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Killing (continued from preceding page) powders, marijuana, carved tusks.
A woman with a scrawny, deformed child in her arms begged for money. Her mouth was rouged out from betel nut chewing. A blind man, playing what looked like a home-made guitar, was led around by a little girl who held out a tin can for coins.
“The way I see it,” said Phil, “Vietnam is like some grotesque amusement park. Disneyland for the weird. An E-ticket in an alternate universe. Surreal. Sir-Real.”
Phil chattered about himself in a rat-a-tat-tat hipster manner. He had studied photography in Maine, he said, then moved to “the coast,” where he got a seaman’s document and worked on a couple of ships to Vietnam. Back in “San Fran,” he met Theresa, who convinced him to try his luck as a war photographer. So he flew to Saigon on his own and started taking pictures.
“Theresa got rid of me the same way,” Hank said. “What?”
“Yeah, she suggested I catch a ship back to Vietnam. What’s she do, send all her old men here?”
“Yeah, well,” said Phil. “So you been here before?” “It’s my second trip to the Zone,” Hank said.
“Ah, right. Double base pay when you’re within 50 miles of the Zone. Bonus cargo.”
Hank nodded. “Yeah, for the guys I work with, it’s all about the paycheck. Ten percent more of our base pay while there’s 50 tons or more of ammo on board, any kind of ammo.” Hank changed the sub- ject. “So you came out here as a freelance photogra- pher. Then what?”
“Yeah, see, some of my pix got picked up by the wire services, you know. As soon as that happened, man, I was on my way. That’s when I kind of hooked up with Dan. He’s tall and handsome, so when I’m with him there’s always a lot of attention from the ladies. He’s got this movie star charisma, everybody’s drawn do him.”
As if on cue, whores came up to both at that moment, pinched their arms and offered a variety of services. Hank was always ready to go to a massage parlor, but he hated group pinching and waved the whores away.
“I wonder if all wars have been like this,” Hank said. “People in the war zone whoring themselves to the invading army.”
“We’re all whores, man,” Phil said. “You, working on ammo ships. Me, taking pictures. I mean, we chose to come here, and we choose to stay. We’re all whores. That’s what Graham Greene would have said.”
Phil had two touchstones. One was the outrageously handsome Dan Barrow, who sent young girls’ hearts aflutter. The other was Graham Greene, who had spent years in Vietnam during the 1950s. Phil point- ed out places where Greene had slept or eaten or been entertained when he was a journalist here.
Hank and Phil walked past the American NCO Club, where dozens of cyclos waited for business. Phil gathered some of the drivers and gestured as if he were smoking a long pipe. He said, “O-peen, o-peen.” One of the drivers, ancient-looking, nodded and ges- tured for them to sit in the cyclo.
A few minutes later they were being pedaled deep into a warren of very narrow streets where most of the residents wore black pajamas.
“Does the clothing mean anything?” Hank said.
Phil laughed. “Hey, it could mean they’re VC. But, you know, I respect the little yellow bastards. Far as I’m concerned, they’re not Charlie, they’re Charles. Look, nothing’s safe. Nothing here is safe. You can’t protect your ass all the time, you know. We’re the invaders. They can move around like shadows. We can’t.”
In a narrow alleyway—no way in the world they could have found their own way out of there—the driver stopped and pointed to a doorway. Phil jumped out, knocked, and a toothless papa-san came to the door.
“O-peen?” Phil said. Papa-san nodded and waved them into the house.
Hank signaled the cyclo driver to wait for them, then they went inside.
One by one, Phil and Hank lay down on their hips on top of a wide, bed-like platform, covered only with tatami mats, that took up most of the small room. Then another old man, the pipe-preparer, joined them. He also lay on his hip, a lit kerosene lantern in front of
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