For the Life of Thi Lin Klein

Part 1

The American Girl

Chapter 1

She had been warned, from the moment she made her plans known. It was a war zone after all, even in those safer southern parts. But she flew in anyway, as soon as her visa was approved, alone, with nothing more than a suitcase, a wish to fulfil and that propensity to see things in a positive light. An alien humidity greeted her as she stepped from the plane onto the open tarmac. Heavy clouds billowed overhead. Tan Son Nhut Airport, Saigon. September, 1971.

The war was around a decade old by then. American and American-backed initiatives occurred so incrementally it is difficult to name an actual starting date. But it was a time when western armies contained few women, very few outside medical staff, and she was neither soldier nor health worker. She would avoid the danger areas, where they could be reliably identified, and she planned on a short stay. Still, her visit worried those who knew her, and those who came to know her.

I was one of those who came to know her, well enough for us to agree to meet up after the war, ‘back in the world’. She had more confidence in that world than I did, a greater capacity for hope, which I liked to see as something in her personally, and not just an American thing. We had known each other just eight days, and although we spent fifty odd hours of that time very close, as close as two lost and frightened strangers might get, it was still not a long time. And we were young, and from different countries.

But if there was something fanciful in the rushed, frenzied moments of our agreement, I know she meant what she said. My word was less reliable. I made no real commitment as I talked up the possibilities of seeing her again, in a different time, in a different place. Our heart-to-heart took place on a stormy night in a humble hotel room in Saigon, the rain lashing the little balcony so hard that some of it came into the room. We marvelled at the force of it, wished it would ease.

One day the war ended, the curtain closing finally on those images of ignominious defeat, old newsreel clichés today, a communist tank crashing through palace gates, helicopters pushed off the sides of aircraft carriers like redundant junk, and people scrambling to get away from their own country. That was April, 1975, and some six months after that, four years from when I had last seen her, I set off to find the girl I’d promised to see again, back in the world. Well, more or less promised, trusting always that circumstances permitted.

And I gave her no warning, arriving in a small mountain town in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies hoping to track her down. She was twenty-five years old by then, quite possibly married, with children. Babies. I didn’t want to think about babies.

Watching the little airport terminal empty of people wrapped in furs and heavy jackets while the snow piled up outside, I wondered if I might be doing something less than proper, arriving unannounced. Like a stalker, an unwanted memory from the past, leaving the young woman little or no way to refuse my approach. No. I would call her first. And I didn’t have to say where I was. Anyway, she might have left this town, this district, long ago.

The friends I had left in Los Angeles saw nothing unbecoming in my behaviour, just something foolish, or so they intimated, laughing at my reticence. ‘I’ll call her from Vancouver,’ I told them. I told myself that from there I’d really know how serious I was. Because I had been the one to break things off, such as they were, ending any potentialities by not replying to her only letter, which arrived a couple of months after our parting at the airport in Saigon.

I like to blame the war for not writing back, the aftermath of confusion and regret. And my concern for the shock she must have been suffering still, because she was more deeply affected by what happened than I was. She was in a different world now, so far, in so many ways, from where we had been. She had a need for closure, as they say today, as if she could ever really close those things out completely.

Feeling that way, I sensed in her letter, behind her attempts at familiarity, a fear of a return to it all. I might have imagined more of that fear than was really there in her letter. It was a difficult time. The memories still fresh. And whatever the precise import of that letter, I judged it through my own sense of a need to start again, to forget and move on.

In any event I did not reply. When I heard no more her silence encouraged me and if I could never properly put her out of my mind, so much nobler then my resolve to leave her alone.

But now here I was.

At Vancouver I should have tried to phone, at least gone searching for a phone book, but I anticipated, procrastinated again, until the last call for the flight to her town. And I was on the plane, then circling in what to me seemed impossible cloud, as the pilot waited for a blue patch through which to descend, and miss the mountains as he did. Cold, unfamiliar Canada felt suddenly disconcerting. There I was in a town where I knew no one, well possibly no one, somewhere near the British Columbia-Alberta border.

The affable motel proprietor clearly thought I was running from something, arriving in winter, alone, professing no interest in skiing. Our conversation quickly waned and I went to my room, unsure whether to call at all in the morning, even should I locate her phone number.

Eight days. No more than three together. Four years ago. In the world’s most tumultuous and devastated corner at the time. Her personal turmoil. Her state of mind. Would she really want to be reminded of all that? And then there were my needs. Did I want to bring it all back into my life? I had at least a week to get to New York and meet up with my friends. Back home I could explain this little trip into the mountains as part of the holiday. I could finally forget her, and as they say, move on.

But in the morning, even a reluctant Canadian morning, the sun no more than a colour of warmth, a range of white peaks beyond the motel window and the valley of the town leaned into the sky in one direction. There was a jagged, haphazard uniformity about them that both defied and declared the clarity of the blue, and seemed to point the way.

The motel manager seemed brightened too by the sun and the blue and white world, might even have been pleased to see a suggestion of goodwill in my eye, where last night there had been a downcast and defensive redness. He poured smiles and coffee as I sat smelling bacon from the kitchen.

Klein? He frowned. No. I know most everyone in town. Do they live out of town maybe? He returned soon after with my breakfast and a phone book. Here. There’s a Klein up in the valley. That’s well out. Just because they have a telephone doesn’t mean there’s any other power out that far. Everyone in this country has a phone. In case you get snowed in.

And so I was committed, took my time with my breakfast, prepared myself.

A male voice answered. Hello?

Hello. My name is Mark Ross. I’m not sure if I have the right number. I was hoping to talk to a … to someone named Abbie Klein. He was quiet, forcing me to go on. I wondered if you might know a Klein, first name Abbie. It’s four years since I last saw her, but I think I have the right … region.

Yes, I know her. She’s my sister. She doesn’t live here anymore.

Oh.

There was a pause before he said, she moved away nearly four years ago. And before I could summon the nerve to ask where to, Is that an Australian accent?

Yes.

Are you the guy …? What name did you say again?

I told him.

"Do you know Abbie from when she was in Vietnam?’

Yes. That’s right. I … I should have tried to contact her. I’m travelling with some friends and took the opportunity …

Where are you?

I’m at the Lake Motel. Here in town.

You’re here in town? How long are you staying?

I’m not sure. A few days. I made no definite plans … in case …

There was another silence before he said, well, look. I remember your name. Abbie told us about you. And since you’re here in town, do you think we could meet? If you want? If you have the time?

Chapter 2

The first time I saw her I was on guard duty. A sort of guard duty. We also called it garbage duty because we had to escort a local garbage truck through the camp grounds and watch that the men on the truck didn’t take anything they weren’t supposed to. We only got to do it once or twice during our one year tour and it was when my only garbage duty was nearly completed that I saw her. I had to maintain some sort of watch on the men, or the appearance of it, so that when I looked again she was gone. And she was a rare sight then in that part of the world.

I waited and watched, distracted for a moment from my present duty. It was not the first time I had been distracted from my duty, nor would it be the last. Looking back now, remembering my stint in the military, I see myself, a soldier short on commitment, easily distracted. A young man at war with little interest in it beyond self-preservation, the company of a mate or two, and the odd recreational enjoyment, usually alcohol induced. Physically, tall, some athleticism, but with something lacking, a solidness. The face promised no more than average intelligence, with some firmness of purpose missing there too, despite a hint of youthful arrogance.

Like thousands of others during the years of the Vietnam War, I was a conscript, called up to serve at twenty years old. Some three years before that I had started a university degree, and dropped out soon after. At the time of my call-up I had not re-enrolled. And now, at twenty-two, graduating was still years away. It required maturity, and that was not me. Looking back, so I see myself.

I told the garbage men it was time to go. They looked at me in an innocent and surprised way as though I was cutting short a vitally important assignment and I noticed a newly painted desk and a filing cabinet disappearing onto the back of the truck.

Heh! I said. No! No more! Fini! Get those off.

The boss of the gang offered me money again. I adopted the pose of the morally outraged, wished I’d never taken any in the first place. He explained that they were late and would drop me at the Signals hill near the camp’s front entrance, some distance from my unit.

I wasn’t having it. Back to transport compound. I stepped up onto the running-board. The breeze in my face was a relief but the truck stank, the job stank and I couldn’t wait to be out of it. And out, as much as was possible, of the heat and humidity which sat like a heavy coat on a hot day, building to afternoon rainfall.

We swung out of the compound and I watched the low, flat building from which the girl had emerged until it was out of sight. But she was gone.

A grey powdered road divided the dirtied sandhills of the Australian Logistic Support base near the coastal town of Vung Tau where some five or six years earlier, army command had selected the flatter sections, between the sand-hills and on top of the bigger ones, for sandbag-reinforced huts where men and equipment were housed. The hilly terrain offered some variation to the usual flat monotony of military camps the world over, but if any tropical appeal once graced that part of the country’s southern shoreline it was lost now to the business of war, although that far south, in those later stages, we felt relatively safe. Army-green ambulance vans, red cross on white patch on their sides, lined up alongside the hospital, and heavy earth-moving equipment in the engineers’ compound, all spoke of the camp’s support role. Most of the fighting units were camped at Nui Dat amongst the rubber tree plantations some thirty kilometres to the north.

The garbage truck, a rusted relic of World War 2 parts and cast-offs, lurched in the hot dust, gears crunching, seemed to groan of man’s treatment of his beasts of burden. With one hand firmly gripping the passenger side door, I checked the button on my hip pocket with the other, and the thick bundle of notes inside. It was all piastre, the local currency, and the equivalent of about sixteen US dollars, enough to get you drunk every night for a week at the ORs’ canteen. There wasn’t much else for us to spend our money on. If you liked to live more dangerously it could get you several drinks in town, and the company of a bargirl.

But my new wealth sat uneasily. Perhaps the sight of that girl, western, pale-faced in her olive-green overalls, reminded me of a world where corruption wasn’t so commonplace, or at least not so obvious; a place where I had nothing to do with local garbage collectors desperate to make a few American dollars.

But they had practically stuffed those soiled piastre into my pockets. So I told myself. And I’d been pretty good, considering. I saved a few pairs of boots left in hut doorways, washing drying on makeshift lines, a bundle of tarpaulins, crates of Coca Cola. A crate of beer at the back of the Transport Sergeants’ Mess had them all looking at me hopefully until I went and stood beside it.

At central admin a soldier came running after the truck to retrieve a pair of stereo speakers and I had to yell at the driver to stop. I managed to rescue a few copies of Playboy, which they all found very amusing, but they were fast and when their boss offered me 400 piastre for a ‘mistake’ with a pile of used tyres, and I accepted, they knew they had me. Their guard was corrupt.

As the truck moved away from where I stepped off near the Transport compound, feeling like I’d been more or less in control, I saw the crate of beer sitting on top of the load. The two younger ones who rode in the back waved, all smiles and ‘see you later, mate.’

In the shower then I used lots of soap. The stench of corruption, like the stench of garbage, clings and lingers. I would get rid of the money as soon as possible. There were risks in leaving camp alone to go into town but the convoy wouldn’t be back for hours and I had my ill-gotten booty to unload.

Blowfly was the only other driver in the hut as I got dressed. His job was to take the ‘wet’ garbage from our company mess to a dump across town, every day. Everybody else preferred convoy work, even though it took us outside the camp and beyond the town. But Blowfly never complained, and he did work a short day. I told him about my sighting inside the American compound. I wanted to tell someone. Our taciturn garbo glanced at me expressionlessly. Yeh, I know. I see her sometimes when I go down that way. She’s better from a distance.

Blowfly had no fear of town. He saw the same bargirl nearly every evening, spending the night and then turning up at the camp each day to work. He didn’t mix much, didn’t seem to need us, and I have no idea where he came from but I had heard him say that he wasn’t really looking forward to going home. The rest of us were counting the days, literally. Accused once of ‘turning nog’, Blowfly had shrugged casually, indulged in a proud smile. And on the subject of the American girl he was just as phlegmatic. Everyone thinks she’s great, just because she’s a round-eye.

I left it at that. There was no point. The man was prejudiced.

I went to town. Vung Tau. Fishing port and formerly a local beach retreat. That was pre-war, before the Americans came. Now, at its centre at least, a market place for the soldier on leave, catering to those of his needs he was less likely to write home about. Old women squatted on dirty sidewalks with baskets of pornographic photos and trinkets, including multi-coloured peace beads, peace signs and little metal cards engraved withfuck the army, born to kill, Vietnam sucks and the like, attached to leather necklaces.

The peace movement had reached the war zone, in glittering piles of these anti-war messages and flower-power paraphernalia. All in jest of course, the self-mocking curse of the ordinary soldier, but it didn’t say much for morale. Put your life on the line, soldier, so the toothless mama san squatting in the dust can go on selling messages that make a mockery of your service. Henry ‘Moll’ Mollineau, a driver from my hut, had one of the little slogan cards attached to his bush-hat withFuck it. Just fuck itinscribed on it, declaring his attitude wherever he went. Americans in particular liked to wear them around their necks with their peace beads and dog tags.

There must have been ordinary soldiers somewhere, with a belief in the cause, and ordinary locals with a genuine welcome in their hearts for visiting soldiers, and whatever they stood for. You just didn’t see any on the streets of downtown Vung Tau.

Girls spilled out of narrow, smoke-filled bars onto the hot, crowded streets, their western hairstyles, heavy make-up and tight mini-skirts accentuating their Asianness. Heh, Uc dai loi. You want girl? Wanna good time, big boy? Ha, ha, ha.

The Red Cherry Bar was bigger than most with a fully-charged, hard-core porno movie working away on the wall. The mama san had attempted to dress the place up with hot pink paint and mirrors, which only added to the cheapness but also achieved a kind of innocence. Anything done up that badly was screaming out for help.

You wanna buy me Saigon tea, honey? the girl on my lap whispered in my ear as she put my hand on her leg. We talked about nothing and she laughed at my stupid jokes as she squirmed around on my lap until I had bought enough Saigon tea to keep her popular with the mama san. You want boom-boom now, honey?

She had a baby in a crib in the corner of her little room and I had to wait while she took it away. The shabby, unpainted room and listening to the baby cry while she spoke to an older woman outside unnerved me, but she gave me a big smile when she returned and closed the door. I watched while she slid her slip of a dress over her hips.

You have condom, honey?

I showed her. She came to me where I sat on the bed, still smiling, as though we were real lovers and she hadn’t a care in the world. And then she was straddling me, sighing on her downward movements, coaxing me into quicker action, to sate the lust, to please, always to please, to assuage whatever frustrations had brought the soldier to her. For she was my lover. Her final cry was expertly timed and accompanied, I realised, by another cry, the cry of a baby somewhere in the distance.

She knelt on the bed after, brushing her hair and watching me peel off a pile of piastre.

You have US dollar? I shook my head. I had some US military currency but wanted to unload the local stuff from the day’s business. You be my boyfriend, honey?

I took a proper look at her for the first time. She was pretty and friendly, a little older than most bargirls, and she might have been more anxious than others to introduce a little regularity, even security, into her life because of the baby. But I mumbled something meaningless and handed her the crumpled wad of piastre.

The air outside in the noisy street was thick with the threat of the evening’s downpour. I caught a Lambretta back to the camp before darkness arrived as suddenly as it would and had to share the noisy little three-wheeled cab with a group of five or six women and a brood of chickens cooped in a cage at one woman’s feet. They were smiling shyly but when one woman spoke they all laughed.

I arrived in camp as the convoy was entering the compound and hurried to the shower block to beat the rush. I was glad I did. A glance in the mirror showed that my left earlobe was red with lipstick. I managed to wash it off just as the first rowdy, dust-covered drivers entered the shower hut. Cleansed of my sins and red evidence thereof, I wandered back to the lines in thongs and a towel. My hut was a hubbub of disrobing drivers.

Did you go into town? Tony Carmody asked. He sat on his bunk pulling off his boots. Tony had been to town once only, and then just for a look. A school teacher from Melbourne, he had a fiancée and was living for the day of their wedding soon after he got back home. He wrote her a letter every day, at least a couple of pages. And how much did you make on garbage duty? They reckon Daniels made twenty dollars. Slipped ‘em a crate of booze.

I told him about my day, my attempts to keep grasping brown hands off army property and personal belongings, my struggle to refuse dirty money, my eventual capitulation.

At which he looked unmoved. Tony Carmody had this infuriating maturity and integrity about him. On the day he did his garbage duty he took none of their money, held to his principles, in the face of all those smiling exhortations from the foreman garbage collector, the man in charge, distinguishable from his barefoot crew by a tattered American army cap, plastic sandals and a pocket full of piastre.

Tony’s maturity sometimes left me feeling envious. A fully qualified professional at twenty-two, his life looked sorted, at least on course. He was a reminder to me that my life’s plans were not nearly as settled. It was comforting to know that an office job with an insurance company was waiting for me back home in Brisbane, to be taken up again when my national service was done, but the job itself held no great attraction.

I decided to change the subject. How’s the Dat?

Wonderful. He tossed a boot under his bunk. Wonderful because it’s a good reminder of how lucky we are to be living down here in slack old Vungers.

Outside there was a rumble of thunder and the sky was now quite dark. Tony lay back on his bunk. Thin lines of dirt had settled in the creases of his neck. He had his eyes closed. Fancy a beer? He asked. When I’ve had a shower?

What an excellent idea. And I can tell you about my big discovery of the day.

What?

A girl of the round-eye variety.

He looked at me. Down in the American compound? I know. Blowfly reckons she’s better from a distance.

By the time he got back from the showers the rain had started and we had to make a run for the canteen hut.

Chapter 3

To those of us who had seen her she was a curiosity, an occasional conversation piece, the object even of a few regrettable fantasies. And then I met her, and she became a person.

The couple of weeks leading up to that meeting went by uneventfully, our unit’s operations as much about routine as anything else. Except for one unusual order from base command, an order to which I responded as apathetically as any other driver, and an order that would, eventually, have more to do with all that happened to the American girl and me than I could have imagined at the time.

We need a volunteer, our company 2IC, Captain O’Brien told us at morning assembly. Just one. To march in a parade.

He watched us for a moment, gauging reaction, with no sign of optimism. We hadn’t marched since basic training and didn’t want to start again now. Except for one driver whose interest in the job had nothing to do with marching.

The parade’s being held in Saigon, the captain went on. To commemorate South Vietnam’s national day. It’ll be made up mostly of American and South Vietnamese troops, but there’ll be contingents from other allies as well, including Australia. Certain Vung Tau units will be volunteering one soldier each to make up our marching party and we have been chosen. Command must have noticed how soldierly we look.

There were grins, bored but wary, from some of the thirty odd, mostly shirtless, mostly shaven soldiers before him. But the captain was not smiling. It’s an assignment that any digger should be proud to participate in because he’ll be representing his country. All smiles had stopped and nobody moved. In the growing heat a churlish cynicism descended and multiplied.

O’Brien continued, referring to orders as he did. Command would prefer a soldier that would, in appearance at least, he read from a paper, do the lean and legendary digger proud. We already have one volunteer. Unfortunately, while he might be legendary enough, Private Daniels leaves a bit to be desired in the leanness department.

The few sniggers stopped when the captain began scanning his men, looking for a hint of interest, and the required leanness.

Now don’t be shy. His usual smirk turned to a sneer. You’ll get a few days in Saigon, to practise with the squad before the parade takes place. At this Bushfire Daniels raised his hand. The captain looked at him. Not that you should make much of that. You’ll be there to march. Daniels slowly lowered his hand. Anyone? Still no one else moved. Private O’Malley. See me after parade.

There was an audible sigh of relief. Lyle O’Malley was our best driver and our best volunteer. We could always rely on Lyle to take on the more difficult and unpopular tasks. Escaped again, so I thought, if I thought at all, from another crappy job nobody

wanted. Marching and things military were put happily behind us as we headed out on convoy duties.

We spent our days assisting the construction of roads and other infrastructure in Phuoc Tuy Province, an activity which Crazy Al Stanley, our resident socialist, said was probably aiding the enemy. If Al was right we didn’t care. Anything to keep out of harm’s way.

For us the war was there more in atmosphere and potential than in active violence. We were shot at once, but it seemed the perpetrators were most likely local police, when a truck passed through a check-point without stopping. Watching helicopter gunships spitting fire into the Long Hai Hills along the road to the coastal town of Phuoc Hai reminded us of how close the action was and land mines kept us edgy. But the last time one of our trucks had hit a mine I was still in Australia and there always seemed to be someone else ready to lead whenever we left the bitumen.

And so the days rolled by, in heat and dust and rain and mud, but then after-work beer, laughter,