Part One: Arriving Home

If assholes could fly…

Arriving in Saigon in the summertime near noon, I was bombarded right away by the heat. It found its way everywhere in the country, air conditioning or not. It wasn’t the temperatures that bothered me, deserts kinda make you forget about that. But damned if the humidity wasn’t a bitch, it worked your body like one gigantic mosquito, sucking out the energy to do a damned thing outta you.

Then head games of customs. Many a-tale about Charles and his antics had been related to me, but I wasn’t all that frightened, prepared as well as I thought I’d ever be. I was armed, with the most effective weapon never issued to me during all my time in the field which could be taken aboard an airplane without tripping the metal detector. Abraham Lincoln was on my side.

Charlie's inefficiency was well known in the circles. But in the presence of greenbacks, you’d think he was ready to grab a bicycle and run off with a cart of shells off to Dien Bien Phu again. Was that a smile on the customs worker's face as he opened my passport? Oh, no. That was the green bouncing off of his face. The name on the passport elicited a frown, but it was brief. Looks like I applied enough grease to that squeaky wheel. Grudgingly, he gestured me onwards to the furnace. In the neighboring booth some other Viet Kieu had been standing there for ten minutes as Chuck counted the letters of the guy's name in the passport, and doubled-checked it. His passport was green though, just not the right shade.

In reflection, one had to appreciate how quickly Charlie established his hierarchy after the Giay Phong(Reunification). Almost everyone in a police uniform spoke a brand of Northern Vietnamese(piss poor and slurred), more often than not their geneology having some roots in the stuggles against the French, Americans and South. If they had any relatives that jumped ship and became boat people in previous decades (within three generations), so much for their career prospects. They basically had more connections than a switchboard. The official pay was piss, but by golly are there fringe bennies. A patrolman on a commercial route can rake in well over a couple million dong (a couple hundred USD) in one day from overloaded cargo trucks alone. That's a lot of monopoly money. Sure, they were hell on you when they first pull you over about some trumped up traffic charge, but a shuffle of the pockets quickly elicits a smug grin and a stiff warning. No one ever said Communism was about taking vows of poverty.

I think one of the first things that hit me as I got out of the airport was anxiety. Wait, that was an old lady shoving a water bottle in my face. No, it was the swarm of cabbies and freelance motorcycles asking me if I needed a ride. Oh wait, now I remember. It was the large mass of people waiting by the distance, about 30-odd of which were my extended family. Now the games really began.

I remembered what dad said and picked up a bottle of Hennesy at the airport, but looking at the bunch which were my uncles, I felt grossly unprepared. They never mentioned this in my Boy Scout handbook, let alone the field manuals in the Corps. I hoped they didn't expect me to pay all the tabs. A Lance took home more than about most of the country a month, but nowhere near enough to get a dozen or so grown men dirty drunk in ample celebration. Besides, I still had my car to pay off. I just hope they didn't drink like Marines.

Now in Vietnam, a variety of things are ubiquitous. For starters, the motorcycles. Then the drinking joints which line up on a street. Also the clouds of cigarette smoke (non-smoking areas, what’s that?). And you can't forget the national past-time of drinking coffee, which can start a chain of events which takes up a whole day and ends up the next morning with a hangover. Between the four, being able to jog a mile without stopping is quite an accomplishment for locals.

But I didn’t need any of that at the moment, I felt a little parched for water. So onward to the lady peddling bottles. In areas frequented by travelers, street peddlers are always present and armed with goods to accompany you on the road, including coming right up to your car window. Since I had no Dong yet, I figured I'd pay in dollars. I heard her saying something about the bottles being 5,000 each in Dong, but the moment she saw my miserly wad of ones she shouted to me in English, "One dollar!" Mildly scandalized, but still shimmering with a virgin's shyness, I swallowed my pride and bought her damned water. I needed to get some monopoly money, and fast. And the old bat had the cojones to smile about it afterwards, it seemed like the national salute.

Going solo, I didn't pack much save for my trusty overseas bag, which on my back barely fit onto a motorcycle. So after the initial shocks from the family, we hopped on the caravan of motorcycles and headed to Third Uncle's house, all 30-odd of us.

In the early years of high school where the ratio of people who could drive and those bumming was quite cramped, I had a dose of being stuffed into a variety of small spaces, including one trip in the trunk of my friend's CRX whilst passed-out drunk after one night of clubbing. But it was in Saigon that I witnessed the truly packable nature of Asia. A motorcycle with a seat of about 4 feet can comfortably hold about 2 adults and a small kiddo in the front. However, under duress, and given the persons involved are of the right stature, a family of oh say, 5 can travel on one motorcycle. It gets awful dicey at that point though, so usually the most that'll get on is 3 adults and one kid. Thankfully due to my overseas bag which counts as an adult in the formula, I was spared the phenomenon for my first ride thorugh Saigon.

One thing I wasn’t spared though was the immense traffic of midday Saigon. Darting in and out of lanes, running red lights, nearly getting pegged by the countless motorcycles, cars, trucks and bicycles; using your horn and flashing your headlights were simply good manners. Taking a look at the automobile lane on the far left, I caught notice of an interesting technique in passing a car ahead of you. Instead of passing on a lane going in the same direction, drivers would dart over to the side of traffic opposite them and pass the car in front of them, getting back into the right lane. You’d see just about every car pull it off one time or another, from a Kia Pride all the way up to a 5 ton truck.

Up head I saw Charlie again, this time standing on the street corner keeping an eye on traffic. Didn’t see a police cruiser nearby, save for a motorbike at the ready. A few seconds later, I saw that it wasn’t necessary as he pointed and whistled at some car passing by. The car stopped, pulled over and waited the agonizingly long 30 seconds for Chuck to walk up to him and chew his ass out like a good old gunny on the parade deck. Saw some lame ass gesticulations of apology, a pair of shifty eyes and some multi-colored Uncles headed in the way of the traffic cop. After a couple more ‘stern’ warnings, he let the poor wayward cargo truck carry on along its way. All in a day’s work.

The chaos continued for the remaining 15 minutes it took to travel about 10 kilometers through the bustling city. Until finally we ended up down some back alley off of Nguyen Tri Phuong, roaring through the alleys as fast as our 60cc motorbikes could take us up to the front gate of the menacingly 4 story tall and 10 food wide house of Third Uncle.

My eyes wandered all around the entrance of what constituted the front yard. Enough tables to seat about 40 people scattered around the floor, cases of beer to weaken the resolve of even the most stony First Sergeant, plates of roast pork, duck, hot pots and gigantic solid blocks of ice with the steam rising up from them. And all the way in the back up on a shelf with a plate that had the best of everything on it, perfumed with the scent of a few dozen burning joss sticks, were pictures of my great-grandparents and grandparents. The convoy began to dismount and park their steeds in every other open nook and cranny in the front and a great clamoring ensued at the new arrival, yours truly. And like the good little Marine I was, I zoned myself out of the hustle and bustle and went off to do what my mom told me to do when I got to the house.

I walked up to the altar, grabbed a couple of joss sticks, bummed a light off from the lighter that was placed next to the stand and lit them. With the incense in my hand I bowed my head and hands down with them three times and put them into the holder. That bit of ritual accomplished without much disaster, I turned around to face the crowd that was my family.