The Man from Saigon. Marti Leimbach
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yes or no. Not even sure whether to hand back the photographs.
After a minute the editor sat back in her chair, folding her arms across her chest and frowning at Susan, who had not shifted from her seat. When I said think carefully before saying yes, I did mean you should say yes. She dug into her handbag for a new pack of Larks, stripped the plastic seal, and offered one to Susan.
I don’t smoke, Susan said.
Start. It’s good for keeping the bugs off you in tropical climes.
It’s not that I don’t want to go—
I wouldn’t have asked you if I didn’t think you wanted to go. Of course you want to go. What I’m telling you is this: you won’t likely get another chance.
Susan tried to look confident, relaxed. She tried to imagine herself in Vietnam. I’m just letting the idea sink in, she said.
The editor attempted a smile, but it came out wrong, the smile was more like a grimace between streams of smoke. The idea is to have a chance to distinguish yourself, she said. The idea is to be somebody.
And so she had arrived early in 1967. By then there was already plenty of every kind of reporter in Vietnam, almost all men, and she doubted more than one or two of those who gathered at bars and restaurants, who stood in line at the cable office or wrapped up their film for shipment, expected her actually to go out into the field. The magazine, too, had imagined she would remain, more or less, within the protection of Saigon, staging occasional day trips to nearby (secure) bases.
But she soon discovered this was not possible, not if she wanted an actual story. She attended the afternoon press conferences, winding her way through the maze of corridors and windowless, low-ceilinged offices at JUSPAO, chatting to the reporters doing the same, but found nothing in the press releases that would translate easily into magazine articles. The military gave battle statistics: body counts, numbers killed in action, wounded in action, killed by air. They talked about the enemy, but rarely about people. They talked about territories, but not homes. They had a particular way of describing the Vietcong’s movements, how they “infested” villages, so that Susan imagined them like the enormous, prodigious cockroaches that roamed freely through cracks in the skirting boards of Saigon buildings, emerging from tiny spaces in plaster where wires flowed, even up through sinkholes. It was part of the jargon—WHAMO, LZ, DMZ, ARVN, PVA, NVA, SOP—that she was learning, that she was trying to learn, and which at first felt as mysterious and incomprehensible as Vietnamese itself. One day during her first week in the country, she made the mistake of drawing attention to herself by asking the lieutenant colonel making the announcement, a man who seemed to dread the afternoon press conference as much as the press who attended (who were said to be divided into two camps: those who did not believe the information, and those who did not care), a question about this terminology. Raising her voice so that it could be heard in the front of the room, she asked the lieutenant colonel to please tell her what “WBLC” meant.
The officer stood on a raised platform in front of a large map on which there were highlighted areas, circled areas, circles within circles, and a great deal of cryptic numbers. He was older than he ought to have been for his rank, somehow stalled at the lieutenant colonel status now for so many years it was certain he would remain there through to his retirement, which was imminent, though he was saddled for the moment with this band of undisciplined correspondents as though with unruly children. His uniform was newly starched, immaculate, with knife-point creases, reminding Susan all at once of something she had forgotten: how her father told the story of how he would examine his own dress uniform with a magnifying glass for wrinkles—this, before state dinners. She wondered if the lieutenant colonel in front did the same, whether he glided the glass across the crisp collar and sleeves, along the pressed seams on which she could not help but bestow a certain feminine admiration. Her own summer dress stuck to her skin, having lost its shape in the humid air. If she’d had to stand next to the lieutenant colonel she would have felt like a servant girl in an inadequate frock, and she was grateful that she was sandwiched, almost obscured, between the men sitting on either side of her.
You want me to explain what a WBLC is? the lieutenant colonel said. He leaned over the edge of the platform in a hawkish manner, his attention directed at her. She immediately regretted the question. She seemed to have ignited something inside the man. The lieutenant colonel had been using a pointing stick made of pale wood to indicate places on the charts and maps that flashed across the screen behind him. Now he slapped the pointer across his palm brusquely so that it reminded her of a policeman’s nightstick. His face seemed devoid of expression but she could tell by the way he set his mouth, as though holding back all manner of unsaid words, that nothing good would come of this conversation, which—she was reminded now—was being held publicly in front of all her colleagues, most of whom she had not yet had the opportunity to meet.
She nodded. The way the lieutenant colonel glared at her had an effect she would not have imagined of herself: her heart pounding, the heat lifting from her like a series of veils, her throat becoming uncomfortable as though she’d swallowed a bug. I’m afraid that is correct, sir, she said, grateful she was sitting down. I’ve never heard of a WBLC.
Miss, if you want to cover a war it is important you have some familiarity with military terms.
In one of her notebooks, one that she hoped would never be seen by the likes of the lieutenant colonel, or anyone gathered in the press room at JUSPAO, was a glossary of military terms which she had committed to memory. That is why I am asking the question, she said. Sir.
He grunted his disapproval, twirling his pointing stick in his hand. For a moment she thought he was going to strike the screen.
WBLC would be waterborne logistics craft, miss. I hope that will help with your education.
There was a smattering of conversation in response to this remark, a twitchy sort of laughter, exchanges whispered between the correspondents, who, Susan imagined, would either be agreeing with the lieutenant colonel that she was severely unprepared for her assignment here in Vietnam, or who were simply relieved it was the female reporter from Illinois being singled out for attack rather than themselves. She felt her face flush. She felt a beading of sweat along the rim of her skull. If her father hadn’t been a full colonel, she would never have dared to ask the next question. If she hadn’t grown up watching such men overindulge in every available vice, seen them drunk, heard their stupid off-color remarks, and the ridiculous manner in which they made every conversation a contest, she would never have said another word. But she’d seen it over and again and she was, after all, the daughter of a full bird. She cleared her throat. I’m sorry, sir, I don’t think I know what a waterborne logistics craft is.
The lieutenant colonel wheeled around, glaring at her, then glanced to the side, shaking his head. It was too much to look at her, so ill-informed, unwise enough to let her ignorance show. It was like seeing a man admit he had no clue, not an inkling, how to do his job, like having some failing fucking New Guy stand in front of him, parroting back the words he himself had instilled in the recruit: No, sir, I do not have any idea how to perform, sir! How to be a useful part of the US Military, sir! It angered him, enraged him. He looked across the audience of assembled press, with their unkempt hair, their fat bellies, their ridiculous safari shirts, sneering, he thought. Totally unaware. He was tired of them, tired of seeing them at the airports and officers’ clubs, ready to pounce on the smallest mistake made by the lowest-ranking of officers, ready to spread yet more tales of woe when the war, as he saw it, was going very well—magnificently, in fact. It was an impressive war if you looked at it properly, which these reporters never seemed to do.
You don’t know—he began, his voice rising with each word.
Someone passed a note to her. It arrived from across the room, hand to hand, over the laps of journalists. She held it in her palm, feeling the moisture of her skin soften its corners. She wished she wasn’t so nervous. It seemed completely unprofessional of her not to assume the same lazy confidence of the others in the room. Sampan, the note read. Sampan = WBLC.
She