The rainy season came to Vietnam shortly after I arrived and it didn’t
seem like it was ever going to end. The reason that Lin said every Vietnamese
song was about the rain was that it never truly went away. There was the season
when it rained all day and all night and then there was the season where it got
hot as hell every day and only rained around four in the afternoon to cool
things off. I never minded being caught in that rain because it felt so good
and I knew that a half-hour after it stopped I would be completely dry.
The period right after I arrived in Vietnam just seemed to a very damp
and monotonous time. The only sounds permeating through the bleak, gray sky was
the alternating whirring and whacking of huey rotor blades and the constant
slamming of raindrops onto the metal roofs of the barracks.
On one of those rainy days Tony and I rode a bus into Saigon to take some
pictures, play around with the tea girls on Tu Do Street, and just do our
Hemingway thing, which boiled down to getting away from the structure of Long
Binh and into the helter skelter of the city with absolutely no rules—or a lot
of rules that everyone seemed intent on breaking. The object was to interact as
much as possible with the locals so as to feel that the war, and our year in
it, didn’t become just an exercise in keeping our noses clean. When we went to
Saigon we were looking for trouble—not big trouble with a capital T but
maybe mischief with a small m.
