Flight into Folly by Jon Christensen

Author:Jon Christensen [Christensen, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781477232026
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Published: 2012-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

After we had been briefed, and a couple of days before we were to embark on our S and R mission, our platoon was given a twelve hour leave. Some of us decided that it might be a blast to make for the heady climes of Saigon and partake of whatever treats it may have to offer “shave tails” from States side. We were each given a package of a dozen government-issue condoms (just in case we got really busy), a street map, our first pay packet of scrip currency (with the tongue-in-cheek admonition not to spend it all in one place), and sent on our way in the backs of a couple of PTVs.

The ride was monotonously uneventful, though damned rough even on the paved part of the road, which seemed to sport more than its fair share of pot holes. I would more than gladly have traded places with the driver. I felt it should have been my job in any case.

From our tarp-shrouded perches, what we could see of the views on the way certainly weren’t anything to write home about either. By way of vegetation, there were only gnarled, stunted, and seared looking trees whose mostly leafless branches seemed to be lifted in prayer entreating the heavens for some semblance of moisture. There were sparsely spaced tufts of tall, equally seared looking grass whose reason for existence seemed highly questionable.

Over all this hung an almost continuous pall of dust swirled into dancing eddies by the passing traffic, of which there appeared to be a surprising abundance. Even the sky was an uninteresting light dun colour that matched, almost to perfection, the colour of the parched and cracked soil that looked to be staring disconsolately from between the sparse and withered tufts of flora.

As to the native fauna, there were only the odd dead, emaciated and mostly desiccated dogs in varying stages of decomposition lying at the sides of the road. Other apparent animals, all dead but beyond the stage of identification, also lay crumpled along the arid fringes. On that trip, nothing living presented itself at the sides of the road. Perhaps continued existence in that environment might not have been the better option for them.

As we approached the city, we could actually smell it almost ten minutes before we arrived. It was a distinctly strange odour to say the least. It seemed to comprise an odd comingling of the bestial and the natural, as though a breath of the blood, sweat, and excrement of generations rose from the very earth in an exhalation to create the very atmosphere of the place.

So this was the high life centre of South Vietnam!

As we climbed stiffly down from the vehicles, in what I soon realised was the edge of the “red light” district, we were immediately descended upon by a literal multitude of purveyors and vendors of everything imaginable from gaudy baubles and knick-knacks, to food and drink, to drugs of an amazing variety, and to “flesh” ranging in age from about twelve to approximately eighty by the look of them.

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