But encouraged, and finding doors were opening as a result of my new reputation, I resumed my tour of the bases — Long Binh, Bien Hoa, Da Nang — and their backstreets and byways. I even went to visit Oberkamp at Nui Dat and saw the little sandbagged, cinder-block hooch that he called home, now, out on the airport perimeter — but he wouldn’t let me take any photographs of the Australians. ‘The Aussies are mine,’ he said, and he wasn’t joking.
I was in Hong Kong when the Tet Offensive broke out in January 1968. I watched the simultaneous mass assault on some thirty South Vietnam towns and cities as I sat in my room in a hotel — the Royal Neptune — that looked out over Kowloon Bay, seeing the faces of the TV reporters I knew, ducking and wincing, under the roar of incoming fire in Hué, in Khe Sanh, in Saigon itself. They were that close.
I had needed a holiday, a break of some sort, as I’d now been in Vietnam for nearly a year. In the GPW bureau in Hong Kong I could call my family and have a proper conversation — Annie was thinking of doing postgraduate work; Blythe was playing in London pubs in a folk group called Platinum Scrap.
I had a long conversation with Blythe and there was something about the flat tone of her voice that worried me.
‘Is everything all right, darling?’ I said. ‘Boyfriend trouble?’
‘How do you know I’ve got a boyfriend? Did Annie tell you?’
‘Educated guess. Is he nice?’
‘Tall, blond, talented, wicked.’
‘Sounds good to me. Is he nice as well?’
‘Only four adjectives, Ma. You know the rules.’
But she seemed to have brightened up, now she’d told me and we chatted on about her band and the awful pubs they played in.
While I was in Hong Kong I was also able to sort out the financial mechanics of the new success I was enjoying as a result of the prominence of my photographs of young soldiers. I was in almost daily telephonic correspondence with a counter-cultural Californian entrepreneur who wanted to license one of my photos to put on a T-shirt. His name was Moss Fallmaster.
‘I’m thirty, tall, skinny, I have a beard. I’m pretty sure I’m gay.’
‘I don’t quite understand.’
‘Of a homosexual persuasion.’
‘Oh. Good for you. So’s my uncle.’
‘Well, isn’t that wonderful! So, I’m on your side, Amory, I won’t rip you off. If I win, you win. We’ll make a fortune.’ (I never made the fortune that Moss Fallmaster promised me. However, the deal still provides me with a diminishing but still welcome dividend.)
He bought the rights to the photo he was after for $1,000 with a ten per cent royalty for me on every $2 T-shirt he sold. He printed them up with an ambiguous caption that caught the mood of the time: ‘Never Too Young To. .’
The ‘Never Too Young To. .’ photo.
I had vowed never to go back into combat again but, to our general consternation, after the cataclysm of the Tet Offensive seemed to have died down, so the Mini-Tet arrived in May ’68 — and right on our doorstep. You could stand on the roof terrace of the Caravelle in downtown Saigon watching the gunships strafing the streets of Cholon a mile away.
Mary Poundstone, back in Vietnam, fully accredited to the Observer, said it reminded her of Madrid in 1936 when the Falangist forces were dug in right in the heart of the University district. You left your hotel — the Ritz, by preference — and caught a bus to the front line. Meanwhile, here on the roof of the Caravelle in 1968, we sipped our martinis, smoked our cigarettes, and watched the lambent roseate jewels of tracer arc into the evening sky.
I had Truong drive us into Cholon — Mary came with me, it was her insistence — as close as we dared. Truong would take us down narrow side streets, drop us off and we would creep forward to join whatever unit we could find, US or ARVN. I was very nervous but I could see all Mary’s old war fever return, her passion fired again. Tracer, machine guns, mortars, RPGs — she loved it, perversely; her dander was up.
At one stage, a few days ago, we took shelter in a ruined house during an airstrike. The fetid air in the room seemed to physically shudder from the percussive force of the bombs. We huddled in a corner, backs to a wall.
‘Mary,’ I said, ‘what are we doing here? Are we insane? We’re two old ladies.’
‘We’re not old — we’re wise. We’ve lived, we’re experienced, that’s why we should be here. Not like these potheads running around trying to get their million-dollar wounds. That’s not for us. We see things clearly.’
After that I’ve only been up once again. I’m beginning to feel my luck is running out.
I was in a newish bar in Tu Do Street called Marlon ’n’ Mick’s — perhaps to lure in both rock fans and film buffs. It was always dark and only played American soul music, which was why I patronised it. I was becoming an uncritical admirer of Aretha Franklin.
Then John Oberkamp came in with a friend, a lanky Englishman, who was introduced as another photographer called Guy Wells-Healy. They were both stoned, but functioning, looking for ‘poontang’. Wells-Healy found his tart but John Oberkamp was plainly more interested in talking to me, waving away the circling bargirls impatiently. I made him drink a quart of Coca-Cola and we went and found a booth where we, with an undergraduate earnestness, discussed the art form we both practised. I started with my usual broadside — that there were only thirteen types of photograph — but I could see he wasn’t willing to engage.
He took out a pack of Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes — twenty immaculate ready-rolled marijuana joints that retailed for $3.50 on the streets of Saigon — and suggested I try one. I held up my Scotch and water and told him that this was my chosen means of intoxication. But he wheedled away at me so eventually I agreed to join him in his joint.
I did it, not because I wanted to smoke marijuana but, for the first time since Sholto’s death, I was aware of being attracted to a man. How does this happen? I wasn’t looking for it — but it creeps up on you and, if you’re honest with yourself, you can’t ignore it. From the first second of meeting Oberkamp in his Non-Com Hotel I had felt that little frisson of interest in him. There was something lithe and unpredictable about John Oberkamp that I responded to. It might have been his smile, or the way he’d touched my breasts that night (so I knew he was attracted to me). I wanted to get high because I fully intended that to be the excuse I would offer for making love with him, shedding all responsibility. Not my fault, Your Honour, he drugged me. I desired John Oberkamp that night and I didn’t want to pretend that wasn’t the case, didn’t want to do the sensible thing and back off.
So I smoked his cigarette and felt good — but I had been feeling good with the whisky, anyway — maybe I felt better. Who knows? My theory about intoxication is that it all depends on mood and inclination. If you are thus inclined, a sip of Madeira will do the job for you. If you’re not, a bottle of 70-proof bootleg gin won’t work. And of course we had the added ingredient of the old war-zone aphrodisiac. If you stepped outside Marlon ’n’ Mick’s and listened hard you could hear the muffled thump of explosions as the Mini-Tet offensive played itself out in Saigon’s distant suburbs. We were safe in our Tu Do bar but not far away ordnance was being delivered and people were dying. It concentrated the mind on the here and now.