I had a couple of days off in Saigon and went to visit a friend who was an Explosive Ordnance1 sergeant. Toveras had his own jeep with a bubbletop and had free access to anywhere in Saigon, Cholon and Tan Son Nhut. He had become intrigued by the stories of Hong Kong which was then still under British rule. “Man, these damn Brits, they are all over the fucking world!” he once told me. “I wanna go there and check that shit out in Hong Kong before those fucking Chinese take over and screw it all up.”
We were authorized one seven-day R&R2 trip to a number of destinations of our choice. Toveras talked enough about Hong Kong that I became intrigued. We made plans to go there on our R&R. Before the Hong Kong trip, he visited our friend, Papasan Bich, and got a bag of pot to last us a week. I waited for him in the very back of the R&R processing center until the doors closed. He failed to show. About some fifteen or twenty minutes into the required briefing, a door opened and Toveras walked in lugging his duffle bag and wearing jungle fatigues while the rest of us wore the required civilian clothes. The redneck sergeant conducting the briefing yelled out “Soldier, this is R&R processing for Hong Kong. You’re in the wrong building, soldier!”
Toveras walked up to redneck and began a conversation. Toveras continued while the sergeant’s face began turning red while shaking his head. The sergeant sent his assistant to bring a captain into the conversation. The captain listened intently, nodded and gave the sergeant some order which I could not hear. At that point Toveras began walking to the back of the room where I was. Toveras began pulling some civilian clothes from his duffle bag and began changing into his badly wrinkled clothes while the redneck sergeant continued his briefing still red-faced.
Toveras and I were standing across the counter from each other at the back of the R&R processing center in Tan Son Nhut filling out the several forms before proceeding on to the airport.
Redneck was still up on his platform yelling out to the ninety or hundred of us “Take the yellow form, put it in front of you and you can look it over, but don’t fill out anything yet. We’re all going to do it by the numbers.”
“Man, what’s all this shit about?” Tovares muttered. “I’m not going to MOVE there! I just wanna get the hell of this miserable fucking place for a few days. Why make me do all this shit?” He made perfect sense.
I’ve never had the patience to play by the rules when ignorance rules the day. I began to fill out my form. I had just started filling my form on my own when the assistant specialist tapped me on my shoulder, “Listen to the sergeant. We’re going to do it by the numbers,” he said. Ignoring him, I kept on filling out my form. Tovares was impressed. “Man, you are one baaaaad ass!” He started filling out his, too, with the specialist raising his hand trying to get redneck’s attention.
“Someone got a question in the back?” shouted the sergeant.
“Sarge, we’ve got two folks over here who have started to fill out the forms.” the specialist complained.
Redneck shouted out “Goddamit! You two are not complying!. You fuck up my forms, and you two are not going anywhere but back to your unit!”
Tovares and I finished filling out all the third-grade level forms while the rest of the group was still working on the yellow form. He pulled out a cigarette and offered me one. I did not smoke but I took it. Bad manners to refuse. We started chatting, and I learned he had overslept. He lied to Redneck telling him he was late due to an EOD emergency which he had to attend to. When his story was doubted, Toveras showed the captain his official orders proving him to be an Explosive Ordnance Disposal specialist. “These orders make me God!” Toveras boasted. “Nobody fucks with me once they see I’m EOD.”
Toveras and I had become good friends. Whenever I was in the Saigon area and found myself downtown past curfew, I would take a taxi to Toveras’ unit. Since he had no particular work schedule, he was available around the clock. I’d call him on his unit’s radio and set up a rendezvous. He was always good for smokes and knew the best places to find the coldest beer. When bars closed around 0200 hours, it was no problem to drive past the gate guards with his bubbletop flashing. No gate guard dared stop or even slow down an Explosive Ordnance Disposal vehicle.
It was probably a three hour flight to Hong Kong, and from the moment we stepped into the terminal at Kowloon airport, it was like we were stepping into another world altogether. This was the civilization we'd been living without for the past many months! We were bussed to our hotel and before I even had a chance to unpack, Toveras was calling me on the phone. "Meet me in the lobby. I heard about a Kobe beef steak house where they feed the damn cows by hand. And they give them daily massages for a month before they kill'em. Let's go get some of that shit!"
We tried to get a taxi, but just could not figure out the taxi system, so we started walking looking for a "Kobe" steak house. In the process, we went by bar after bar after bar. "Let's go in here and have a cold one. Maybe someone can give us directions," said Toveras. We went into the next bar and stayed. There were munchies, minature club sandwiches, for free. We left the Kobe mission for that next day.
We were getting ready to leave when an all-girl band began setting up on a small stage. "Let's wait and check out this band," I said as the band started warming up. The all-girl band was a Vegas-quality band. They played the latest American hits and played them with a flair and spirit the original singers never had. I turned to Toveras to comment on the band and saw him lighting up a joint. As he took a hit, a bouncer ran towards us yelling "Mister, you cannot do that here! Please put that out or leave." I took the joint from Toveras and snubbed it out. Toveras was so mellow with the joint and beers, he didn't even flinch.
The rest of the R&R was a blur. I recall a lot of shopping, restaurants, tours and bars. We even went to a monestary on an island off the coast of Hong Kong situated on a mountain peak where the only food available was wild weeds, vegetables and bamboo shoots with rice. Toveras wanted a tailored suit, so he had a taxi driver take us to "my brother's tailor shop". We surmised this to be a lie when the Chinese taxi driver introduced us to his brother, an Indian or Pakistani. When Toveras called him out on it, the Chinese taxi driver offered, "Yes, we're brothers. But we have different fathers."
"Not likely," responded Toveras. Still, Toveras was measured for a suit which he picked up the morning of departure from Hong Kong. We departed that afternoon going back to the "land of enchantment" as Toveras liked to refer to it.
Toveras was making an inordinate amount of extra money off the black market. He taught me the best places to sell my rationed items and put me in contact with Chinese dealers who taught me to order merchandise for the black market from American mail order catalogs and the PX mail order catalog. They also put me in contact with a Chinese lady who worked at the Cholon Class VI store3. By providing her with small inexpensive items from the PX, she would pretend to post my liquor purchases to my ration card. In this manner, I could purchase three or four times my allowed liquor and cigarette purchases for my Chinese dealers.
Toveras was on thirty-day leave to the States when I finally left the Saigon area for good. He was the type of friend one meets accidently and becomes best friends with after learning we shared many of the same interests. Unfortunately, he became one of those loops in my life never closed.
1 Explosive Ordnance Disposal – These folks disarmed landmines, unexploded bombs, rockets, mortars.
2 A 7-day Rest & Recuperation to such places as Manila, Kuala Lampour, Bangkok, Taipei, Hong Kong and Hawaii was afforded every soldier during his tour of duty and for every six-month extension.
3 All materiel in the U.S. Armed Forces falls into one of ten Classes of Supply. Liquor is one of those personal demand items included in the Class VI category.
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