Saigon from a Bus

In July 1970 I left Vietnam behind and flew to Tokyo, Japan on my first week-long R & R.  We flew out from Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon.  To get to Tan Son Nhut, I had to catch a plane from Firebase Buttons to Bien Hoa Air Base and then take a bus.  This picture of a street in Saigon was taken from the bus.  The street is wet and the sky is dreary looking because it was rainy season in Vietnam.

We had just got off the highway that connected Bien hoa with Saigon.  Along the way, the bus driver and the guard played a game of stealing hats from unsuspecting Vietnamese citizens.  The guard would lean out the door of the bus while the driver pulled up behind a slow moving motor scooter and grab the person's hat!  They obviously had no respect for the Vietnamese people to do such a thing  It is amazing they never killed anyone.  At least I never heard that they did.

On the right, you can see a three-wheeled taxi that was called a Lampro I just learned.  It could hold up to ten passengers.  There was two benches in the back and two seats next to the driver up front.  The Italian motor scooter company Lambretta made them.  I learned that they were finally banned from the streets in 2004 because they were considered unsafe.  Further up the street you can see the back of a three-wheeled bicycle taxi called a Cyclo.  Cyclos are still used in Vietnam.

The sad highlight of the bus ride was not the guard stealing hats.  It was an old women squatting down on the side of the road and relieving herself as we passed by .  I'm sure it was common back then to do that in Saigon but not in my eyes.          

Not a Buddhist Temple

It was late January, 1970 when I took this picture of what I thought was a Buddhist Temple.  I had been in Vietnam for about two weeks at this point.  The Army had me pulling guard at Bien Hoa Air Base at night.  So during the day, there were times when I wandered around the village of Bien Hoa.  It was in Bien Hoa where I ran across this building.

 I was attracted to the strangeness of the architecture and the Vietnamese words over the door.  Cows were roaming close to the building for some reason.  A couple of Vietnamese soldiers in the doorway (it's hard to make them out) were shooing them away.

Recently I scribbled down the Vietnamese words over the door and googled them.  To my surprise, the building was not a Buddhist temple at all.  It was a temple in honor of Confucius.  Confucius brought three essential values to the Vietnamese as part of what is termed, Vietnamese folk religion.  They are respect for ones parents in life and to remember them in death, the care and concern for other human beings and the respect for ritual or the proper way of doing things.  The rituals focus on what is considered the great moments in life: birth, marriage and death.

It is a shame, but this particular building was likely destroyed between 1975 and 1979 when anti-religious fanatics destroyed most of the temples.  Beginning in 1985, the state realized the mistake that was made and began to rebuild.      

Filling Sandbags

I was in Bien Hoa, staying at the VIP Center on a sunny day in April 1970 when I took this snapshot.

There are four, young Vietnamese girls and a young boy in the picture filling sandbags.  Not much of a job but I'm sure the U.S. Army was paying good money to have it done.

Sandbags were a necessity in Vietnam.  As long as there was a sandbag between me and an incoming bullet or piece of shrapnel from a mortar round, I would be reasonably safe.  The idea was that the sand in the bag would catch the bullet or piece of shrapnel and prevent it from wounding or killing.
Sand bags were used in many areas in the rear.  At the VIP center, a wall of them surrounded the barracks where we slept.  Sandbags surrounded the beer hall, the outdoor movie theater, the shitters (bathrooms) and any other building where we spent any time.  On a firebase, sandbags protected the bunkers where we pulled guard and the hooches where we slept.  Of course, we did not always have sandbags to hide behind.  Out in the jungle for example, there were no sandbags.  But where it was possible to make use of them, we did.    

In Vietnam, it wasn't just the Vietnamese that filled sandbags either.  We all did it at some time or other.  It was just another one of those jobs that was unique to Vietnam like burning shit every morning.

By the way, if you look closely, it appears that the young boy is posing while grabbing the breast of the girl next to him.  I noticed it for the first time when I began work on the book.  Maybe he was trying to sell her services to me.  Well, it never went any further than the picture.    

Rubber Tree Plantation

In March 1970 we were out on patrol and walked into an abandoned rubber plantation.  The French must have left it behind during the First Indochina war in the early fifties.  There were no homes or remains of homes out there that I remember.

What did remain was rubber trees laid out in a very orderly rows.  Jungle plants were slowly but surely taking over.  I would bet in twenty years the plantation would be unrecognizable.

All of the trees were bleeding rubber to some extent.  Raw rubber doesn't look like what you might expect.  A sticky, sap-like substance similar to Elmer's Glue bled out through fissures in the bark.  It was so unusual, I gathered some of it into an envelope and send it home to the kids along with a letter.  I described what it was to my Mother and asked that she let the kids take it to school for a show-and-tell.  The raw rubber from those trees was the first souvenir I sent home from Vietnam.  Years later my Mother gave me the letter back with the samples of rubber inside.  I held on to it for a long time.

Recently I donated the letter, the samples of rubber and a number of other souvenirs to the Smithsonian in Washington D.C.  I gave them chu loi leaflets found on the jungle floor, a piece of bamboo from the jungle that I had cut with a machete, a pair of ho chi min racing slicks that were removed from a Vietcong soldier who no longer needed them, parachutes left behind from white phosphorous flares, a jungle shirt, 1st Cavalry magazines, boonie hats, an example of the military money we used in Vietnam, and finally, a copy of my book 21 Months, 24 Days.  They were quite impressed.  I felt that if I didn't donate everything, it would all end up in a trash can when I died.

Maybe that is what the Smithsonian did with it when I stepped out the door.