saigon). I'm not sure why private cars were considered less immoral. Houses were private but perhaps this was on security grounds and not moral ones.

I was entirely ignorant of all this, and anyway we were officially living on our base. Apart from the fact it was entirely alien to my anglo-saxon sense of liberty. I can't remember any Americans being too happy about it either. In any case we all felt above or outside any laws that existed. That is the way it was . Later when I became a resident not related to the military I did conform. I'm not making any apologies here but I do not think we in general and I myself in particular were always very agreeable people. We did trample on local customs, mostly through ignorance often through arrogance. I do though have this somewhat naïve opinion that police should behave in a civilised manner. The term white mice was used to refer to the civil police whose uniform was white and it was said whose courage was questionable.