Page 50 of Good Days Bad Days

Greg

Caravelle Hotel

Saigon, Vietnam

The tile floors of the Caravelle Hotel, where nearly a hundred war correspondents are housed in Saigon, is wet from the afternoon humidity. It’s monsoon season and I’ve never felt damp in so many ways.

Reaching my hotel room, I peel off every centimeter of wet clothes until I get down to my socks, which strip away from my waterlogged feet with a sick slurping sound.

My body is worn, and the landscape of my ribs is easy to see through my skin, which is tanned dark brown from the days in the sun.

Yet, lying in my underwear inside the only air-conditioned building in Saigon, I find I can’t complain.

I’ve seen too many living and dying in worse places than this—both soldiers and the Vietnamese who are left homeless, starving, injured, and ragged.

The young soldiers we interview tell us their honest perspective about the war.

Some are here out of patriotic service or proud family military tradition, but many of these men didn’t choose to be here and wish nothing more than to go home.

They are young men like my brother, who had an unlucky birthday drawn and no money or connections to get out of being shipped overseas.

I, like the patriotic soldiers who volunteered for this hellish war because of moral and political beliefs, chose to climb onto that plane out of Minneapolis ten months ago. Martha and I resigned from WQRX on the same day, and Don Hollinger lost his ever-loving shit as we cleaned out our desks.

“When you crash and burn out there, don’t even think about crawling back. You’re dead to me.”

Martha had a few choice words for Don, but I’d already packed away my bitterness after almost unleashing them at the MWBA banquet. It’d been Betty who’d convinced me to keep quiet, who’d reminded me of my pledge to her, but she had no idea how far away I’d need to go to keep those promises.

“What do you mean, Vietnam?” she asked from behind me as I sorted through the standing toolbox in the studio after escaping Hollinger’s tirade, collecting a few screwdrivers and wrenches I’d brought from home.

“I was offered a job with KSTP. They’re a part of a group of some Midwestern stations headed over there. They lost their other camera guy.”

“I thought you hated the war,” Betty said, the sound of her foot tapping increasing my anxiety.

“I do,” I said. “That’s why I’m going—to show people what’s going on over there, to make a difference.”

I tossed a screwdriver into my canvas bag and faced Betty. She stood with her arms crossed over the buttoned bodice of one of her Classy Homemaker dresses, the hand with her engagement ring tucked under the bicep of her right arm. I couldn’t see it, but I still knew it was there.

“It’s not safe,” she said with tears in her eyes, like she was really worried, like I was her sweetheart or her brother rather than a coworker. I was ready to leave WQRX and I was ready to leave Betty, mostly because it hurt far more to stay, but I never thought leaving would make her cry.

“Listen, I’ll be fine,” I said, wiping some grease off my fingers with a rough towel. I wanted to reach out and touch her one last time but stopped, knowing I’d ruin her show-ready look.

“You don’t know that.”

“None of us knows that,” I said, hiking the canvas bag over my arm, thinking of Pop’s heart attack when I was twelve, Ma’s lifeless body three months after finding out about Jim, her grief too great to keep on living.

“True,” she said falteringly. “So, you’ll write?”

“Sure,” I said as though I didn’t care either way, even though the idea of receiving even one letter from her brought me near euphoria. “I’ll write.”

“Good. And I’ll write you back.”

Then, as I was about to leave, she did something I’ve been replaying in my mind ever since.

She dove through the space between us and collided with my torso, her arms encircling me in a crushing, lingering embrace.

When my initial shock wore off, I dropped the bag and wrapped my arms around her.

My God, if she’d asked me to stay while I held her that way, I’d never have been able to say no.

We stood like that for what seemed like forever, her tears soaking the front of my shirt and my lips finding the top of her head.

I inhaled her sweet, powdery scent, forcing it into my memory.

Intoxicated by it all, I kissed her hair once and then twice.

When she leaned back to look at me with tears still wet on her cheeks, I wiped them away with the side of my thumb, running my fingers up into her hair from the back of her neck.

To have her that close, to touch her with such freedom, it was nearly worth all the torture I’d endured.

“Kiss me goodbye,” she whispered.

Usually, I’m a man of inaction, of hesitation, but in that instant, I was all the things I’d always wanted to be.

I dug my fingertips into the flesh at her waist and deeper into the velvety depths of her bobbed hairdo, yanking her into me, pressing my mouth against hers.

There was no tentative start—from the second her mouth met mine, a fire erupted between us.

She shivered under my touch, opening her mouth to take me in, our tongues reaching for each other, her hands wrapped in the fabric of my shirt so desperately my knees went weak.

And as suddenly as it started, it was over.

She broke away mid-embrace, her hand covering her mouth as though she’d been sleepwalking and awoken to find she’d nearly walked off the roof of a tall building.

Without a word, she ran out the studio door, leaving me vibrating with passion and dizzy with confusion.

I didn’t see her again before I flew out.

I donated my mother’s piano to the local school, put all my belongings in storage, and drove to Minneapolis with one suitcase in the back seat.

Martha was the only familiar face at KSTP, but I was only there for a few days before I left with the team.

She stayed behind, as KSTP’s newest news operations manager, also promising to write.

No lingering embraces there. I broke Martha’s rose-colored glasses the night of the banquet, which ended up being a blessing.

Now that she knows how useless I’d be as a boyfriend, we can be friends.

Martha wrote to me right after I left, sending me six double-sided pages about all the new experiences at KSTP, her coworkers, the still uphill battle she faced as a newswoman, and then a whole narrative of how they decided what shades of orange to paint their new set.

The letter was waiting for me in Saigon when I arrived back from my first assignment.

After twenty hours of nonstop travel, we dropped our belongings in the shared hotel rooms and then hopped on a helicopter that took us into a combat zone, where we bunked with the grunts for a week.

I’d been warned by Scott O’Neil, the correspondent I’d been paired with, that the trips into the field had two speeds: boring and deadly.

“Avoid anyone with a radio,” he said when giving me tips on staying alive. “And keep low. You’re so damn tall you’re like a walking target for the VC.”

We didn’t end up seeing much “action,” as they call it, on that first outing, but I did lug around my heavy camera and bag.

I spent the days recording O’Neil interviewing men who wanted to send messages home or say their own two cents about the war and what it was like out there in the “rice paddies.” I didn’t talk much on that first trip.

I had no reason to. I was a facilitator, a means to an end, a silent witness, but that didn’t mean I was unaffected.

When O’Neil and I returned to Saigon, I craved distraction, and finding a stack of mail on my bed was just what I needed.

Besides the letter from Martha, I also had one from Mark, who wrote me about his new Playboy Club key and his repeated attempts at convincing Lucy to let him take her out for dinner.

As a sign-off, he included one very graphic and impressively accurate drawing of breasts.

And I had two letters from Betty.

“I got your address from Mark,” the first line in her letter read, which at this point I’ve reread so much it’s close to falling apart, the folds of the off-white stationery reinforced with Scotch tape.

“He said you’re doing well and I’m sure that’s true, but I thought I should probably find out for myself. ”

The pages smelled of her perfume, and her tight but loopy handwriting looked so feminine that it made my pulse rise, making me feel like some kind of pervert.

The first letter was one full page, front and back.

She detailed how the show had been taken over by an import from EBN, resulting in Martha’s more feminist segments being trimmed down.

She also mentioned that she was writing a book, though she wasn’t doing it alone.

A team had been assembled to help her shape it according to EBN’s views and agenda.

She included a lot of talk about work and even a small paragraph about the weather, but I didn’t care how bland her narrative was.

I was delighted to have something she’d held in her hands and taken the time and effort to send.

The second letter, though, took me by surprise.

In it she told me about a mistake she made on air.

She said it made her remember her tenth-grade music concert, how her voice cracked during a solo.

It was the last concert her mother attended before she went missing.

“For two years I would always think about how I wish I’d sung for my mom one more time before she left so she didn’t walk around living the rest of her life embarrassed by her daughter. ”