Foreword
Hai starts his life as Cat and ends up as the Tiger of the novel's title. In between, he does what he can to survive the two brutal wars that ravaged Indochina and then Viet Nam for twenty nine years, from 1946 to 1975. Haunted by his mother's tuberculosis, his thirty-six year curse, his lack of education and the hopelessness of their circumstances, he never gives up and fights back by adapting as best he can in a holocaust that claimed some three million lives. Like the proverbial cat with nine lives, he re-invents himself under the French, Viet Minh and Japanese regimes time and again to finally emerge as a tiger in the South Vietnamese Republic, whose gallant alliance with America ended in 1975. Not one to give up, the Tiger moves to Washington to continue the fight...  

Excerpt from Part 1: Chapter 2: Cat
(Back to top)

As a boy, things began to make sense in 1924, the Year of the Snake, when my mother and I were living as vagrants under a filthy railway bridge near the central station in Ha Noi. Peasants like us didn’t bother much with the French calendar in those days but I knew I had been born in the Year of the Tiger, so I must have been ten, more or less. Blessed with a good memory, which I had probably inherited from my father, my recollections from the bridge days are quite clear. Everything before that time came from what my mother told me as we lay in each other’s arms under a patched up mosquito net under the overhang of the bridge, unable to fall asleep because of our empty stomachs.

   My mother’s given name was Que, which means cinnamon in English. My birth name was Meo, which means cat. Later in life, my mother picked Hai for my adult name, meaning ocean, and during the American war in Viet Nam I became known as the Tiger General. 

   My mother became pregnant at sixteen and her immediate reaction was shame. She wanted to make her stomach small again before the neighbors noticed but she didn’t know how. Her mother had taken to drinking and making scenes in public since her father had left them, and was nicknamed the Drunken Lady in the village. Her many uncles and aunties in the village, some really related to her mother and others not so, had soon stopped being supportive and Cinnamon didn’t dare approach them. To make things worse, it had been her mother who had arranged with Miss Fatty for Cinnamon to be smuggled into the Trinh manor to service The Young Mandarin. That had been one year earlier. Now, the stomach.

   Our immediate neighbor, the Skinny Lady, sold vegetables in the village market and doubled as a midwife when necessary. I came out a boy, as she had predicted, and I was normal in size, well formed and very light skinned. “Looks like a boy from a rich family,” she commented, and my grandmother, sober for the occasion, swelled with pride, nodding her head with silent conviction as thoughts of revenge ran through her head. Things would certainly change from now on, she told herself. They were going to pay for calling her names and looking down on her. They would see what they would see, she promised herself.

   The old midwife suggested that I be called Cat until I was five. “He’s like a little kitten but his eyes are already open, and they are very large,” she said. My mother, who was barely seventeen at the time, nodded in silence. She had vaguely thought about giving me the Young Mandarin’s name, Bach, denoting purity, to prepare me for life in the manor where she would be installed. But now, on the cai phan where the family slept, the preposterousness of such a name appeared in all its clarity. To her, Cat sounded all right. Her brothers had been named Wart Face and Frog at birth, and she herself had been called Pimples till she was six.

Excerpt from Part 1: Chapter 15: The Railway Gang
(Back to top)

All of the things that had happened to my mother in her short life came out in the long evenings as we sat next to each other under our mosquito net. To help us forget our hunger, she would talk for hours, about everything and about nothing. I asked a lot of questions and gave my opinion on everything. She liked that, and I could see how proud she was that I could talk along like an adult.

   “You’re like your father, son,” she would say, her eyes brightening in the darkness. “He talked so well and so do you.”

   I could see that whatever my father had done to her, he was very much in her mind all the time. Sooner or later, whatever the subject we started out with, my mother would bring my father up, usually in connection with me, the way I looked, talked or acted. Did she still love him or did she hate him, I asked myself more than once. Did she want me to take revenge on him for her? One night she said this, the next she said that, all contradictory. I felt we should both hate my father but I wasn’t sure and I waited for a firm indication of what she expected me to do.

   After a year or so of living under the bridge on one meal a day, I had begun to accept that Vietnamese from all walks of life despised and disliked poor people like us as much as the French did. Knowing we would not get anything out of them, we would hurl the worst swearwords we knew at them and run away before they could lay their hands on us. When I stopped to catch my breath, shame and anger washed over me for running away and I would promise myself that one day I would become somebody who commanded attention and respect. I wasn’t a nobody, I told myself. We were not dirt, we were people, whatever they thought. But I was beginning to realize that my mother, even though she was not cursed by bad stars like me, would not be able to become somebody unless I carried her with me. Not only was she sick but she was also uneducated. I would have to climb up the social ladder for both of us. I was willing to do this, but how? I didn’t exist, I was always hidden under some name or other, living in the shadows as if I were ashamed of my real name. Even if I were clean and well dressed, people who looked wouldn’t see the real me. One night I woke up in a cold sweat. I had had a dream in which I wasn’t wanted by the Young Master because I was poor, by Ma Mère Supérieure because I couldn’t remember my catechism, by Monsieur Saintenoix because I wasn’t French, and by the vagrants under the bridge because I behaved like a white man, a tay. I hadn’t come from anywhere, so I couldn’t join any group, yet when I insisted on joining, they wouldn’t let me in because I had always come from the wrong place. This nightmare of not belonging and not being able to join any group came back night after night until I accepted the fact that I wasn’t like everybody else and it just went away. It was as if I had outgrown it, or had found new problems to deal with.   

   I was eventually taught to be the second man in a string of three pocket pickers. The first boy was the real star of the show, and the third had to have stamina. The snatching or lifting was always done at a street corner. Boy number one, moving north, brushed against the victim and lifted the wallet or purse or coins, instantly handing them to boy number two, me, who was moving south. Within seconds, I immediately passed the takings to a third boy who ran down an alley to the west or east. It was impossible to figure out which boy had the goods on him.

   There was one girl under the bridge I noticed from the start, a Eurasian girl with a harelip named Hélène. An orphan a couple of years older than me, she was strongly built, with a fair skin. She looked like a French girl and had hazel eyes. She dressed like a boy, cut her curly brown hair short and would have been good looking if it were not for her deformity, which made her look stupid. This impression at first sight was reinforced by her voice, which she deliberately made frog-like when she was begging. Everyone referred to her as “rabbit mouth”, and her nickname was Rabbit.

   One night a bunch of drunken rickshaw coolies entered the area under the bridge to rape the women who slept there. These men, belonging to the lowest level of the urban working classes, pulled rickshaws for a living. Wearing singlets and shorts, they ran barefooted all day between the shanks of the rickshaw, their leathery lungs filling with dust and their skin burning to a crisp in the sun. Getting drunk and fighting among themselves was one of the few pleasures in their short and brutal lives. Looking for free sex was another.

    One coolie fell through our mosquito net onto my mother, knocking me aside. Before I could react, the man, reeking with alcohol, had ripped my mother’s pantaloons off her and was trying to mount her from behind. With one fist, he was pounding her on the back of her head and she had gone limp. I hit the man on the back with my fists and tried to wrestle him off my mother, but this was an adult, not one of the flyweights I was used to fighting. The rapist backhanded me in the face, and I saw stars and tasted blood in my mouth. Then I heard a sickening crunching sound and the man went limp. I looked up and saw Hélène with an iron bar in her hand. In the kaleidoscope of lights that flashed around in the Stygian darkness under the bridge, I saw she was laughing. With her mouth wide open, her harelip made her look like the devil, but her teeth where white and shiny.

   “Let’s drown him,” she said. I noticed with surprise her voice was perfectly normal, even pleasant to the ear. While the fighting was going on, we grabbed the man by the legs and dragged him off my mother, over whom I threw a blanket before helping Hélène haul the drunk to the smelly canal a few meters from our cubbyhole. Once there, I looked at her, not knowing what to do.

   “Push him in,” she said in a clear, melodious voice, not at all the foghorn voice she adopted for begging.

   “Is he dead?” I asked, hesitating. Why was I asking this stupid question? Why was I frozen with fear? She looked at me with surprise, then reached over, iron rod in hand, and thumped the man’s head a second time, really hard. The skull caved in completely.

   “He is now,” she said with a short laugh.

   We pushed him in and the body slowly sank into the deep, stinking ooze. A few thick bubbles appeared which burst with audible plops. Behind us, the fighting was beginning to end, although the police had not responded to the calls for help. It was late at night, and they had better things to do than to get involved in street fights between rickshaw coolies and vagrants living under a bridge. I suddenly remembered my mother.

   “Thanks,” I muttered. “I’m Minh,” putting out my hand.

   “I know you,” she said, shaking my hand. She had a firm grip. “You’re the Nut Kicker. I’m Hélène. They call me Rabbit, but I’m more like a tigress.”

   At the time, it didn’t register, but many decades later, when I was known as the Tiger General, I often had the occasion of remembering what my tigress had done that night. The tigress had bitten just once, and it was all over for him.

Excerpt from Part 2: Chapter 27: The Cadres
(Back to top)

Later that night, I followed Phong through the velvety night to the edge of the suburbs, where huge squatter colonies lived. There was no running water or electricity, but rubbish dumps were everywhere. Groups of surly men, some drunk, stood around smoking. Haggard-looking women screamed and fought over scraps from the dumps while dull-eyed children, dead to the world, slept in dingy shacks that were washed away after each monsoon rain. Mangy dogs chased after huge rats, tearing holes in the flimsy partitions that separated the clapboard hovels. We picked our way down soft muddy lanes lined with putrefying garbage. After a while, we arrived at a small hut. He whistled softly and I heard the latch on the door being pulled. A small kerosene lamp burned inside, around which two men sat smoking. The third man had opened the door. We entered the hut and sat down on a reed mat on the beaten floor, cross-legged, while the smelly lamp sputtered steadily in the center of the circle.

   One of the men asked me what I had been doing these last few years. From the tone of his voice it was clear that he was the senior man in the room, and that Phong deferred to him. A bony face, thinning hair, deep set eyes, thick lips and shiny black teeth, a real peasant and a brutal one, born with hatred written on his face. I repeated the story I had given Buffalo Head a couple of years earlier, since I was sure that this was what Phong already knew about me. When I finished, the four men looked at each other, expressionlessly. The leading cadre, whose name was Quach, turned towards me.

   “Young Tam,” he said evenly, “I take note of the fact that you speak French. Tell me how you came to learn that language.”

   Clearing my throat, I swallowed hard and repeated the background story I had given the Buffalo Gang leader. My mother had worked for a Frenchman when I was still young and I had picked it up from playing with the Frenchman’s children. I couldn’t remember the name of the Frenchman, nor the address, because that was long ago.

   “But how did you become fluent in speaking and writing French? Comrade Phong says you were able to read French documents.”

   “My mother then worked for another Frenchman, a military, and he sent me to the army school inside the camp.”

   “Your mother seems to like working for Frenchmen. Was this military man fucking your mother?” Quach asked. He made an obscene gesture, poking his left index into his right fist, cupped to denote a vagina.

   “I don’t know,” I answered, blushing instantly. Anger flared inside me at the man’s coarseness but I knew I was in the presence of dangerous men and had to stay calm.

   “He treated me like a father and wanted me to be able to read and write French.”

   “Was he fucking you?” one of the men asked, breaking into laughter. Quach looked at him and he fell silent. Obviously, there was a pecking order in this group.

   “Was this Frenchman a policeman?”

   “No, just a soldier. A corporal, I think. I’m not sure.”

   There followed a long series of questions about the name and age and facial characteristics of the military employer, the exact location of his barracks and why my mother had left him. As the pace of the questioning picked up, I began to sweat seriously. The smell of the kerosene lamps gave me a headache and I was beginning to regret having made contact with Phong. 

   Suddenly, I felt my mother moving inside me. She was looking at the door and visions of guns flashed by my eyes. The number nine appeared.

   “There are soldiers outside,” I said quickly, interrupting Quach.

   For a split second the resistance cadres remained frozen, only their eyes darting about. Then they dived head first through a hole that had been cut out of the mud wall nearest them. This small opening, which I hadn’t noticed until then, had been covered with brown rice sacks and looked like a part of the wall. I followed without hesitation and we scuttled like large rats down into a ditch just outside the hut, climbing up onto a wet earth dike and disappearing behind a small brick factory. Behind us a double-barreled shotgun blast shattered the flimsy wooden door and soldiers burst into the smoky room, guns firing wildly.

   With Quach leading the way, we walked single file down one lane and turned into another and reappeared near a waterway. They knew every inch of the neighborhood. We slipped down the muddy bank, Quach untied a small boat, we all climbed in and paddled our way down the river estuary.  

   Finally, Quach spoke.

   “Duc,” he said, with finality.

   The other two men nodded grimly in silent agreement. 

   “Why?” Phong asked.

   “He took their money,” said Quach, again in a voice that invited no comments. “We should have rubbed him out last month when we had the chance.”

   Everyone nodded except me. A long silence followed, broken only by the soft sounds of our paddling. I wondered where Duc was and what would happen to him when Quach and his men caught up with him. I remembered Buffalo Head, Chanh the Hammer and Tong man and the body parts that littered Ha Noi soon after the cancelled heist. Would another lucky dog get Duc’s liver?

   Quach spoke again, and his voice a hint of friendliness in it.

   “Young Tam, you have very good ears. The Party can use a man like you.” The boat glided along silently in the moonlight. He turned to Phong.

   “French speaking recruits are always useful, but he will have to be sent to base camp up for training first. You vouch for him, I’ll second your vote. The best place to use him is at the Fort, since he knows it already. Make sure no one recognizes him.”

Excerpt from Part 2: Chapter 40: The Japanese Occupation
(Back to top)

The Americans had been shipping supplies through Hai Phong port to Chiang Kai Shek’s troops in Yunnan province, and the Japanese Imperial Army High Command in southern China asked the Vichy government to allow Japanese troops to cross into north Viet Nam to put a stop to this. The dithering over this request by a regime supposedly allied to Japan’s ally, Germany, and therefore now also Japan’s ally, infuriated Tokyo and on September 22, 1940, Japanese troops from China attacked a number of French forts on the Chinese border, killing eight hundred French troops. Two days later Japanese aircraft bombed Hai Phong port and Japanese ships landed troops which marched on Ha Noi. The Pétain government in Paris capitulated without any further ado and Japan took over control of northern Indochina. Within the week, high-ranking Japanese military intelligence officers from the Kempetai had arrived in the northern capital to supervise the takeover of French military installations, including la Citadelle.

   One morning in late 1941, Captain Godot summoned me, now Lieutenant Hai, to his office. The Vichy government had just agreed to the second back down and Japanese were now to take direct control of south Viet Nam as well. He had been advised to prepare to receive Colonel Tomohiko and his staff the following day, to “coordinate the management of intelligence affairs from that time onward”. The memo was signed by the Governor General, The Honorable Jean-Pierre Lelouche, and addressed to his superior, Colonel Perret. We stood shoulder to shoulder, leaning over his desk, reading the memo together. Papa then spoke rapidly.

Excerpt from Part 3: Chapter 48: Acclimatization
(Back to top)

   In 1958 I was sent to America to be retrained in police work at the International Police Academy at Georgetown University. Working with a mix of FBI and CIA instructors, I was taught the American approach to counter insurgency, criminal investigations, interrogation and agent handling. A massive culture shock scrambled my brains during the first three months. I had seen Marseilles, Paris and different ports of call during my self-imposed exile from Viet Nam after Dien Bien Phu but none of those held a candle to America. The skyscrapers; the network of highways; the number of cars; a telephone in every room; air-conditioning everywhere, they had to be seen to be believed. Large, self-confident, well fed and well dressed people whose vision was worldwide and who talked business all day long. Then there was instant communication between offices in different cities; the speed with which decisions could be made; the ease with which things could be done. This kaleidoscopic jumble of sights, sounds, smells and startling impressions added to the difficulties I was having in following my classes, which were all in English. There were all sorts of foreign students in my group, such as Turks, Thais and Mexicans, whose grasp of American English was also basic, and we wrestled late into the night with dictionaries to try to be prepared for the next day’s course. Thanks to having learned French, my vocabulary was adequate, because many American military terms were similar to those used by the French army and police, but my grammar was poor and my accent very poor. Day after day, night after night, I struggled with dreary manuals that had been printed for Americans. 

   Towards the end of my stay, I was approached by well-dressed men who introduced themselves as CIA recruiters. They explained that the within the CIO was an office called the Counter Intelligence Bureau, the CIB, and that they were assessing potential recruits.   A number of discussions followed, sometimes in my barracks, sometimes at various private offices, during which we went into the details of what the CIB was supposed to do. One day, out of the blue, the senior man in the group, Jim Donovan, asked me was why President Diem hadn’t yet been able to establish effective control over the southern population, even though he was receiving plenty of American support. This was a loaded question. After thinking it over, I decided to tell them what I thought was the problem, regardless of the consequences.

   “After Geneva Conference,” I said, “Diem fifty-three, Ho sixty-four, both old nationalists, both fight French. North South have same problems. Country bankrupt, many refugees, peasants cannot grow rice, demonstrations in countryside, labor strikes in cities. Ho and Diem from old Viet Nam, have same attitude for masses, big stick small carrots as you say. Russia no interfere with Ho housecleaning, he use big stick, no carrots, he control North within two years. Americans want Diem operate American way, plenty carrot, small stick. Diem has stick but must ask Americans for carrots. If Diem take American guns and money to use his way, he can control South quickly. Human rights, social justice and free press all important, for Vietnamese same for Americans, but must come before or after war, not in middle.” 

   After I had said this, an uncomfortable silence fell on the little group. The voice-activated recording machine came to a silent stop. An unpleasant truth had been spoken, and the audience was groping for a correct reaction. I went on the attack.

   “I ask you questions. If Washington want democrat, why pick Mr Diem? He from old Court family, he feudal. If Washington want popular president, why pick Catholic for Buddhist country? If Washington want reformer, why Mr Diem? He monarchist, he no want change, he want go back Emperor system. If Washington want to pick anybody, why not ask the people first? Washington have plenty money, plenty contacts. If you fly one thousand South Vietnamese family heads to America for one week discussion it cost less than Sai Gon budget for one day.” 

No one made any attempt to answer.

   “Enemy not superman, like in American movie. He not bigger not stronger than us. North masses no understand communist ideology, same like South masses no understand democracy. But communism is good system for making war, for destroying. Make people think of group, not self. Capitalism not good for fighting war, make people think of self, not group. Both sides Vietnamese, same character, same fanatic same fatalist. Can endure great sacrifice for cause. Ho and Diem spend twenty- five years looking for solution for Viet Nam problems. They spend five years fighting Japanese, nine years fighting French. They have big patience. Discipline, self-sacrifice and patience inside Vietnamese blood three thousand years, in North and South. Ho and Diem fearless, willing to sacrifice everything for national cause. The Vietnamese fight many wars already but they only know how to fight Vietnamese way, not American or Russian way.”

   I looked at my audience. Not a smile, not a facial twitch, but four pairs of burning eyes fixed on me. I sensed that they were not hostile and decided to continue. 

   “Finally, one big problem coming. Russia give military support but don’t send Russian soldiers fight in Viet Nam. Russia give financial support but no Russian ruble in Ha Noi. Everybody use Vietnamese dong, everybody live like poor, even communist leaders. That’s correct decision. Too many American soldiers and politicians in South no good.  Too many American businessmen in Sai Gon no good. Too many American dollars in the street destroy society. And if American soldiers kill Vietnamese people like French soldiers, very big problems for my government. This is Asia, and South Vietnamese cannot accept foreigners kill Vietnamese, North or South.”  

   The recruiters sat there flabbergasted. Finally, one of them cleared his throat in an exaggerated manner, and we all stood up and went to the canteen for lunch. They felt they been punched in the stomach. As insiders to the thinking in the White House, they knew that it was just a matter of time before US combat troops would be sent to Viet Nam.

Excerpt from Part 3: Chapter 57: Surprise Attack
(Back to top)  

I met with Jonathan and rapidly briefed him.

   “In Ha Noi, they’re one day ahead of us. Today is their first day of the New Year. Tonight, after midnight, PAVN will launch coordinated attacks on our northern provinces, which they call their 5^th Military Region. They are banking on us confusing the new attacks with the on-going battles at the DMZ and continuing to honor the truce. Tomorrow, on our first day of Tet, they will attack the southern provinces after midnight. Sai Gon will come under ground attack after midnight tomorrow, early Wednesday morning. The bulk of US and ARVN troops have been on leave since yesterday, and won’t be able to react until Thursday at the earliest. The exceptions are generals Weyand and Sy, who are in full agreement with me and have elected to remain on full alert. They’re way outside of the capital, but can mobilize about 10 battalions to counter-attack by mid-day Wednesday. General Loan has some 300 NPD Field Force men deployed inside the city and can call on another 200 troops from ARVN Special Forces. CIB, using Phoi Hop PFF I flew in from Quang Ngai yesterday, can field 500. That makes 1,000 on our side.”

   I paused and looked at my friend. I saw a very worried man.

   “In addition to these troops, we have MAC-V’s 716^th MP Battalion and ARVN”s MP Battalion. With three-quarters of their men on leave, they can field about 300 men each. That’s about 1,600 armed men who can move about the city. We’ll have to take care of about five VC battalions, between 2,000 to 2,500 heavily armed sappers, some of whom have already begun infiltrating the capital. We have five major targets the VC could be interested in, while you have 130 American installations in the greater Sai Gon area.”

   Jonathan blanched at the figures. He didn’t have any doubt about the veracity of the information. I had always been precise as well as correct in my assessment of a situation. The Tet truce now really appeared in all its ghastly stupidity. 

****

As usual every year, for the Lunar New Year, war or no war, Sai Gon had melted into a massive party that would last three days and three nights, starting on the eve of Tet. This year there would be the additional bonus of a three-day truce. In the residential districts, where the rich lived, champagne parties blasted away into the night while well-dressed Vietnamese families and their foreign guests ate delicious canapés, drank expensive Scotch and puffed on Cuban cigars. Dozens of servants milled around. The women wore their best jewelry, and diamond rings flashed under the bright lights of crystal chandeliers as they waved their hands around, talking excitedly. The young be-bopped to the latest tunes, stopping now and again to drink Cokes laced with whiskey, a habit they had picked up from American GI’s.

   In the central shopping districts, on the first day of the Lunar New Year, the national party had already lasted one full day. Never truly representative of Vietnamese society, Sai Gon had always represented the best and the worst of a dynamic port society. Part Chinese, part French, part Vietnamese, part American, it had always been wholly sybaritic. Known as the Paris of the East in French days, it had become the Wild Wild East with the advent of the Americans. Thousands of cars, motorbikes, cyclo-pousses and bicycles jostled with hundreds of thousand of pedestrians, each fighting for vital space along the main arteries of the capital. The noise level was indescribable. Cars horns blared continuously, trying to clear a path for themselves. Everyone was shouting and laughing at the top of his voice. Hundreds of GI bars, open night and day, poured out torrents of pop music at full blast, through open doors and windows. Outside the bars stood bevies of very young bargirls, skimpily dressed, with full makeup on. In the side streets, furtive fixers sold a variety of drugs at very competitive prices and child prostitutes gave blowjobs to clients standing up against the dirty walls, with varying looks of pure bliss on their faces. American GI’s were everywhere, drunk to varying degrees. Some rock-and-rolled with their girls, others drank from bottles they held in their hands. Occasionally, a National Police jeep, filled with armed policemen, siren blaring and roof lights flashing, churned through the dense crowd, followed closely by an American MP jeep with a swivel-mounted machine gun, with long ammunition belts clanking against the dashboard. Their radio units crackled and hissed as the officers spoke to other units nearby. They were heading for a bar fight that had gotten out of hand, or an accident, or maybe a killing. For them, this was a working night. But around them no one cared, and no one made an effort to let them through. From the top of tall buildings, strings of firecrackers that reached the ground blasted away without letup. Every twenty-five small firecrackers, one jumbo exploded with a thunderous sound, making everyone jump with crazy laughter. Just after midnight, it seemed as if the tempo of the festivities was increasing. Huge explosions were heard every now and again, coming from the suburbs, and it seemed that the number of giant jumbo firecrackers was increasing. Tracers began to light the sky, and many of the revelers thought the fireworks show was beginning.

   It took some time before people began to realize that the sharp, flat tat-tat-tats were not firecrackers but AK-47s, a sound that everyone was well acquainted with. And the explosions were not giant firecrackers but Semtex explosives, which went off not unlike bombs and with which the population was also very well acquainted. People began looking at each other, their survival antennas tasting the air. Somewhere, someone switched a radio on. The National Broadcasting Station announcer was in hysterics. “We’re under attack! We’re under attack! We’re under attack!” he kept on shouting, like a broken record played at maximum volume. The crowds began to break up, picking up speed as people realized, through a haze of alcohol and adrenaline, that something was wrong. Panic set in and the crowds began running in every direction, trampling over the very old and the very young. The streets of the capital cleared, as if by magic. The lights of the shopping district remained full on, highlighting the shoes, bags, debris and detritus that now littered the empty boulevards and deserted streets. Abandoned cars, doors wide open, stood grotesquely all over the boulevard, some halfway up on the pavements, where their owners had left them. It was one o’clock in the morning of January 31, 1968, and the attack on Sai Gon had begun.

   By 0230 hrs, in various parts of the battened down city, hesitantly at first, heads appeared from the darkness, from behind low walls and hedges, like hyenas sniffing the air. Squads and then platoons of men, all dressed in black peasant pajamas, with white, yellow or red armbands, appeared from the shadows. They grouped in small bunches, whistles blew and they loped off silently towards specific targets throughout the burning city. All wore the Ho Chi Minh sandals, made out of tire material, and over their shoulders hung bandoleers of ammunition and AK-47 assault rifles. The group leaders wore a yellow headband and ran on ahead of their men. The flat, slap-slap-slapping sounds of their rubber-tire sandals beating in perfect unison on the asphalt could be heard distinctly in the houses they loped by, like bands of wolves

   In the central district, until an hour ago the scene of bacchanalian revelries, a group of guerrillas appeared, silhouetted against a department store. They moved swiftly but silently to the main street, Tu Do, Freedom Street, known by generations of French settlers as Rue Catinat in kinder times when Sai Gon had been the Paris of the East. More men appeared, hand signals could be seen, then a shrill whistle pierced the air. Immediately a large group of armed men formed up. They were for the most part small in size, even boyish-looking. An older guerrilla read something out as they stood in disciplined silence, their eyes on him. Immediately above their heads hung a huge red neon sign that read “The Pink Pussy Bar”. Below the name, the Vietnamese and American flags stood, their poles crossed. The bright neon signs flickered on and off, garishly lighting up the broad, plain faces of the young boys cradling their AK-47s in red and then in blue and then in white. None of them even bothered to look up.

*

Back to top | Back to Homepage