I flew to Tan Son Nhut Airbase on a trip to secure a pallet of beer and a pallet of liquor for our team. I dropped in to see my friend. Tovares was glad to see me and without even asking drove us to see our friend, Papasan Bich, to deliver a load of liquor and cigarettes. Tovares was what I came to know many years later as a left-brain personality, action without plans and doing without thinking it through. He was very much like me. On the way back from Papasan Bich, I informed him that I would be leaving my Advisory Team in the next few weeks and Vietnam for good upon completing my six-month extension.
"Man, what you wanna do that for, O-jay?" said Tovares. "We've got a good thing going here. You know I just extended six months."
I informed him how I was completing my three year enlistment in just a few more weeks and was going back to Texas with no real plan in mind other than perhaps working for a utility company as some of my friends were doing. At this point of my life, I still had no plan to attend college. I did not believe then that I academically qualified for it. Toveras' plan was to stay in Vietnam as long as he could stand it and make enough money to purchase a service station in his hometown.
"O'Jay, that was one badass mudderfucking business back in the day," Toveras once told me. "I worked there since I was old enough to turn a wrench. The owner is getting old now and got no kids. He promised me he'd hang on to the business till I got enough money to give him a good down-payment."
Toveras had saved up a sufficient amount of cash for the down-payment but had now gotten greedy and wanted to outright purchase the business in cash. When Tovares could not convince me to change my plans and extend my enlistment, he improvised a quick plan to celebrate my leaving. The more he talked, the more he developed the farewell.
"Damn, O-Jay, July 4th is coming up, so we'll celebrate your going away and have one bad-ass 4th of July." He came up with the plan to rent the ballroom at Victoria hotel for an "invitation only" dinner. This would have been our second in-country 4th of July for us both, and Tovares wanted a celebration in style.
"O-Jay, 4th of July last year I was with 2nd of the 60th, 9th Infantry Division at Tan Tru. We had the regular roast beef and some crappy, soggy side dishes with shitty pies which I hate anyway. Man, how can these assholes waste hundreds of thousands of dollars for every gook we put down and not spend just a few hundred dollars for a good fucking meal on special days? Let's plan the biggest, baddest mutherfucking feast for the 4th . . . AND for your leaving this goddamn awful shithole of a miserable place which we've all learned to love!"
There was a medium size ballroom at the Victoria, and the plan was to rent it to provide semi-formal dinner for up to ten of our buddies including Papasan Bich. We did not have all the details yet, but Tovares gave me the task of arranging the venue. The feast would be taking place in a couple of weeks. Tovares was in charge of buying the meat from the commissary and side dishes from the St George Hotel NCO club. We could not trust buying them off the local economy, and the commissary was limited in scope and selection, but ham and turkey were almost always available.
Being a regular customer at the Victoria, I had become friends with the gorgeous Vietnamese lady at the front desk. She had not been there when I checked in that morning but seemed genuinely happy to see me when I walked in looking for her. I told her about our plan to hire the ballroom for a dinner. "Oh, you have to talk to my boss for that," she said. She handed me a ticket for a free drink at the rooftop bar and mentioned her boss would be back in about an hour.
After several drinks, I went back down to the front desk. My Vietnamese friend apologized profusely saying, "He called me. He not coming back today. I told him what you want. He can do it for you for five cases of beer and six cartons of cigarettes. "
She seemed embarrassed by his demands and offered me some more drink tickets. It had been some three hours, and I had to report back to Tovares about my progress, so I took a rain check on the tickets and went to Tovares' unit. I was already thinking of a different venue for our dinner.
"Man, can you fucking believe these assholes at the club?" Tovares yelled out to me. "They will not cook ham or turkeys unless we buy them and eat them inside the club!"
"Well, buddy, I didn't have much luck either – not unless we can come up with five cases of beer and six cartons of cigarettes – or we can just find another venue."
Some years later in life, I began noticing in myself symptoms that are nowadays recognized as components of ADHD.1 Perhaps that's why Tovares and I had become good friends. We were both left-brains and borderline if not full-fledged victims of ADHD. We had developed spur-of-the-moment semi-formal dinner plans, gave it life for a number of hours and just as quickly let it die its tragic demise. It had been a good and solid plan, but we were thinking logically in an illogical environment.
I spent that the 4th of July in my Advisory Team in Bac Lieu eating canned ham for both lunch and dinner. Papayas and fresh mangoes from fields around the Mekong Delta along with fruit salad straight out of the can were available for dessert. Tovares worked that day.
1 - Attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder.
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