The Phantom Blooper (21 page)

The black grunts do not bother to salute me, the shitbirds. I feel like writing their asses up on charges for their lack of military courtesy.

The black grunts carry their M-16s slung over their shoulders, but locked and loaded. They carefully scan the face of every civilian. They look for the glint of an AK-47 in any unfriendly eye.

Our guide, a Front liaison agent, appears, a smiling teenaged girl in green shorts, no shoes, and a ragged old khaki shirt with tarnished eagles on the collar lapels--the rank insignia of a full bull, a Marine colonel. The girl's right knee is a deformed mass laced in red with crude surgical scars. She does not greet us, does not even approach us. She ignores us. She limps along at a brisk pace, ten yards ahead of us, carrying a big bundle of dirty laundry balanced on her head.

The village of Khe Sanh has swollen in size since my last skivvy run. It's a circus of chattering cyclo drivers, three-wheeled Lambrettas, street beggars, and children of all ages.

Pathetic refugees squat inside shelters constructed from stolen plywood, stolen cardboard, and stolen canvas. But there are not as many American troops on deck as there were in the good old bad old days. Since Khe Sanh Combat Base was abandoned, the only American personnel in this Tactical Area of Responsibility are from smaller garrisons at landing zones and firebases.

We follow the liaison agent through the village black market. Here ambitious capitalists who talk fast and travel light hawk stolen military equipment and PX stock off muddy ponchos spread on the ground: C-rations, Kodak Instamatic cameras, Coco-Puffs breakfast cereal, and expensive Hong Kong watches that wholesale for two dollars a dozen.

Two Arvin sergeants from the loot-now, fight-later army are haggling with an old mama-san over the price of a brass statue of the Buddhist goddess of mercy which has been cast from a melted-down howitzer shell casing. The old mama-san referees the fight by punching at both men with little bony fists, talking nonstop and threatening deadly violence. She's a real tough old broad.

An old man wearing an Australian bush hat steps into my path. He flashes toothless gums and laughs like a crazy man. There are ugly scars all over his neck. The crazy man swats a fly from his face and goes on laughing, a weird, gurgling laugh. He is the world's easiest audience, easy to please, but all the time he's glaring at me in the special way the villagers of Hoa Binh glared at me for the first year of my captivity, with that same combination of fear, fascination, and deadly intent, as though I'm not a human being at all, but some exotic venomous snake.

The crazy man holds out a small glass Buddha and flashes three fingers; thirty piasters. He makes ugly noises deep in his throat as though he's trying to talk.

The laughing crazy man is shoved aside rudely by a strangely seductive, strikingly sexy teenaged girl wearing a black eye patch. The girl has a slender body but comically oversized breasts. Her bosoms are vast and bloated, protruding ahead of her like the prows of black battleships. She is dressed all in black and has a black shawl over her head.

Behind the beautiful girl, silent and unnoticed, a little boy barely old enough to walk clings to the girl's black pajama trousers leg with a tiny fist, while she tugs him around, seeming not to notice that he is there.

The girl talks nonstop in pidgin English. "You. You. Boom-boom picture you? You buy. You. You buy. You buy now, okay?" And then she pulls a dirty picture book out of her bra. "You buy now." She flips the pages in front of my face. The photographs in the book substantiate in no uncertain terms the eternal undying love between women and biker gangs, women and women, and women and Danish farm animals.

I shake my head and wave her off, arrogantly, an officer, a Roman centurion dismissing the rabble in the provinces. My dream girl has turned out to be just another flat-chested hustler with a brassiere stuffed full of Tijuana Bibles. The story of my life. "
Di di, mau len
," I say--"Go away."

Our guide with the laundry on her head pauses in front of Beaver Cleaver's steam-and-cream, just for an instant, then moves on, not looking back.

In broad daylight, when I'm not half drunk on hot beer, the steam-and-cream is a real sleazy dump, although garishly gaudy and colorful when contrasted to the refugee shelters surrounding it. The steam-and-cream is an ugly palace of plywood scavenged from military packing cases. The plywood has been covered with a multicolored layer of rusting beer cans which have been pounded flat and then tacked on, overlapping, like scales on a fish.

On the outside of the steam-and-cream is a large fading sign that says in block letters: CAR WASHED & GET SCREWED. Inside the steam-and-cream are hot rocks and water in gourd dippers and twelve-year-old girls who suck you off.

It was inside this building that I saw Mr. Greenjeans catch Beaver Cleaver red-handed with Viet Cong agents, swapping a truckload of hand grenades for a knapsack full of raw heroin.

This steam-and-cream is the most famous and most popular boom-boom parlor in Eye-Corps because it features only round-eyed whores, none over the age of fifteen.

As we walk past, one girl striking poses in front of the steam-and-cream calls out to me, "Hey, Captain, I think I love you. You got girlfriend Viet Nam?" She's a sexy black girl with a Vietnamese accent, wearing pink hot pants and high heels. Her yellow tank top is thin enough to leave nothing to the imagination. Her lips are too red with too much lipstick. "Ten dolla you. Number one fuckee.

"My name Peggy Sue. I love you too much. Sucky-sucky number one." Her voice is so snotty with contempt that you feel like slapping her face. "You pay now. No freebies today."

Some Navy Seabees surround Peggy Sue. The leader of the Seabees is a Chief Petty Officer with SUPERGRUNT written across the back of his flak jacket. Supergrunt yanks out a fat stack of MPCs--military payment certificates. The small paper bills are the colors and size of Monopoly money.

"Pussy," says Supergrunt. "I love it." And the Seabees laugh.

Peggy Sue, the black teenybopper whore, falls out of love with me with a heartbreaking lack of finesse. "Short-time?" she says to Supergrunt. "You pay now. I love you too much." Peggy Sue latches onto Supergrunt's arm and drags him inside.

The other Seabees pair off with other girls. One of the Seabees says, "Hey, baby-san, you souvenir me one boom-boom?"

Baby-san giggles. "You cheap Charlie."

Somebody says, "You know, not counting gook whores, I'm a virgin!"

From inside the steam-and-cream steps the Funny Gunny, Beaver Cleaver's business partner. He is fat and wears hornrimmed glasses with thick lenses. The thick lenses make his eyes look too big.

The Funny Gunny is eating fried chicken and laughing. He looks happier than a pig in shit. He gnaws on a chicken leg and grins and nods to each and every incoming customer.

The Funny Gunny puts his arm around a white girl who looks like some pom-pom girl's younger sister. The girl has a sweet baby face but hard, mascaraed eyes. She is reading a comic book about the financial adventures of Donald Duck's Uncle Scrooge. "Hey, baby," she says to me, not looking up from her comic book, "me Tracy. Me cherry girl. Me horny. Me so horny. I love you, G. I. No shit."

Saluting me with a chicken leg, the Funny Gunny says, "Go ahead, sir." He says with a southern accent, "Pork her eyes out. She's clean. A real round-eye! They're spook kids. Little CIA bastards. We bring 'em in from all over Viet Nam. They have to be twelve years old. Younger'n that, can't use 'em; no tits. Now, Tracy's thirteen and just startin' to get a nice little pair of tits on her. And her pussy is as bald as a clam and tight as a vise."

The Funny Gunny grins at me again, then shrugs as if to say that he's just a good ol' country-assed boy trying to make a hard dollar in a highly competitive business.

The thirteen-year-old whore does not look at my face. She grabs my arm and tries to pull me inside. From the doorway I can see that the walls are still papered with Playboy centerfolds.

From inside the steam-and-cream come sex sounds and laughter and smells of stale cigarette smoke, cheap perfume, and sweat.

As I pull my arm free and walk away from the girl she says in a sneering, hateful tone, "You cheap Charlie," then jerks aside her black halter top and flashes a bee-sting tit. It's a reflex action, because she has already erased our entire romantic relationship from her mind.

Tracy's goodbye flash brings a hoot and a holler from a squad of giggling pogues as they shove past me, hot on her trail.

I rejoin the Woodcutter and Commander Be Dan, who have been watching me with interest.

As we walk away we can hear Supergrunt, the Seabee, giving an introductory lecture on the lore of whorehouses in Viet Nam: "These gook women are so small you have to screw them two at a time to get any satisfaction. And, yes, the rumors you have heard are true, gook pussies do, in fact, slant sideways. Half of these gook whores are serving officers in the Viet Cong. The other half have got TB. Just be sure you only fuck the ones that cough."

We walk into the village and everyone is excessively polite to me, the American officer. Everyone smiles. But it's a fuck-you-I-hope-you-die smile. If these people are whipped dogs, it's only on the outside. They're all
Chien Si
, every man, woman, and child. It's there in their faces, as plain as day. It's funny I never saw it before.

Our guide reappears. We follow her. She pauses at a hooch, then hurries away with her stage-prop laundry on her head, not looking back.

The Woodcutter, my bound prisoner, orders us into the hooch. Inside, I untwist the black comm wire from around the Woodcutter's wrists while silent women come in and serve us tea and rice cakes.

I am introduced to the confused women as Bao Chi, the American Front fighter.

Commander Be Dan changes out of his Arvin Ranger outfit and back into his black pajamas and hurries off on some urgent errand.

The Woodcutter and I squat on the dirt floor, silently sipping our tea.

Shadows come with the night. The shadows move in and out of the small hooch. There are so many of them; they must be waiting for their turns outside. They come to talk to the Woodcutter. Their voices are like the soft rippling of creek water. The Woodcutter speaks to each applicant softly, politely, with endless patience, sometimes rubbing his wrists, sometimes pausing to eat a rice cake.

A slender teenaged girl brings us red rice and fish.

We eat. The girl squats in front of me and stares. As the famous
Chien Si My
, I am becoming just another jaded celebrity. Everywhere I go, I have my fans. But there's something very unusual about this girl. She has a powerful presence.

It's dark in the hooch, so I can only scan the girl with my night vision. She is very beautiful. Her hair is cut as short as a man's. She is wearing a black T-shirt, faded blue jeans, and red rubber sandals. In a shoulder holster the girl is packing a nickel-plated snub-nosed .38-caliber pistol. Around her neck hangs a braided string necklace with a white jade Buddha and a gold chain strung with maybe fifty dogtags.

The girl stares at me, silent, a Mona Lisa smile on her lips. She holds her head first this way, then that way, checking me out from every angle. She must be some kind of groupie. Boy, I hope so!

An electric chill grips my stomach as I sense that the girl is blind. She can't see me, but she knows a white foreigner when she smells one, like the blind barge man. This beautiful woman is sitting here, calm and serene, thinking up extrapainful ways in which to torture me to death.

The shadows move. Someone lights a kerosene lantern.

The new light scares a gecko. The brown lizard doubletimes upside down along the thatched roof.

The Woodcutter says, "Bao Chi, I wish to introduce you to Miss Tiger Eye, the Commander of the Western Region. We are here in obedience to her orders."

Tiger Eye says, "I have heard of you, Bao Chi. You are becoming a legend to my people." Then Tiger Eye says to me in English: "Welcome to my country."

I say, "Thank you, Comrade General."

Tiger Eye leans forward. In the lantern light I can see her face. She is not a teenager. She's probably in her early thirties; with Asians it's always hard to say for sure.

The Comrade General pulls a black eyepatch over her face and onto her right eye. She says, "You. You. Boom-boom picture you? You buy. You. You buy."

Her performance makes her laugh merrily. She is the dream girl who sells dirty books out of her bra. She says, "I am a very good actress, Bao Chi.
Oui?
Don't you think so?" And she laughs again.

I laugh too.

I pull my dogtags up over my head and offer them to Tiger Eye in the polite way, with both hands.

Tiger Eye pulls off her eyepatch and leans forward again into the light so that I can slip the beaded chain over her head. I see something that makes me hesitate.

Tiger Eye is not blind, but she has lost her right eye. The eye socket now holds a marble as big as one of the Woodcutter's Ping-Pong balls. When I was a kid we called these oversized marbles "jug rollers." And we called this type of marble, crystal clear except for a single slash of yellow in the center, a "cat's eye."

Tiger Eye accepts my dogtags bashfully, smiling and blushing until I think she's going to cry. She lifts a braided black string necklace from around her neck. On the string hangs a small white jade figure of the Buddha. She places the loop of string over my head.

Then the Commander of the Western Region takes my right hand between her two hands and lifts the three hands between us. We sit like that, saying nothing, facing each other across the kerosene lamp and a blackened brass teapot.

The Woodcutter smokes his pipe. He looks at us without expression and nods his approval.

Midnight. Now all of the horny soldiers and Marines have retreated behind their barbed wire and are hunkered down in their firebases and landing zones, safe behind sandbagged walls and Claymore mines and interlocking fields of fire.

In the black-market section of the village people materialize out of the darkness, an army of ghosts in white paper hats.