A shocking, lance-sharp view of Vietnam not-likely to be given by the O.W.I., the Press, nor the Brass!
A PEC Special
AUTHOR'S FOREWORD:
This is a tough book to digest and the chances are you will read this foreword twice. Once, we hope, before you read the book, and once more, we are sure, to firm up your understanding of how and why the book was written in the first place. The material is dealt with in two segments.
Book I came from three sources.
First and oldest source is the papers written by a Salem business man named John White. He arrived in Saigon in 1819 and his mission was to establish commercial exchanges with the people of Annam. He spent three months in Saigon and he came into intimate contact with the dignitaries of the That Government, many merchants and the people of Saigon.
Second source is an encyclopedia which furnished some reasonably accurate facts with which to align sparsely detailed impressions.
The prime source of the Book I material is a set of books in five volumes-, published in French in 1892-3. Their collective title is L'ETHNOLOGIE DU SENS GENITALE, by Dr. Jacobus. A condensed version of his work was published a year later by Isidore Liseux of Paris under the title, L'AMOUR AUX COLONIES. In 1898, the edited English version appeared under the title, WANDERINGS IN THE UNTRODDEN FIELDS OF ANTHROPOLOGY.
We know now that Dr. Jacobus was a nome de plume, and the extensive works were actually written by a French Army surgeon, one Dr. Jacob Sutor. His origins are obscure, but it is on record that he spent thirty-five years of his adult life as a surgeon in the colonial forces of the French. He retired as a Major-General, so far as available records are able to determine.
Among learned opinion, Dr. Sutor was many things. Moralists called him a dirty old man. Some academic minds called him an anthropologist. His contemporaries, who were just beginning to play with psychology, called him a sexologist. Today, his work, outdated, inadequate and over-ridden by new knowledge and extended opinion, has been largely ignored as little more than a literary curiosity. The one substance of his work that has not changed is the concise authority of his impressions, and he dedicated over thirty thousand words of his writing to the Annamite-who now wears the label of Vietnamese. As the French created the protectorates of Tonkin, Annam, Cochin China, Laos and Cambodia, Dr. Sutor labeled the people as Annamites, a racial category that ignored political boundaries.
As a doctor, he knew no more nor no less than contemporary medicos of his time. He was blessed with a French conscience, a Catholic upbringing and a colonial prejudice. He managed all three with remarkable restraint, however, which proved him to be a man of rare wisdom.
He was inspired by an insatiable thirst for knowledge in the realms of sex, not because he was a libertine nor a reformer, but because he had a strong belief that the history of a race was largely a history of their sexual nature, including their physical as well as mental approach to carnality, legal or illegal. He was magnificently interested in the why and wherefore of the hordes of teeming humanity with whom he would associate during his career as a military surgeon. He kept copious notes, and conferred constantly with contemporaries. Being a bold man, with rank and authority, he conducted experiments and performed research a long way beyond the call of duty.
Di. Sutor's honesty can hardly be questioned because it was evident that, during his years of service, he had no real assurance that his life's work would ever be published. Admittedly, he used the, then-current, French standards of moral and theocratic values as a measuring stick. But he did provide evidence for his conclusions to such an extent that no one has ever been able to refute his determinations.
He simply said that this is the way it is, and we have taken his findings, edited them to clarify their import and herewith present them as Book I.
* * *
Book II was researched a different way. Your writer has never been closer than six hundred miles to Vietnam, North or South, and that was twenty years ago. The information used to picture Saigon, 1966 was gathered from many correspondents, some now in Saigon, some who have recently returned from Vietnam duty. They number five in all, and none of them know each other. They represent the Marines, the Army and the Air Force; some were 'swingers,' two can be classified as 'intellectuals,' three have seen military duty in at least two other Oriental countries and in North Africa, and all were articulate.
We hope to live long enough to utilize the mass of material accumulated by these people. This book contains only the segments pertinent to our premise-that the Annamite is hardly worth the fuss his tribulations have caused.
The sub-title of this book, "DON'T WORRY, MOM" is deliberately cruel. Having published some three million words, your writer is aware that a bold degree of sadism is required to penetrate the apathy shown by most Americans about matters of subtle but vicious import. As a people, we have become so used to paying the asked price that we do not always measure the worth of the currency we spend.
We have avoided several things. We have not discussed politics, religion, the War, nor responsibility. Neither have we offered a solution to whatever problems we have outlined. We have included a few sneaky opinions but none of them are singularly our own.
In evidence of our own innate brutality, we hope this book leaves as bad a taste in the reader's mouth as it left in the writer's.
Sincerely, Leland Gardner September 28th, 1966
* * *
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER ONE
THE YEAR IS 1865.
The frigate lies at anchor some thirty miles up the river known as the Saigon. The ship is weary, battered by winds, mountainous waves and a never-comforting sun. She is a French man-o'-war, bearing arrogant and uniformed members of the French Colonial Army. To a man, they wear a look of anticipation.
North, lying like a pustular eruption on the green and yellow surface of the swamp is Saigon, the most decadent city in all of Indo-China.
Of the forty officers and men loading into the two lapstrake long-boats, thirty will end their six-year tour of duty wracked by syphilids and gonorrhea, yellow fever and cholera. A few will succumb to alcoholic stupidity, some others will sample the soothing wiles of the opium pipe and nearly all will plunge into the morass of fetid evil known as the Cochin-China colonies. They are hardy, experienced soldiers, imperious and lusty and unafraid of the promised moral breakdown available in this exotic land.
The able seamen pull steadily at the oars. Here, the river is five hundred meters wide but looks considerably less because of the hundreds of floating sewers. The sampans huddle and bob, gunwale to gunwale, each showing a thin crooked mast and thinner fishing poles of bamboo. Each sampan seems bulbous because of the rattan hovels built over the hull for these rotting boats house a floating city. Great birds, seagulls, scavengers and bright black crows soar and hesitate, to dive at the human excrement and rotting garbage thrown into the sallow water.
Things huddle. Scrawny, knotted fingers move about some simple task. Unknowing eyes peer out from under flatly conical straw hats and naked children turn to watch the longboats. Over all, the heavy humid heat beats down and homogenizes bamboo, flesh and filth into one malodorous sore.
Along the land behind the floating city is a street of mud, rendered fluid by torrential rains. The buildings are ugly, irregular and rotting as are the shopkeepers and the thin natives. Most of the buildings are of bamboo and mud, though some are stone. They lurch with agony, supporting thatched roofs, and occasionally a broken tile covering which sprouts weeds and wisps of wild grass.
Momentarily, there is diversion for the Frenchmen as sampans, gracefully sculled by willowy women in black, ankle length garments, glide by, then they are once again staring at the shore. They can see the walls of the Citadel, moss-covered and crumbling, showing the seat of Annamite power, and this brings arrogant sneers to the faces of the French. They hardly notice the several That ships of the Annam navy, for they are barely more than ornate sampans.
On the shore, an old and symbolically shaped pagoda rears its graceful shape. Next to the pagoda is an open bazaar-merely a great, sagging shed, under which natives display their wares.
The right bank of the river is less populated, less grotesque. Here, rows of huge warehouses, with pink enameled tile roofs show where the industrious Chinese store their goods. To the many docks are tied sampans and junks, loading or unloading their exotic merchandise. But the French interest is to the west where the city squats, lightly shaded by weary arrack palms.
Behind the Citadel, on higher ground, there appears to be some new affluence. With conquest, the conqueror chose this desirable site for the establishment of his military base, and the French compound shines in the sun, showing a nearly palatial main buildings, flanked by lesser buildings of political significance. Arches form porticos and balconies. It is most impressive.
The longboats pull steadily to the docks where light, sleek cutters are tied. The uniformed men peer eagerly at the city. The squalor means many things to them: command, exploitation, adventure and, above all, license. Born with a heritage of romance and gallantry, they stare at this city, capitol of a strange land, from which have come tales of sexual lewdness and lascivious freedom, surpassing the most exciting accounts from Port Said and Constantinople. This is the land of the Annamite, and in all the world, no people can equal their talent for vice and depravity.
* * *
Where the alternate mud and dust of the road turns north to become a hand-graded thoroughfare leading to the garrison and to the elegant homes of the landed Annamites, a cluster of thatched huts sits in a tipsy group. The ground is bare here, and unfriendly. Native men and women move about and children play with sticks and stones and scrawny dogs. Most are naked and dirty. On the perimeter of the cluster, a house-shape stands, a disorganized hulk of mud and bamboo and cane stalks, interwoven with brown leaves from a banana tree and scraps of tin and wood, stolen from the warehouses along the river. There is a brief, hard-packed space in front of the hut, sheltered by the extension of the dried thatching sagging from the roof peak. In this space, stands a man, an adult male of indeterminate age.
He is small and thin, with badly bowed legs and knobby knees. He stands awkwardly on his small, splayed feet. There is a great space between his large toes and the long second toes, as if he practised some weird dexterity like plucking things from the dirty street with his monkey-like toes. His hips, swathed in a loose, dirty cloth, are badly set, thrusting his soft bulbous belly outward. His ribs show a well developed chest, but the thin, unknotted muscles give him a strangely sick appearance. His neck is corded, but not from strength. He seems to have some trouble holding his head erect, and the round skull, swathed in another, dirtier rag is oddly different from his body. The forehead is very low, showing the thick black hair balled into a chignon under the loose turban. The ears are large and stand out grotesquely, making the large, flat nose and petulant lips seem smaller than they are. His eyes are large, heavy-lidded and tipped up at the extreme outside comers. With his lack of understanding, his lips, thinner than Negroid but thicker than Caucasian, are parted in adenoidal relaxation, showing a sudden, hideous flash of black and scarlet. His teeth are lacquered black and the betel nut he chews has turned his mucous surfaces a bright and nasty red.
He watches the two longboats pull slowly toward the military landing. He knows nothing of why of them, and cares less. He thinks not of yesterday, has already forgotten today, and he cannot think of the morrow. He is a creature of habit, of sly connivance and of no innate convictions. He has two mild concerns. One is food and the other is his penis; and his wife, a fertile, sly ba, will attend to both. He thinks about neither problem because the satisfaction of both hungers is basic and routine.
* * *
The only light comes from the setting sun peeking through the reeds of the hut walls. The interior is less than five paces of the man's spindly legs in any direction. The day is nearly finished but not quite.
The woman, perched in a peculiarly easy, folding stance on the dirt floor, is naked to the waist. She is flat-faced, with high cheek bones and large, thick-lidded eyes. Her teeth are lacquered black and her petulant lips show the scarlet froth of constantly chewed betel nut. At her breast, a broad, flat breast of good volume but no beauty, suckles a naked child. It is a girl, a congai, something short of two years of age. It lies in the curl of the woman's arm, its bowed and too-thin legs akimbo. The child's belly is distended, making its thin legs and scrawny neck seem less than adequate. The woman cares nothing for the looks of her child. She fondles it and coos with maternal affection.
Outside the hut are five other children, ranging from four to twelve. The eldest is a boy and he huddles over the back of his ten year old sister, his head thrust forward to peer through the broken wall reeds. He is thin and unyouthful, except for his belly which is just losing the bulge of childish malnutrition. Under the curve of his body, the thin, unnubile girl is just beginning to show the shape of a woman. She too peers through the bamboo wall but her position is bad because her brother is lifting her hips so that his rigid, finger-thick penis may nudge and rub between her little nates. Both are naked because they have not yet reached the age when their poor parents deem it essential to clothe them.
Two small, dull-faced girls, equally naked and interested in what transpires within the hut, crouch some feet away. A fifth child, barely four, sits, in the dirt and plays with a ragged, half-starved puppy. He is too young to be interested in what his parents do, even though he is aware that his brother and sisters are intensely intrigued by what may be occurring.
Inside the hut, the ba sets her suckling child on the rattan mat at her side, revealing her awareness of her chong. She looks up as he displaces the baggy folds of his waist garment. He will not undress, nakedness being a fetish he can not endure, but he bares his groin. His belly is hairless and even the few stiff black tufts have been plucked from the pubescent mound supporting his diminutive sexual organs. His penis is the length of his palm-width and hardly thicker than his middle finger. Dropping in hairless nonentity, his scrotum is small and wrinkled, displaying the inconsequential bulges of testicles barely the size of pigeon eggs. He moves to the woman, spreads his feet and stands awkwardly, presenting his masculinity less with pride than with demand.
A tiny bead of gonorrheal discharge is visible. Further back on the mahogany colored shaft, prominent scars show the remnants of primary chancres, healed as the blood fever moved the disease from the point of origin deep into the man's system.
There are no words, no gestures of affection. The woman raises a strangely claw-like hand, her forefinger removes the drip of yellow and she manipulates her Chang's organ into mild response. When he hunches indicatively, she puts her mouth forward. She does little but resist the enlivening with her betel-red lips until her chong is satisfied with such doings. He settles to the rattan mat, nursing the accomplishment of his ba.
When she stands, the woman is not ugly; the maturity of her body is a healthy refutal of her husband's mishapen body. Her breasts are slightly sagged, but alive and her back is rounded and curves into a waist neither bulbous nor slim. As she shrugs out of the peculiar trouser like garment, her buttocks are firm and tawny and her thighs are solid, crooking down into knobby knees and nearly calfless legs. Her mons veneris is thick and plucked of the stiff hair she had grown after the age of twenty. Her sexual organ is not apparent because with the peculiarity of her race, the axis of her vaginal cavity is back past the center of her torso.
There is no hesitation, no moment spent in romantic exchange, either by mind or body. There is no expression of desire and no indication of understanding. The woman straddles her man's hips and squats, dropping her taut buttocks over his rampant groin. Her position is not unlike the one she uses for cooking, nursing her children or resting, except that instead of merely slinging her hips from the tight fold of agile knees, she now uses her thighs as springs.
The moment is short and seemingly impersonal. The ba makes certain movements that bring into play some tensions particular to her position. The chong shows mild animation and presently, a frantic thrusting; agony occurs as his discharge swells and sharply irritates the diseased and sensitive ureter. He is indifferent to the reactions of his wife arid she shows none of his breathlessness.
She stands again and moves off of the rattan mat. A massive spastic jerk descends her body, aided by her palm, pressed firmly to her lower abdomen and her chong's small glutinous discharge drops to the dirt floor. It soaks into a dark spot and she dons her trouser-garment with no care for the fact that it is already soiled and stiff from the residue of other occasions.
As her chong revives and makes his way to the hut door, his eyes turned toward the city where he will go to loiter and dally for a few hours, the ba resumes her squat and lifts her child to the weary breast.
If she thinks, it is not about her chong, nor the older children, now writhing in childish excitement outside, but about tomorrow.
Immediately following the noonday cannon, she will make her way to the military compound. In clogs, a brocaded chemise and a better pair of trousers, she will seek out the certain Lieutenant Major who has some tolerance for her physical charms. There, for a piaster, she will endure the desire and dimension of the Frenchman, and perhaps steal a bit of his brass after he falls asleep from the heat and the indifferent attentions she will supply.
Presently night settles over the hut and the ba summons her brood. They eat, a small bowl of boiled brown rice, and drink from a pottery jug containing warm, half-stagnant water. They find huddling room on a dirty mat, and use each other for futile protection against the decadence and deterioration which four thousand years of impotence has confirmed as their destiny.
* * *
The house is huge, walled and secure. Behind the wall a rolling plot, part wild Chinese grass, part garden, and part bare earth surrounds the mansion. The inept expenditure of wealth is evident. Quiet has descended upon the estate; in the moonlight it is imposing in its ponderous elegance and it becomes difficult to see the cluster of mean huts behind the gardens. From the big house, the lights show through shuttered windows, and there is life within the stolid structure.
Inside the long, broad parlor there is no odor of tea, nor is there the smell of gunny-sacks and rice. There is the strong odor of French perfume, of native incense and of olive oil, because the high, precise chignon of the delicately boned hostess is a work of art and custom. Her face is oval, high cheeked and stolid. Her eyes are very black and lifted artificially at the corners to accent them. Her nose is flat, thick at the root and, somehow dominates her face. Her lips are full, tinted scarlet from long use of betel nut and her teeth are lacquered black. She is dressed in expensive silks, harid sewn and embroidered with gold thread. The skirt is long, black and tailored to her hips, meeting the long scarlet jacket that begins with the standing, snug collar and descends in unwrinkled conformity down her slender, square shouldered body.
The four military men and the two elegant Annamites sipping brandy, pay little attention to the woman. One or two of the French officers show the slightest sign of perspiration. The conversation is in French and it concerns tariffs, produce and the arrangements common between the government and the land owner. Later, there is some laughter, and it is obvious the pleasant company has turned its attention to less formal matters. A look of amused interest comes over the face of the coiffured and silk-sheathed Annamites.
That talk of women and sport and merrymaking should bring such animation to the faces of the French officers still surprises the wealthy merchants. But they do not say this, nor do they ignore the interest. They have long understood the tremendous bargaining power of flesh.
There is much talk now, and snide laughter. The new shipment of personnel, arrived that afternoon, offers many possibilities. The Annamites are interested in cementing relationships, the French officers are interested in the prospect of introducing their new comrades to the glories and privileges of foreign duty.
No one pays any attention to the coming and going of the servants. These slim, effeminate looking natives are dressed in nearly the same fashion as the woman, except that their skirts are white, flowing, and flap about the thin ankles and broad, splayed feet as they hustle brandy and sweets in and out of the room. Every few minutes, one of the young servants checks the kerosene wicks in the magnificent chandeliers lest they smoke and the odor annoy the guests.
The talk and the brandy soon bring a flush of eagerness to the French faces and the elder Anna-mite, seeing this, makes a sign and a look at one of the young servants. Within minutes, the six men have gravitated to the front portico, and when the handsome carriage, pulled by fine horses, appears from the rear of the estate, they climb into the vehicle and depart.
Their journey is slow, rough and dusty once they have left the graded estate entry. The driver is quiet and efficient, and he urges the horses with small, nasal clucks. As the carriage approaches the central city, the driver chooses a side road and the few skulking denizens of the night move aside as the flickering kerosene lights in the brass brackets warn them of oncoming gentry. Soon the carriage arrives at a better street, lined with buildings in better repair, and of considerable size.
This is the Chinese Arroyo, wherein exist the more glamorous establishments of vice and corruption. Here, among the edifices of the trade-wealthy Chinese, exist elegantly-appointed bawdy houses and gambling dens. There is laughter, brutality and opium, mixed with license, ingenuity and enthusiasm.
There are strong odors within the tinsel elegance of the establishment. To the Frenchmen it is exciting, and their nostrils flare as the mixture of perfume and body sweat, of incense and hair-oil form a blanket of hot erotica over the revelers.
There is baquan, dice, Chinese dominoes and a multitude of curious games involving numbered squares and peas and coins. The croupiers are all Chinese, slim fingered, swift and bland of face. They speak and move like smoothly oiled automatons, gathering in the wagers with total disregard for the cries of distress or disappointment. Half of the patrons are women, not unlike the hostess of the now defunct party. They play with great intensity, ignoring their surroundings, fidgeting with frustration, but driven on by a fever the Chinese have long cultivated in the Annamites.
Occasionally, a loser, or a winner, with equal impatience, leaves the games. They move toward bamboo partitions, find corridors which lead up, or sometimes down, depending upon habit. Downward, the halls lead to the opium chambers. Upward they lead to the small, purposefully furnished rooms where the whores, both male and female, ply their carnal trade. There is always wine-thin, Chinese wine-and eagerness, partly for the customer, partly for the chance to steal a piaster or a trinket.
There is no privacy, but then there is no curiosity between the chambers separated by rattan partitions. Europeans mingle with Asiatics freely, because this is a house of distinction, and the trade is expensively exclusive. There is nothing exclusive about the commodity for sale, nor does it compare with too-great superiority to similar wares sold cheaply in the bamboo huts along the distant river. Stripped of the finer outer garments, the woman may be younger, more adequately endowed because her Chinese souteneur is an excellent businessman. But her merchandise is similar, and equally malodorous.
The single difference between her treatment of an Annamite male and a European customer is her beginning. To an Annamit, she simply presents her nude body and with neither enthusiasm nor regret, suffers whatever brand of licentiousness he desires. To the military men, and civilian aliens, she determines first his choice of sexual congress.
Aware of, but not ashamed of the European's normal disgust for her lacquered teeth and red-frothed mouth, and his innate dislike of her overwhelming odor of unwashed flesh, she offers no fondling or close embrace. She is gay, enthusiastic and bold. She speaks no French or Portuguese, and she is certain her client speaks no Annamese. She reverts to sabir, a pidgin dialect which has grown between the natives and the foreigners.
Despite her professional status, she seems to take great pride in her knowledge and execution of fellatio, which she calls, "Chewchew" in patois, or in presenting her bare brown backside, cheeks palmed apart for abtic, of which the Annamite, male and female is extremely fond. If the pocket-book and the backbone of her customer are both robust, she may service him with every ability of her experienced person, drowning his European inhibitions with rice wine and spiced tea. If his drunkenness and exhaustion seem genuine, she may rob him of some portion of his remaining money, or take some bit of jewelry he might later assume to have been accidentally lost.
If she is not exotic, she is erotic and accomplished, because it is the heritage of her people to wallow in the sensual. She despises nothing venal, cares nothing for subterfuge and is indifferent toward the future. If she has hopes, they are bounded by a narrow, impenetrable wall of circumstance she does not understand. She possesses the truly Oriental trait of complete belief in fatalism. Her day is her life, and it might seem that she senses the inevitable end, not only of her own disease-ridden life, but the end of her kind.
Standing over her exhausted lover, her body reeking of carnal filth, her eyes measuring the destruction she has temporarily wrought, she represents the last convulsive spasm of a civilization already ancient when the ancestors of the debilitated Frenchman crawled out of the Mediterranean morass and turned his white nose toward the North.
CHAPTER TWO
THERE IS EVIDENCE TO INDICATE that the Annamese of Indo-China are the direct descendants of the Giao-Chi, a distinct and singular race of aboriginal inhabitants of an area in South China. This tribe entered into the records of Chinese historians two-thousand, two-hundred years before the birth of Jesus.
They were, the Giao-Chi, obviously a branch of the yellow race, but in the beginning, some indefinable difference formulated a strong tribal singularity. They were darker, probably because the area in which they lived was more tropical and in the process of development, Nature pigmented their skin as a protection against the unrelenting sun.
Little is known of their basic culture except that they were not stupid nor cowardly. They built no massive cities and created no distinct architecture in the manner of the Chinese or the Egyptians. Proof of their intelligence lies in the manner of their sustenance. They borrowed from the Chinese (who were beginning their dynasties with pomp and ceremony) language, customs and attitudes. Proof of the Annamite's individuality lies in several obvious areas. He polluted other, surrounding races without being polluted. He conquered and lost, traded and fornicated among the other tropical races, but always his racial strain remained un-dimmed.
The Annamese fought off two huge dragons. The land in which he lived ranks with the most debilitating and difficult in all the world. It is nearly equatorial in location, sweltering under the brazen sun and suffering the humidity and fetid atmosphere of furious rains and steaming jungles. Everything in such a land helped to breed disease and stinging insects. Mold, fungus and putrefaction assault any lifeless thing within minutes. Even rain, falling through the layer of contaminated air over this land, was dubiously pure.
All this the Annamite survived. The second dragon did not appear as a natural enemy. It came in the shape of China's bulging population. With civilization came greed and the massive horde of war-like Chinese gobbled up the land and the servitude of the Annamite, claimed his land as a vassal state and extracted homage by dint of pure force. This until China itself was torn by internal discord and civil war. Out of the political chaos of the thirteenth century, a time of murder and ruthless striving, the grandson of Ghengis Khan arose to recapture the glories his illustrious grandfather had won, only to lose again to the wrangling overlords of his vast empire.
With terrible brutality and frenzied haste, Kub-lai Khan sent his blood-thirsty hordes over the land, reconquering, enslaving, raping and looting. This ferocious infestation thundered down on the areas of South China, leaving a broad swath of blood and decapitated resistance until it reached the great steaming jungles of Indo-China.
There the Khan's hordes met the three-thousand-year-old jungle denizens and the jungle in which they lived. The Annamites promptly decimated Kublai Khan's forces, slaughtering them with the skill the Annamite had long ago borrowed from the Chinese themselves.
After the initial defeat, the Annamites waged successful war against the ensuing attempts to resurrect the image of Kublai Kahn, and in 1428, managed to wrest their independence from China. Thus was born, after thirty centuries of undistinguished history, the Kingdom of Annam.
The chronology of what afterward transpired will indicate that the victory and the few years immediately following constituted the zenith of the Annamite civilization. True to the pattern of history, the people basked in their military success and in basking, permitted the enervating sensuality of the climate and of the borrowed culture to suck away at their lifeblood.
When the intrepid Portuguese and French traders came ashore in the late seventeen hundreds, they found the Annamite a decadent, agrarian entity, strangely himself, but definitely Oriental. He had retained his racial characteristics admirably, even while he had allowed Chinese, Japanese, Philipinos and Malays, and the countless migratory tribes from the interior of Indo-China to settle and mingle with his own race. The mingling invariably produced a dominance of Annamese blood.
The Annamite women produced bastard children of low mentality and complete emotional instability. The Annamite men bred the same characteristics into the get from the alien women they bedded.
Neither had anything to offer except a blood-line so strong it resisted dilution. But while it was simply blood, its inferiority was unquenchable and it coursed through unhealthy veins, fed deteriorated brains and suffered the ravages of every known disease.
More powerful than the Portuguese, the French began to dominate the colonization of Cochin-China, and when the Tri-Color of France was raised above the city of Saigon in 1863, the land and its people lay like a giant festering ulcer, oozing physical as well as spiritual pus as it struggled against the death throes of its own creation.
It might be noted that the French brought with them several items not listed on the ship's manifest.
They brought a sense of romance which had long been defunct in the Annamite. They brought a set of morals which were intriguing in their irrational-ism and infinite fun to violate. They brought inadequate resistance to disease and a total inability to cope with the climate. They did not even bring the will to try to understand the Cocbm-China native nor his Oriental religions. The French brought their own religion, dignified highly-polished, dramatically ritualistic.
It is erroneously thought that the French brought gonorrhea and syphilis, but they did not. Along with leprosy and elephantiasis, these diseases were already wide spread, deep in the interior, long before the Europeans penetrated the sweltering, rot-infested land.
* * *
Defeated militarily, the Chinese conquered Cochin-China with other weapons. In his own fashion, the Chinese business man is without a peer, and he was no less astute in earlier centuries. The Chinese were patient, shrewd and thrifty, and they were satisfied with a small margin of profit. They were clannish beyond belief and secretive to a degree not understood by a non-Oriental. Few economically invaded countries realized that the Chinese sense of profit and loss was aligned with his basic Oriental venality. He was possessed of an inborn sensuality; he loved subtle business, fine silks, gentle sounds and quiet luxury. His literature and art were delicate, if profane, and he fostered religious tenets which were mystical and practical.
With enterprise, the Chinese brought their own brand of sensuality. A trader in tea and rice was also a procurer and a gambler. When the French raised their flag over Saigon, the pungent odor of opium already pervaded the listless land, introduced by the greedy Chinese business community several decades earlier.
The French understood immediately the colossal value of the opium trade. Not only were there piasters to be gleaned from the Chinese distributors, but the value of a national opiate for the people was easily tallied up. The first French Governor of the colony promptly assigned the sale of opium rights to the appreciative Chinese importers and, in one fell swoop, secured the cooperation of the moneyed Orientals and the addiction of thousands throughout the harassed land.
The Chinese operated a complete monopoly for over twenty years, during which time the less observant French gradually became aware of the massive profit the opium trade produced. Subsequently this bonanza was recovered from the Chinese and the sale of all opium was controlled by the Excise Administration. The French Government purchased its opium from the British Government for about sixteen shillings a kilogramme. The narcotic was subsequently sold to the consumer in measured quantities for the French equivalent of ten British pounds.
The second area wherein the Chinese excelled was that of the gaming rooms. Inveterate gamblers themselves, they brought many vicious and intriguing games to Indo-China; all calculated to extract piasters from the populace. It was not essential for the games to be rigged, even though the Chinese were masters of chicanery-the games offered the titillation of chance to everyone but the house, generally the property of an Oriental.
All in all, the larger cities and towns were simply organized centers of trade and vice, controlled by the French, but dominated by the Chinese and dedicated to the further destruction of the already declining urban Annamite.
The rural Annamite was in no better position. There were thousands who lived in mean, sagging huts of palm fronds and bamboo, in some unproductive portion of the vast rubber and cane plantations. They worked the fields, the rice paddies and the cocoanut groves. They were paid next to nothing, and part of the nothing was attention. Once their day of labor was ended, these men and women went back to the sleepy, inhibited morass of their villages. They clung tenaciously to their Annamite heritage; the bastard forms of Buddhism, Taoism aid usurped versions of sundry pagan beliefs, occupied the slight spiritual instinct they possessed. Their family customs sufficed as a form of self-government, and as long as they showed up for the morrow's labor, no land owner or overseer cared what transpired in the filthy, decrepit village among the filthy decrepit inhabitants.
Those Annamites who were not chattels of the land-owners wandered through the land, settling in places where the jungle's fierce encroachment permitted and water was available. They knew little of husbandry, and their crudely-formed rice paddies and vegetable gardens produced barely enough to keep body and soul together. They plundered the jungle forest, supplementing their inadequate farming with wild plantains, cocoanuts and the various tropical fruits they could find. Their system of economics was slightly less secure than the plantation inhabitant, but they shared, equally, in the fundamental Annamite weaknesses.
It would be difficult to say they were immoral because the word does not exist in the Annamit tongue. The concept of social awareness-likewise did not exist. They were family conscious because within the framework of the family lay their security from everything including the wild beast and the hunger of tomorrow. Hunger and fear (which bred selfishness and distrust) kept them together. They saved nothing, planned nothing and comforted themselves with the simple expenditure of sensuality of which they were inherently capable.
* * *
It must be observed that, in all the history of colonization as practiced by the British, the French, the Spaniard and the Portuguese, no real intent to assist the native population of a colonized land was ever intended. Historically, the death of colonization occurred when communications and competition revealed the venality and injustice of exploitation and its accompanying servitude. Europe entered into the colonization of the world in fifteenth and sixteenth century, carrying the sword in one hand and the Cross in the other.
There were earlier forays into new lands by intrepid adventurers, but the race for economic power among the Europeans became, at this point in history, a national passion. Portugal fell by the wayside and Spain began to limp. The British and the French urged their military men to remote conquest, following the bloody sword and the blasting musket with greedy, clever merchants. That the pattern of conquer and exploit was a profitable one, is attested to by its extent and the vast wealth the major European powers attained. In return for their gains, however, they were forced to reveal to the conquered and the oppressed, the nature of the European mind.
It was further inevitable that among the soldiers and merchants there should be some who believed genuinely in the dignity of his fellow man, regardless of his color, customs and depravities. Missionaries, teachers, technical pedagogues and the academically curious followed the leaders. Each left a small mark, contributed in some small way to the emancipation of the subjugated country.
As naturally as water seeks its own level, human greed lumped the lands of the earth into two categories as to desirability.
One was a land fit to five in.
Europe was bursting at the seams with people; torn by wars between truculent neighbors; tortured by political and economic upheavals. The weary sought escape; the oppressed, sanctuary; while the ambitious pursued fresh challenges. Philosophers, scholars, teachers and anthropologists had agreed upon the formula early in the Christian era:
The nature of the land determines the nature of its population.
Those lands in the temperate zone, the climates of which possessed both the energy stimulant of winter and the fecundity of summer, were coveted most because of their desirability as areas to swallow up the hungry, oppressed overflow of European population.
The white European came to North America and claimed the land, beating back-eventually slaughtering off-its aboriginal Indian population, permitting only a token few to survive. The same pattern applied in South Africa, except the native blacks were too numerous to be neutralized by extinction. In Australia, the aborigines retreated from the thrust of colonization, voluntarily, leaving the white in possession of the continent's fertility. In South America, the white European sought the high land but, inevitably, the land defeated him; the hardy, few survivors were, with few exceptions, assimilated into the Indian population.
The second category of lands for potential colonization were those unfit for Europeans to inhabit.
The vast, equatorial belt, steaming and putrid, was marked for exploitation, not occupation. Not even the Annamese wanted Indo-China.
They had not-in four thousand years-created a national entity nor a social awareness. Once in the desperation of fear, they had joined hands and faced the might of Kublai Khan, but the victory, on appraisal, was worthless. It simply returned to them the right to swelter and fester in the jungle (from which there was no escape and no promise, except death). They weren't even aware of the hopelessness of their existence because they had no knowledge of other lands.
Shorn of a reason for progressive thinking, they permitted their inner natures to control, completely, the path of their lives. They let their minds inbreed which was much more damaging than physical inbreeding (though they did much of this too). Without a social conscience, they did just the things which could bring some sensate satisfaction. Gradually, the habit of doing became a ritual, a way of life. Their emotions reverted to the animal, their sensitivity to sensuality, and the maintenance of life became a necessity to be coped with daily but with no great enthusiasm.
What happened to the Annamese had happened in other parts of the world. If a bowl of rice kept a man alive, then there was no need for more than rice. If there were no rice, then a root, or a fish or a chance bit of fruit from a jungle tree would suffice. In due course, malnutrition became the master of the populace.
Today, we know what Doctor Jacob Sutor did not know. That the effects of malnutrition on a national basis, continuing over centuries has two principal effects. It drains the physique of its lubricity and strength, at the same time it reduces in direct proportion the mental capabilities. The deterioration of a race can be traced directly to all things which effect the race. It is small wonder that the good physician Sutor was both appalled by and engrossed with the decadent and depraved Annamite as he found him in 1865.
CHAPTER THREE
THE CHRONOLOGY OF DR. SUTOR'S findings is difficult to ascertain. This may be due to the translator's libido, or to the acknowledged fact that many early impressions enjoyed by the good French medico were some years in being confirmed. He was not a professional writer, nor, yet, was he illiterate in any sense of the word. We further doubt that, at the same time Dr. Sutor made his meticulous entires, he had any certain knowledge that they would even find publication. This supports our tendency to accept his observations with faith in his basic intentions.
Not set out in this work are the findings he made in Africa, India, Guiana and sundry areas in which he served the French Government. Dr. Sutor's zeal in the pursuit of sexual statistics around the world would have made Kinsey go to his knees in tribute. Dr. Sutor lived in the jungle, the desert, the in between, and he was (by his own admission) prey to all the foibles of his military comrades. Admittedly, he was no saint. He admits to long personal experience in the opium dens. He shows quiet glee in certain of his descriptions of the sexual abilities of various female specimens and we suspect that in later years, when the pattern of his life's work was established in his mind, he deliberately cultivated personal situations in areas where clinical investigation might produce false "truths."
We are not able to determine that he was ever married, a state which other chronicles reveal was not unusual for a professional military man of the era. We don't even know what he looked like, since his investiture of personal vanity was not sufficient to cause him to include a personal description in his notes.
Despite his French code of morality, he was objective. His findings described sodomy as a filthy habit, in the same paragraph, noting that it was, virtually, an Annamite way of life. The doctor was more appalled by the hygienic harm that lacquered teeth and betel nut stain did to the mouth of the adult (or near adult) female than by what that same spectacularly-hued oral cavity would do to a rampant penis. With one voice, he proclaimed the Annamese love their children with evident manifestation; but that there were few virgins in Indo-China above the age of ten. This because children, by custom, slept in huddles of from three to as many as ten, regardless of age or sex.
Sexology was virtually an unknown science in Dr. Sutor's day, but, if he'd had the factual ammunition of later investigators, he might have realized the Annamese preoccupation with unromantic sex was a logical thing. The native of Cochin-China had little else to do except, at progressively lower ages, develop an pre-occupation with sexual exercise. The Annamite child attended no school, understood no social order (except that of his own family )and was promised no future. Thus, with no horizon to attract him, the child sought the single, personal adventure available to him. With centuries of sexual permissiveness behind him, his early participation in sex activity was inevitable.
The good doctor, however, assumed the Anna-mite's lascivious nature was the result of racial decadence when, in fact, consistent lewdness was simply due to a lack of other interests and to the undeniable fact that sexual gymnastics, in any form, was a pleasure-and not much pleasure was present in a life where pain and discomfort were constant companions. If the reasons were obscure to the doctor, he dealt with the facts of Annamese depravity, nonetheless.
* * *
Dr. Sutor noted that, although the Annamite was a branch of the yellow race, he was wizened, crookedly-boned, extremely nervous specimen, with little physical strength but with great stamina to withstand fatigue and the climate he lived in. The mentality of the Annamite was more difficult to assess because shrewdness, distrust and fear often gave the impression of intelligent understanding. The doctor often noted 'gems' among servants, quasi-public officials and shopkeepers but also recorded the Annamite could not relate two positive facts to a third possibihty. The Annamese intelligence would not support itself, and, without urging, would quickly revert to primitive logic.
The Annamite inferiority-both physical and mental-was reflected in his sexual equipment. A prolific breeder, the infant mortality was equally high. Compared to other areas of Asia, the population growth was unimpressive. This was further emphasized by the doctor's statements concerning the age of puberty or nubility, and the life expectancy of adults.
We are interested in these facts, since they show something important in the overall picture of the Annamite. The doctor noted the people were fundamentally stupid, lethargic and seemingly dedicated to self-extinction by lack of enterprise and a basically venal nature. It would not be improbable to assume, he wrote, that the Annamite had arrived at a condition of racial libido almost idyllic in its carnal lethargy.
Compared to other lands and other races, the doctor noted, it should follow logically, that such a race would be gay and childish, endowed with fantastically developed sex organs and early maturity. We picture, with Caucasian perversity, a group of happy savages cavorting under a banana tree, loving all who appear with a simple, honest affection. We see beautiful women and strong, primitive men-so elementary in their lust as to decorate the lushly-flowered jungle with their pure and untrammeled passion.
The aboriginal race which fits this romantic picture may very well exist, but the male will not be a skinny, bow-legged Annamite and the woman will not be a diseased, red-mouthed dan ba, with equally bowed legs and an unwashed crotch.
Dr. Sutor found the general appearance of the Annamite appallingly disturbing, partially because he was used to the French esprit de corps and partially because he had not yet had time to delve into the reason for such debilitated, sallow mien. He commented on the peculiar blandness of face, begun by the definitely Oriental features and completed with an inborn look of distrust in the slyly furtive eyes, and a low degree of emotional sensitivity.
His first sexual observations were logical. In his notes, Dr. Sutor shows the propriety of his own early upbringing by stating that no one's modesty should be unduly disturbed if he begins his observations among the Annamite children, who without exception, spent the first twelve years of their fife in complete nudity.
Comparatively, the male Annamite at that age seemed extremely underdeveloped. This was a physical thing because, by reason of a general laxity of parental supervision and the constant association with equally undeveloped girl children, the inherent sexuality of the boy was already very active. It was not uncommon to observe, in the streets and areaways between the thatched huts, stark naked children of both sexes engaged in erotic play, which among the older children actually became sexual congress, their brown, thrusting bodies rolling in the dirt with more enthusiasm than technique.
Logically, it was assumed by the doctor that such animalistic actions were due to several conditions. One commanding aspect was the completely promiscuous attitude of adults before their children. Most Annamite homes were mere hovels, four walls of rattan or fronds. From birth to the day they migrated from the family hut, children were witness to all of the intimate and unromantic antics of their parents. Children past the age of sucklings, generally at two or three, were separated from the parental bedchamber by a thin, inadequate wall of reeds. As the child aged, always in company with an older or a younger brother or sister, or both, suggestion, permissiveness and slowly developing sexual instincts were bound to draw some physical response.
A second condition was parental protection. It apparently did not exist among the Annamites. They showed great affection for their children and could generate some ferocity if one were in danger, but Dr. Sutor, responsible for the care of the subjects of French rule as well as the military personnel, noted in countless cases the complete lack of hymenal virginity in girl children over the age of ten. This was of no import to the same mother who brought her child to the clinic with an infected knee or a bleeding ear.
Later, he developed a third cause for the complete indifference to childhood chastity. In the Annamite, both male and female, nubility, or the arrival at puberty was extremely late. Despite their lascivious nature, the physical development of a boy did not show much promise until he was fourteen or fifteen and, in most cases, the complete development of the male generative organs did not take place until the age of twenty, often later.
These observations gave rise to the anthropological theory that part of the blood strength of the Annamite was due to nature's hold-back on certain, other active growths. As the mind had descended the ladder of lewdness, the physical had ascended a different ladder. The male Annamite did not arrive at full growth until his twentieth year and,-likewise, the female seemed unable to conceive at will until her twentieth year, the average age of a woman at the time of her first child.
Thereafter, she became a veritable brood mare, and families of eight, ten or more children were common, discounting those children who succumbed to the filth and inherited diseases before reaching adulthood.
At the same time, the doctor ascertained that the fertile period of a woman was terminated at about age forty. He spoke constantly of the brief span of life permitted the Annamese people. They aged quickly, and at fifty, a man might be white-haired, wrinkled and only a moment away from death. Occasionally, a very old man or woman was encountered but these were very unusual.
There was then, an apparent relationship between the tenacious blood line and the lascivious nature of the Annamite. As his capacity for venal exercise was reduced, his desire for the same exercise was increased. It seemed to be an unspoken, mystical agreement with nature that, in the death throes of a race, the physical should survive the mental, thereby reversing the cycle of evolution which had begun with a body rather than intelligence.
Numerous notations included the strange similarity between male and female Annamites up to the age of twenty. By reason of their borrowed culture, the Annamese, like the Chinese, did not cultivate nudity in adults. The costume was universally similar, consisting of a chemise-like shirt and baggy trousers, or loosely defined skirt. The hair was sleek and black and usually done up in an elaborate hair-do with a tight chignon outthrust from the back of the round skull. There were significant differences between the habiliments of a woman and those of a man but, to the inexperienced eye, it was difficult to determine. Even in speaking, the voice of the male Annamite was soft and well modulated, more feminine than masculine. This, in company with his weak physical condition and generally effeminate build, gave the total populace a most perverse appearance.
While all of the vices Dr. Sutor had been taught to abhor, as sexual perversions in Europe, existed in tenfold promiscuity in Indo-China, the social impetus and psychological inversion attendant with French perverts did not exist in the Annamite. He never once labeled them perverts, the while he wrote volumes concerning their perversion.
* * *
To him, the signal of racial death lay in his understanding of the dan ba. The Annamite woman was immeasurably superior to her spouse. She was more intelligent, infinitely more inventive and generally his superior in physical strength. She was, further, industrious to the extent that:-no matter how useless her husband-her children and her husband did not starve. No bachelor, medic or not, could be expected to know that women of all races have a massive capacity for the practical support of her family, but in the circumstances surrounding a dan ba, her actions were nearly heroic.
She wove the cloth, marketed the rice she planted, shopped the bazaar and tended the scrawny poultry. That she further had the time and strength to bear endless children, cuckold her husband at every opportunity and, often, supplement the family income with a piaster or two earned by baring her charms to a buyer, was a sign for the doctor that, if there were hopes for the Annamite, it lay in the lying and deceitful soul of the female.
The urge for survival was slightly apparent in the freedom afforded the dan ba. While most of the customs of the land were borrowed from the Chinese, the dan ba had managed to slip the constricting leash which encircled the throat of the Chinese woman. The Annamite females were not cloistered, nor hindered in any way from circulating in the streets, tea houses and gambling dens. Her feet were not bound and her head was not covered. It was almost as if the Annamite male understood that unless he gave his pout-mouthed, conniving woman her freedom he would starve and fall by the wayside. All he really demanded was food, sex, and a protected sense of 'face.'
This was evident in the adulterated codes left by the Chinese. Adultery and abuse were the prime sins against a spouse. A wife caught in the arms of a paramour, for sensation or piasters, was subject to ninety strokes of the rattan whip on her bare buttocks. The punishment for insulting or striking her husband was one hundred strokes of the rattan, it being considerably cheaper to cuckold the chong than to assault either his mind or his person. As with most of the rest of the world, the penalty for a chong caught cheating was little more than the fury of his wife.
Further evidence of the position a woman held in the scheme of Annamite survival was the nature of marriage. Love and affection for the spouse was not a normal commodity. The general promiscuity of the Annamite male and female made romance a peculiar word, understood only by the European.
From the strange heritage of the Annamite had come only the knowledge that family was important. The single reason for marriage was, in any case, the maintenance of family.
Marriages were arranged through agents called the mai-dongs. These agents brought the families of marriageable adolescents together, arranged the terms for connubial mating, and prepared the simple, pastoral wedding. This ceremony was extremely fundamental. The boy, generally about sixteen, met his bride-normally fourteen or fifteen-took her to bed on dirty straw; then they spent the coasting minutes chewing betel nut together and the deed was done. There was no question of virginity, chastity nor cleanliness.
There was a question-already settled by the mai-dong-of dowry which, in Indo-china was not paid by the bride's father, but by the groom's father. In this reversal of almost universal custom, the Annamite subconsciously admits that in assessing the value of marriage components, it was the woman who possessed importance, not the man.
How far back in the racial picture this reversal occurred is not precisely known, but it happened at a time in Annamite history when the deterioration of its society was well begun, and survival of the race was more important than the Chinese custom of marriage originally had been.
The elevation of the female to a figure of importance accomplished nothing but the preservation of life. In her daily existence, she had acquired exactly the same characteristics her spouse had utilized to destroy his prominence. She cheated at the market and sold her fidelity on the brothel bamboo, gave it away to passing fancies and insured the degradation of her offspring by dedicating herself and her emotions to lascivious conduct.
CHAPTER FOUR
DOCTOR SUTOR RECORDED MANY excursions into the interior jungles. He drew no great differences between the personal morals of the jungle denizens and those of the Saigonite, except to say that the opportunity for professionalism did not exist in equal volume.
After he described the badly-formed rice paddies, the miserable huts and compounds, and the closely knit but inconsequential villages and hamlets, he once more turned his eyes on the people in an effort to record their true stature in the scheme of things.
The religion he found was Buddhist, predominantly, but it appeared in a form he thought parallel to the Annamite decadence. Few understood even the basic elements of Buddhism, and even the priest-often the patriarch of the family village, used the theology to his own ends. The villages were strictly communal, in that they consisted of blood relatives and the few wives who were imported from nearby villages by the mai-dongs, or marriage managers. While these villages were unbelievably poor, starvation was virtually unknown, unless the elements destroyed the seasonal crops.
But it was not unusual, Dr. Sutor recorded, to find as many as five or six families, encompassing a hundred men, women and children, living in a long narrow hut, with a high peaked thatch roof and numerous religious emblems, carvings and symbols to signify the spiritual fervor. Within these large huts, the structure and profanity of family life was conducted without interference from outsiders.
His insight into the moral fiber of these families came through being required by his military superiors to bolster the strength of certain cooperative village chiefs. His medical services were requisitioned as a privilege for those rural centers of local power who could see eye to eye with the French colonists.
In the end, he concluded that the percentage and degree of pederasty, incest and general promiscuity was about the same as he had found in Saigon, Hue, and Tonkin. Whole families were rotten with Hue, and Tonkin. Whole families were rotten with inherited syphilis, which he noted seemed to bother them less than his European experiences had led him to expect, and gonorrhea was prevalent among both the men and the women, and not a few children.
Added to this were the numerous debilitating diseases native to the land: yellow fever, elephantiasis, dropsy and innumerable skin diseases. Anyone can understand the doctor's decision that the Annamite people were well on their way to self-destruction. His chief lament was that, even when shown the virtues of cleanliness and medical treatment beyond the abilities of the village voodoo doctor, the Annamite was incapable of remembering what he had learned.
It must be remembered that the doctor was not unbiased in relation to the differences between the French Colonial and the Annamite citizen. He also dealt in human beings invariable plagued with physical disorders, ranging from saber cuts to simple infections, but seldom did he deal with whole people. In the beginning he had been content to make notes and comparisons as he experienced incidents. Later, he developed the academic compulsion, the incessant thirst for knowledge that grew markedly throughout the thirty-five years his total works encompass.
Editorially, we suspect the doctor of possessing one more characteristic that pervaded the motives of nearly all the colonists, both in the military and in the commercial areas. No great attempt was made to analyze the basic, individual humanity of the native. As a professional healer, he was forced to come into closer contact with many more citizens than say, the commandant of the garrison. He was an accomplished linguist, knowing over fifteen languages at the time of his death. His rank was sufficient to provide authority and financial security, and he was obviously, a very direct man.
None of these characteristics indicate he was either a psychologist nor a humanitarian. He went to observe and to note, to measure and plumb, and he made a conscious effort not to involve his emotions with what he saw.
With this aloof attitude, he watched fellow officers sicken and rot away with syphilis, watched them descend the military ladder with brains addled by years of opium addiction, and witnessed their total moral breakdown as they soaked up the vice and licentiousness of the indifferent natives."
Thus, he came up with two types of notations. The first and most extensive were his purely clinical records of the Annamites as people, possessed of flesh and bones and a racial nature. In these records, he stated what he found to be an average, and he drew strong comparisons between the Annamites and the subsequent natives he attended throughout the French Colonies around the world. It will be remembered that we stated originally the difficulty of aligning chronologically his findings, and that we suspect that thirty-odd years of research was eventually edited as a whole prior to publication. Because we are concerned with the Annamite, who is today's Vietnamese, it must not be assumed that Dr. Sutor's placement of the Annamite in the scheme of human stature was determined at once. His clinical decision that the Annamite, one of the oldest civilized races of the world, had, by its decadent, vicious demeanor, doomed itself to a physical deterioration approaching the level of a lascivious monkey (with comparable mental capacities) was made twenty-five years after his arrival in Saigon in 1865.
* * *
The shape of his second set of notations had to do with purely personal observations of the Annamites' actions as they were exposed to presence of the French Military. It was from this secondary appraisal that he developed his knowledge of how and why the Annamite reacted with steadily downward trend. He accepted the fact that, at that time, the Annamite was as intrigued by the strange European as the European was with the strange Annamite.
It must be remembered that, in 1865, there had not been time for commercial establishment of the vices desired by the French. The soldiers came, found a situation far beyond their most vicious dreams, and wallowed in the blatant vice offered with little or no urging. We have then, a raw Oriental land, peopled by a race older than most recorded time, complete with habits and customs and tendencies no historian could blame upon the French invaders. The physical deterioration had already occurred, the mental receptiveness had already been mushed into sensual inertia and the course of Annamite existence was established.
There is no way to show the doctor's social observations of the Annamite behavior without recording them in some chronological order, complete with the .atmosphere in which the observations were made. But again, the considerations are divided between two definite social levels.
There was the Saigon of the enlisted soldier, and the Saigon of the officer. It was largely a question of money and the social levels at which each branch of the military could find debauchery. That the two levels corresponded exactly with the differences between the privileges of the rich and the poor citizens is not unusual.
Available to both groups was vice beyond compare. It must not be assumed that only the Annamites were available, either. By 1880, men and women of many races and countries had infiltrated the cities of Annam and, as in all seaport cities, there were International houses of prostitution, alien entertainment and variety. But the bulk of the available individuals were Annamites, and the nature of the vice was Annamese. The importation of Chinese, Japanese, Hindu and sundry other prostitutes merely provided variety, not invention. By Dr. Sutor's own admission, at the time he entered Saigon there was not one European prostitute in the area, and he gives rather a boisterous account of the advent of two such courtesans, both over forty, who were subsequently the prize in a bawdy raffle which reached the proportions of a mild riot among the military.
The single insight to be gained in recounting the doctor's experiences with professional vendors of vice, is that in most cases, the professionals were simply ordinary Annamites who were fortunate (? ) enough to find a buyer for what they normally gave willingly. He is quite voluble in insisting that the depravity he encountered in Saigon and other Indo-Chinese settlements was not of the European's bringing. It was, he states, a question of the vanquished corrupting the vanquisher and it was aided and abetted by the fact that the European was almost completely isolated from his own kind, especially European women, plus the insufferable depression afforded by sojourn in a land where absolutely nothing healthy can survive.
He neglected to mention the obvious fact that the French military answered only to itself, and that in the name of the Tri-color, the physical and moral degeneracy of a soldier was completely unrecorded. Colonial duty in areas where no great amount of soldiering was required to maintain the status quo, required a minimum of military bearing, and there was nothing in the Annamite code of existence which might deter a soldier from sliding headlong into whatever pit he chose.
CHAPTER FIVE
THERE WAS NOTHING surreptitious nor expensive involved in an enlisted man 'going to the Bamboo.' The location of the brothels was mostly a matter of chance, though many existed in the commercial districts, along the docks and interspaced among the bazaar shops and the warehouses of central Saigon. Not a few existed back farther, where the commercialism gave way to some clusters of thatched huts, because many of the women who plied their trade lived close by (or even in) the evil smelling brothels.
There was nothing elegant, nothing clean and nothing private about the miserable huts which were open to all comers. The interiors were separated by wicker partitions, but not effectively. In each so-formed area there was a 'hurdle' consisting of bamboo fronds gathered together and tied. The covering of the bamboo was a dirty, ragged cloth. It was from this crude couch of assignation the 'going to the Bamboo' originated because when the French soldier went to vent his lust, he rubbed his knees and pained his palms on the knots and wattles of the bamboo hurdle.
Here and there about the interior of the brothel were crude stools, used to seat the soldier while he primed his stomach with the cheap, bitter wine sold there. It was essential that a soldier drink this for several reasons. It comforted his nerves, and it dulled his sense of sight and smell, both facilities violently offended by the filth and normal condition of the whores.
Brothel inmates ranged from twelve to forty, and though Dr. Sutor was, himself, adamant about their total ugliness, there were those who found the Annamite female very attractive. They were unwashed, but delicately boned and slim of build. Their hair was magnificent but their lacquered teeth and betal red mouths were repulsive. They wore simple cotton chemises, unlaundered lest they wear out in washing, but most of the prostitutes possessed a silver bracelet or a necklace and they were fond of dangling earrings.
The doctor remarked the elaborate hair-do fancied by the whore but lamented her seeming unwillingness to wash it. To accomplish the styles of ageless custom, she merely put more cocoanut oil upon that already grown rancid. On the other hand, she plucked or shaved all body hair from under arms and groin because tradition had taught her body hair was spiritually undesirable.
The soldier faced with such a female was immediately prone to retch, the doctor stated, but there was no denying, traditionally, the demands of a tumescent penis. Driven by intent, fortified by wine and encouraged by the wily prostitutes, the soldier soon learned to tolerate the fetid mixture of cocoanut oil, sweat, sex and excrement.
The price for the girl varied, depending upon her age, her popularity, her looks-and the temper of the lusty customer. A tenpence was sufficient to enact the quick, brutal venting of desire; a piaster might rent the girl for an entire night. There may have been some unnoted significance in the further comment that these miserable, unwashed humans were consummately gay, and there was little doubt but that they enjoyed their lot in life. Which confirmed the doctor's estimate that only things sexual could excite the Annamite to anything resembling enthusiasm.
A hazard which startled only those soldiers recently arrived from France or some other less vicious colony was the manner of the whore. He was given a broad choice of method in sex. There was no great differential in price because the Annamite woman finds no special terror in any particular form of sexual congress.
If the soldier showed disgust at her lacquered teeth and beteled mouth, she would happily turn her buttocks up for a less intimate relation. With no urging at all, she would perform fellatio, partly because she was fascinated by the European's superior dimensions and partially because of some innate liking for the act. Unwilling to wash herself, she was more than willing to wash a soldier with her tongue, though the doctor remarked that the first few square inches so licked would be scarlet with the residue of betel stain.
In analysis, the doctor offered many findings concerning the purely physical attributes of the working co, or unmarried female. In keeping with nature's law of compensation, the vaginal capacities of the Annamite female were in direct proportion to the lack of penile bulk in the Annamite male. In terms of measurements, of which the doctor made many, the average Annamite penis was something in the order of a 'meager' four inches in adult length and no greater in girth than a stout European finger. In response, the vaginal extremities of the co, or dan ba were equally diminutive. Recalling his statements about the underdevelopment of Annamite children, one might wonder at the pure physical possibilities of a twelve year old prostitute.
He found that few girls of fifteen or older had not suffered from the 'flowers,' a disagreeable infection which had a tendency to relax unhealthy tissue. He reported the fact that continued exposure to the European sex organ considerably distended a willing, greed-inspired vagina. He reported treating unnumbered cases of uterine inflammation, and as many more cases of subsequent infection due to internal abrasions and distentions.
His early studies in the physical effects of a prolonged addiction to sodomy, both in the male and the female, came into great stead when it became his chore to inspect streetwalkers and suspected homosexuals prior either to their release or their commitment to the prison on Poulo Condore. In the beginning, he arrived at only a few most unscientific conclusions. Except for the scars of chancres, pederasty among the Annamites left very little in the way of physical evidence. The moment the susceptible entered into congress with the French soldier, the evidence was obvious. Massively formed infundibulums, torn and distended anal tissues and internal ulcers immediately stamped the patient as having indulged in sodomy with one or several members of a race endowed with considerably larger genitals than the Annamites.
Apparently, no real attempt was made to control the antics of the French soldier, presumably because he encountered enough hazards in the normal course of his sensuality.
Not devoid of a sense of humor, Dr. Sutor remarked that one hazard found in the 'bamboos' were the giggles and murmurs from the unoccupied whores who watched through the reed partitions while one of their sisters was being used. It was wise, he said, to assume that the revenue from sense-drugging wine was almost as great as that obtained by the completely available prostitute.
* * *
There were variations, even for the soldier of limited pay.
Living in an ugly world, beset by poverty, married to a spouse for whom she had no affection and possessed by an inherited sensual nature, an average Annamite woman was susceptible, either to a kind word or a piaster. A brush cluster, a shadow, or a niche in a gambling house was sufficient. It was the soldier's modesty which was in consideration, not the woman's. Born to a way of life that penalized apprehension, but not deviation, the dan ba was safe as long as the observer did not report her lascivious conduct to her spouse.
In the end, the effects upon the soldier were exactly the same. Prostitute and housewife were equally diseased, equally filthy. Before the arrival of the French, the Chinese doctors had discovered lucrative ways to treat syphilis and gonorrhea, but no way to cure either. Over decades of infection, the Annamites and many of the other oriental races had developed a strong immunity to the ravages of venereal disease. It seldom crippled, seldom incapacitated the natives. It worked havoc with the French soldier, particularly if he had been long exposed to the debilitating tropics. It was also true of yellow fever, typhoid and numerous other near-fatal diseases which racked up fatalities among the military while the infectious population enjoyed apparent immunity.
Another variation of sexual congress available even to the enlisted man with limited resources was the preponderance of male prostitutes. These were divided into two classes and designated by the terms 'nays' and 'boys.'
* * *
By 1870, Dr. Sutor was aware of the accusing finger aimed at the French military. As conquerors, they were automatically blamed for every degrading and immoral habit the natives showed to inquiring historians. With no great amount of emphasis, he simply stated that the same French and Portuguese soldiers who were accused of introducing and cultivating pederasty in the Annamite had not introduced nor cultivated the vice in the Antilles, in Guiana, Senegal or any other land they overran.
Continuing his medical work in Saigon, Tonkin, Hanoi and other Indo-China cities, he came into contact with all segments of the population, and his total conclusions were that pederasty was almost an innate instinct in the Orient.
While he had to use the word perversion to describe what he found, he did not infer that the widespread vice of sodomy, fellatio and related vices had very much to do with sexual perversion as the European understood it. He did observe that all of China showed strong tendencies for these vices, but by remembering that the Annamite was fundamentally a member of the yellow race, he was already committed to the inclination, and by the nature of his own racial deterioration, the Annamite was a fertile field for the expansion of pederasty. Though there were laws concerning male prostitutes, they were seldom if ever enforced because the populace as a whole was too thoroughly addicted to such vice to take the law very seriously.
Further conclusion arose from the fact that the number and availability of the male prostitutes was far beyond the corresponding volume of Europeans who might be expected to pay for the debauchery. Dr. Sutor observed that if the perversion of young male Annamites was the responsibility of the French garrisons, then the adult male population (consisting of Annamite merchants and shopkeepers) had absorbed the habit with alarming readiness. And when, in the course of his duty tour in Indo-China, the good doctor made his many trips into the rural and tribal areas of the jungle, he recorded the system of male prostitution in these unsophisticated areas to be as pronounced as he had found it in Tonkin or Saigon. Only less expensive.
He stated that in keeping with the slight early differences in appearance between the Annamite male and female, there seemed to be a corresponding similarity in their mental attitudes toward carnal sex. It was true that they bred incessantly once the age of nubility was reached, but that this was-likewise a matter of racial habit. Before progeny and after conception, they again went about their perverted habits in the pursuit of personal pleasure. These conclusions came to him after some period of medical practice in Saigon, but his observance of the general acceptance of pederasty came almost at once.
The introduction to pederasty was sudden. It manifested itself by the abundance of nays, whose name in literal translation was 'basket.' These boys, from seven to fifteen clustered around the docks, in the bazaars and ir. front of shops of all kinds. They were thin and 'wretched' and wore their hair long. Their clothes were mere rags, and the only uniform of their calling was the round wicker basket each carried.
For a tai-an (a penny) he would carry a shopper's packages, following along behind until he had deposited his laden basket in the shopper's house. It was singular, Dr. Sutor observes, that these nays invariably chose male patrons. Once inside the house, the nay would make open proposition if he had the slightest indication that his extra-curricular services were in demand.
His foremost service was 'chewchew' because it was quick, uncomplicated and in great demand. His price was cheap and his technique universal. He would require his 'patron' to lie or sit on a bed or a long chaise, bare himself and submit. The doctor was appalled by the apparent indifference these prepubescent nays had for cleanliness, color or even moderate evidences of disease.
They were not only expert 'suckers of the dart,' but they were in fact, greedy for the resultant flow of lust.
Apparently the Annamite male who purchased these favors did not mind that the nay was dirty, scrawny and unkempt. It is almost a certain thing that the nay had never in his life washed all over, arriving at a state of filth where friction, alone, kept the dirt from clodding over and around his skinny shape. In further evidence that this nay (and his perverted habits) was not the result of European teaching lay in the nay's unwillingness to understand the European's distaste for body dirt and stench.
Dr. Sutor comments wryly about the nay's willingness or unwillingness to sell himself sodomically. The nay had no prejudices for this pederastic act, but he was slightly wary about the disproportionate relationship between his anal aperture and the penis of a full grown man, and especially, a European, who considerably out-measured the most robust Annamite to be found.
These nays, or 'baskets' abounded in Saigon, Tonkin and in many lesser cities of Indo-China. In many cases, a shrewd and ambitious nay or two in the family was sufficient to provide the parents and lesser brothers and sisters with a full stomach. More often, they were rural lads who came to the cities simply to ply their personal preferences for a profit.
From this class of juvenile pederast came the vast population of boys. They were fundamentally servants, and while they had not learned cleanliness in any direction, they had acquired reserve, and a suit of silk. They wore silk kerchiefs around their greased coiffures, a brightly colored cummerbund, and twenty years of unwashed stench.
For some reason not clear to Dr. Sutor, these boys led a dual life. During the day, they were servants in one household or another. At nine, when the normal servant working day was done, they went out, seeking other doors, other masters and a piaster or two. Inveterate gamblers and most vain about their silk suits of brilliant color and embroidery, they spent their illicit earnings at ba-quan or similar gambling games.
More obnoxious to their patrons was the boys' addiction to thievery. Once admitted to a house, they found devious ways in which to return, and nothing that could be hidden under a silk chemise or thrust into the folds of the baggy trousers was safe. The most active time for the nays was somewhere immediately after the garrison cannon had fired, signifying the beginning of the midday hours of siesta. The boys plied their trade after the cover of darkness. Thus, the citizen of Saigon or Tonkin or Hanoi had available at any time the mobile flesh of a pederast.
* * *
It might be well to note that the doctor mentions the fact that all of Indo-China knew and recognized these nays and boys for what they were, but that a peculiar indifference existed, a sly unknowing acceptance of the picture of an Annamite merchant being trailed by a filthy ragamuffin as he went homeward for midday siesta.
Later, Dr. Sutor admitted that, because of the saturation of sexuality which had occurred among the Annamites, there was little lewdness nor lasciviousness to be observed in a casual manner. The indoctrination to total viciousness in sexual matters had occurred over centuries, and it did not need advertising nor exploitation. Vice of the most depraved sort appeared without warning, without any emotional preparation and was concluded without more than a few words, mostly concerned with money and the probability of a repeat performance when the buyer's backbone had returned.
Little imagination is needed to guess at the monstrous task facing a military doctor in a land where the lowliest of enlisted personnel had access to such a variety of sexual congress, with its accompanying disease.
It was from these tasks that he gleaned the endless notes forming his ugly picture of Indo-China. He boldly reported that the French soldier, and officer, invariably became embroiled in carnal vice, and that this appetite, plus the readily available opium pipe played havoc with the troops. Much of Dr. Sutor's records were devoted to the study, physiologically, of the effects of sodomy and fellatio, the nature of diseases so transmitted and the direct effect mentally, of such addiction.
His own industry forced him to delve deeply into the history of the Annamite, both as a creature of deteriorated body and determinate mentality. Lest he might be accused of authoritative bigotry, he plunged into the stratums of Annamite life, trying to determine what differences existed between the very low and the very high; for, despite the fact that Indo-China was a vanquished country, there were wealthy Annamites, landowners and merchants in the manner of all old civilizations. It is exceedingly difficult to separate his findings because, in all cases, he remained silent on the politics or social attitudes of his subjects. As an officer in the French Army, he did define the various methods by which the Annamite approached men of higher rank, though the nature of their wares was never varied.
CHAPTER SIX
FOR SOME REASON, inexplicable to the oriental, the Western world has almost totally relegated fornication to the hours of darkness. This might be the result of the industry of mind and body that is associated with the European bloodlines, or it might be due to the fact that police and other moral watclidogs are more effective during the daylight hours.
There is much more evidence than Dr. Sutor's that the Orient, the tropical countries have no such limitation. While we accuse the Spaniard and his equatorial colonies of creating the hours of siesta, the custom of long, midday rest periods exists throughout the tropical lands of the world. It was so in Indo-China, and the halt of midday activity was also a signal for the appearance of the 'Daylight Whore.'
She is described as an Annamite woman between the age of sixteen and perhaps thirty, presenting exceptional cases of durability. As the rule, she gathered in chattering groups around outside tables in some small restaurant yard, out of the center of town, or huddled under the shade of a banyan or palm grove. She was dressed in typical chemise and skirt, bright and orderly, but not necessarily any cleaner than her lesser counterpart in the 'bamboo.' In fact, most of the daylight whores were inmates of the bamboo brothels but recognized some singular advantage which had moved them to take to the streets. They each had a souteneur or pimp, who protected her from the police by distributing a piaster where it did the most good.
Even in areas where the French Military had decided to exert some restraint on the local traffic in prostitution, the police were invariably native Annamites. The midday sun was dangerous, Dr.
Sutor notes, and so the French avoided long periods of military guard during the high sun. The Annamite policeman, himself inured to the idea of prostitution, either female or male, could be readily bribed by the souteneur.
Source of trade for these daylight whores was the stream of officers, functionaries and wealthy merchants bound from the center of town to their respective homes for the midday siesta. The women seldom spoke, seldom made any solicitation. Even passing in a rapidly drawn carriage, an interested male could be assured of being followed by merely looking twice, gesturing or nodding.
As a rule, by the time the interested gentry had released his collar and removed his boots, the daylight whore was in attendance. As all the house of ranking officers were resplendent with servants, she became expert in eluding jealous or protective boys.
Her appearance, according to her age, or lack of it, was deceptive, Dr. Sutor relates. With her neat hairdo and straight, heavily decorated chemise and skirt, she presented almost a doll-like desirability ... until she opened her mouth and exposed her blackened teeth and betel-red tongue. Many such daylight whores wore gold buttons for earrings, bracelets and ankle bands of silver, and large gold finger rings.
The Annamite woman was a better physical specimen than her male counterpart, and they often possessed high, firm breasts and good posterior development. It was nearly universal that her legs would be thin, her feet and hands small, and her gait somewhat awkward.
She would be totally devoid of romantic pretense. Her initial statement of intentions was generally accompanied by boasts of her complete knowledge of Phalanza, which was translated into meaning that she understood all the phallic delights the European imagined, even in his wildest dreams.
Despite the fact that adult nudity was nearly unknown in the land, at least as it applied to public appearances, she would immediately disrobe, hoping that nakedness would quell any doubts the European might have generated upon inspecting her close up. It was here, Dr. Sutor remarks, that the strong stomach was needed. Her foul, unwashed body exuded odors calculated to still the most carnal of thoughts in the novice; more experienced Europeans had learned to ignore the odor of su generis, and the business at hand was rapidly consummated.
The daylight whore had no limitations, and in fact, she would be wont to propose any or all of the depraved tastes she herself had cultivated. She was 'avid for mouth sucking, enthusiastic for sodomy and not spiritually injured if the man in question had not yet gotten used to her ugly mouth and malodorous body. She would bend herself double and present her rump with as little chance of contaminating his belly as she could manage. Within minutes, she would complete her business and with none of the restorative concessions (thought essential throughout the world: water, soap, even a hasty wipe with a rag) would don her garments and slip away in the midday heat, piaster in hand while the debilitated male availed himself of a quick nap in the fetid heat of noontime.
Some commentary on the naivete of the French officer was made by explaining that, among the other things the daylight whore accomplished was a complete knowledge of the interior. She would note where the officer hung his watch, which cupboard he used for his gold and his brass, and she would plot in her mind the manner in which she could return at a later date and plunder the weary fellow.
She was an adept prowler, and a thorough-going thief. Many a fine gold watch, the doctor notes, turned up in the shop of a Chinese pawnbroker, sold there in exchange for cheap earrings or a silver bracelet.
* * *
With clinical calmness, Dr. Sutor relates that many French officers, weary of the filthy 'bamboo,' and exasperated with the dirty unemotional daylight whore, turned to the problem of acquiring a woman of his own, for his own use. This, he asserts, was invariably the case in the interior of Indo-China, where the delights of Saigon and Cho-lon and the Chinese procurers were not available.
A French officer could purchase from her parents a girl of fifteen for about twenty piasters. Were he stupid enough to insist that the girl be a virgin, they fooled him with an ointment of papaya juice, sundry herbs and concoctions dedicated to the contraction of vaginal tissues. Unemotionally, the good medico states that by the time an Annamite girl had been the rounds among her brothers, her cousins and her neighbors, she was certainly no virgin, either vaginally or rectally, but because of the small penile structure of the Annamite male, the larger, lustier European could not tell the difference.
The problem from the standpoint of the French officer was considerably more serious than twenty piasters. The girl was invariably delivered to him in a complete state of physical disrepair. She would be dirty, unkempt and clad in the raggedest of dresses. It was his responsibility to take this savage who knew no French and little Annamese, clean her and dress her and present her to the world as a suitable companion of an ong-quan, or man of rank.
Net cost for such a transformation was usually in the order of two hundred piasters, plus patience in the basic education of the jungle savage. For this, he received little more than a bad bedmate. It was an extreme rarity for any sort of emotional understanding to exist, and the suddenly-affluent girl would permit her slight personal vanity to nourish immediately.
The doctor noted her clever pretense at fidelity and filial devotion, and he commented upon the original pride the officer might show in displaying his toy to other officers. Unless he actually caught her dispensing her favors to Annamite servants and trades-people, the officer might never know of her cheating, conniving nature until he turned up with gonorrhea or some other irrefutable evidence that his mistress was less than perfect.
The insurance against such a condition was to set his Annamite boy as a bodyguard over his mistress. The doctor admitted this was not an unhandy thought. It was true, the boy would avail himself of all the fringe benefits he could, but in jealousy and fear for his own penile infirmity, he would be diligent about protecting the girl. Further, it was easier to detect venereal problems in the Annamite boy than in the mistress, so a periodic examination of the watchdog acted as a periodic check on the mistress.
In all fairness, one must note that Dr. Sutor was immensely pleased when a French soldier showed even the slightest bit of intelligence when confronted with the weird and wonderful ways of the Orient.
* * *
Despite rules and codes some four thousand years old, Annamite observance of these ethics amounted to lip service and automatic, unconsidered actions. The doctor was unable to record any genuine indications that the Annamite had the slightest political, social or religious feelings in relation to his fellow man. The Annamite families who had acquired wealth and prominence had no national plan and no understanding of their responsibilities. Their pride was in possession, their power was in ruthless exercise of physical superiority.
These families (whom Dr. Sutor did not even bother to name) impressed the French not at all. Their concerns, their excitements and their agonies were petty matters of hourly change. They had no total perspective, no plan for tomorrow. In consequence, they fell easy prey to the ambitious, inventive Europeans. Having no real aristocracy of their own, they welcomed the pseudo-regality offered by the French.
To minds as addled as the Annamites', the French offered a fair bargain. In exchange for cooperation, specifically known as surrender, the Annamite had only to accept piasters, orders and a new religion. (And a hundred thousand colonial soldiers to insure the French investments.) This seemed no problem to the inbred, decadent first families of Cochin-China, so they enthusiastically agreed.
The medium of selection was religion. Significantly, the small Catholic inroads in Indo-China appear in the urban areas; by 1870 less than five percent of the total Annamese population had responded in any way to the Christian doctrine, and even this small percentage was almost directly dependent upon largesse dispensed by the Church, and so conditioned themselves to liturgic participation.
This no doubt, disturbed the good fathers who had enjoyed a much better percentage in other parts of the world. It might be added that this failure to convert was not singular with Indo-China. Few Oriental races responded to Catholicism-factually, the religions of Buddha and Tao resisted the influx of Christian doctrines more effectively than other pagan beliefs.
But it must be remembered that the Annamite was a conquered, not a coerced people. Had it seemed worthwhile, the fathers could have built a church or a mission under the shadow of the French cannon with no great hazard. Their real defeat came in the shape of a listless, lethargic people, incapable of understanding hope, or the promise of hope. They were a decadent race, merely inhabiting a land which produced rubber and tea and cotton and minerals. That none of these natural resources ever entered significantly into the economics of the world was due to the inability of the French to make the native work well. The French occupied Indo-China for nearly eighty years, and, though the Republic garnered profit and trade from the land, it never represented the portion of success England enjoyed from India in all considerations of size and population and resources.
It might be argued by students of homogenized societies that the evils of colonization in the end justified their means, and this is true in certain areas. But with the Annamite, the colonist ran hard into a situation no one knew existed, and after five years of intense study and physical effort, Dr. Sutor alone came up with the concept of worthlessness as applied to a total people.
In his survey of the populace, he noted the presence geographically, of a number of races and tribes and imported nationals, all of whom had been evident in the Indo-China jungles for many decades. It might have been expected that a race so strongly genetic as the Annamites would have absorbed culture, enterprise-any tangible asset that could have halted their downward course, but the opposite was true. Their strong bloodline persisted, and they corrupted the Malabars, the Malays, the Moys and the Chinese, giving nothing of blood strength-just their depravity.
* * *
We are interested' in the measures the French administrators utilized to prevent the total deterioration of their own forces in Indo-China. In the first five year tour of duty in Saigon and other Cochin-China cities, Dr. Sutor notes the period of disastrous relaxation which nearly defeated the French, and the slow, relentless manner of the garrison's recovery.
It became necessary to push the Annamite out of Saigon.
At least, it became necessary to rid the city of all Annamites who had no direct connection with the military establishment and the economic life of the city. The merchants and the trades peoples were essential, and the personnel to work the docks and the streets and the 'legitimate' residential districts were issued cards of identification.
So dissolute, diseased and debauched were the city's normal residents that, to prevent the total collapse of law, order and commerce, a stringent rule of curfew was essential.
The net result was that besides Cho-lon-the Chinese Arroyo city, dozens of smaller towns and villages sprang up around the perimeter of Saigon, Tonkin and Hanoi. Economically, it made no difference to the Annamite because he had no economy and sought to create none.
There is hardly any characteristic of a race or an era as difficult to eradicate as that of depravity. It would be safe to say that the 'clean-up' was rendered doubly difficult by the fact that the 'cleaners' genuinely enjoyed the filth they sought to erase.
It did not take a concentrated effort for an Annamite to foil the new laws. Any Annamite within the military jurisdiction of the restricted 'district' was as susceptible to sodomy or a bout with 'dart sucking' as the obvious professionals now living on the outskirts of town. Vice was not a profession, it was a way of life. Professionals existed simply because they could only insure a livelihood by being professionals.
Annamite girls still surrendered their virginity at the age of nine or ten, and her brothers and little friends still availed themselves of her behind. As the French dug wells and piped water, created clinics and inspected food, the Annamite ignored water, nurtured his disease and ate fish which would have poisoned a less inured human. The nays and boys merely altered their procedures, and the fewer number merely increased their revenue by working more.
The daylight whores made pretenses of marriage with shopkeepers, and dock workers, thus retaining their right to walk the streets of Saigon and Tonkin.
Statistically, we concern ourselves, now, with the years of Dr. Sutor's first tour of duty in Indo-China, and this was ended in 1870. This was sufficient time for the French to instigate drastic rules and regulations for control of the decadent Annamite, but it could hardly be considered sufficient time for some measure of morality to rub off on the Annamese. Politically, we do not know if he resisted this disruption in his existence, but practically we do have evidence that it was resisted, because Dr. Sutor notes no change in the moral attitudes while he did note alterations in the connivance of these people to maintain their indolent way of life.
As an indication, after many years of dealing with the European's dislike of lacquered teeth and beteled mouths, the very unreligious, untraditional daylight whore had not the intelligence to forego this personal disfigurement. She did not learn to wash, despite the fact that it would have made her conquest of a French soldier's wallet far more simple.
There seemed to be no way to instill the Annamite with awareness. They had no light side, no great humor and no sense of holiday whatever. Although the population seemed extremely nervous and excitable, these personality conditions never involved any serious items. They were apparently incapable of weighing consequences, making plans or anticipating the rising sun. They were insensate to the vibrations which trigger most of the world's humanity, either in danger or in exultation.
Their sexual life was so intense, so all-encompassing that every aperture, every appendage was utilized in the exploitation of sensation, but they were insensate to feeling, emotionalism or love.
In fact, linguistic proof of their racial condition is offered by the fact that none of the words, "Love."
"emotion."
"devotion."
"honesty," nor, additionally, "modesty," appear in the native tongue. They did have positive words which mean "fellatio."
"sodomy" and "intercourse," and many variations in patois, with gestures.
It is less than marvelous that Dr. Sutor generated an intense interest in sexual sizes, shapes and usage when confronted with a race so vastly different than his European heritage had indicated. While all the vice and depravity he saw, existed in his native France, it existed as a perversion, a special degradation of an unselect few. Faced with a nation of creatures whose depravity was a way of life, he became justifiably curious.
We find no charitable excuses, no sentimental identification with the natives in his work. He was neither a psychologist nor a preacher, and he practiced no subterfuge in the analysis of the facts he perceived. It is almost a shame that there were none of the societies and "isms" available in those years to formulate peat sympathetic movements to purge the Annamite of his hideous image. It would be interesting to compare what they might plan and hope and infer against Dr. Sutor's findings, and it would be doubly interesting to hear their justifications for the Annamite failure to respond to a brighter culture as the years marched by.
CHAPTER SEVEN
BY 1895, SAIGON HAD ASSUMED an entirely new personality. It had grown to twice the population and area since the day Dr. Sutor had first seen it in the mid-sixties. While moderately exploiting the wealth of Indo-China, the French had accelerated the pace of life in Saigon in keeping with the number of latex bolls, rice bags and mineral shipments extracted from the reluctant land.
Saigon had become the French capitol of Indo-China. By drawing lines on a map in 1884, the French had designated Cochin-China as a directly ruled colony and they had declared Tonkin and Annam as protectorates. Later, they established protectorates over Cambodia and Laos. Militarily, the seat of power remained in Saigon.
The French built an impressive Government House, fine court houses, innumerable government buildings and endless tiers of barracks. Very obviously, the French had come to stay. " Within the city of Saigon, they built many elegant dwellings with landscaped surroundings. These were big, impressive houses, with multiple storys, tile roofs and expansive verandas and gardens. These imposing houses were the homes of ranking military officers and the government dignitaries.
Under the shadow of this new military establishment were even greater changes. Public buildings were many. In addition to the construction of the military requirements, the French had nearly razed the old Saigon, burning out and tearing down the miserable shops and huts and generally ridding the heart of the city of its festering filth. Streets were hand-graded and cobbled, and a new water system had been installed. Ancient Annamite canals were cleaned out and made usable, and new ones were being dug to facilitate the transport of city-required supplies. For each new enterprise, a public office was created, employing dozens of French administrators and clerks.
A Post and Telegraph office had been built, establishing Saigon as the center of Indo-China's communications. A massive new Cathedral was nearly finished, as was the French College of Saigon. There were many lesser, elementary schools to accommodate the numerous French children and the offspring of the upper class Annamites.
At first glance, Dr. Sutor might have assumed that through some miracle, the French had struck a critical chord in the Annamites, and that they had responded with some of the glories they had known several hundred years ago. In fact, he stated, the magnificence which had been wrought from so sordid and disorganized a beginning was encouraging. He was not long in determining that this new ebullience had absolutely nothing to do with the Annamite.
As an anciently-endowed civilization, the Annamites had long understood how to build with mud and stone and thatch. While they showed no real racial ability to create huge edifices or temples, they did build bridges, quays, delicately ornate tall pagodas, and occasionally, an interesting building such as the Citadel. They were numerically available and they were poor enough to welcome such opportunities as the French building campaign offered, but it soon became evident that if progress were to be maintained, it dared not rely on the Annamite. The new Saigon, as the doctor found it, was largely the work of imported Chinese laborers.
It had not been possible to plan and execute any great improvement without providing an imported labor force to supplant the lethargic, decadent Annamite. The doctor decided that the French had expected too much from the native. In return for schools, cleanliness and public enterprise, the French had expected the Annamite to wash, learn, and utilize his body and mind. To the Annamite, this was not a fair exchange. He seemed contented to stand by and see the people of many foreign lands enter his cities, penetrate his jungles and reap profitable harvest where he, himself had stumbled and failed.
As a result of the hopeless response, the French had taken drastic measures to reduce the contamination offered by the Annamites. In 1895, it was illegal for an Annamite to be found in the streets after midnight, and up to that hour, he was required to carry a lighted lantern lest he come too close to the uncontaminated citizens of Saigon.
The police of the city had embarked upon a stringent campaign to rid the streets of vice and filth. Permission to five in Saigon was reserved for distinct classifications. An Annamite had either to be a member of an 'old family,' or a worker drawing a legitimate wage from a European or a respected household. Every Annamite, no matter his social stance, carried an identification card bearing a description and a photograph. To enforce this law, and some others, it was necessary for the French to supply a completely European police force, uniformed, ruthless and often arbitrary beyond the existing laws.
An Annamite picked up by the police who had no such card was immediately arrested and hauled off to the constabulary. If he survived the police interrogation as to his honesty, he was then turned over to the military doctor: based upon Dr. Sutor's earlier extensive studies (as to the effects of addiction to fellatio, sodomy and sundry sexual deviations) the man was either freed Or popped off to the penitentiary at Poulo Condore. The penitentiary, the doctor notes, was very full because among the Annamites, signs of sexual perversion were nearly a universal thing.
The latter procedure was also effected with Annamites who actually carried a proper identification card, providing the military had any, however lightly-founded idea that the man or woman arrested was of a professionally lewd character.
The justice of such decisions and the personal encroachment upon a citizen's rights was not the doctor's concern. He blamed the condition, not upon the over-zealous French, but upon the decadent Annamite. He does state that the native members of the Municipal Council worked diligently to reduce the restrictions and that they eventually managed to have the lantern law repealed; Dr. Sutor lamented this repeal because it once again allowed skulking in the streets.
* * *
The new face of Saigon might have assured casual observers that the deplorable morality and filth of thirty years ago had somewhat improved. The exterior look of the city had altered and the populace seemed vastly superior to their previous generation. But Dr. Sutor was placed in a position where the truth was difficult to disguise and he was appalled by how little things had really changed among the native population. In the face of progress, the Annamite had simply moved aside, or into new areas more conducive to licentiousness.
Apparently the single thing the Annamite had learned in thirty years was how to evade and disguise his or her identification. As in all Oriental and tropical lands, ten servants were utilized where one good one would have sufficed. A French or Chinese or Annamite of position or wealth could have as many servants as he chose. If involved in a commercial venture, there was no limit to the number of workers employed. The Annamite, willing to feign industry, would agree to work for little or nothing, merely to obtain a card which would permit him access to the city.
Further, the Frenchman who was once set up in Saigon to market the imported essentials, had been displaced by the clever Chinese. The Frenchman had gone on into the interior, seeking more fertile fields. He could not compete with the wily Chinese .who imported cleverly and sold at a smaller margin of profit. In thirty years, a system of merchandising had solidified in usage and as long as the exterior, obvious conditions of conquest were met, the French permitted these conditions to flourish. It had been easy to forget that most of the organized vice of 1865 had been managed and nurtured by the Chinese.
The great floating city along the bank of the Saigon River still existed because under strictest analysis, these were the fisher-folk and the trans-river ferry minders. There were stringent regulations controlling their movements, and many were born and raised without setting foot on dry land. The great ships in the harbor, fed by and delivered of their cargoes by lighter-boats, made the mouth of the river a virtual beehive of activity. Saigon was also a naval base, acting as headquarters for the French fleet which maintained communications and order along the hundreds of miles of seacoast surrounding French mandates.
Item by item, Dr. Sutor began to align the new Saigon with the old. As a man of great travel, of great experience in colonies throughout the French colonial system, he was able to draw many accurate comparisons between the reactions of the Annamite and the reactions of the natives of many other conquered lands. He began to search for confirmation of his notations, made twenty-five years before, and he found this confirmation with no difficulty.
* * *
He had sampled the opium pipe in his earlier tour of duty, and the first thing he observed was how thoroughly the military had squashed the use of the pungent drug among its own officers and men. By then, control of opium sales was directly in the hands of the French Excise, or Tax Administration, and while it was not impossible for an officer or an enlisted man to buy opium, or attend the neatly camouflaged opium houses, the tendency to addict himself to the drug had been considerably reduced.
This was due to many years of painful education the French had endured in the opium trade. It was also due to the fact that by 1895, the social starvation felt by the soldier had been fed with the immigration of many civilian French and not the least, with new interests and much feminine companionship.
Dr. Sutor held in those years at the turn of the century, many of the convictions now represented as advanced thinking by our modern psychologists. Vice, depravity and corruption occur most viciously when the individual is shorn of security and interest. The growth of Saigon, and the inclusion of theaters, restaurants, endeavor, and the influx of French women altered the direction the soldier had so easily chosen.
There was no shortage of opium because it was a Government monopoly, but the Europeans who addicted themselves to the drug did so in a vastly different clime than in the older days.
The pipe is a quiet vice, and little understood by most Caucasians. Editorially, the opium is not smoked. Pure gum opium appears like thick, muddy honey and is very expensive. It wouldn't burn under a blowtorch. Classically, opium is cooked, and the preparation of it is an art. A small gob, or pill is extracted from the container, generally on the end of a small bamboo stick, not unlike a thin chopstick. This gob of raw opium is deftly maneuvered over a low flame, generally of vegetable oil. The 'cooker' twists and turns the pill until it forms a relatively round ball and begins to show a skin of heated opium. Once this skin is formed, the cooker manipulates the pill in such a fashion that the interior of the unseared opium begins to form bubbles, gaseous pits within the perimeter of the pill It is often manipulated on the smooth skin of the finger web between the thumb and forefinger, shaping and building the pill until it is a spongy, potent container for opium gas.
The pill is then deftly dropped into the 'bowl' of the pipe, and the smoker is required to inhale strongly, breaking the outer skin so that the gaseous buildup in the pill is sucked into the lungs. There is no smoke, no fire, no coals. It may take two to ten strong inhalations to completely collapse the cooked opium. In the meantime, the cooker has prepared another pill. It often requires from six to twenty pills to induce the pleasant, silkenly buoyant sensation which the opium smoker desires.
The condition of mind acquired with opium is one of complete well-being coupled with physically acute abilities to feel. Rough cloth acquires the texture of velvet. Fetid air is transformed to the freshness of a mountain breeze. There is no evil, no worry, and no oppression. In every sense of the word, opium is euphoric, completely voiding the unpleasantness of the world. It is a drug which inhibits physical action. Under its influence, it is impossible to generate ambition or movement. It is possible to regulate the use of opium to utilize the extreme agility of mind resultant, and many opium addicts are quite accomplished and capable artisans.
Under normal circumstances it requires from three to eight years to acquire a physical habit and, in many cases, the addiction does not occur as is understood with morphine, heroin and other drugs directly effecting the blood balance in the human system.
In Asia, the evil of opium had taken on other significance. It was, so far as the user was concerned, a pleasant way to blot out pain, misery and ambition. It was utilized by the rich and the poor, the young and the old, to obtain the nirvana their position in fife refused them. It was both a cure for ennui and a luxury where none existed. It was, dispensed and controlled by the government, a thoroughly effective manner of controlling a populace which might have otherwise, by sheer numerical advantage, caused the rulers much insurrective trouble. It, further, returned to the coffers the money paid by the rulers for labor and products dragged out of the land by the opium addict.
Dr. Sutor remarks that a tael of opium which was approximately an ounce and a third, sold in Saigon for two piasters and in the hands of a skillful Annamite cooker, would produce about one hundred pills, bringing the price per pill down to about a penny, French. In the Saigon of 1895, opium smoking among the Europeans had diminished considerably, but the addict who did remain was forced to cultivate his habit in the privacy of his own home.
They invariably possessed an Annamite mistress who was adept at cooking the pungent drug, and the extent of his addiction was his own business. Because opium is not an aphrodisiac, in any sense of the word, the presence of the mistress was purely academic. Dr. Sutor remarked that the use of opium among the officers and men of the military in 1895 was almost non-existent. Education and experience, plus a severe penalty, made it hardly worth the effort.
* * *
The physical pattern for this city in Cochin-China had been utilized by many colonists throughout the Orient, but in Saigon, the rules were more stringent, more restrictive. As the Annamite was abolished (unless he had some valid reason for being in Saigon), of perforce and desire, he settled in great, festering settlements around the perimeter of the city. There was no wall to climb nor gates to open. There was a civil police district and outside of the designated boundaries, the Annamite dwelt and fornicated and connived in peace.
The 'bamboo' was there in greater concentration than ever before. The opium dens and brothels and gambling houses flourished mightily, fed by the natural growth of the population and by the strange permissiveness of the physical shape of Saigon. There had always been some form of law and order in Saigon, but now, the settlements had no law and order, no form of control. The police of these settlements were purely natives, responsible to natives, and their chief function was to act as gangsters and collection agents for the organized vendors of opium and flesh. This made it very easy for both the Europeans and the moneyed aliens of Saigon to avail themselves of the delights (? ) vended in the suburban areas.
As senior surgeon of the Saigon garrison, Dr. Sutor was called upon to act in judiciary capacity in many cases of curfew violation; and in his general observation, he could discover no change in the Annamite. He had not learned to wash, he had not learned to think objectively and he had not grown one whit stronger nor more stable despite the availability of mental and physical sustenance. Those few who had apparently embraced European culture and religion forgot both the moment they entered the doors of their homes.
Incest was still a family habit, and the doctor's military clinic was filled with evidences of connubial perversion and abuse. The percentages of venereal infection had not decreased, either among the military or the citizenry. He remarked that the price of an Annamite virgin was the same, but if she were not infected with syphilis or gonorrhea, her incompetent and worthless self was upgraded in price.
A Catholic himself, Dr. Sutor stated that in thirty years, the Church had made little or no headway among the people. Many of the 'leading' families had subscribed to the religion but he felt that this was largely a mark of social accomplishment and political expediency. They embraced Christ-and they continued to fill his clinic with the same ailments their less fortunate friends and relatives suffered.
Murder, he said, was less serious than thievery in the scheme of Annamite performances; innate cruelty manifested itself in sadistic acts of violence against relatively unimportant offenders.
CHAPTER EIGHT
TO FULFILL A DEMAND and upgrade their merchandise, the Chinese procurers had imported great numbers of Chinese and Japanese whores. At the same time, the demimondaines from France and Senegal and Giuana had moved into Saigon and taken their place in the appropriate social stratums. With them, chronologically-not socially-had come many French families and a totally French way of life existed, at least on the surface of Saigon. In addition to the theaters and restaurants, the elegant gambling houses and private clubs formed a round-robin of social activity which was of recognizable similarity to the French way of life in Europe.
They even developed an opera house and maintained an opera season. Botanical gardens and parks and off-season band concerts gave the city a most sophisticated air. Occasionally the wind shifted and wafted into Saigon the fetid odor of the settlements, but it was not difficult for the average Frenchman to forget, that such places, populated by such miserable specimens, existed in the shadow of his fine city.
It was inevitable that the more affluent Annamite of old family developed a distinct aversion to his racial counterpart in the jungle. Colonists the world over have recognized the importance of installing and maintaining a landed gentry among the natives. It is these traitors to their national heritage who are most responsible for the continued repression and exploitation, because in their desire to continue and augment their position, they learn to talk out of both sides of the mouth.
They are the peaceful rulers of the hordes, and in Saigon, the French created a massive elite among the Annamites, using them as a buffer between enterprise and insurrection. It was a role to which the Annamite took with perfect response.
The lack of national spirit, lack of racial pride and lack of basic intelligence produced a brutal, selfish autocracy which bowed to the French and beat the lesser Annamite with a ruthless rod. As all the families of the Annamites could date back a thousand years, it took little doing to create imaginary dynasties of regal ancestors, and by 1895, these families had privately elevated their own opinion of themselves to a notch above the French. The wily Frenchman cared not a whit for this sham legacy; in fact, he cultivated the existence of a few powerful families, using them to voice certain political and social desires as if the concept of Annamite servitude was really a matter of the right of blood.
In this light, the original observations Dr. Sutor made about the strength of the Annamite bloodlines seemed accurate. The Annamite of Saigon religiously protected his blood, even while he prostituted his mind and his position. He was really a man without a country, because he delivered his land to the French and he alienated his people who trod the jungle trails with the same lethargic indifference they had shown for a thousand years.
Dr. Sutor's second observation (that the Annamese, as a race were completely useless, undependable and unintelligent) was also being confirmed. He had compared them to the monkey, a chattering, sly beast with the capability for loud noises, endless lascivious activities and no constructive inclinations. He had furthered the comparison by listing accurately all of the physical attributes of the Annamite and the monkey. If it was an uncharitable comparison, he felt indisposed to alter it after his second tour of duty in Indo-China.
* * *
In no other land where the doctor served had the problem of male perversion been so compelling. While it was conceivable that wherever men soldiered, or commercialism flourished, the female of the land would make herself available, it was in Cocbin-China that the male pervert was the most predominant.
Even a servant or a gardener or a tradesman was liable to approach an Annamite or a European with sly, lewd proposals. With a thoroughly educated eye, it took the doctor very little time to locate the nays which the new Saigon had disguised in commercial positions.
The 'baskets' had completely disappeared. The Saigon police (in an effort to stamp out sodomy and its generative diseases) had wiped them off of the streets, pushed them out into the suburbs and imprisoned the most brazen. The nays responded with a sullen resistance. Instead of haunting the markets and shops with their dirty hair and lewd gestures, they had become lower sellers and sweets peddlers.
The nays were to be found in small bands, clustered around the entries to restaurants, cafes and public places, displaying their identity cards to the police while he displayed his flowers to the citizens. In many cases, he was accompanied by a small girl whom he passed off as his sister, and she too was available. It took only a nod or a gesture-or the show of a piaster-to set in motion a system Dr. Sutor had to admit was as effective as the basket had ever been.
Once the nod or gesture of understanding had passed, the procedure depended upon the buyer's choice of sexual exercise. The nay and the girl would follow the nodder, with some discreet distance between hunter and hunted simply to fool a chance policeman, who in the city of Saigon was always a European.
If the boy was not desired, he would slip away and the girl, carrying her flowers, would then go ahead to a side street where there would be a row of closed carriages. In most cases, the drivers were Malabars, Hindus from the east coast of India, but the girl always chose a carriage driven by an Annamite. The driver would signal to the eager buyer that the girl had entered his cab and thus would begin the tableau. Before the driver could cluck his horse into motion, the nay would slip up on the box. He was not only there in case the buyer changed his mind about the type of lewdness he wanted, but the nay acted as a lookout for the police.
The cost, in 1895, for an hour in the privacy of the cab with the often prepubescent girl was a piaster, with a half piaster for the driver, who was careful to drive his cab out of Saigon and into the settlement streets to avoid an unpleasant interruption by the police. The Botanical Gardens was a favorite place as the roads were winding and better graded, causing less disturbance for whatever gymnastics the man and the girl might generate.
These girls were accomplished 'suckers of the dart,' willing partners in sodomy and if the buyer were shy, deft manipulators in masturbation.
For an additional piaster, the nay would scramble into the cab and submit to any depravity the buyer chose to perpetrate. And if the buyer were old, unsound but lascivious, the nay and the girl would perform, naked and malodorous, any sexual act the buyer might indicate. Through it all, the Annamite driver would sit like an indisposed ape on the box, minding his horse and the road ahead.
The variations were immense, and if a buyer wished to spend the night with the girl, or the nay or both, the driver would then seek out certain portions of the settlements where thatched huts, for a reasonable rental, were available. There, no danger of apprehension existed because the native police were part and parcel of the connivance. These huts were separate entities, and therefore separate expense. It was possible to buy food, opium, tea, more girls or more nays, and it was, demonstrably, folly to fall asleep without a secure grin on the pocketbook.
In most cases, the average age of these nays and their little girl companions (their 'sisters') was from twelve to fifteen. The single thing which gave the he to accusations of commercial exploitation was that in these settlements, the congress between sexes at any age level went on in great enthusiasm without anyone paying for the orgies. Throughout the world, a whorehouse is not nominally lewd nor lascivious in its own shadow, but in Saigon, and the surrounding settlements, the pure pleasure of depraved sexual congress was as evident among the inmates of a hut as it might have been had there been a buyer.
* * *
Past the age of being a nay the scrawny adolescent still advanced into the dignity of a boy. He improved his raiment, and hired out as a manservant. He was found in fewer numbers for two reasons, Dr. Sutor observed. To begin with, he was more obvious, more readily checked by the police for his adult stature. Thus, he had to cease skulking through the night shadows and find a safer place from which to ply his trade as a dart-sucker or a sodomite.
He hung around the gambling houses, legitimate or illegitimate, simpering and posing and making suggestive gestures and guttural proposals to any male who seemed interested. He abounded in the settlements where teahouses, opium dens and brothels flourished. Because his circulation was constricted, and the number of European, Chinese and Japanese prostitutes had cut the business potential, the boy sold his elegance to the poor Annamite for something less than they had once charged the Saigonite.
The second reason fewer boys succeeded in their trade was the massive availability of a new breed of male pervert. He was, the doctor noted, the product of progress. He was the student, and the graduate of the French College of Saigon, and sundry schools of the interior.
Theoretically, these amateurs were from the best Annamite families, the wealthy middle-class and from certain districts where community enterprise had given a likely youth some sort of a scholarship in alignment with the French policy of native betterment.
Their college education was not quite up to university standards in Europe, but it did include a schooling in French, mathematics, history and geography and a formal understanding of the Annamite language in coggnu, or phonetics. As a group, they were taught some elementary rules of cleanliness, morality and social theory. There was some discrimination among the French youths who attended these colleges, but for the most part, the Annamites who attended such schools, were immeasurably improved as to their looks and capabilities.
The sons of rich men did not need to work and the sons of commercially active middle-class Annamites could find no work, and the poor students who returned to the scene of their childhood found no work suitable to the advantages of their education.
A few became interpreters, more worked as guides and tally-minders, but most of them fell into two classes. One class gathered in restaurants and cafes and public places, displaying their finer clothes and the immunity of their blood right, blatantly extolling the virtues or the contingencies of politics and social reform while they felt each other's sexual equipment under the tables. They were a dissolute, thoroughly effeminate group who had on one hand learned to mouth important words while they reverted to the sexual vices their ancestors had bred into their thin, unmuscular bodies. It was difficult to tell which portion of their being was the source of the greatest pride, their education-which was superfluous-or their sensuality which was always on display. Most of them, it must be remembered, had been contracted into marriage by the mai-dongs long before their eighteenth year. This did not prevent the police from regularly raiding a restaurant or club where these semi-sophisticated savages were cavorting in perverted male love.
Another class of college student went directly into lewd practice, acting as pimps for the prostitutes and street walkers, offering their own bodies if they could interest a buyer, and generally upgrading the external characteristic of the boy. Automatically inheriting the right to live and operate in the city, they hung about hotels and cafes, soliciting customers for themselves and their respective prostitutes, offering to act as interpreters, guides and arrangers, with the ever present suggestion that their own posteriors were available should the buyer desire to extend his experience.
It was amazing to the doctor that several years of attendance at an accredited college seemed to make no appreciable difference in the personal, moral or ethical nature of the Annamite. He recognized the lack of opportunity faced by the Annamite alumnus, but he could not understand, except as in his original observations, why the native so completely resisted the least social improvement. He looked better, he talked better, but he clung to his decadent ways with an unbroken tenacity that defied change.
* * *
Nothing dissimilar occurred when the Annamite girl was sent to school, either. Dr. Sutor reported that, though the college student body was predominately male, there, developed in Saigon many girls' finishing schools, and of course a complete elementary system to care for the children of the French Military and Governmental personnel.
The Church-likewise instigated its school, dedicated to teaching young Annamite girls the elements of being mothers, teachers, nurses and social workers. Again, they were dealing with the daughters of the Annamite elite, and some logical response was expected by the nuns and good fathers who had not Dr. Sutor's knowledge of the Armamite's basic depravity.
As a European, the doctor seemed unable to grasp the idea that it was possible for an Annamite boy or girl to attend school, be exposed to the evidences of social betterment and to witness the tangible and intangible profits of such an elevation in progress and yet completely insulate his native habits from the new knowledge. In the end, the doctor returned to his original premise that the Annamite was a dying race, with serious barriers self-erected against salvation or improvement. The Annamese was not capable of relating what the
French taught him to the customs and attitudes of his native culture.
He could not even learn from his own servitude. As a people he hated the French and their military success over his tribal efforts to resist, but he was incapable of assimilating the knowledge and the social consciousness that might create a nation capable of fighting off the token power as represented by the French garrison.
The few Annamite families who had been permitted power and prestige had no goal, either. They absorbed European political concepts and learned of political differences, yet they vacillated according to petty, tribal differences and at no time in the first fifty years of French occupation did they generate one serious political resistance to exploitation.
Even when the French (trying to find a place to utilize the educated youth of Indo-China) created a militia of Annamite youth, no national spirit evinced itself.
The French successfully created a pseudo-national picture which satisfied the 'family' pride of the Annamese and offered not one whit of emancipation nor economic expansion for the Annamite. The elegance of Saigon doubled and still multiplied, producing great changes in the physical shape of the city. The Buddhist temples cropped up in new splendor, the Catholic cathedrals towered into the sky. The university grew and the social culture of the city expanded, and one step out of the gay, elaborate city, the vice and depravity reared its ugly bottom and begged all comers for recognition.
The rural areas actually reversed any slight trend they might have shown for improvement. The innate distrust and selfishness of the Annamite made enemies of neighboring villages which had once been friendly. The presence of a few small voices raised in protest or enlightenment only caused the stupid Annamite to fear himself and his own kind.
The protectorates of Tonkin and Annam recorded the rise of tiny autocracies, led by slightly educated Annamites who had neither the intelligence nor the courage to challenge the French, but who had the stupidity to war on his own kind, with the stakes being so inconsiderable as to make any victory only a personal defeat.
The French interfered with this tribal strife only when a jungle skirmish threatened a plantation or a mine or some other resource from which the French drew revenue. This interference was manifested by sending out the native militia, in command of an experienced French officer. The native mflitia, arrogant, over-uniformed and cruel (with all the sadistic finesse of educated savages) invariably quelled the disturbance because resistance was never concerted. In the end, the jungle was decorated with heel-hung 'rebels,' their nude bodies devoid of heads, generative organs and bowels. Villages were burned to the ground and tribal families were obliterated.
Loot, per se, was practically non-extant. The militia used bestiality as a compensation. Women were raped, men were raped and with no regard for age or sex, entire villages were chopped into food for the persistent jungle to rot away and absorb as fertilizer.
In his period of time, Dr. Surot mentioned not one progressive, intelligent Annamite who fostered a political or social advancement. It is little wonder that the doctor clung to his opinion that there was hardly enough time available to mankind to afford any real hope for the Annamite.
BOOK TWO
SAIGON, 1966
The distant rumble in the night, gentlemen, is not the thunder of angry skies nor the grumble of artillery. It comes from the grave of Major-General Jacob Sutor, where he turns restlessly and laughs uproariously at those who believe that any ideology or any political philosophy can make something of nothing.
CHAPTER ONE
DON'T WORRY, MOTHER, HE made it easily.
The planes come into Tan Son Nhut Airport like diving hawks because a normal, low-level approach invites sniper fire from the Viet Cong, who look just like South Vietnamese-and often are.
For a moment between severe elevation and touchdown the plane passenger gets a quick look at the broad, flat plain surrounding Saigon. It is heavily cultivated in varying shades of brown and green and, if it is the monsoon season, there are many patches of flooded paddies and muddy ponds. There is no forest and no jungle. Clumps of trees show here and there and fines of dark green vegetation outline the farms and settlements. Roads and canals run in many directions. To the Southeast from Tan Son Nhut is Saigon, a sprawling city of two million inhabitants. It is known as the Pearl of the Orient, but in fact, it is today, one massive, vice ridden garbage dump whose male citizens are as dependable as quicksand and whose female citizens are sexually oriented to a degree found nowhere else in the world.
To a seasoned traveler, Saigon looks similar to Bombay, Mexico City, Cairo, or a dozen other cities whose past is unpleasantly mixed with the future, but to the untraveled, Saigon seems simply shabby and confused. Coming down Duong Cong Ly into the heart of the city, a number of incongruities appear. The streets are wide and mostly surfaced, and along the edges, shaded by arrack palms and small-leaved semi-tropical trees with exotic names. There is traffic to the point of hysteria. Blue and cream taxis, buses, pedicabs, which are half cabriolet and half bicycle, plus hundreds of motor scooters, zip about between imported cars of every European and American make. Saturating all this are thousands of bicycles, making their precarious way without regard for the poorly-implemented traffic laws and the ire of more substantially wheeled citizens.
The architecture is a mad mixture of Eastern lethargy and Western modernism and it all blends together with mold and discoloration, induced by the heat and the humidity and the universally porous quality of cement and brick. Windows, doors and gates into walled compounds are mostly of ornamental ironwork, exquisitely done in the tradition of long-departed French tastes.
Monsoon ponds are everywhere, and these are churned into muddy slop by pedestrians. The nearer the center city one gets, the fewer ponds. There are high, stately trees and many parks, badly tended but capable of being made beautiful should anybody care. The affluence of commerce and industry has caused many buildings to rise above the average level, and it is here that the mark of Western enterprise has lifted Saigon out of its sweltering tradition.
About here, the new arrival is aware of something that has been mildly offensive ever since he departed the airport. Everywhere are piles of trash and garbage, heaped indiscriminately between buildings, in vacant lots and on street corners. The piles are not neat because stray dogs, children and ragpickers have spread them about in search of some undiscovered goodie discarded in error. The odor of these mountains of refuse is predominant, but no one seems to care.
Somewhere within the new order of conflict, the city garbage collection system broke down. The excuse was lack of manpower and a shortage of equipment, but currently, the political scandal of why the collection system (possessed of forty new and efficient garbage trucks presented to the city by the American military) has not seen fit to function is of high priority in the scheme of casual dialogues. But talk is as far as the Saigonites care to go with it.
What do the Saigonites care about? There is no single answer because Saigon is made up of myriad groups, homogenized by religion, politics, conflict and greed; and equally divided by the same influences. The citizenry itself is a hodge-podge of racial and national elements, and this melange is divided into two entities: those who are politically and militarily involved in the current war and those who couldn't care less about the whole ideological mess.
There are three quarters of a million Chinese in Saigon, mostly living in the old settlement of Cho-lon. They control much of the industry and commerce and remain aloof from the active political conflicts. Many are recent arrivals, most are from families who have resided in Saigon for generations. They are Vietnamese citizens and have largely assumed Annamite names, and they have little or nothing to do with their Chinese antecedents.
Remnants of the French occupation number upward of ten thousand, and the evidence of French culture is everywhere. The more sophisticated elements of Saigon show the Gallic influence. Schools, libraries and many public buildings have a Parisian look, and numerous professionals, doctors, lawyers and engineers, have French names.
Added to this are samplings from every country in the world. There are Portuguese, English, Spanish and German people there. Many of the tailor shops and clothing stores are operated by Hindus. All manner of Orientals are represented, including a formidable number of Japanese.
And without trying to second guess military statistics, there are about one hundred thousand American officers and men billeted within the metropolitan perimeter of Saigon. These are not combat troops. They are shift workers, involved in administration and supply, transportation and liaison.
* * *
Concerned agencies have furnished some other statistics.
There are twenty-five thousand professional prostitutes in Saigon, another fifty thousand part-time operators and another twenty-five thousand young dan bas standing around waiting for some one to pop with bed and board. They come at all prices, at 118 piasters to a U.S. dollar, and even an unranked enlisted man can manage three to four thousand piasters a month for a pretty dan ba who will act as housekeeper, cook, pad manager and bed partner. There seems to be about a five hundred piaster differential between a nice clean Catholic girl and an equally acceptable Buddhist girl, but the services are the same and the theocratic distinction is left outside the bedroom door. With the Catholic girl, one does have to ignore the fact that she may get up at five-thirty in the morning to go to mass, but she will return before her man is fully awake so no real harm is done.
A goodly number of these available women are married, many have legitimate or illegitimate children, and most have an over-abundance of family. If by definition, a pimp is one who directs the activity of a prostitute, then many of these man-and-dollar hungry females possess capable pimps known as me, which is Viet for mother.
The preponderance of male sexual deviates among the Viets is difficult to ascertain, largely because the American, per se, is not widely addicted to either passive or aggressive homosexuality. But it is there among the Viets, because their actions and desires are displayed in theaters, restaurants and sundry elegant religious cults that flourish throughout the city.
Collectively, the Vietnamese dislike Americans intensely, beginning with his North American vitality and ending with his State-side virility. Individually, the women think he is very acceptable, because he offers some romance with his lust and he pays for services rendered. Any service. They are all amazed that a G.I. will spend money for even the slightest evidence of sexual involvement. There are several places in the city where a ba will masturbate her eight year old son for an audience as long as there are piasters in view. There are recorded cases of less than teen age girls performing fellatio upon a younger boy for even fewer piasters. The fact that insignificant venality brings reward is something the Annamite cannot understand.
And the American soldier indulges. To prove this, merely make a head-count of the thousands of Viet girls and women who have suddenly appeared with astounding economic status. Current wages for Viet women are inflationary but average. A maid for a Viet family may earn 1500 piasters a month for dawn to dusk service. From an American, officer or enlisted man or civilian, she can expect three to four thousand piasters a month and her work will take an average of four hours a day, with a day or two a week off. An airline hostess, civilian secretary or a FX worker will get about six thousand piasters, and an office supervisor will go as high as ten or twelve thousand piasters a month. Any B-girl (and there are hundreds of them) will make twelve thousand piasters and the aggressively adept will go as high as one hundred and twenty thousand piasters. Few educated Viet men can equal these earnings, though some do.
A house pet rates from three to twelve thousand piasters a month, depending upon her looks and her petter's financial ability.
Before leveling an accusing finger at the soldier, one must remember that the breath of death blows hot upon the man in Saigon Operations-just as it does at the Marine in the rice paddy. The graceful dan ba crying Ai vit Ion! so she can sell her half-hatched eggs, may also be carrying five pounds of hot plasticene in her basket and it can wipe out Operations as quickly as a mortar shell can dry out a rice paddy.
No soldier is personally responsible for being where he is and the American G.I. maintains his excellent morale by being a first class male, not a parrot for insipid philosophies that don't work too well-even at home-and certainly do not seem to apply in Indo-China.
* * *
Prima facie evidence adds another factor to the picture.
The white man has always had a predilection for the dark woman, despite the current, contrived fad for bleached blondes in America. By the same token, the American negro, of whom there are thousands in Vietnam, has developed a sensitivity to lighter skinned women, largely because possession of same has represented the ultimate in lynching provocation. The dan ba is darker than Caucasian and lighter than a Negro, and she wears her color well.
The Viet woman, washed, brushed and dressed in an ao dai is the sleekest, cutest, most startling female in the world. She is known among traveled sophisticates as the Flower of the Orient. If this description seems to confound some earlier chapters in this work, it must be remembered that Dr. Jacob Sutor said the Annamese woman was the only light in the Annamite sky, and that her bent for survival was ten times as strong as the male's. In the sixty years elapsed since the doctor's last sojourn in Saigon, western civilization offered much to Indo-China, at least on the surface. The women of Saigon and other urban centers learned quickly, partially because they are sexually oriented from the first moment their brother or their father lays a lewd finger to them; and partially because they possess an innate sentimentality that had been masked for centuries by an orientally-inspired culture which down-grades the female.
In a land economically and physically invaded by strangers, and possessed of a lethargic, completely inadequate male, she turned herself into a producer in the areas where her talents were most in demand. Sex, as such, has never been much of a conversation piece among the Annamites. It was something all availed themselves of with little or no provocation and to have this unimportant commodity suddenly represent an inventory of considerable value may have surprised the Viets but it did not confound them Their price was necessarily regulated by their numbers, but in Vietnam (as in more advantaged countries) a consistently employed prostitute does very well.
Any dan ba, or unmarried woman under thirty possesses nearly all the qualities of appearance that is attractive to an American male, except one. She is notoriously breastless by Hollywood standards, but this, because of the national dress, is often disguised by the overall design. The dan ba is small, delicately boned and straight of back. Her throat is smooth and long, and her head is delightfully round and covered with hair such as only a wig-maker could create. Her eyes are large and dark. Her nose is halfway between China and Africa and her lips are petulant, darkly crimson by birth, and her teeth are broad and strong. She has beautiful hands, and her skin is brown velvet, though in the nude, they often show a fine layer of flat black hair which on a blonde would be little more than peach dust. On such a woman, the concept of balloon bosoms might seem ridiculous to any but the irrational.
All this at a cheap price is hardly conducive to celibacy, and in the foregoing, we have only described the obvious. There are variations which complete the net and make it veritably impossible for the average American male to escape. Had he the wish to escape.
The rural girls have less to offer, simply because they lack the black market in PX soap and perfumes and because they are not full-time prostitutes, for the most part. A few are, but these are to be found along the roads where military traffic is constant and the heat requires many stops for cold drinks or custom indicates it might be fun to stop. But the rural girls have not the Saigon police to contend with, and they can start at age ten and finish whenever they choose.
The ten-year-olds have a gimmick of their own. Dressed in a single, simple skirt, they confront a command car full of G.I.s, place a stiff and plunging forefinger between their pouted lips and hold out the other hand for the donation. There is no price, except to the second, third or tenth man in line. Whatever the lead man pays for her lip service is the established price, at least for that car full of soldiers. Because Americans are notoriously afflicted with false modesty, the girl will take each man behind a bush or the family hut. For her part, she is quite willing to stand them up in a row and make her few piasters with as little footwork as possible.
Her sister, or several, may operate a soft drink stand a few hundred feet up the road. Often, the stand is operated by dad or mother, who are generally a bit shriveled and snag-toothed. The signal of availability is that the girls so inclined wear heavy lipstick, or betel nut paste to simulate lipstick. Back of the hut, for twenty to a hundred piasters, depending upon the looks of the girl, a G.I. can get a drink of cheap country wine and his lusts evaporated, providing he can maintain his virility above the catcalls and pseudo-encouragements from his comrades out front.
The above procedure is frowned upon by the military because it takes time, and because it often fills the morning sick call with venereally infected men. More serious, in this day of antibiotics and the imperious needle, are the other contagious diseases which can be imparted in a skin to skin contact.
Another rural condition exists more often than one might think. The countryside is dotted with villages and hamlets, sometimes containing only one family of fifty to a hundred persons, sometimes including several families. Many of these settlements are indifferent to politics and the war, and they practice the policy of wavering loyalties to suit the moment. Squads, patrols, sometimes platoons and often whole companies of American fighting men roam the land in search of the enemy. Often, these men are billeted in the villages or close to them over night. It is not unusual for the village headman to see to it that safety is maintained by bribery, and as the only negotiable commodity the village possesses is the services of the young dan ba, he offers them with lewd gestures and leers. The same girls may have been offered to a squad of Viet Cong the previous week, but sex is notoriously non-political and the girls will never tell.
CHAPTER TWO
BEFORE THE STEAMSHIPS AND AIRLINES become jammed with missionaries, reformers and do-gooders, it would be well to understand a few facts. It might be argued that the culture preceded the race, or vice-versa, but as we have observed, the Oriental is by nature a confirmed introvert If the Viet is not a true Oriental he, at least, has been nurtured on the Chinese culture for some three thousand years and the net effect is exactly the same.
The 'blank face' and the social courtesy we attribute to the Oriental are both based upon his unwillingness to display, his true feelings. His motives are not always ulterior, but even in personal family matters, one member of the tribe seldom lets another know precisely what he has in mind. If one adds the Annamite stupidity to this racial introversion, the nature of the beast becomes very difficult, at least in the eyes of a Westerner.
As with any nationality, we go to a foreign land bearing measuring sticks of our own devising. A few scholars can explain these social standards but most Americans simply accept them as the way,' and forthwith dedicate themselves to forcing those standards upon all whom they encounter.
The Catholics failed throughout the orient for two reasons. First, they did not offer a better religion than the ones already in common use. Second, they introduced the confessional which to a face-conscious Oriental is pure idiocy. No confessional screen is thick enough to ameliorate his horror at having to confess his sins. Particularly when five thousand years of tradition had not labeled his acts as sin. The word "sin," per se, does not appear in any of the Oriental languages.
The Church counts ten percent of the Viet population as its own; among this percentage, there will be about the same number of sincerely devout Catholics as one might find in any other area. More important is the number of remaining citizens who subscribe to any one of the forty so-called pagan religions in Vietnam. Even the Buddhists are split into no fewer than thirty sects, and with all the fervor of traditional tribal attitudes, these make social and economic war upon each other.
Annamite standards are based upon two measuring sticks. One is called filial piety, or ancestor worship and the other, closely allied, is a polytheism in which the divinity of filial piety is set forth. A basic Annamite family is composed of a man, his wife and his children. Many such families, descended from a common ancestor, form a clan and it extends to nine generations from the great-great-grandfather to the great-great-grandsons, excluding in-laws unless they are of the same clan. And of course, excluding all the women, no matter.
A clan member believes that his good and bad deeds are witnessed and judged by his dead ancestors, but the extent of their concern does not go beyond the immediate areas of filial piety. He is not judged for anything he may do beyond the limits of his clan.
In the interest of his family, or clan, he may steal, rape, murder and do all sorts of mischief without fear of censorship by his smiling ancestors. By the same token, he may indulge in all the bad habits his ancestors had simply because they were his ancestors and, thus, could do no wrong.
The above is over-simplification but it will give a fair idea of the problem faced by any non-sympathetic people who seek to alter such a narrow concept of sociology. Moreover, the absence of an omnipotent God or even an Angry Ancestor makes his religion something more than practical. In the final analysis, as long as the Oriental appears to honor filial obligations, he is sinless. Thus, he maintains a bland exterior and protects 'face' in all circumstances. It is practically an unbeatable system once it's understood.
How much success the Communists will have supplanting the Ancestoral Council with the Committee is moot. We already know that the Franciscan Order went home with egg on its face, mumbling unhappily about both the number and the quality of its Annamite converts.
It may well be that the American form of Free Enterprise will succeed, simply because a similarity exists between capitalistic ideas and the concept of clan.
In the meantime, we are faced with the Annamite, however and whatever. He and she are here and now.
* * *
In one of her autocratically stupid moments, Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu became excited about the failing marriage rate in Saigon and she caused a survey to be made which showed that seventy percent of the young men of Saigon preferred to remain single. Because the women outnumber the men, this statistic automatically doomed eighty percent of the marriageable girls to some form of spinsterhood. Identifying the form is not very difficult.
The young Saigonites did not say they did not approve of women seventy percent worth, but that their objections were to marriage. If this attitude is in direct contradiction to the filial piety concepts of a clan which depends upon progeny to maintain its status, it can be blamed upon several things. The cost of a wedding in Saigon is fantastic in the eyes of a middle class male. Fast this cost, he faces the problem of setting up a household, providing for children and servants and the many other things required to 'save face' in the eyes of his family and associates. As few Annamite marriages are based upon romance, the creeping influence of Western 'freedom' told the eligible young man that by saying 'no' he put himself in a position to have all the 'wives' he could service, for so long (or short) as he cared to dally.
He was aided in his playboy role by the apparent willingness of the Saigon dan ba. As a minor member of the filial piety society, she had not been overly happy with her male counterpart for many generations. She had cheated on her husband and been cheated upon. Her share of an unromantic marriage had been traditionally a nothing. It entailed having innumerable children, working in the streets or rice paddies, maintaining the house and providing her thoughtless, overly sensual husband with a home he could use to bolster his 'face.' The same Western concepts that had freed her swain, freed her, and on the face of it, she is doing better at going it alone than the male Saigonite. It must be remembered that among the Annamites, there is little or no stigma to an unscheduled pregnancy or a series of unofficial liaisons, with either another Annamite or an American soldier.
Among the so-called higher class Viets, a loose-living dan ba might endanger her worth on the Annamite marriage market and at the same time, alienate herself from her face-conscious family, but both theoretical treasures were a bit obnoxious to her in the first place. Except for those who have embraced Catholicism, her virginity was never a commodity more lasting nor valuable than her baby teeth.
The ba came equipped with a racial tradition that now has some meaning. Used to a philandering spouse, she had also declared herself as the privileged goose, and in a city of two million people, discretion is not hard to maintain.
In short, the Annamite tendencies for wavering loyalties have permitted a demanding alien culture to dilute the four thousand year old perimeter of their basic social structure, the family. Their predominant theology was never broadly moral, so a wakened social responsibility has now turned into social opportunity and they have accelerated their own demise as a national entity.
* * *
Most Americans discover Saigon in rapid stages, beginning with the sharpie who promises great exchange rates for his American dollar and sends him scurrying from an alley with a hastily tendered roll of worthless paper covered by a hundred piaster note because the Saigon police, affectionately known as 'White Mice' are about to swoop down on the illegal transaction.
His second adventure may come in any one of the many cafes or bars, of which there are hundreds in Saigon. Entering one of these, he immediately notes that there are more flashing-eyed B-girls than there are customers. He is on the barstool one minute or less when one of them takes a stool beside him and immediately requests that she be bought a drink. Okay, but what is served her looks exactly like strong tea and that is what it is. The bartender, who is often another bright-visaged dan ba (who may well own the place!) demands one hundred and sixty piasters for the tea. If the soldier is incensed, the girl at his side immediately begins to stroke his inner thigh and she is adept at finding the key to his patience. In time, he is informed that for from four to five hundred piasters, she will take him upstairs or out back and "screw good, babee!. "
His next adventure may well be with the base medics, but if he is lucky enough to evade venereal infection, he has nothing but a resurgent appetite for more.
Between feasts, he may find Saigon to be an enchanting city. The streets are filled with exotic looking people, the shops are just shabby enough to be intriguing and over all hangs the odor of spices, strange and repulsive food, and the ever present stink of people, garbage and the climatically-inspired fungus. It is an unreal world, despite the Western face of the Majestic Hotel and the familiarity of the miniature golf course across the street. Directly in front of a prosperous jewelry store he may be accosted by a street peddler with all sorts of bad watches, poor ball-point pens and sundry trinkets. There will be engaging color postcards of Saigon, and behind these, hair-raising photographs of man's original sin, compounded by ingenuity, perversions and cleverly emphatic retouching.
If he is a gambler, there are many places and ways to cure him, if he can be cured. The National Lottery, which boasts of making twelve millionaires a month is available; there is a race track which will entertain twenty piaster bets as a minimum so one may watch a group of sleek, small horses go every way, including over the track railings. With diligence, he can also get into a mah jong game, or try his idiocy at Chinese dominoes; and if he persists, the Viets will introduce him to several games of their own invention, including the childish game of Chinese checkers which turns out not to be so childish when played by an expert.
After a few days in Saigon, the soldier will discover that everything he wants to do is calculated to extract from him his superior economic condition. He will hate this because he doesn't mind spending his money, all of it, but he hates to be chiseled in the process. How long it takes him to be direct in his desires with the fewest possible detours to them, depends entirely upon the individual.
He is considerably aided by his Government. His money is worth approximately two to one if he is smart enough to spend it in the PX and sell his purchases to the hordes of black-market buyers. If he is over twenty-one, he may buy the finest American whiskey, Scotch and gin at excellent rates. A quart of gin costs one dollar and eighty cents, a fifth of Crown royal, four dollars and ninety cents. Cigarettes are a dollar and ten cents a carton, and everything else, from portable television sets to hairspray, is similarly priced. A glance at the inventory sheet of any PX will make one wonder at the appetites of a military man, but the Viets appreciate the super-market plan of dispensing unofficial aid to their country.
Another Government assist comes in the form of 'no sweat' pills, furnished all who desire same. These anti-biotic marvels are far more efficient than the World War II rubber prophylactics always to be found on the First Sergeant's desk when he handed out passes to town. And no one checks on a soldier's rate of consumption as long as he does consume the pills, or appears to. There is no way to count the number of these pills that are fed to untrusted dan bas on a preventative maintenance basis.
Further evidence of the Government's consideration for the soldier is found in the method of housing the massive influx of non-combatants. It seemed impractical to build barracks and the attendant facilities so the bulk of military personnel in Saigon is billeted in hotels, apartments and any other structure with a modicum of plumbing under a reasonably rain-proof roof. Aside from the freedom of movement so provided, this method of housing immediately introduces the G.I. to the mechanics of living in Saigon.
It is a city of undersized drains, split pipes and faulty valves. A shutoff valve in a toilet flushing system has all the charm and efficiency of a bad toy. As all water mains are over-taxed, each building has an individual pump which sucks water to a reservoir on the roof. As nothing really works, the reservoir often runs dry which foils any attempt to flush toilets or shower until the situation is remedied.
Power fluctuates constantly, which makes for dim yellow bulbs or fluttering fluorescents. Often, there is not even sufficient voltage to properly start a fluorescent light and the G.I. spends many a maddening evening under blinking tubes. Or grabs his piasters and heads for areas not requiring strong or dependable fights.
In newer structures, the cement is so thinly mixed with sand an energetic fingernail will produce a good gash in the wall. Irregular bricks form the inside of most walls, covered with this sorry excuse for concrete. A Viet Cong Claymore, which is an anti-personnel grenade, set off outside a building often sends its shot through several of these chalk walls. Rains seep through the porous material, causing stain and mildew on the inside walls. Only regular painting keeps the buildings looking healthy. Nothing keeps the horde of Saigon rats out, or distresses the myriad other crawling things.
All public water supplies are contaminated because the water table in Saigon is a mere twenty feet deep and the sewer systems, where they exist, are leaky. The G.I. learns to take a shower with his mouth closed. The roof reservoirs, after a few weeks of untended use become green and scummy, and often sport a rat who couldn't swim. The logical way for a thirsty soldier to take in his daily requirement of water is to find it in coffee, tea, beer, liquor of some sort with a short water, or boil the fetid liquid, dope it, and down it while he holds his nose. Within the boundaries of his military operations, the water is made safe by chemicals but it has not been made palatable by any device.
As in other lands, in other times, the soldier learns to live with such conditions. No one expects a foreign war to be fought under ideal circumstances, and with typical American ingenuity, he sets about making adjustments.
Logically, if he is forced to make adjustments concerning the water he drinks, the food he eats and the quarters in which he is housed, and if he has to make adjustments about being cheated, propositioned by black-marketeers and hustled by 'tea' gulpers, it takes very little more adjustment to wade into the available sensuality abounding in Vietnam. The 'go-for-broke' attitude of most soldiers, sailors, Marines and sundry, makes them the fighting men they are, and you know, mother, that darned kid has been a little devil ever since he was three years old and snapped the refrigerator door closed on the cat's tail.
CHAPTER THREE
DR. JACOB SUTOR DID NOT COUNT upon this decadent, deteriorating Annamite being adopted by a benevolent Uncle Sam, so his prediction that the race was doomed to extinction may not come true. But saving a people from self-destruction does not mean that the direction of their natural proclivities has been changed. There is absolutely no evidence today that the Annamite of 1865 is not walking the streets of Saigon, disguised perhaps, by Western slacks and white shirts and a false arrogance but not really changed in his basic personality.
There can be no doubt that Red China is having the same difficulty with the Northern Annamite that America is having with the Southern Annamite. Lethargy, stupidity, and unawareness are characteristics of the race and have nothing to do with the flag under which that race lives.
The major industries in both segments of Vietnam are not of Vietnamese origin, either in the rural areas or the urban centers. The Viet sense of practical economics runs only in two directions. One is toward petty shop keeping, the other is to corruption under all forms of whatever political clique is currently in power. The rice paddy Viet is concerned with neither. He wallows in a state of suspended animation, requiring a minimum of sustenance and nurturing an ignorance that is almost unbelievable to outside observers.
like their shoddy cement, the Viet enterprise is sparsely mixed with lots of indolence. The indolence is more mental than physical, although few Viet men are amenable to hard work. And apparently, the better educated a Viet is, the less responsibility he is willing to assume. It is not uncommon to meet many ex-teachers, and retired businessmen, who are under forty-five. At a certain, unpredictable point in their life, they decided they are sages, and above working. It does not matter that they lack the financial means to retire. They have reached some position akin to the ancient Mandarin concept of moral immortality and the economics of the situation are pushed over onto his wife and children. The theology of filial piety does not allow these put-upon members of his family to complain, and they shoulder the new responsibility without hesitation. As most of the relaxed reprobate's sons are already married and with family, the burden falls on the shoulders of the ba and her unmarried daughters.
The latter immediately fall backward on the nearest mattress.
As in all societies, there are a hundred stratums of economics. In Saigon, the very poor and the very rich seem to be welded together by one common denominator, connivance. Americans, military and civilian, who have lived in Saigon for a long time and made friends among the natives, are one in insisting that it is not wise to trust a Vietnamese in any matter pertaining to money or material goods.
On the docks of Saigon, stevedores steal about twenty percent of every cargo unloaded, civilian or military. They are marvelously adept and sneak with more finesse than a hungry rat. Cab drivers, vendors, shopkeepers and servants, male or female, steal as a matter of everyday enterprise. Caught, they weep and moan or smile pitifully, depending upon their assessment of their captors. If possessed of a piaster or two, and apprehended in their thievery by the white-clad police of Saigon, they make the best bargain possible. (The 'white mice' are as famous for their corruption as are the policia of Mexico City, et al.) For the Viet, it is more blessed to steal than not to steal. This is probably because the Viet has an innate greed plus a powerful disrespect for law" in any form. Eighty years of French domination may be responsible for the disrespect.
A thousand piasters loaned to Mr. Nam is a thousand down the tube. Those non-nationals who have come to Saigon and entered into business with some success will be found to have an Annamite wife, whose family knows all the kinks and hooks of devious Viet business and are thoroughly familiar with the tricks of competitive merchants. If an enterprising Caucasian enters: business without family connections of this sort, he may expect to be edged out of his investment within a very few years'. The Vietnamese civilian government has been so unstable in the past several decades that resorting to the law only steers a plaintiff into massive payoffs and unreasonable delay. A lawsuit is always decided in favor of the man with the readiest cumshaw. The loser never gets through paying because few Viet businessmen, large or small, have a clean past and he is-likely to wind up paying for every indiscretion he has ever committed.
It would not be fair to omit mention of the few Vietnamese who conduct an honest business, even in the face of the burgeoning economy. There are even a few who deal daily with the G.I., and are content with an honest margin of profit simply because the volume of business makes the effort of cheating an unnecessary labor.
* * *
As a first impression, Saigon might appear to be a city of women. Men are seen, pedaling bicycles, walking, driving and-sometimes-standing behind a counter, but in the main, it is the women one sees. Part of this may be due to the distinctive costume worn by the dan ba. In addition to the traditional ao dai (pronounced owz eye) the dan ba invariably wears the broad, conical hat made of straw. Two hundred of them, gathered at a market or a bizarre give the impression that the hats are edge to edge like umbrellas at a British coronation.
Current trend in Saigon, due to the influx of American movies and the flood of fan-type magazines, is to make the traditional under-pajamas of sheer chiffon and the over-chemise out of printed material instead of the time-honored black. The split, front and back apron effect of the chemise permits a good side view of the chiffon pants which in turn reveals the under-pantie line. The Saigon maid has learned about falsies, also and her normally flat-chested look has been corrected by imports from Hong-Kong.
Add to this, when the dan ba is financially able, a pair of strange shoes. These are actually sandals, fitted to a wooden sole that is arched to rest on a very slim and very high heel. There is no give to these lacquered soles, and the girl who wears them is magnificent in immobility but gives an observer the impression that she is smuggling valuables in unseen recesses when she walks. The consensus among the troops that such an attired dan ba is tremendously disturbing to see.
Women mind the shops, carry the produce on long poles from which baskets are slung, scull the river sampans and do any other chore required in the native economy. As a commentary on the new feminine philosophy in Saigon, the shoulder poles supporting the baskets are called 'dummy sticks,' inferring that any woman with any looks at all (who still earns her living so,) is a dumbbell.
Certain occupations are distinctly male. Cab drivers, cyclo-pedalers and guides are always male because they are almost always pimps, by marriage or persuasion. Most professional offices are also male-occupied. As a G.I. teldom has business in office or professional quarters, his impression that Saigon is run by women is almost valid.
Which reminds us that Dr. Sutor spoke convincingly of the immeasurably superior female in An-nam. This is so, from high to low. There is no question today but that Madam Nhu was the power behind the Diem regime, even if her inspiration was that of a reformed courtesan in its fervor for Puritanism. Fifty percent of the bars, whorehouses and markets are owned and operated by women in Saigon. Be she an honest maid or B-girl, fifty thousand bas earn more piasters than their husbands. It is safe to say that Vietnam is, fundamentally, a matriarchy-in-fact, even though the arrogant and noisy males proclaim otherwise.
If this offers hope, it is wise to consider the world-wide fact that women, per se, have never been able to formulate and carry out any strong national movement. They will maintain a status quo, but it is only in bad Italian movies that the Amazon has accomplished any solid claim to stability.
If the Viet woman has a weakness, it is her sentimentality. Oddly, and contrary to most professional whores, the hustling dan ba, or ba, is almost maudlin in her sentimentality. For three or four thousand years, her yen for romance and affection was completely stifled. She was hardly aware that it existed until a G.I. kidded her and petted her when she frowned. It took the Vietnamese women about seven minutes to become addicted to gentle consideration in a lusty male, and she is justified if she goes overboard at the slightest provocation.
In marked contrast to Dr Sutor's observations in 1865 is the note of gaiety and holiday to be found now in Saigon. More so among the women than the men, though this may be related to the fact that the women have come closer to solving an economic and emotional problem than have the men. By and large, Viets laugh a lot, but they also throw tantrums and go into vicious, violent rages on an individual basis. Much of their humor is childish because, as a people, they have not yet become sufficiently aware to be concerned about politics, national economy or sociological problems.
* * *
It is safe to say that the Vietnamese people, North and South, are possessed by a kind of schizophrenia that is difficult for a Westerner to understand. This dual personality is more obvious in Saigon, Da Nang and Hue than in the rural areas, but under stress, it crops up as a racial personality, no matter the geographical coordinates.
The Viet has not involved himself in the civil war now raging over his land. He has never recognized the international character of that war, nor his position in the scheme of Asiatic betterment.
The Vietnamese have recognized the tremendous economic advantage to be gained by turning on and off their interest in the war and its warriors. If there is a piaster to be gained by standing up and cheering, they will stand up and cheer. Two minutes later they will forget the whole thing and go back to doing the small tasks that have occupied them for four thousand years. Tomorrow, he may stand up and cheer again, with little concern for the fact that the uniform is totally different than the one he cheered yesterday.
Broken down to specifics, the average Viet family in Saigon operates with two standards. There are the time-honored ethics and behavior patterns he uses in dealing with his own kind, and the newer, unrestrained ethical gymnastics he practices in the face of the political and military forces roaming his country.
In the Viet mind, one behavior does not contradict the other. It is almost as though his personal deity gives him special dispensation in all cases where his filial piety is not in question. It is safe to say, bolstered by the intelligence gathered by all reporting agencies within and without the Vietnamese government, that the Viet is using the war, each to his (or her) own ends, without subscribing to the principles involved.
It no longer matters, now, why the war is being fought, or how it got started in the first place: the Viet has failed to recognize that it is a reality, an'd that its consequences, regardless of who wins, will bring pain to the citizen. He has not prepared himself to accept the responsibilities either ideology will demand, and if both quit, he will delight in going back to his insignificant condition. A few ambitious and politically ruthless Viets will utilize the worst they have learned from Western influence, bolster it with their racial tendency for shrewd connivance and the people will settle back into nonentity.
This evaluation is based upon now, without having to peruse the history of Annam. Even the most naive and optimistic American would have little difficulty in fitting into this script all the Viet names appearing in the daily newspapers over the past ten years.
* * *
Just before an American soldier gets shot, many facets of the Viet personality are amusing, if frustrating.
To an Annamite, the night is made for sleeping.
The idea of manning a military operation around the clock is almost beyond his comprehension. Dire threats of military justice do not lessen his aversion to staying awake in the wee, small hours.
For some unknown reason, the Viet has an almost insurmountable conviction that he is right, no matter his personal ignorance nor the proof at hand that he is wrong. This arrogance is based upon no observable justification but it has to be dealt with, particularly in the military. To change a Viet method, one starts off by telling him that the way he is doing something is peachy-keen, but it might be better if he did thus and so. Criticism seems to crush a Viet, and in a fit of pique, they can and do stretch a ten minute task to indefinite lengths.
The Western system of promotion through ability is utterly useless in Vietnam. The moment a Viet is told he is in charge, he quits producing instantly. He becomes a sage, a mentor, and is above lending his great wisdom to the problems at hand.
In the higher political echelons, military as well as administrative, it is considered bad ethics to scold a subordinate, and bad policy-because by tomorrow, the subordinate, through family connections, may be the boss. Almost all strong military figures in the Viet army and air force operate on a family basis, and their treatment of their individual commands is on a family basis. The failure of a commander destroys the force: the unsympathetic force can destroy the leader, with right, wrong and expediency never the question.
There is also no question concerning the basic compassion in a Vietnamese. He has none, in keeping with the rest of the Oriental people. It displays itself in mild forms when disaster befalls a fellow citizen in Saigon. Viets will look, chatter and point but they seldom if ever extend a hand to the fallen.
A Viet does not extend aid or succor to any person other than a member of his or her own family. The Oriental philosophy of self-aggrandizement is part of it, another part is based upon the innate knowledge that an Oriental, once classed as a supplicant, remains a supplicant. To involve oneself as a sponsor or a Samaritan may well become an endless responsibility. There is also the question of economics. The average Oriental has enough difficulty in taking care of himself and his family. To assume a burden out of pure compassion is ridiculous. .
The obvious form of this selfishness appears in violent cruelty, practiced upon one's neighbor, a debtor, a less fortunate offender and an enemy. The secret of the Oriental's inbred cruelty is that under no circumstances, does he or she identify with animals, things or people beyond filial influence.
Americans identify with everything. We feel sorry for the bull at a Spanish bullfight. We think for our cats, our dogs and our horses. We assume that because we feel pain and spiritual agony, all things, including nerveless mechanical items, have equal feelings. On Sunday, dad says, "That poor car sure needs washing." The captain of a ship, and all his crew, talk incessantly about the 'old girl,' meaning the rusty hunk of inanimate iron on which they are floating.
The Oriental identifies with nothing.
The Viet Cong scalp twelve year old girls and disembowel villagers, they twist and cut and break captives, regardless of age, sex or infirmity. The Vietnamese do the same thing. If there is a reason for cruelty, they do not hesitate, North or South.
There are many fine Oriental traditions to back up the rough handling of prisoners under interrogation, or stubborn enemies. The Oriental is utterly practical about these things. If you know a captive has valuable information why not commit the necessary barbarities to make him talk? If an enemy has become troublesome, why not show him what happens to troublemakers? The Oriental doesn't even know what one is talking about in the matter of 'civilized war,' and from experience, the writer knows that the Oriental practicality is far more infectious than are the Marquis of Queens-bury rules.
Today in Vietnam, a typical and highly effective stunt is to take a handful of prisoners up in a helicopter. Questions are asked of one. If he so much as clears his throat, he is kicked out the door.
The rest often start singing in a loud chorus. The administrators of this program are usually volunteers who have suffered something truly unspeakable at the hands of Charlie.
With no humor intended, several months ago the Marines tore up a VC outfit, recovering three as prisoners. Two of these were badly wounded. Our Navy surgeons went to work on them and did some miraculous patch-ups. Barely off the operating table, these three were immediately taken over by the Vietnamese Army, which has prior claim on all prisoners. The trio were taken aloft in a helicopter, away from the cries of the Navy surgeons who had done all the work. The two seriously wounded VC were promptly tossed out of the helicopter. The third VC talked beautifully, and completely to the point.
Our military has long ago given up trying to convert the Viet to more compassionate measures, and there is some evidence to support the contention that our military is beginning to believe in the effectiveness of Oriental tactics, especially when the prisoners are Oriental.
The difference is that, once removed from the war zone, our G.Ls will revert to the 'nice kid next door' image but the Annamite will retain his capacity for cruelty because it has helped him survive for thousands of years in the face of fantastic odds.
CHAPTER FOUR
VOLUMES HAVE BEEN WRITTEN about the political and moral impact of the Diem regime, but no commentary upon the morality and integrity of the modern Vietnamese would be complete without mentioning the Diems, and particularly, Madame Nhu. She was a real heavy, in respect to her own ideas of morality which were based upon her conversion from Buddhism to Catholicism.
Sin was out. Any Viet girl who was dressed too sexily or not dressed enough was arrested. None of the many night clubs in Saigon could boast strippers or exotic dancers. A girl in a taxi with an American could be hustled off to jail unless she could prove she was married to the soldier. The bars were restricted to four or five B-girls and their conduct was under constant surveillance. It was prima facie evidence that a woman was a prostitute if she had anything at all to do with a soldier, Viet or American. Opium and hash-hish was virtually worth its weight in gold because the Diems went after the narcotics with a zeal which made the F.B.I, seem lax in comparison.
A half-thousand laws were passed, all dedicated to Madame Nhu's concept of Puritanism. She automatically constructed fifty black-markets, which sold everything from opium to reserved seats at Black Mass-type orgies. Her support was not even very strong among the Catholics but she needed no support. She was tyrannical, powerful and impatient; and as unbending as an iron rod. It has since been learned that, aside from the crusade for her definition of morality, she was plotting with her husband to murder his brother so she, by needling her lethargic spouse, could become the ruler of Vietnam.
The effects of her campaign lasted about two days after the Diems were murdered. Bars opened, opium peddlers flourished and the women of Saigon went back to the native costume, the ao dai, to the Hong-Kong split skirt; and the demand for see-through chiffon nearly ruined the market. As the laws had not been repealed, and are still not repealed, the White Mice turned into a Saigon Mafia and corruption in the police department became its mainstay of operation.
Today, a bar hires as many B-girls as it can pack into the building, and whorehouses abound back of, above and next door to almost every business where soldiers may trade.
Every apartment, room or space not occupied by billeted soldiers was taken up by streetwalkers and 'live in' whores. As the expected revenue from a brothel was far more than that anticipated from a legitimate business, big building landlords began evicting Viets and the offices were rented out to the clamoring girls.
If there are no walls, the larger rooms are divided into smaller spaces by curtains strung on wires. A bed, a chair, and sometimes a table, constitute the furnishings of these cubicles. There may be a space allotted to the parlor, or pick 'em room. Laughter, liquor and love are dispensed with no privacy and very little caution. The plumbing in such an emporium normally consists of a cold water tap only. The toilet, singular, is a hole cut into the concrete which leads down into an open sewer. The room in which this hole is cut is also the garbage disposal area; food, rubbish-whatever-is thrown in to be swept, later, down the all-swallowing hold. Rats scurry through it all ... and the odor would unsettle a goat.
Thus, today in Saigon-and most of South Vietnam-the Diem regime is largely forgotten. Occasionally a reference to it will be seen in the SAIGON POST or the OBSERVER or in one of fifty or so periodicals. Marking Madame Nhu's dynasty will be the words "Diem Regime"-seldom more-and they mark a period and a way but no permanent flow in the sea of Viet life. Whether the regime was good or bad is not in discussion here; it is pertinent to remark that, once more, the Franciscan Order withdrew with egg on its face.
* * *
Opium, or a phieu as it is termed in Annamese, is available throughout Saigon and the provinces. After the French took official control from the Chinese in 1879, they cultivated the opium trade with considerable caution and, insofar as word of its existence reaching the Western world, much secrecy. No matter, opium was virtually an Oriental staple and nearly impossible to eradicate.
The narcotic was outlawed, after much soul-searching by the French colonial government. It shut down the big opium combines, permitting only the small operators to continue, thus filling the needs and desires of the addicts. By this gambit, the French maintained, officially, face with the rest of the world.
Today, in Saigon, a kilo of opium costs 150,000 VN ... about $I,250.00 at the official rate of exchange. This makes opium cost about $600.00 a pound, U.S. Currently, the typical purchase is a tiny plastic phial containing about a half thimble full and sells for one-dollar and seventy cents, or two hundred piasters. Oldsters remember when the same amount sold for two pennies, French.
There are many opium dens in Saigon but they are difficult for the G.I. to reach. Most are in Cholon, or other outlying villages. Many of them are hardly different than they were in Dr. Sutor's time: dark, subterranean, generally in red or scarlet (because these colors represent, to the Oriental, love and passion.) And they are quiet, lest the dreamers be disturbed by some raucous sound. It is in these dens that privileged transients mingle with confirmed addicts, but the proportion is gratifyingly low.
Not to be denied any new adventure, the G.I. has figured out a way to the drug. Pure gum opium is spread thinly on an American cigarette, leaving the fire-end clean so a good light can be started. As the cigarette burns, the opium bubbles and exudes its lovely gas, which the smoker inhales along with the mild odor of fresh tobacco. As the opium does not burn, the smoker has to work diligently to keep the tobacco going. This procedure does not produce the specific kick of the pipe but, if smoked in a closed room, everyone enjoys the aroma and feels happy.
A second method is to put a drop into one's coffee. The odor is distinct, the opiate is mild and the drinker enjoys a subtle, undemanding feeling that wears off in a short while.
It is a gentler "kick" than marijuana or hash-hish, but one many G.Ls are afraid of because of its theoretical habit forming reputation. As for "pot," there is ample, at a price about equivalent to American prices. The Viets are adept at plucking the tobacco from American cigarettes, mixing it with "Mary" and repacking the fragile tube with the potent mixture. Where there is a Viet, there's a way.
It might be assumed that the American authorities could put an end to most of the extra-curricular delights of Saigon but several factors deter them. Our military position in Vietnam is shrouded by a peculiar, "hands-off' attitude which requires our forces to tolerate many conditions they'd like to change immediately. There are strict penalties for interfering with the civilian population in any way. Interference runs from busting a smart aleck in the mouth to enforcing regulations peculiar to American standards and contrary to Saigon behavior. It is even against Military Law to argue with a shopkeeper or give him a deserved cussing-out.
A second item is that the soldiers (billeted in Saigon) are reasonably free to come and go as they choose. A hundred thousand men are easily lost in a city of two million and to supervise any twenty percent of them who may be headed for out-of-bounds pleasures is virtually impossible. Particularly when the "out-of-bounds" goodies are not restricted to one district.
A state of declared war does not exist, which leaves the various military branches with no support for drastic measures. Each service maintains a complete police division within its structure. Undercover investigators, generally enlisted men assigned to Intelligence, do their best to run down large and efficient vice combines, and they check out valid reports of individual wrong-doing. But it is a thankless task; one that is constant-never diminishing.
There is little use in appealing to the Viet Government. The lethargic attitude treats such matters with little or no diligence. There is positive proof that the vice lords are often highly placed government officials, and those who are not are paying cumshaw to operate. Notably, in all dialogues between the American administrators and the Viet officials, one is aware that the Vietnamese have the upper hand. They can not be forced to cooperate, and they feel that the Americans can not afford drastic measures and still keep their weak grip on Vietnamese politics.
It is a completely static situation. In the end, the weight of the war is greater than the urge to clean up Saigon. It must also be noted that the military usually acts only upon complaint, and if things are running smoothly, most administrators are happy. "Running smoothly" has many definitions, none of which is critical if no one bleeds too freely.
* * *
Among American soldiers, there is a grudging respect for the Chinese in Saigon and Cholon. This is simply because, compared to the Viet, the Chinese are immeasurably superior. Cholon itself has narrower streets than Saigon, fewer trees and less ostentatious buildings, probably because the French practiced a hands-off policy in Cholon, including matters of public refinement.
There is no apparent boundary between old Saigon and Cholon, the city having grown over the open spaces once separating the two. Chief evidence that you're in Cholon is the appearance of signs (generally gold on scarlet) announcing the business and the proprietor in both Vietnamese and Chinese characters. The Chinese have adopted the Viet dress and are distinguishable only because they are lighter in color, rounder of features and heavier-limbed. Their hair is usually coarse and seldom shows the wave so often seen in predominantly Viet communities.
Cholon is the center of the opium trade, the gambling syndicates, and the better bars and nightclubs.
By any standard, Cholon's whorehouses are much preferred over Viet institutions. Order and cleanliness are more evident and as paid partners, the Chinese prostitute is far superior to the dan ba. With the clink of a coin, the Chinese girl "gets with it"; the Viet girl seems shackled by a strong aversion to appearing wanton, even though her wares are on the block for a cash customer. As physical sensitivity is not a measuring stick for a prostitute's enthusiasm, one must attribute the dan ba's pillow-like lethargy to a traditional unwillingness to relax 'face' before a stranger.
As both girls are products of the Chinese culture, the difference might seem unreasonable, but it is not. Among the Chinese, the male is still dominant and while his 'face' is important, his women are less than nothing in the scheme of social worth. Among the Viets, the male has been losing his stature for several hundred years, and his women have usurped his social stance and, with it, his reverence for 'face.' This peculiar interchange is multiplied by the sudden emergence of the dan ba's innate sentimentality, which is not so pronounced in the Chinese girls.
Ignoring the bars, the gambling dens, the whorehouses and the opium dives, Cholon presents an air of prosperity not found in Saigon. If the buildings are less grand, less Europeanized, the atmosphere of the shops and business houses is noticeably enterprising. The smell of money is everywhere and many small shops boasting a sign moderate in size may conduct vast import and export operations. The Chinese are incredibly capable merchants and their industry has earned them the respect of traders throughout the world. Indelicate observers long ago labeled them the Jews of the Orient, both for their ability at the market place and for their clannihiness.
Before hysteria strikes those who are horrified at the presence of some seven-hundred and fifty thousand Chinese amid our anti-Communist efforts, one should note that these particular Chinese have far more to lose at the hands of the Viet Cong than do the natives of South Vietnam. Any communal society would ruin the business it has taken a thousand years to generate, and the citizens of Cholon know this. And to assume that the Chinese in Cholon are not under military surveillance, above and below ground, would be to underestimate our own awareness.
* * *
Oddly, the most popular literature on the Saigon market, aside from arrogant and idealistic books about current Viet affairs, are Chinese adventure stories. These romantic novels are based upon an Oriental version of Don Quixote, with less humor and hardly any message at all. Not only do these novels appear in book form but are a popular item in the Saigon newspapers. Circulation is seriously affected by the appearance of a Quixote serial.
The best known Quixote writer in Vietnam is a Chinese by the name of Kim Dung, whose novel CO GAI DO LONG, or the Do Long Girl, caused a major competition in bidding among the Saigon dailies. He has written many, NHAT DUONG CHI (One Finger's Punch) and ANH HUNG XA DIEU (The Eagle's Shooter) are some of his most famous.
Young and old, the educated and the barely-so, read these fairy stories. They are generally knighterrant novels in which bloody battles are fought against a cruel, imperious group of dastards, and the action involves massive sword battles, many forms of hand-to-hand contact, and romance to suit the most saccharine. These are, however, sexless novels and are couched to appeal to the romantic imagination of young and old, not to their baser natures.
Madame Nhu, through her influence over the
Information Ministry tried to limit the publication and sale of the Quixote novels, largely because to her Catholic soul, the glorification of Chinese 'paganism' was distasteful to her. At the same time, she clamped the lid closed on the manufacture and sale of salacious books, using her own definition of salacious as a guide for censorship.
Chinese culture has always shown a marked tendency for the profane and even the limited production of Vietnamese literature reflects much of this delight in things venal. The advent of the non-Viet speaking American has caused a rash of translators, cartoonists and mediocre photographers to appear but invariably, a work meant to be purely prurient winds up being hilariously funny because of the difficulty of translation. Moreover, the Viet's standard of pornography is strange, at least to an American. Sex is not pornography to the Annamite. He is excited and shocked by the bursting of tradition, and the build-up is often more delightfully surreptitious than the eventual pay-off.
However, it has not taken the Viets long to learn how to please the G.I. who-likes pornography. like all Oriental countries, the Viet is camera conscious, and he has models available at every turn. The price for a single bit of graphic pornography, involving every type of sexual variance, is about two hundred piasters. Whether this price (which is about twice what it is in America for similar photos) is due to the scarcity of buyers or their avidity is not known.
These same photographers can produce upon demand, photos of Viet Cong atrocities that would turn one's stomach. These are known by the troops as 'grislies,' and they are in fair demand at an absurd price.
On the lighter side, the SAIGON POST runs Ann Lander's syndicated column, a massive set of astrology charts and boldly suggestive ads for the livelier nightclubs and bars. It also runs ads for Jacqueline's Barber Shop and Massage Parlour, at 135 Bd. Nguyen in Hue, First floor of the "Tax" building. Aside from its regular services, this shop, like many others of its kind, is wont to provide limited sexual services. The pretty girls are adept fellators and fricatrices, abstaining from straight coitus because under the law, this constitutes prostitution. Any service short of copulation is considered to be hardly more than fooling around, which any masseuse is licensed to do.
There is probably no country in the world where voodooism is as active as it is in Vietnam. It is as universal among the Vietnamese as it is among the Chinese and the hill tribes, including the Mois and the Montagnards. The forms vary slightly, but are all based upon the power of amulets, potions and the more violent forms using pin-stuck effigies and orgiastic rites. Professional magicians and sorcerers are everywhere in Vietnam and because the entire population believes in voodooism, it enjoys more success than failure.
Coupled tightly to the voodoo cults are the astrologers. The horoscope industry in Vietnam, North and South, is a booming one. Horoscope casters have opened offices in increasing numbers throughout capital, and most of these are operated by educated women, often professors without tenure, because it seems that the women are more adept at the art than are the men. An on the spot consultation costs about 50.00$VN. A carefully studied and written out horoscope costs about 1000.00$VN, or more if the client is an important one.
The downfall of the Diem family was predicted by astrologers throughout Vietnam. By their logic, Diem was born in the Year of the Mouse, or Canh Ti 1901, and 1963-which was the Year of the Cat
-had to have some dire influence on the ruling family. When the time was right, by the astrologer's logic, the Cat killed the Mouse.
Few public officials, civilian or military, will make a step without consulting their horoscopes, and those of their associates. The seriousness of this superstition can be evaluated when one considers that if a powerful member of the government is having a bad period and his enemies are having a good period, immediate upheaval may take place. And oddly, those whose auspices are bad, seldom struggle very hard against the fate they expect.
When a race of people, already indoctrinated to Oriental fatalism, also embraces superstitions such as astrology and voodooism, it automatically consigns itself to the superstition's vagaries. To say that the Viets are difficult to regulate, particularly in matters of pressing military importance, is to understate the case. Logic, to such people, has all the value of a bowl of moldy rice.
CHAPTER FIVE
BECAUSE SAIGON, AS A CITY, is less than two hundred years old, and because the Viets, or Annamites, were never famous for their architecture nor their feeling for relics, sightseeing is soon done with.
There are about a hundred moving picture theaters in the Saigon-Cholon area. Five show Chinese films exclusively, the others run mostly American films, with a few French and English pictures for variety. The theaters are malodorous, noisy and uncomfortable and, in many instances, the pictures have been cut, or mutilated until the average G.I. is bored, even when the vintage of the movie is reasonably current.
Annamese is a difficult language to learn to use orally or to read. Fortunately, the Viets are good linguists and though they may not learn English correctly, they do learn enough of it to ease the barrier for the soldier. But the impossibility of the language closes libraries and shuts off periodical stands to the average American.
What there is left to do is five it up, and the opportunities are unlimited. If he is a bit naive, all the G.I. has to do is watch the old timers, or take a good look at the Viets, because they live it up on every possible occasion.
Most ovbious and easiest to get to is the Bach Dang Quay, stretching along the face of Saigon at the river's edge. This is the poor man's Riviera: it offers cool river breezes, a beautiful view of the docks across the river at Knanh Hoi, and a playground for the children. Starting at about six in the evening, thousands of vehicles and pedestrians converge on the quay.
Sometimes an entire family noisily unloads from a Lambretta motor scooter. There will be two young children standing in front of their father while the pregnant mother rides on the rear seat holding her latest baby in her arms. Four-and-a-half to five-and-half people per scooter is average. Except for the pimp and his girl. She rides behind her man and they both look for a lounging G.I. or a Viet who looks as if he has the price. When a potential customer is spotted, the pimp curbs his scooter and his girl goes after the unwary.
Bach Dang Quay is a place to relax. It is cluttered with vendors of all kinds, and the boxy peddler-carts selling various Viet delicacies are busy. These have been dubbed 'Howard Johnsons' by the G.I. and aren't generally patronized until the soldier has a few weeks, and some experience, under his belt.
The most frequented area of the quay runs from the foot of Tu Do Street to the Pointe des Bla-guerurs. Just opposite the Majestic Hotel (a rather pretentious, Westernized structure with bad plumbing) is a miniature golf course. The G.I.S play, the Viets watch, giggling and shouting and misunderstanding the game. Along the quay, numerous concrete benches shaded by vine-covered bowers dot the riverside. People sit there for hours, chatting, minding the children, or making unobtrusive romance with their companion. Unobtrusive is the proper word because even a confirmed streetwalker does not appreciate an arm around the waist or an attempt at intimacy in public.
Numerically, the Viets outnumber the G.I.S about twenty to one on the quay. From the various landings along the river, motor boats or sculled sampans depart for Khanh Hoi, or to points up and down the sluggish, garbage filled channel. Not a few shuttle out to floating beds on junks sailing slowly up and down the Saigon River.
Most of these junks are owned by industrious Chinese, although the captain, crew and girls may be Vietnamese. Many are miserable, dirty and uninviting, though many are luxurious, in the style of Viet luxury. Some offer the opium pipe, there usually being time to destroy or hide the evidence if a patrol boat is sighted. By the same token, the degree of vice offered aboard the floating junks is considerably more vicious than that offered in most of the city's whorehouses.
Many of the girls employed on the junks are virtually prisoners. They are recruited from the ranks of the very, very young, the very, very ignorant, and the hundreds of rural girls who have flocked to the city in the hysteria of war. These junks operate with full knowledge of the White Mice, and their counterpart, the river patrols. Corruption allows them to function; solitude permits their customers any form of vice he is able to pay for.
A typical thousand piaster ride includes wine, spicy native snacks, and perhaps two girls. One is invariably a teen-ager, one a bit older. The teenager is adept at 'wind starting' (an Airforce slang term for fellatio) and her friend has all the instincts of a mother cat, with a predilection for an oral assault on a customer's anus. If, after their original ministrations, the debilitated male has any strength and any more piasters left, he can rid himself of both any way he has the imagination to devise.
He can also, if he has too many piasters left, get himself separated from his head and tossed into the down-current side of the river.
Many of these junks, not accessible to the G.I., are the scenes of massive gambling games and blackmarket conferences. They also provide hiding places for criminals high on the wanted lists.
* * *
Saigon's second big concentration of high life is the Saigon-Bien Hoa highway, the broad concrete road that connects the capitol to the Eastern provinces. It represents twenty miles of unrestrained carnival, with something for every one, depending upon his or her tastes, finances and inclination.
Originally, the Bien Hoa highway was a loud item of Viet Cong propaganda, the naive and inexperienced declaring that the four lane concrete road was in actuality, a runway for heavy bombers. Later, the VC may have learned that it takes something over eighteen inches of reinforced concrete to sustain the impact of a landing medium bomber, let along the jet heavyweights. They have ceased to point an accusing finger toward the Bien Hoa road.
The road is the result of a joint venture between the Diem government and the U.S. International Cooperation Administration. Capitol Engineering Corporation designed the project and the Johnson-Drake and Piper Company built it. It was started in July, 1957 and took three years to finish. The road is 32 kilometers long, plus 1700 meters of bridge spans over the many creeks and canals streaking the land (north and east of Saigon) and the Saigon River. The cost was roughly $35,000,000 American dollars. To this, the Vietnamese added 37,000,000$VN, paid out to property owners for land used. Divided by 118, it becomes apparent that the Viets sacrificed a full one third of a million dollars for the project, which is about par for all ratios of expenditure in Vietnam.
In any case, the Bien Hoa Highway has made the Viets very happy. It provides a place for the gamblers and gives the 'cowboys' room to stage illegal motorbike races. It is an excellent place for beginners to learn how to drive scooters, automobiles and sundry, and the aprons on each side of the road, being one hundred meters wide, allows kite flying, picnics, loitering and various forms of relaxation.
The latter is normally enjoyed in the seats of cars, on the ground, or on a motorbike. Rendezvous at the Highway has become so famous that after nightfall, there is barely a place to park, at least with any reasonable distance for privacy between trysts.
The police do not interfere unless there is screaming, or gunfire. Most of the participants are half of (or two halves of) a marital breakdown. The road's popularity is due to the inevitable matter of 'face.' It is extremely difficult for a jealous wife or husband to pick a spouse out of the hundreds of autos, and therefore, the illicit romancers are reasonably safe.
A car parked, showing only waving heels above the window line, is called a 'sweet nest,' and no one is boorish enough to peek or tattle. Even those who are gymnastic enough to accomplish their passion on the dual seat of a motorbike are not overly stared at. The Bien Hoa Highway is simply the place and most who go there after dark are too busy with their own pursuits to worry about other couples.
Fundamentally, the land on each side of the highway is dedicated to industrial sites. There is a textile plant near Thu Due, a paper plant at the Dong Nai Bridge and an immense complex called the University Village. There is a cement plant, the Thu Due Industrial Complex and many more. The highway contributes mightily to the transportation security and has solved a 900 car-a-day traffic problem between Saigon and the Eastern Provinces.
It also solves the assignation problem for the Saigon business man and his current light-o'-love. And it provides a place where the girl from the right side of the tracks can meet a lover from the wrong side. It isn't recommended by the Services or experienced wenchermen, but there are often several jeeps to be seen, sporting bare legs from one side of the tiny vehicle and two heads from the other. As an aside, a thoughtful G.I. brings along a mosquito net because-with all the garbage infested creeks and canals about;-the diminutive dive bombers can be quite a problem on the exposed epidermis.
* * *
Despite the 'concentrations,' the city streets are still the best hunting ground for the predatory G.I. Overcrowding, hysteria and the built-in corruption of the White Mice has turned Saigon into a madly delightful place in which to hunt. The fact that the still-standing Diem law says that the sleek, bright-eyed prostitutes are illegal simply makes the hunting more exciting.
For the G.I. who is a notch above out-and-out purchase of a sexual interlude the field is wide open. Trapped by insecurity, sentimental to a ridiculous degree, and intrigued no end by the willingness of an American to 'work at it,' thousands of Viet dan bas play at the game of romance simply because the soldier will permit it. Their schooling in by-play comes from movies, imported periodicals and a genuine desire to trade in her Viet background for one which promises something for her.
One step out of a thatched hut or a slum ghetto, they become tremendously interested in jewelry, cosmetics and hair styling. They drive themselves to learn enough English to meet and greet the soldier. Many have a reasonably good elementary education, despite their low station in life, and these are found working as clerks, typists and general help in military offices, supply depots and communication centers. Not all B-girls are whores in the commercial sense of the word. Many hustle 'tea,' play fingers and permit handling in the bar shadows but balk at a cold proposition. These holdouts can be had after a few return trips and a good deal of gentle talk but they struggle, as do girls throughout the world.
Once conquered, they want to be adopted. And in most cases, they are adopted because they are cute, completely feminine and they retain enough of their child-like paganism to arouse a possessive instinct in almost any lover. The fact that the average G.I. considers the Viet girl to be the worst bed partner in the world, at least until her fear of seeming wanton is quelled and her education completed, is beside the point. If sexually lethargic, she is willing, and in many cases, seemingly insatiable. A properly treated adoptee is surprisingly loyal, providing her G.I. isn't a schnook about things she believes to be unimportant. She may still retain her job as a B-girl, and she believes her man should not get too excited about her handling a new customer exactly as she handled him in the first place.
The infallible way to break up business in any whorehouse is to bring along a Sears catalogue. The girls gather around, squealing, "oohing" and "ahing," and business is over until the last page is turned. The girls' favorite magazines appear to be on a par with American Confessionals, if slightly more sentimental. The back pages are filled with ads for cosmetics, beauty aids and figure fixers. The Viet girl has already discovered that her national figure is something less than startling, and she envies the mammary and posterior development of
Western women.
She also envies their noses. Within four pages of the start of her perusal of an American magazine, the reader will be observed to be fingering her flat nose self-consciously. It costs 13.000$VN to have a nose-job in Saigon, and the many surgeons who advertise the ability have all the business they can take care of.
The importation of falsies from Hong-Kong is a big business. There is a large local trade in dramatic d'colletage, but not for public wear. Fancy underpants, worn under chiffon pajamas, are in great demand and the side splits in the Hong-Kong dress are getting higher every day.
With the advent of the Military PX, hairspray has become a major item of barter between a G.I. and a prospective adoptee. It does not seem to matter that a Viet girl's hair and her traditional style of wearing it is extremely attractive to an American male. In her desire to be suitable, the dan ba often tries for the extremes. Many attempt the bouffed-up routine and wind Up looking ridiculously top heavy, as if they had wound their luxurious hair around a basket ball. A few have gone for the bobbed treatment, with no acceptable results.
While she delights in costume jewelry, today the Viet girl's imagine has shifted to something a bit more practical. In a land of leaping inflation, it has occurred to the dan ba that a bit of real gold might survive a ruined currency, and they often shop to invest in gold jewelry if a client is not immediately at hand who requires attention...
It should be clear, from the foregoing, that there is a class of dan ba in Saigon, completely inaccessible to the Viet male. He-initially-lacks the ability to be convincingly romantic; then, his pockets are usually light; finally, he is not willing to indulge in sex for the sake of sex.
While most Viet girls are practical in realizing that any life-long attachment to a G.I. is impossible, they still, strive valiantly for the interlude, no matter how brief it may be. Many girls who think and act so, recognize that, inevitably, they will marry a Viet or stay single. There is not enough statistical data yet available to predict the life span of a Saigon hustler, but the girls are depending on seeing the soldier around for quite some time to come...
CHAPTER SIX
THERE WOULD BE NO JUSTICE in presenting the American G.I. as a grinning reprobate who bounces around Saigon sampling each and every delight by dangling his superior economy in front of every wench he meets. Many are reasonably quiet, inexperienced and shy. The nice thing about Saigon is that there is a girl type for everybody.
In the Western world, no one but a nut tries to become sentimental over a prostitute, but in Saigon, it becomes easy, and is often exciting. Because of American economy and the nature of its sex-for-sale artisans, most young men of from eighteen to twenty-five have never really known a full-time, truly professional whore. It is easy then, to ignore the obvious and assume that the sleek, glossy chick in the Hong-Kong skirt and the bubbling smile is really a poor kid from the country who is lonely, down-trodden and dependent upon the 'teas' he buys for her.
Less obvious are the thousands of Viet girls who are working in stores, offices, as maids, as PX clerks and in many jobs where the suggestion of lewdness could not occur. These girls, unlike their more aggressive sisters in the bars and on the street, have held on grimly to a strong degree of her native 'face.' She is coy, not overly articulate and meticulously mannered. As her English is limited and his Vietnamese is nil, there is plenty of time at restaurants and on benches along Bach Dang Quay, or in a theater or just walking along a Saigon street (not recommended because, by law, the girl can be arrested as a prostitute) for furtive hand holding, eye-kissing and general togetherness.
As in other lands, the problem is where to go for some privacy. He is billeted with three other men in a building full of men. She can't and won't take him home because she is justifiably ashamed of her family abode. After several dates, it turns out that she doesn't really live at home, but she was wary of telling him she has a private room, or an apartment, sometimes shared by one or two other girls. He is overjoyed. He makes a quick trip to the PX, loads himself with all the goodies she has been ogling, or murmuring over and away they go. All is circumspect. He may manage to get a kiss or two and a quick feel but her shyness is too magnificent for a genuine try.
By this time he has learned to ignore the advice of his billet buddies, and he is sure that in all of Vietnam, he has found the one girl who is straight, honest and genuinely affectionate.
In private, she doesn't mind him being pushy but she lends no particular enthusiasm to their romance because she is afraid he might think her wanton. She just holds still while he frenzies up a storm.
Earlier or later, he is surprised at the ease with which he took her to bed. If he knows a thing or two, he may be disappointed in her performance, but if he is at all naive, he goes for the inexperienced doll routine.
At this point, a hundred affairs can go a hundred ways. If he is kind, gentle, ardent and considerate, he couldn't get rid of the dan ba with a pistol. If he has enough stripes to afford it, she may find a small apartment for them. As she already knows how much 'monkey money' he makes, she will only demand what he has. He may be slightly mystified that so much money buys so little but he is by now, hooked for her slim, willing body and the gaiety she provides after a day at Operations. Sentimental boys soon forget she is a gook. Not a few begin to think of marriage. Many of the latter are abruptly introduced to one or two or three small brown-eyed kids, and a sad tale of a husband who was killed by the VC. A few of the others are encouraged by the operation of a dan ba who has spent much of her leisure time perusing American movie magazines. r But in general, the G.I. has managed to set himself up in a housekeeping situation, which if left alone, is not a bad arrangement. The girl is considered by her friends to have a good deal, and the soldier is not hurting.
There is definitely, no such thing as a platonic friendship involving a G.I. and a Viet girl. It may start out that way, using great and happy as the denominator, but in time, even the 'brotherly' character will find himself where it counts because in Vietnam, a brother has a lot of privileges that are not normally allowed an American brother ...
* * *
Alliances are formed in strange ways, with odd bonds. Many Saigonites are totally anxious to avail themselves of any knowledge of America and its ways. The clerk in the camera store, the cab driver, the shopkeeper and others, often make and receive overtures. Eventually, it will cost the G.I. something, partially because asking for cumshaw is natural to these people and partially because they have learned how much stock an American puts in friendship)-a nearly non-existent emotion among the Viets.
Alliances are particularly easy to form between soldiers and the poorer class of Saigonite. As in most foreign lands, city zoning does not exist. A military billet, or a hotel, may be across a street from a block square cluster of thatched huts, containing hundreds of families and five times that many children. If Americans are notoriously soft in the head about children, the kids of Saigon are about as idiotically fond of the soldier.
And a sure way to get a ba and a chung to offer the services of their teen-age daughters is to become a "good guy" by reason of candy and chewing gum dispensed to the younger children. Mama will sit on the cot (which is a badly defined curbing) and talk happily to her new soldier friends. Papa will stand in the hut door, talking over his shoulder to the waiting girls. When one, or maybe two of the generous soldiers responds to mama's indicative thumb, papa will stroll away, leaving the hut, the girls and the stink to the new friends. Neither the ba nor the chung are risking anything because even the ten year old girl is not a virgin, and there is always the chance that once the soldiers have sampled the obvious delights of the dan bas, there may be piasters, PX merchandise, or both, forthcoming. Even if the eventual cumshaw is very light, the Saigonese family may not feel too badly. There is some prestige in having American friends, and they will always be kind to the children.
Another sure way to form alliances with the Saigonite is to ask questions. The Viets seem universally eager to explain their feelings about politics, the war and their religion to all who will listen. The fact that the answers received may well represent a hundred divergent viewpoints and only serve to confuse the curious is unimportant. Apparently, only the Chinese in Cholon are unimpressed by American curiosity. They remain polite, but reserved, as if they already knew that any dialogue with a transient soldier is a waste of time. The difference probably stems from the certainty that the Chinese in Vietnam have no reason to feel sorry for themselves.
* * *
It should be firmly understood that, under the present government (and any other conceivably in sight) the situation in Saigon can not change, except to slip slowly and inevitably downward.
Corruption and vice is as predominant in high places as it is in the lower stratums. The degree of corruption has been noted in numerous American newspapers and periodicals, the vice has been soft-pedaled, largely because vice, per se, is not exclusively the property of Vietnamese officials.
On the other hand, occasions which would shock Americans, even those who have attended the notoriously famous stag parties which are part and parcel of most male-oriented conventions, give the ruling members of the Vietnamese government not the slightest rise in blood-pressure. One thing which does elevate it is to be publicly accused of vice, particularly when the country is abounding with free-traveling groups of do-gooders who are trying to 'find' the real answer in Vietnam.
One of these occasions occurred on the 8th of September, 1966, which if checked, turns out to be three days prior to the widely-publicized general elections. The motivating incident was a huge party, given by Deputy Prime Minister Lieutenant-General Nguyen Huu Co for the Vietnamese football team that had just won the Merderka Championship against stiff Asiatic competition.
The SAIGON POST, which is trying hard to be a newspaper with the least practical offensiveness, spread an intriguing photo on the front page of a lovely, leaping belly dancer named Tuyet Nhung, who if not the headliner, was at least the most photogenic of the bevy of beauties who entertained the team. This in itself seems a nothing, until one sees the SAIGON POST of the 10th of September. Smack in the middle of the front page was an outlined box headed, "Apology."
In the same issue, Prime Minister Ky lashed out at Catholic pressure groups (who wanted exiles and prisoners made captive following the Diem regime) released, or allowed to return to Vietnam. The present government wants nothing to do with the antiseptic leftovers of Madame Nhu's puritanical dynasty.
The fact that Ky's Airiorce employs a whole team of procurers to supplement the volunteers from a limited number of elite families in Saigon is not a rumor. Ky's wife is a gorgeous ba, who might well be a reflected image of Madame Nhu, and her family is extremely influential in Vietnamese politics and commerce. The fact that she is of an old-line Viet family probably permits her to tolerate her 'papillion' so long as he plays footsie out of her sight.
The meat of the corruption is the nature of the central government's method in maintaining control in the provinces. District and province chiefs are appointed by Ky and are bound to his support not only by the largesse, but by family ties that go back for centuries. If this seems to be a near-British form of autocracy, it must be remembered that all Annamite families can be traced back a thousand years, and choosing the honored family is largely a matter of anticipated cooperation.
The district and province chiefs in turn designate 'headmen' for villages and hamlets, which may explain why the VC takes such delight in removing the heads, bowels and genitals from village leaders. Many of these leaders were 'rice bowl' Catholics under Diem, and are now vacillating between Catholicism and Buddhism, as the opposing troops approach or recede. Between troops, they burn joss-sticks while they read the Catechism, hoping that one god or another will keep the war out of their respective bailiwicks.
* * *
To the average G.I. passing through Saigon, billeted there, or spending a rest furlough in the city, the underlying currents are not very obvious. Badly versed in the mechanics of their own country's politics, American forces personnel can not be expected to concern themselves about the nature of Viet tribulations. Nor do they enter into the furious religious hassle churning the emotions of Saigon. Protestants and Catholics nominally lean toward the Christian faiths, but many have half-sided with the Buddhists, not because of religious waverings but because the Buddhists have a far more forceful case to present than do the subscribers to an alien theocracy.
Fundamentally, the G.I. is interested in passing time to the greatest personal advantage. After all, a man can't spend all of his time writing home to the "Chief of Staff," and rotation is a long way off. The girl back home writes nice letters but they seem to be disconnected from facts. The chic gook in the bar downstairs, or next door, is very real.
We mentioned the schizophrenic nature of the Viet: there is a little of this same duality of mind in the American soldier. Each day, after the 'hump' is reached, he may mark off days on his "Short-Timer's" calendar, but the eventual date of his rotation has little to do with the ever-present ennui of military service.
And few men are able to resist the exotic impact of the erotic East. The inbred venality of the Annamite is apparent everywhere. Bluntly, the men look like queers and the women look like sex machines, and when this impression is tested with positive results, the attraction of available indulgence is compelling, to say the least.
Psychologically, the presence of the virile American is an injustice to the Vietnamese people. Already steeped in the sensuality of the ages, they are being presented with a massive opportunity to exercise their talents for vice and depravity. As a people, they are rushing headlong into a flesh trap from which there may be no escape.
If the VC were to give up tomorrow and the G.I.-all except those required to man the multi-billion dollar ring of steel being built to check the Chinese Communists-were to go home, the Viets, and particularly the two million in Saigon would find very little market for the commodities today supporting the city's economy, at least among the non-government elements.
With no one to drink the beer and booze, and no one to bed the dan ba, a total segment of the population would go hungry. Pedicabs, taxi cabs, trinket shops and cafes would be a drug on the market. The gigantic black-market would be without a source of goods and the kids of Saigon would have to learn to chew their fingers. There would be no more hope for the pretty congai a year or so short of marketability, and her future would look something as drab as a dummy-stick or the scull oar of a river sampan.
More serious, the populace of Saigon would again face reality, and this is a condition the Annamite has always avoided if possible. To tolerate his own indolence, he would have to revive the opium pipe and the hash-hish plant once more. He might vote with one hand but with the other, he would cling to the debilitation of filial piety, and for comfort, he would submerge his intellect in a sea of lewdness. Once more, he would return to the certainty that having a leader was enough and to expect him to be a good leader would be ridiculous.
Some small, personal lessons will be learned by the people of Saigon. A big percentage of the people will learn to hate the American cordially, not because he spent his money, bedded their women and bulged the economy all out of shape, but because he ceased doing what he had been so famous for. The Saigonite will look at his war-ravaged city and country (regardless of its eventual politics) and translate his own inability to change the raw material of Western handprints into a predictable future, as an evil forced upon him by the alien American.
In the interim, the barometer of Viet climate shows no hesitancy in the areas most compatible with their history. They avoid good politics, good administration and good intentions and they lust for all of the fringe benefits of a war-torn community.
There may be a hidden benefit, suggested by Dr. Sutor when he remarked the nucleus of a matriarchy among the Annamites. If today, the dan ba, the ba and the budding congai represent the most positive merchandise in Saigon, then tomorrow, when the market has been constricted, she may turn her sensual enterprise into something more than a diversion, especially since her mentality seems more practically valuable than does that of the Viet male.
Who could guess what might have occurred with the Diem regime if Madame Nhu (a smart chick by any measuring stick) had been inspired by a sense of national achievement instead of a fervor for moral Puritanism? Who can determine the potentials of Viet women like Nguyen Thi Nga, editor and publisher of THE OBSERVER, Saigon's most analytical monthly periodical? Even the fifty or more bars, owned and operated by Viet women, the countless shops and markets all due to a ba's enterprise, indicate the promise of a feminine hierarchy.
From the seasoned B-girl who at forty, makes 140,000$VN a month to the prominently-toothed PX clerk (measurements twenty-nine, twenty-nine, twenty-nine) the evidence of desperate determination is apparent. If Saigon abounds in mothers and daughters who have picked up and carried the economic ball after a forty-five year old chong has decided he is too wise to work, may it not be possible that these same unflinching women might be induced to bring sanity to a mascadine government of matimen? It remains to be seen, of course.
In the meantime, the girls may not be winning the war but they are of inestimable value to those who are giving it the old college try. They are, in large part, responsible for the 'grand morale,' currently a boast in the civilian and military reports of our fighting men in Vietnam. At least, they help a lot more than do the puny members of the Vietnamese Army, who by actual count, close their eyes fifty times out of a hundred before they fire the rifle. This is the guaranteed technique for "Maggie's Drawers"-on the firing range the reward for missing a target ...
CHAPTER SEVEN
THERE ARE A FEW CONCERNED intellectuals in Saigon who raise their voices to protest against the seeming destruction of their country. But the destrlction they fear is not that generated by terrorists and foreign ideologies. They assume, with their inherent investiture of Oriental fatalism, that the war will be settled one way or another, and in the end, the Viet is going to see himself in a most uncomplimentary mirror. Which is one of the small wars within a war that currently excites the non-national.
The cry is that corruption, prostitution and general thievery has become a way of life for the average Viet. The shape of this average Viet is difficult to ascertain because he or she looks exactly like the Government leaders and the filth-encrusted river people who live their lives on a leaky sampan.
The destruction started many hundreds of years ago, for reasons obscured in the faulty history of the Annamite. But regardless of history, accurate or obscure, Vietnam is today the focal point of a massive international contest and the Viets, North and South, have been dragged back into the human race by forces far beyond their control. They must stand inspection whether they want to or not.
Our judicial system long ago determined that the accused is never an efficient counsel for his own defense: to inquire of a Viet why he is what he is, would only bring indignation, rebuttal and a flat denial of the charges.
He will say that the White Mice are corrupt because the Government taught them to be so. He will say that Saigon is one big whorehouse because the military provided men, money and an economic incentive to the dan ba, and that fright drove her into irresponsibility. If he is Catholic, he will accuse the Buddhist of pagan insensitivity. If he is Buddhist, he will accuse the Catholics of creating false idols, impractical morality and autocratic politics. If he is a poor man he will accuse the rich and if he is rich, he will blame the lazy poor. Thievery, murder and wavering loyalties are blamed upon no one because these conditions are traditional.
One fact is self-evident: not today nor in the history of Annam, has one strong, forward-looking force appeared, either as an individual or a cult. A hundred have made the start, but before their "isms" could acquire momentum, the innate worthlessness of their own people tripped them from behind, or separated them from their heads.
To say that there is no hope for the Viet will distress the many people who assume that, by fixing the blame for a condition you effect a cure. But what if there is no one to blame? Two centuries of Western observation indicate that the Annamite has not changed a particle in that time, unless compounding inadequacies can be called change.
It is completely obvious that, despite eighty years of occupation, the French did a bad job of exploitation, and thus did a worse job of selling the Western credo in a country that sorely needed a spiritual, unreligious inspiration. The Diems, while propounding theoretical morality and gulping down American aid by the millions, spread prosperity only to the chosen Faithful Few, and in so doing, demoralized Vietnam in general by constantly irritating the basic instincts of the population mass.
The destruction of the Diem regime and the huge influx of American military forces, accelerated the evils more rapidly than it created responsibility. The nature and proximity of the Viet Cong terrorists created a hysteria that resolved itself in an expenditure of emotion rather than in development of a defense.
Refugees flock to Saigon by the thousands, are rejected because of economic inability or Administrative wrath, and are forced to pack themselves into crude thatch slums on the outskirts of town. The men do small tasks for a piaster or two, the better looking women sneak back into town, to go to their knees in a secluded niche or onto their backs where there is enough space.
There is no shortage of food, except among the usual percentage of stupids who would starve to death in a super market. The wizened men, the wrinkled old women and the bare bellied kids that appear in newsreels are indigenous to the land. Malnutrition is apparent, but from wrong diet rather than lack of food. Disease is everywhere, and, while the population as a whole has developed a certain degree of resistance, the disease is still there. It is largely like running a high compression engine on low-test gasoline. To expect maximum (or even mediocre) performance is asking a bit too much.
Temporarily, the war has choked off much of the rural economy. Vietnam once exported thousands of tons of rice, cane sugar and corn, to say nothing of coal and rubber. Today, it relies for the most part upon half rations and outside aid. Vast areas of formerly productive land have become fields of terror and destruction. Instead of life being paced upon a day to day schedule, it is measured hour by hour.
The Viets are bewildered by Americans who are vastly different from their predecessors, the French. They are impressed and covetous of the affluence enjoyed by both military and civilian forces, but they are not willing to put forth the energy required to create for themselves that affluence. They are in awe of any people who can display such battle field ferocity and then become laughing, scratching merrymakers when the rice paddy mud is washed off. They listen to our words about honesty, integrity and morality, then, in wonder, see us do many things they believe to be in ridiculous opposition to what we say.
It would be in error to say there are no progressive minds in Vietnam. There are, and among them are adept scholars in the field of political intrigue. There are some who have a genuine wish to see their country disgorge its impotent futility and take a small but correctly-oriented place in the scheme of world progress. The problem with these people lies in their unwillingness to abandon tradition, even though that tradition appears in the form of nearly pagan non-thinking. The truth is that thinking and planning are not enough, and without a willing race of people to implement those plans, the best efforts will accomplish very little.
Today, the Viets are waiting-for what they do not know-and (from their clearly-stated attitude) for what, they do not care. This attitude is less noticeable in Saigon, Da Nang and Hue, Haiphong and Hanoi than in the hills and plains country. One must include the cities in North Vietnam because it would be folly to assume that a political boundary has much practical value, due to the nature of the people living in districts bounded in such capricious consideration.
Whatever it is the Viets are waiting for will have to come from some exterior source. And that force will have to remain for a very long, consistent time or what it has accomplished, and will accomplish, soon will be over grown with jungle, populated by the chattering, venal and uncaring Annamese.
* * *
The foregoing pages do not constitute an all-inclusive history of Annam, nor of the Annamite. like Dr. Jacob Sutor, we had no intention to chronicle the political and military adventures currently in exercise. He was concerned (as are we) with the irrefutable evidence of a racial character because we have inherited the responsibility so ineptly sidestepped by the French.
Editorially, we assume that somewhere, some one knows what the American is trying to accomplish in Vietnam, but whether it be to stem the Communist tide or to make the jungle safe for Lever Brothers, R.C.A. and Woolworth is relatively unimportant. We are there, involved and caught up in a momentum which no one seems able to control.
Since Dr. Sutor's last entry concerning the nature of the Annamite, many things have occurred. The country has been liberated' of its French occupation and for ten years has made sounds like a nation of people. It has absorbed industry, some culture, and considerable false prestige. It has created state-supported schools and universities, it has subscribed to radio and television influences and sent neatly-garbed, wizened dignitaries to the United Nations. It has gulped down billions of dollars in foreign aid and has become the end of the trail for thousands of American soldiers.
Without naming names nor quoting dates, the events of the past few years show a most glamorous resemblance to the unglamorous events Dr. Sutor reported in Saigon, one hundred years ago. He accurately described the present day rural citizen, and the modern elite of Saigon. He weighed the mental tendencies of the Annamite man and he firmly established the character of the Annamite woman. He termed them shrewd, lewd and conniving, and he said they both forgot yesterday, ignored today and had not the mind to think of tomorrow.
Setting forth their cowardices and their weaknesses, he accurately distinguished between ferocity and determination. He recounted their innate cruelty and said that it only heightened their sensuality. They disguised ignorance with placidity, he said, and they fought change, improvement and culture with distrust and lethargy. He had much to say about their excitability over petty things while they showed total indifference to the forces that threatened their very existence. It was plain in 1865 that there was no national pride and the wobbly structure of a nation rested in the hands of a few misguided and autocratic families who would embrace a foreign religion, a puppet grandeur or a Chinese procurer with equal enthusiasm.
By updating the script and piling the garbage on a paved street instead of a muddy, rutted road, the picture then could well be the picture now. And the odor is exactly the same!
* * *
The American public has a right to be frightened by the contents of this work. By using many high-sounding words, we have managed to expose over thirty million American men to the most repulsive aspects of a hundred foreign cultures since 1917. Where the soldier goes, the land breeds depravity, with its brothers-death and destruction. And no land is better equipped to leave its scar on the American soldier than is Vietnam.
Today we hear much loud talk about the sexual revolution and the social breakdown of our insurrective youth. How much of this is due to the fact that a massive percentage of our energized male population has experienced the vagaries of other cultures, where wavering loyalties, unfettered sensuality and native selfishness are the order of the day? Are we stupid enough to believe that, under the stresses of military service, our schizophrenic, ineptly-taught lessons upon morality, patriotism and self-respect will hold up? Or that a prayer murmured by a bedside in Peoria or Houston will be heard in Tangiers, Tokyo or Saigon?
There are no studies to prove that the theory of contamination by association is valid, but no thinking person will ignore its probability. More to the point, there is no way to avoid it, even if the premise is true. Our national habit is to fight our wars on foreign soils, and we choose our enemies, rather than to be chosen. We pride ourselves on not being militarily aggressive but we are definitely aggressive about money, mother and manipulation. When a nation goes to war, casualties, no matter their nature, are part of the price to be paid.
Historically, our veterans of foreign wars have a remarkable recovery rate. In their youth, they may be impatient with law and order and the fortunate 4-F; and in old age, they may be maudlin and enjoy conventions and wobble-legged parades, but in the main, they contain their experiences very well. But the experiences are there.
The pilot flying the helicopter from which two or three screaming VCs have been kicked may never forget the sound of their passing, but he may also not forget that the fourth VC did exactly as he was asked to do-talk-and the establishment of might, tinged with cruelty, may cause him to give a delinquent fourteen year old son a bad time at some later date.
Moreover, his memory of an enjoyable five minutes in a narrow alley while a thirteen year old congai provides a 'wind start' may send his eventual wife home to mother with a badly damaged psyche. It is also remotely possible that a few vets will remember the pleasant, relatively harmless kick they got by popping a drop or two of opium in a steaming cup of coffee.
Most damaging would be the memory of a whole race of people, ignorant, lazy and sensual, who got by on lies, indolence and connivery, and whose intellectuals could expound constantly on the virtues of non-binding commitment. Not a few vets will carry a small sense of guilt for the rest of their lives, based upon misadventure, dalliance and a credibility gap. Not every soldier who goes to war is capable of total analysis, particularly when his own mentors disagree heartily about why he was there in the first place.
* * *
In conclusion, it must be said that all Viet men are not thieves, pimps or murderers, nor are all the women prostitutes and hustlers. The politicians are not all corrupt and the military leaders are not all completely unreliable. If one searches diligently, a shining star can be found among the garbage of Vietnam. The kids are cute, sharp and appealing, and the old ladies grin with great charm.
By consensus, the going is rougher than Korea, but if you, Draftee, can manage to be one of the four out of five who doesn't see rice paddy duty, the country is for fun. A real trip. You may average two doses of clap a year, but the medics are standing by with the latest cure ... and considerable advice about the third dose.
Develop a sense of humor. After all, you stand taller than the biggest Saigon rat and stink never killed anybody. If the toilet doesn't flush, put the lid down, or make a lid out of something. If you go broke buying tea at the Florida Club, sweat out payday. Be nonchalant: the fact that she has a husband and three siblings is her problem, not yours. Gamble a little bit because you may never earn enough money as a civilian to come back to Vietnam when the war is over, and it is certain that the country will never look the same with your wife along.
In short, swing. By the time your leaders get around to making a direct attack on the SOURCE of Communism, you'll be a good deal like this writer, gray, too fat and barely vigorous enough to pay taxes.
The End
Not quite the end!
At eleven-fourteen of September 28th, seven hours after the last page of this book was written, KABC, Channel 7 in Los Angeles broadcast an item on the Baxter Ward News. To wit:
The Saigon City Council unanimously passed an ordinance submitted by a Vietnamese woman attorney which legalizes prostitution in that city. It was stated that forty percent of the prostitutes in Saigon are venereally infected and that, under the new ordinance, legal, medical and geographical control will be enforced. The girls will be confined to certain entertainment centers. Privileged Viet soldiers will be given passes to these brothels. Other Viet soldiers will pay sixty cents (approximately 70 piasters or dongs). Foreign military personnel will be charged two dollars and twenty-five cents (approximately 265 piasters).
Say, three bucks-with tip!
This news will be received with varying reactions.
By Saigon's "White Mice" with unrestrained glee because none of the political operations of a local government offers such unrestrained opportunities for personal corruption as the complexities of legalized prostitution!
By the Saigon soldier, with hilarious disbelief that the devious Viet could make so logical and open a move as posting a price for vice!
By the NAACP here at home, with shocked disbelief, since the price differential lets fall on white troops the weight of its discrimination (a condition widely-publicized as the exclusive burden of the Negro!).
By the Draftee, with chilling disbelief at this concrete expression of how much the Vietnamese appreciate his presence ... and the combat hazards he must face...
O Tempora, O Mores ... to each, his own! This IS the End.
