Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (free biff chip and kipper ebooks txt) 📗

Crimes Exhibition, which was known as the Museum of American War Crimes until diplomatic ties between Vietnam and the United States improved.

After strolling through a display of alleged American atrocities, Ron and I headed for a restaurant called Vietnam House, which has a cool, inviting, colonial-style piano bar. Play it again, Lam. The food was unexceptional, but we enjoyed eavesdropping on a young American businessman at the next table who was suggesting all kinds of exotic travel to his extremely young and beautiful Vietnamese companion.

Outside, we ran into the mama-san who had hired out the young and beautiful companion. She was pacing up and down, looking worried. She asked if we had seen the girl. We said that we had. She asked if the girl was being well treated. We assured her that as long as the 9 2

A L A N R I C H M A N

child hadn’t ordered the gummy fried rice served in a clay pot with nearly invisible bits of chicken, she was likely to survive.

Vietnamese women liked me, and Vietnam is a great place to be liked by women. This popularity with women wasn’t noticeable before I arrived in Vietnam in 1969 and it has never recurred since. I’ve tried to understand. I think it was the fatigues.

I had great fatigues. I got them in the mid-sixties, when the United States invaded the Dominican Republic. Nobody remembers us invad-ing the Dominican Republic, but we did. I was a second lieutenant then and quite nervous about joining the Inter-American Peace Force and going off to war, but everything worked out. My job was to load soldiers onto airplanes.

Back in those days, U.S. Army jungle fatigues looked like something you would buy at Banana Republic, except there was no Banana Republic back then. They had pockets and flaps all over. By the time I got to Vietnam, jungle fatigues had changed. They had been streamlined and didn’t look good, but I had kept my old fatigues and wore them when I went out at night. Dressed in my multiflapped fatigues, adorned with captain’s bars and the appropriate USFORDOMREP (United States Forces, Dominican Republic) right-shoulder combat patch, I looked great. Or at least I looked great until I started gaining weight from all that steak and lobster I kept in my freezer.

The most spectacular women I came upon worked at the South Vietnamese Air Force Officers’ Club, located at Tan Son Nhut Air Base.

The airport is still functioning, although now it has so many miles of excess runways and empty parking areas it looks forlorn. I couldn’t find the old officers’ club. It so exemplified imperial decadence, I suspect some government official ordered it destroyed.

As I recall, the ground-floor and upstairs function rooms were used for weddings, banquets, and other activities commonly associated with the social life of a military officer. Downstairs was the lewdest bar I’ve ever patronized. The front door opened onto a narrow, dark foyer lined with long benches packed with extremely tiny young women with F O R K I T O V E R

9 3

extremely large breasts. Where they got them, I have no idea. As you walked this girlie gauntlet, they would reach out, clutch your arm in a death grip, and attempt to drag you through the bar into a nearly pitch-black back room.

I recall one memorable occasion when I declined to enter the back room and three girls desperate for business surrounded me and started pushing and pulling. Not willing to go but not wanting to hurt anyone, I stood perfectly still, rigid as a statue. Although I was wearing combat boots, they slid me along the floor like a piece of furniture.

Once in the back room, anything from fondling on up was available, providing drinks were purchased for the young lady. These drinks sold for two dollars and were called Saigon tea, which is what they were.

In every bar in Saigon, the price was the same and the drink was the same. If you were in a discreet establishment where the women really were hostesses, you would be expected to buy a Saigon tea every fifteen or twenty minutes. In the back room of the South Vietnamese Air Force Officers’ Club, they arrived every minute or two. I never sought the company of hostesses, rarely bought a Saigon tea, and refused to enter the back room of the officers club, at least not after my first, harrowing visit. I paid a price for my restraint. In my favorite bar, now gone, the women took note of my reluctance to purchase beverages. They nicknamed me “Captain Cheap.”

Today, the solicitation is much more subtle. The woman who came up to Ron and me at a tranquil bar named Linda’s Pub asked politely if she could sit with us, then said nothing at all until we offered to buy her a drink.

Shyly, she said, “I work here. Customer come here. He like me, he talk to me. Ask what me like drinking. I say okay.”

“So,” I said, “you’d like a drink.”

No, she didn’t want a drink.

Fine, she didn’t have to have a drink.

Sadly, she replied, “But if you do not buy drink, boss he get angry with me.”

“So,” I said, clenching my teeth, “I’ll buy you a drink.” 9 4

A L A N R I C H M A N

No, I didn’t have to if I didn’t want to.

The old South Vietnamese regime might have been corrupt and pathetic, but at least the bars weren’t so annoying.

I told her I insisted on buying her a drink.

She said in that case she’d have juice. She told us her name was Anh and she was sixteen years old. I took the same percentage off my age and told her I was thirty-four. She warned us to be careful if we were looking for women because “some are ladyboys, not true ladies.” I told her I would have nothing to do with ladyboys, but I couldn’t