soldiers who had lived in these horrible camps, one felt even sorrier for the inheritors of all this junk.
The bars, with flyblown signs advertising COLD BEER, MUSIC, GIRLS , were empty and most looked bankrupt, but it was in the late afternoon that I saw the real derelictionof Danang. We drove out to the beach where, fifty feet from the crashing waves, a fairly new bungalow stood. It was a cozy beach house, built for an American general who had recently decamped. Who was this general? No one knew his name. Whose beach house was it now? No one knew that either, but Cobra One ventured, “Probably some ARVN honcho.” On the porch a Vietnamese soldier idled with a carbine, and behind him a table held a collection of bottles: vodka, whisky, ginger ale, soda water, a jug of orange juice, an ice bucket. Laughter, slightly drunken and mirthless, carried from inside the house.
“I think someone’s moved in,” said Cobra One. “Let’s have a look.”
We walked past the sentry and up the stairs. The front door was open, and in the living room two Americans on sofas were tickling two busty Vietnamese girls. It was the absurd made symmetrical—both men were fat, both girls were laughing, and the sofas were side by side. If Conrad’s dark reenactment of colonialism, “Outpost of Progress,” were made into a comedy, it would have looked something like that.
“Hey, we got company!” said one of the men. He banged the wall behind his head with his fist, then sat up and relit his cigar.
While we introduced ourselves, a side door opened from the wall the cigar smoker had punched and a muscular black man hurried out hitching up his trousers. Then a very tiny, bat-like Vietnamese girl appeared from the room. The black said, “Howdy,” and made for the front door.
“We didn’t mean to interrupt your picnic,” said Cobra One, but he showed no inclination to leave. He folded his arms and watched; he was a tall man with a severe gaze.
“You’re not interrupting nothing,” said the man with the cigar, rolling off the sofa.
“This is the head of security,” said the American official who had driven us to the place. He was speaking of the fat man with the cigar.
As if in acknowledgment, the fat man set fire to his cigar once again. Then he said, “Yeah, I’m the head spook around here. You just get here?” He was at that point ofdrunkenness where, acutely conscious of it, he made an effort to hide it. He walked outside, away from the spilled cushions, full ashtrays, supine girls.
“You took the
what
?” asked the CIA man when we told him we had come to Danang from Hué on the train. “You’re lucky you made it! Two weeks ago the VC blew it up.”
“That’s not what the stationmaster in Hué told us,” said Cobra One.
“The stationmaster in Hué doesn’t know whether to scratch his watch or wind his ass,” said the CIA man. “I’m telling you they blew it up. Twelve people killed, I don’t know how many wounded.”
“With a mine?”
“Right. Command-detonated. It was horrible.”
The CIA man, who was head of security for the entire province, was lying, but at the time I had no facts to refute the story with. The stationmaster in Hué had said there hadn’t been a mining incident in months, and this was confirmed by the railway officials in Danang. But the CIA man was anxious to impress us that he had his finger on the country’s pulse, the more so since his girlfriend had joined us and was draped around his neck. The other fat man was in the bungalow, talking in frantic whispers to one of the girls, and the black man was a little distance from the porch, doing chin-ups on a bar spliced between two palms. The CIA man said, “There’s one thing you gotta keep in mind. The VC don’t have any support in the villages—and neither do the government troops. See, that’s why everything’s so quiet.”
The Vietnamese girl pinched his cheek and shouted to her friend at the edge of the beach who was
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