Dispatches by Michael Herr Read Free Book Online Page A

choppers, you had to come down sometime, down to the moment, the street, if you found a pearl down there you got to keep it.
    By 7:30 it was beyond berserk with bikes, the air was like L.A. on short plumbing, the subtle city war inside the war had renewed itself for another day, relatively light on actual violence but intense with bad feeling: despair, impacted rage, impotent gnawing resentment; thousands of Vietnamese in the service of a pyramid that wouldn’t stand for five years, plugging the feed tube into their own hearts, grasping and gorging; young Americans in from the boonies on TDY, charged with hatred and grounded in fear of the Vietnamese; thousands of Americans sitting in their offices crying in bored chorus, “You can’t get these people to do a fucking thing, you can’t get these people to do a fucking thing.” And all the others, theirs and ours, who just didn’t want to play, it sickened them. That December the GVN Department of Labor had announced that the refugee problem had been solved, that “all refugees [had] been assimilated into the economy,” but mostly they seemed to have assimilated themselves into the city’s roughest corners, alleyways, mud slides, under parked cars. Cardboard boxes that had carried air-conditioners and refrigerators housed up to ten children, most Americans and plenty of Vietnamese would cross the street to avoid trash heaps that fed whole families. And this was still months before Tet, “refugees up the gazops,” a flood. I’d heard that the GVN Department of Labor had nine American advisors for every Vietnamese.
    In Broddards and La Pagode and the pizzeria around the corner, the Cowboys and Vietnamese “students” would hang out all day, screaming obscure arguments at each other, cadging off Americans, stealing tips from the tables, readingPléiade editions of Proust, Malraux, Camus. One of them talked to me a few times but we couldn’t really communicate, all I understood was his obsessive comparison between Rome and Washington, and that he seemed to believe that Poe had been a French writer. In the late afternoon the Cowboys would leave the cafés and milk bars and ride down hard on Lam Son Square to pick the Allies. They could snap a Rolex off your wrist like a hawk hitting a field mouse; wallets, pens, cameras, eyeglasses, anything; if the war had gone on any longer they’d have found a way to whip the boots off your feet. They’d hardly leave their saddles and they never looked back. There was a soldier down from the 1st Division who was taking snapshots of his friends with some bar girls in front of the Vietnamese National Assembly. He’d gotten his shot focused and centered but before he pushed the button his camera was a block away, leaving him in the bike’s backwash with a fresh pink welt on his throat where the cord had been torn and helpless amazement on his face, “Well I’ll be dipped in shit!”; as a little boy raced across the square, zipped a piece of cardboard up the soldier’s shirtfront and took off around the corner with his Paper Mate. The White Mice stood around giggling, but there were a lot of us watching from the Continental terrace, a kind of gasp went up from the tables, and later when he came up for a beer he said, “I’m goin’ back to the war, man, this fucking Saigon is too much for me.” There was a large group of civilian engineers there, the same men you’d see in the restaurants throwing food at each other, and one of them, a fat old boy, said, “You ever catch one of them li’l nigs just pinch ’em. Pinch ’em hard. Boy, they hate that.”
    Five to seven were bleary low hours in Saigon, the city’s energy ebbing at dusk, until it got dark and movement was replaced with apprehension. Saigon at night was still Vietnamat night, night was the war’s truest medium; night was when it got really interesting in the villages, the TV crews couldn’t film at night, the Phoenix was a night bird, it flew in and out of