I was on a resupply trip to Tan Son Nhut for the weekend. On my way from the air terminal to the Air Force PX, I stopped at the Class VI1 store and bought my bottle of Seagrams VO. I was going to see a buddy, so I bought a case of the American PBR that he liked. I always bought munchies and a few bags of beef jerky whenever I stopped by the Class VI. Oftentimes, that would be my only lunch and dinner whenever I was is Saigon. I threw my jerky and bottle into my laundry bag which I used when traveling and put the case of beer on my hip. The Class VI was a couple of blocks from the PX. As I neared the PX, I saw a line of airmen and soldiers which formed around the side of the PX and wrapped clear around the back of the building. More men were running to get in line, so I began to think there was something good happening. I got in line.
The line moved ever so slowly. I popped a warm beer, which seemed to ease the pain of standing in line. It must have taken some forty-five minutes and perhaps some three beers before I could see the entrance doors. As I got to the door, I noticed that it was a movie theater! It had apparently opened only recently since I had not seen it on my previous trips there. I was not interested in a movie, but I had stood in line in the sun so long that I needed to sit down. I bought a ticket and started to enter when some yahoo stopped me telling I could not bring my case of beer or my M-2 carbine into the movie. “So what can I do?” I asked. “ I'm with an advisory team in Bac Lieu and have no place to store them here.” He told me he would watch them for me and allowed me to take my laundry bag inside. I informed him there was no way in hell I would leave my carbine with him. He let me take it inside with me. While he was busy talking to another employee, I slipped a couple of beers into my laundry bag and left my case right inside the door. I asked if they had popcorn or snacks. They had none. I grabbed a bag of jerky from my bag.
The movie was “Born Free”, a dumb story about a lion or lioness that had been raised from a cub, domesticated then taken back to Africa and released into the jungle. I had already seen the movie at the only other military theater about a year earlier. I was tired, the beer was making me sleepy and the air condition was just so comfy, I dozed off a couple of times. I didn’t care for the movie, but the theater was safe and comfortable. I woke up just as the movie ended and the lights went back on. I picked up my case of beer and skipped the PX taking a taxi to the Victoria hotel, instead.
After taking a nap, I took a taxi to the PX facility on Plantation Road in Tan Son Nhut to drop off my requisitions for PX goods and alcohol. I paid the taxi driver and walked up to the entrance gate to find the facility was closed for inventory and would not reopen until two days later. I asked to use a phone, and a gate guard allowed me to use his landline. It took me well over an hour to cancel the C-123 transport flights scheduled for that next day from the Tan Son Nhut Airbase to my advisory team at Bac Lieu. I had wasted a trip.
I went to find my buddy who was an explosive ordnance sergeant. Tovares had been sent to a field site on assignment and would be gone for a week, so I took a taxi to the Cholon PX, bought my month’s ration of cigarettes and liquor then took another taxi to my friend Papasan Bich. He was happy to see me and took me to a restaurant next door and ordered egg rolls and fried shrimp. He told me he had not seen Tovares for some time. I informed him Tovares would be back the following week. Back at his bar, he paid me for my ration items and gave me a small bag of pot as a bonus. “I give you for free, my friend. You no pay,” he said. I thanked him and went back to the Victoria.
The lady clerk whom I had become friends with was now at the hotel front desk. She seemed happy to see me and gave me a couple of tickets for free drinks at the upstairs bar. She had a little girl of about five behind the counter with her. She introduced me to her daughter then said “Wait, Mr. Tony. She wants to tell you something in English. She is learning English right now.” Speaking to her daughter in Vietnamese, the little girl clasped her hands in front, bowed slightly and said to me, “Please stop the bus. I want to get off.” While it took two or three times before I fully understood her statement, it was cute nonetheless. The little girl was thrilled when I reached into my laundry bag and gave her some munchies I had bought at the Cholon PX.
The little girl’s father had been a captain in the South Vietnamese Army. Some weeks earlier her mother had told me the story how her husband had been killed in an attack by Viet Cong only days before he was scheduled to go to Texas for language training and to Georgia for some army training. I took that all in stride. Casualties happen in combat. I felt no empathy for her story until I met her young daughter. It was as if knowing the tragic loss of her late husband then meeting her little girl growing up without a father somehow personalized the ugliness of survival in a combat environment.
I would normally come to the Victoria to decompress and get away from grief and sorrow, but having met her young daughter got me to thinking of the ugly circumstances of combat. It was depressing. It added another layer of sadness and another reason for pot and drinking. Nothing seemed to go right for me this trip. I vowed never to return, but that was a short-lived plan.
1 - Military logistics classifies all supply commodities into classes from I to X. Alcohol falls into Class VI.
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