Pham Quyen was the eldest son of four siblings. An older sister had been married off to a man from Quang Ngai, but later she returned home as a widow. The third oldest was a brother, Pham Minh, an extremely introverted and gentle boy who was studying medicine at Hue. The youngest in the family was his sister Lei, now attending the Lycée. Quyen’s mother, having married a prosperous man and led a life without hardship, was an indecisive woman with no willpower. But she had been educated at a missionary school, and at home Quyen had been brought up under a strict Confucian regimen.
Pham Quyen was not naive at heart. But as a university student he had been arrested one day when he was attending a reading connected to the Liberation Front. His friend had gone completely insane after the torturers inserted bamboo needles through his fingernails. Quyen had been released after he swore to cooperate with the Can Lao, the secret police organization run by Diem’s brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu.
His decision had gone morally astray from the beginning. The shame did not leave him until the collapse of Diem’s regime. It was then that he made a firm resolution. Never would he take any responsibility. Neither would he make any choice. He became a nihilist. Rather, he refused to become an “-ist” of any kind. He decided that what he would do is just take money, hard currency. He would keep saving money and then he would sneak out of the country. His destination would be the paradise of the East: Singapore. Whenever he was out on dusty Route 1 performing inspection duties, he always found himself imagining nightlife in Singapore.
Looking into his notebook, Pham Quyen thought how the charts and diagrams he had planned could be embellished. All he had to do was send an order down to company-level staff and the officers there would have it done beautifully within two days. He could have as many copies printed as he liked of the blueprints, the program summaries, the photographs of the foreign communities used as models.
The main problem was how to entice about two hundred thousand peasant farmers to resettle to the three hundred phoenix hamlets. First off, half the funds and materials and grain would be utilized as incentives, and then an enormous amount of agricultural subsidies and fertilizers and medical supplies and. . Pham Quyen realized that from then on he would need to concentrate more than half of his time on the phoenix hamlet program. The general’s enterprise was at the same time his own enterprise. The business of this enterprise was almost infinite: PX requisition matters, military supplies, military conscription, and so on and so on. Pham Quyen had to bring order to all of it.
Footnote:
9 United States Operations Mission
10
The American master sergeant in charge of the canteen was kind enough to bring out a stack of contract papers. There were twenty-eight sheets in all. The payment details were written on the back of each contract, but the documents contained little information helpful to the investigation. Stage names had been used for the singers, and for the dancers all that was recorded was the number in each performing group. It would not be possible to identify Koreans who had joined Thai or Filipino troupes — an agent received payment and distributed wages to the performers. Among the agents, the Hong Kong Group appeared most frequently in the booking records.
Yong Kyu gave up for the time being and asked the canteen sergeant, “How many times has the Korean Army Band performed here?”
The fat American with a tattoo of a rose and dagger on his hairy forearm pretended to be surprised.
“Wait, what’s this about? You said you were investigating black market dealings, so I thought. . in that case I can’t answer.”
“Fine. I’m not here to make problems. They used to be professional musicians as civilians back home. Since they’re underpaid, it’s only natural they do a little moonlighting.”
As Yong Kyu diffused the tension, the sergeant blinked and laughed out loud.
“About four times.”
“Thank you.”
As Yong Kyu started to leave, the sergeant followed him around the table, a bottle of whiskey in hand.
“Come see us again.”
Yong Kyu nonchalantly accepted the bottle. When he got into the car, Toi whistled.
“This is yours.”
“Thanks. You’re good at this.”
“Not really. I got him on a soft spot.”
“At the first meeting? In less than five minutes?”
Yong Kyu just smiled and switched on the wireless transceiver and asked for a number. He was connected to the desk at HQ. After listening to Yong Kyu’s question, a voice asked him to hold on and then read him a report.
“Market at campside, near the navy hospital. Second shop down from the Hue bar. Make inquiries to fifty-eight-year-old Vietnamese merchant by the name of Liao. Eight cartons of C-rations.”
“Got it. Roger, out.”
Yong Kyu looked over to find Toi already turning the Land Rover left in the direction of their destination.
“Goods from that side usually slip across the Thu Bon.”
“If it’s across the river, then wouldn’t it be the locals who are eating the stuff?”
“Conditions have improved, then.”
“They collect taxes in the cities.”
They parked and then walked slowly into the neighborhood near the navy hospital. The makeshift huts and crude shacks looked like the toadstools that sprout from rotting tree stumps. There were souvenir shops selling flags, handcrafts, and cheap embroidered clothes; restaurants, soda stands, and lounges doubling as brothels. The storefront signs were written both in Vietnamese and in English. Some shops were completely covered with signs.
Children were running and playing soccer in the middle of the street. Only at the sound of horns honking would they slowly disperse to let traffic pass. Young streetwalkers loitered about, peering into cars and making their offers in sweet voices.
“Quite an eyeful, this.”
“Mmm, it’s broad daylight now. You’d be shocked if you came back and saw this place at night. And this is only one of many.”
“How many satellite villages are there around the camps?”
“In Da Nang? Six in the city and ten or more on the outskirts and around the bases. But these places have nothing to do with us.”
“Why not?”
“In these places you just do whatever you can to survive. They’re under the jurisdiction of the Vietnamese national police and sometimes the ordinary MPs. That’s the way it is.”
This time Toi led the way. They went into the shop. It was about four hundred square feet, with nothing much inside except for beer and cigarettes displayed in the front window, one old Sanyo refrigerator, a table, and two chairs. The proprietor, dressed in a white shirt and black Vietnamese pants, was busy hunting flies with a fly swatter. They sat down at the table and Toi ordered beers. The owner came back with two cans of beer on a filthy tray. When Toi asked him something in Vietnamese, the shopkeeper’s expression suddenly changed and he poured out a stream of angry words.
“According to him, there’s not a single store that isn’t holding some C-rations. They liked the price, so they set a delivery date and bought up all they could with the military payment certificates they’d saved up. He’d bought about twenty cartons but was caught at the checkpoint by the river because he didn’t have any invoice. An American MP came and confiscated the goods. The Vietnamese police intervened and wrote him a cash receipt for the value of what they confiscated. But there’s nobody who will pay him the interest on so high an amount, he says. I’m not too happy about it, either.”