Nationalist in the Viet Nam Wars by Nguyên Công Luân

Author:Nguyên Công Luân [Luân, Nguyên Công]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Military, History, Vietnam War, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780253005489
Google: Eb-wcbs2fIkC
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2012-02-07T22:24:40+00:00

SÀI GÒN 1966

In 1965 and 1966, American military and civil installations were set up everywhere in the capital city, in addition to others that had been established since 1962. Building contractors and realtors saw a period of booming business. Real estate prices went soaring. Housing rent rose almost every week. Traffic jams were incredible. I spent nearly forty-five minutes making the three-mile drive between my home and my office.

The dollars spent by the large influx of GIs boosted industries that served them even indirectly. On top of the list were nightclubs and snack bars where prostitutes usually operated behind the front hall. Bar girls and other women who officially married the GIs also pumped dollars into the local market.3 In Sài Gòn and cities near U.S. military bases, bars and clubs serving GIs gathered in blocks of certain streets. Rock music, colorful lights, and noise gave these blocks the appearance of being somewhere other than Việt Nam. In nightclubs and bars, people spoke not English, not Vietnamese, but a dialect mix of both languages plus some slang expressions that were coined by both sides.

Consumer goods stolen from the American military post exchange, known as the PX, began flooding cities and towns, available at low prices everywhere from department stores to sidewalk stalls. I knew many Americans who simply bought PX items such as cigarettes, razor blades, shaving lotion, booze, and the like at sidewalk stalls where they paid only half of PX prices. All over South Việt Nam, prices of consumer goods—food and agricultural products in particular—and services rocketed so high that many became unaffordable to my family. In Tết 1966, watermelon was sold at a price five times higher than six months earlier. A medium room was rented to GIs at an average of VN$2,000 to VN$4,000 a month (US$15 to US$30) at a time when my salary (as a first lieutenant with ten years of service and seven years of rank, married with two children) was a humble VN$12,000. Similarly, a clerk typist without English fluency or a janitor working for the Americans was paid at least VN$20,000.

The unstable market worsened the living conditions of government employees and military servicemen and dropped them into a lower social class. Ironically, a police officer next door to me and I had to wait in a long line to buy a few cans of condensed milk at a black market price more than twice that posted on the price list at the grocery store.

I took it for granted that such a situation was an unavoidable side effect of the sharp increase in demand everywhere in the world under similar situations. But many Vietnamese bore a grudge against the Americans, especially when a number of poor women left their husbands and children for a well-paid trade in the red-light districts. Some of these women were just living with the GIs as wives. Such cases were rare, and it happened anywhere in the world under similar conditions, but the GIs were blamed for the trouble.

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