To the Ends of the Earth

The refugees, using ingenuity, looted the barracks; the Vietnamese government officials, using their influence, looted the hospitals. I kept hearing stories in Danang (and, again, in the southern port of Nha Trang) of how, the day the Americans left, the hospitals were cleaned out—drugs, oxygen cylinders, blankets, beds, medical appliances, anything that could be carried. Chinese ships were anchored offshore to receive this loot, which was taken to Hong Kong and resold. But there is a just God in Heaven: a Swiss businessman told me that some of these pilfered medical supplies found their way, via Hong Kong, to Hanoi. No one knew what happened to the enriched government officials. Some of the looting stories sounded exaggerated; I believed the ones about the raided hospitals because no American official would tell me where there was a hospital receiving patients, and that’s the sort of thing an American would know.

For several miles on the road south the ravaged camps swarmed with Vietnamese whose hasty adaptations could be seen in doors knocked through barracks’ walls and whole barracks torn down to make ten flimsy huts. The camps themselves had been temporary—they were all plywood panels, splitting in the dampness, and peeling metal sheets, and sagging fence posts—so none of these crude shelters would last. If one felt pity for the demoralized American soldiers who had lived in these horrible camps, one felt even sorrier for the inheritors of all this junk.

The bars, with flyblown signs advertising COLD BEER, MUSIC, GIRLS, were empty and most looked bankrupt, but it was in the late afternoon that I saw the real dereliction of Danang. We drove out to the beach where, fifty feet from the crashing waves, a fairly new bungalow stood. It was a cozy beach house, built for an American general who had recently decamped. Who was this general? No one knew his name. Whose beach house was it now? No one knew that either, but Cobra One ventured, “Probably some ARVN honcho.” On the porch a Vietnamese soldier idled with a carbine, and behind him a table held a collection of bottles: vodka, whisky, ginger ale, soda water, a jug of orange juice, an ice bucket. Laughter, slightly drunken and mirthless, carried from inside the house.

“I think someone’s moved in,” said Cobra One. “Let’s have a look.”

We walked past the sentry and up the stairs. The front door was open, and in the living room two Americans on sofas were tickling two busty Vietnamese girls. It was the absurd made symmetrical—both men were fat, both girls were laughing, and the sofas were side by side. If Conrad’s dark reenactment of colonialism, “Outpost of Progress,” were made into a comedy, it would have looked something like that.

“Hey, we got company!” said one of the men. He banged the wall behind his head with his fist, then sat up and relit his cigar.

While we introduced ourselves, a side door opened from the wall the cigar smoker had punched and a muscular black man hurried out hitching up his trousers. Then a very tiny, bat-like Vietnamese girl appeared from the room. The black said, “Howdy,” and made for the front door.

“We didn’t mean to interrupt your picnic,” said Cobra One, but he showed no inclination to leave. He folded his arms and watched; he was a tall man with a severe gaze.

“You’re not interrupting nothing,” said the man with the cigar, rolling off the sofa.

“This is the head of security,” said the American official who had driven us to the place. He was speaking of the fat man with the cigar.

As if in acknowledgment, the fat man set fire to his cigar once again. Then he said, “Yeah, I’m the head spook around here. You just get here?” He was at that point of drunkenness where, acutely conscious of it, he made an effort to hide it. He walked outside, away from the spilled cushions, full ashtrays, supine girls.

“You took the what?” asked the CIA man when we told him we had come to Danang from Hué on the train. “You’re lucky you made it! Two weeks ago the VC blew it up.”

“That’s not what the stationmaster in Hué told us,” said Cobra One.

“The stationmaster in Hué doesn’t know whether to scratch his watch or wind his ass,” said the CIA man. “I’m telling you they blew it up. Twelve people killed, I don’t know how many wounded.”

“With a mine?”

“Right. Command-detonated. It was horrible.”