Life During Wartime

I was a kid, early April or late March, 1975. My family was moving to Bangkok where dad had a position with the UN. On the way, we stopped in Saigon. We had friends there from a few years earlier when we had lived in Taiwan. The husband was a "businessman" and former Flying Tiger in SE Asia. It had never been clear what he did for a living, nor why they were now living in Vietnam. His wife was a beautiful and sophisticated Greek woman. Despite the shakiness of the American hold on South Vietnam - the war was essentially lost - my father thought we should see the friends anyway.

We arrived in a commercial airliner at the Saigon airport. The plane landed and taxied to the end of the runway without going to the airport terminal. It stopped. A stewardess came to us and asked "are you the [X] family?" My dad said yes. She said, "please come with me." We gathered our bags and walked down the aisle past everyone else on the commercial plane, who looked at us with curiosity and slight apprehension.

The door to the plane was opened and the ladder-stairs attached. There was a black limousine at the bottom of the stairs. One of the doors opened and a man stepped out smiling. It was the friend of my parents. He laughed and raised his arms. "Welcome to Saigon."

"Businessman...."

We drove to the friend's home through the streets of Saigon. I watched out the back window of the black car while my parents and the friends had their lively reacquaintances. The streets were quiet. Stores had boarded up their vitrines and the city appeared in disrepair, as if it was being built but construction had been halted. There were very few people on the streets. I remember now that it looked like one of the thousands of dead or dying towns you find across the American midwest - barely inhabited, closed, but somehow reflecting a former existence of vitality and activity perhaps in the colonial and traditional architecture, like an Atget photo of empty Paris streets.

We came to a long line of military dumptrucks on a road pointing north (maybe Newport Bridge). The friend explained that the trucks were full of rice, heading to the fighting taking place to the north. A propaganda billboard next to the trucks said something to the effect of "we will never surrender our freedom."

We had dinner that night in the home of our friends and then my parents and the friends had drinks in the living room until late. The friend said he had bought a new record and that we ought to hear it. It was Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. He put it on the stereo. My parents and the friends continued to talk, mostly ignoring the record. I remember lying on the floor on something like a sheepskin rug next to the coffee table with the weird record gradually drowning out the adults' discussion. I listened to the whole thing. I didn't really know this kind of music - I was all "Let It Be" and "A-B-C" at the time. But it somehow fit the little trip we had had through the streets of Saigon.

That night, sleep was difficult to come by for my family. Jet-lag and time differences. We had flown from California. Lying in bed, I felt a kind of dull erratic heartbeat. Not sound exactly. More like sound that hadn't yet congealed. Primal, thumping sound. The space between compressional soundwaves and the sound they produce, but somehow coming through the ground. Like pounding the muscle side of a fist lightly on the desk so that you feel the sound but can't yet hear it. In the morning, the friend asked, "did you hear it?" There was a slight smile on his face that barely masked worry.

The Americans left Saigon during a week of chaos about three or four weeks later as the North Vietnamese came rushing into the city, promptly "liberating" it and renaming it Ho Chi Minh City. This was the event Americans call "the Fall of Saigon."

By this time, the end of April, 1975, my family was already settled into a beautiful traditional Thai home in Bangkok, Soi Ekamai. I already had friends - two British brothers who spoke fluent Thai and two Thai boys. We played on the klongs, the canals that used to run throughout the city of Bangkok, many of which are today filled and used as streets. The klongs were full of fish, snakes, lily pads. We imagined "the Communists" coming into Bangkok and what acts of heroism we would have to resort to. I learned martial arts moves from the Thai kids and how to climb coconut trees, we all played soccer, and I learned a gambling game with little plastic superhero figurines we called in English, simply, "men."

The Greek woman had come to live with us in Bangkok towards the end of April. Her husband had stayed behind in Saigon in order to wrap up "business." Saigon "fell," or was "liberated," depending on your point of view. For us at the time it was the Fall of Saigon. There was no word from the friend who had remained in Saigon. One week turned into two turned into three. My father would call the embassy almost every day asking for news about the friend, whether he "got out." No word. The Greek wife would sit outside in the hot sun and simply stare, while smoking one cigarette after another. As time went on, she was convinced her husband was dead, and she slowly receded into an incommunicative despair.

We were at a restaurant, I remember vaguely. My father received a phone call and went to another room to take it. It was someone from the US Navy, I believe, or perhaps the embassy. They had picked up the friend, the Greek woman's husband. He had left Vietnam after The Fall on a fishing boat and it had taken time to get out of the country and down the coast. He was fine.

Our friends eventually retired and bought a house in Southern France. We eventually moved on from Thailand. And life continues at the periphery of wars.