Death in the a Shau Valley by Larry Chambers

Author:Larry Chambers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

Military Payment Certificates (MPCs)

It was early morning, July 15, 1969, and Miller was almost excited. He finally had a seat assignment on a “going home” flight out of Bien Hoa the following Monday, which meant we still had the weekend to get into some trouble. It was also the morning he told us about his big plans.

Kenn Miller had different exit plans than most of us. He wasn’t going to be heading back to the States, intent on joining a peace march, or getting a job with Dad’s company. He was already planning to head for Taiwan. He loved the Taiwanese. He’d been there on one of his R & Rs, and his goal was to attend the University of Taipei. He’d have to go back to the States first, however. At that time, overseas discharges were not allowed. Even so, Miller was anxious to leave Vietnam, and was trying to make his last few days pass as quickly as he could. I knew we’d find some trouble to get into.

That morning at breakfast, I met up with Miller. He was reading Stars and Stripes. “It says here that Saigon has over fifty-six thousand registered prostitutes, and that figure doesn’t include the amateurs.” Miller was a connoisseur of Saigon and felt that the bar girls formed the elite among the prostitutes. They received a percentage from drinks of colored water, called “Saigon Tea.” You would buy it just to enjoy their company and dance together to blaring rock ’n’ roll music. In Vietnam, unlike most bar girls of the time in European GI hangouts, after bar hours, sex was available but cost extra. In Germany at the time, bar girls were available for talk and dancing—and the sharing of high-priced “champagne”—but not usually for sex. That was more easily available from streetwalkers.

The bar girls and their less fortunate sisters who worked the brothels and the streets were pathetic looking. They would flaunt themselves in makeup and clothes they did not know how to wear. Some had their eyelids “westernized” by cosmetic surgery, an operation that had become popular among young upper-class Saigon women and, more recently, throughout Southeast Asia.

I had a hundred dollars in American twenty-dollar bills. Miller told me that on the black market in Saigon, we could exchange them at five-to-one, whereas the PX—the post exchange—would give the equivalent of the face amount. Of course, it was illegal to trade on the black market, and if we got caught, we’d be busted. On the other hand, we decided, “What can they do to us—send us to Vietnam?” We had nothing to lose. The next morning we caught a jeep ride to Saigon.

The refugee slums that lined the roads in and out of town consisted of shacks constructed of scavenged materials. The most distinctive were made of empty beer and soda cans discarded by the camps. The Vietnamese cut the cans open, pounded them flat, and nailed them to strips of wood to make metal sheets for walls. Everyone living there depended on what others discarded.

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