By the time we got to the state plant (shit-smeared punji stick), we were cracking up, pounding the table and howling, laughing so loudly that we were attracting an audience.
***
Precisely at sundown, CWO Ralph Buffet appeared at the Annex, a colony of ants in his pants. Buffet wore dark glasses and palpable fear. The shades made him look like the world’s clumsiest cat burglar.
“This has to be quick. You do promise to keep it under your hat?”
“Scout’s honor.”
“I can get the firing squad,” he whined, unlocking the door.
I tried to cheer him up. “There are worse ways to go. Ambrose Bierce got it at age seventy-one for dipping his wick in the wrong place.”
Buffet muttered unintelligibly, hurried inside, latched the door behind us, and flicked on the lights.
“Holy shit,” I said, gawking.
Every single day in Vietnam I bumped up against the purely weird. But this little field trip took the cake. Walls and ceiling had been torn out to make one big bare room the size of a small gym. Mixed with the mildew was the aroma of a lumberyard. The only finished wall had cockeyed shelving, floor to ceiling. It held stuff we’d carried here to them: paper, punch cards and mail.
Air conditioners were bolted below sections of torn-out flooring and ducted to blow upward. Others were mounted on bare walls. They weren’t plugged in and no holes were cut into outside walls. Cranked up full bore, I’d bet those babies could ice down
Hawaii
so thoroughly that you’d mistake it for
Alaska
. Strewn wiring evoked images of an explosion in a spaghetti factory.
“You know how many piasters and Yanqui dollars we could make selling those a.c. units on the street, Buffet?” I said.
“Don’t waste your breath on me with one of your crooked schemes. Computers run extremely hot, Joe. We’re not professional carpenters and we all have blisters from the work. The wood and the bigger computer components were brought in at night. The heaviest portion of the construction is done, and, as you see, the cooling is installed.”
Computers?
My 1965 knowledge of computers consisted of knowing girls who’d studied to be keypunch operators at business schools. They’d tended not to lay down for you without at least a hint of serious intentions.
“Like those big IBM machines the giant corporations have?” I asked.
“Ours is far more advanced,” Ralph Buffet said proudly.
He swept an arm to a row of upright wooden boxes with their front sides removed. “These cabinets are to be moved into position soon. General Whipple feels that we’re at a security-sensitive stage and should have 803rd people exclusively do the work, so you guys may be brought in for grunt labor.”
“Uh-huh, right. They’ll take us after they take Uncle Ho.”
“We’ll see.” He led us to a row of tables and big funny-looking typewriters.
“Keypunch?”
I asked.
“Correct. We’ve done substantial preliminary work on the blank cards. We’ll be set to go when the hardware’s memory is where it should be. We’ll need much more stationery brought in.”
“Swell,” I said. “Are we your first party-crashers?”
“You are and that’s not as odd as it seems. In spite of how the war is heating up, the 803rd works nine to five. This is smart. Up the street at USMACV HQ, Westmoreland has the troops riding their desks sixty hours a week, whether there’s work to do or not.
“VC infiltrators observing
oil are aware that MACV typing is on schedule. We nobodies, not involved in that, not involved in anything particularly important, are innocuous, not worth any effort. We’re invisible to the enemy.”
I let him take the credit for Ziggy’s insight. “No security is the best security?”
“Plus we’re ignored by MACV. We’re out of the table of organization, out of the chain of command. We aren’t impeded by bureaucracy. We’ll have the freshest data from troops in the countryside, straight from them to us. We can turn on a dime.”
“’The masses have boundless creative power,’” Ziggy said.
“Excuse me?”
“Your boy, Chairman Mao.”
“You’ll never let me go, will you?”
“No comment,” I said.
Ziggy and I inspected the upright crates. CWO Buffet hovered. “Please be careful. The thousands of vacuum tubes in the components are as fragile as eggs.”
The gizmos inside the wooden crates were metal boxes larger than mess hall walk-in coolers. They had rows of buttons and lights and unrecognizable doohickeys and those tape reels the mad scientists have spinning in sci-fi movies. The most advanced gadget across the street was a hand-pull adding machine.
Ziggy squinted at something with a bunch of square pushbuttons on it and said, “This story I read,
Killer Electro-Sirens of Mars’ Moons,
they was dead ringers for this here.”
“We can play cupid, Zig, this baby and them. Set up a blind date.
Unless it’d be incest.”
Ziggy presented a middle digit the size of a bratwurst. “Go do it to yourself, Joey.”
CWO Buffet said, “The computer runs CAN-DO, our program.”
“As in TV
program
?”
“No. Each of these tape drives has enormous memory capacity. Each holds 256K of core memory. That’s 65,536 words, a small novel’s worth if you require text. Can you believe that?”
Jesus of Capri
and
other novels on one of those thingamabob tape drives? That’ll be the day.
“Nope, I can’t believe. Can do can do what?”
“Computer Analytical Numerical Data Operations,” he said.
“In caps with a hyphen.”
“CAN-DO,” I said, feigning a swoon. “Pentagon poetry is so damn lyrical. What
can
CAN-DO do?”
“We have every confidence CAN-DO can and will significantly shorten the war.”
“How?”
Buffet shrugged. “I really don’t know. None of us know. The specifics are classified at the highest level. Our access to incoming mail is compartmentalized and we’ve been repeatedly warned of dire consequences if we even think about comparing notes. We won’t be told until we implement CAN-DO. The general and colonel may know, but they’ve given us no indication that they do. They do screen the mail here before we input one word or digit.”
“Shorten the war, my ass. It can’t shoot
nobody
,” Ziggy advised.
“CAN-DO can do everything but. CAN-DO does the computation drudgery that men perform. It does it considerably faster and does it flawlessly, as well as analyzing and collating data.
“The ship with the remaining tape drives has docked on the
Saigon
River
. They’ll be here momentarily. The computer console, the keypunch terminal, and the magnetic drums, too. The drums hold an incredible six megabytes of random access memory!”
“Super duper,” I said to be polite. The only mega bite I knew of then was Ziggy in a mess hall.
Today, we all know that six megabytes is less than zilch. Today you can buy a five-buck flash drive the size and shape of a stick of gum that’ll hold a thousand times as much. But who’d’ve guessed that was possible in that prehistoric computer era?
“We’ll be in business! Computers have two major elements.
Hardware and software.
The hardware is the Cerebrum 2111X, which we’ll soon assemble. The
software
program is CAN-DO.”
“Hard and soft,” I said. “We got some kind of kinky innuendo going on here?”
“The guys who invented all this, were they pounding their
puds
?”
Ziggy
said.
Without replying to us, Buffet expanded, his computer jabber delving into vacuum-equipped feed arms, card readers, 36-bit integers, main processor logic, and floating point arithmetic. It went beyond all-Greek. It was ancient Greek.
I said, “I’m still not getting it, Buffet. Why a super-powerful and super-secret computing machine right here, deep in the heart of
Saigon
? We’ve got the climate of a sauna and you’d have better security than the ARVN and local fuzz if you hired playground monitors.”
“Speed.
As I’d stated, the capability of turning on a dime.
Reaction time is virtually instantaneous. Instead of mailing the punch cards to the Pentagon and queuing up for time on one of their machines, we can do it on the spot. A lightning-speed modem will transmit our data to the Pentagon at 2400 baud.”
“Okay, sure, I see,” I said, although I didn’t. I don’t think my smart parents and smarter brother would see either. This was Buck Rogers stuff beyond even Ziggy. He knew sci-fi computers inside and out, yeah, but CAN-DO was out of his league.
Once, the Zigster had told me that someday computers will be no larger than a kitchen stove and we’ll all have one at home that can balance our checkbooks. It seemed ridiculous in 1965.
Insane.
“You’ve heard the saying that the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.”
“Sure,” I said, “I learned it in Basic Training.”
“Well, electronic data processing picks up everybody’s bits and pieces. CAN-DO arrays the information in a usable format.” He paused in awe. “CAN-DO is the most sophisticated program in the world. It’ll be running in the most advanced hardware in the world. The Cerebrum 2111X isn’t remotely close to being available to business, industry, and universities.”
“A chance to work on the most-advanced CAN-DO, is that why you joined the army?”
“Yes. I was recruited for this specific project by the Department of Defense.”
I had one problem with this specific project. If CAN-DO did arithmetic faster than a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand smart people, why the hell didn’t the army draft a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand more troops with slide rules who were good at math? GIs worked cheap, didn’t cost squat to maintain, and didn’t belong to a union. Nor did we/they use the huge amounts of juice the Cerebrum 2111X will when fired up. There was no use arguing common sense with a true believer like Buffet, so I didn’t.
Ziggy chimed in with Buffet. “Mariner 4’s flight ain’t possible without computers. The spaceship got one on board. Otherwise it’d get lost in outer space.”
“So it’d have to pull over at an asteroid and ask directions at a gas station, Zig?”
“Lick my dick, Joey. Mariner 4’s central processor and sequencer operate stored time sequence commands via a 38.4 kilohertz synchronization frequency as a time reference. Data’s stored on a tape recorder with a capacity of 5.24 million bits for subsequent transmission. A command subsystem that simultaneously processed twenty-nine direct command words or three quantitative―”
Ralph Buffet gaped at him, an oddball to the oddest oddball.
I sensed what was coming. They’d be yakking indefinitely. I thanked CWO Buffet and said I had to scoot. He didn’t hear me. Ziggy either. He wasn’t finished with Mariner 4’s innards.
When he was done and I was slipping out the door, Buffet told Ziggy he liked science fiction too, rattling off magazines and books he’d read, and various intergalactic heroes.
An oddball digging sci-fi.
Knock me over with a feather.
Outside, I saw a light on in the colonel’s office.
I scrammed.
AT THE restroom of our sumptuous quarters, after letting the water run until it was transparent, I had a washcloth bath. I hoped that made me
olfactorily
(a word?) presentable. I’d clung to Mai’s white lily, having transferred it to an empty Johnny Red bottle on our dresser. I theorized that the Scotch residue might provide nutrition and act as a preservative. It was hopelessly shriveled and bowed, but I added water nonetheless.
Wasting no time, I departed for 421 Hai Ba Trung, canceling any benefit of makeshift bathing. Compared to the Hai Ba Trung tag, our Main Street and Grand Avenue and Sunset Boulevard names were prosaic.
Hai Ba Trung celebrated the Three Sisters Trung. In 40 AD, they led a revolt that sent Chinese conquerors boogying. Then they proclaimed themselves the queens of an independent
Vietnam
. Three years later,
China
counterattacked in overwhelming force. Figuring death before dishonor, the Trung sisters plunged into the
Saigon
River
.
I was on the lookout for a hostess gift, anything but flowers, which would be trite and repetitive. At this post-dinner hour, nothing decent was available except food and drink, and the wares of hustlers hissing at me from doorways. I had to chance it that I, Joseph Josiah Joe IV, was sufficient reward.
The address was a three-story apartment house of patchwork design with a rear courtyard, eight to ten units altogether. It was the sort of place that attracted a combination of middle-class Vietnamese and short-term Americans. My Dragon Lady hadn’t given me her apartment number and I hadn’t thought to ask. As I was beginning to suspect that she’d been jerking my chain, she peeked between third-floor curtains and crooked a finger.
I zoomed up the stairs without touching them. She opened her door and my legs damn near went out from under me. Mai was wearing gold hoop earrings and a metallic red dress. The dress had a tall collar. It was floor length and slit at the sides. She was the cartoon panel from my wallet she’d torn up, with a jasmine fragrance to boot.
I stammered an apology for my tardiness.
“It is fine, Joe. I just cut up pork.”
Had we discussed this as a supper date? I nodded approvingly, confused.
Her tone was semi-obsequious, spoken with a hint of a curtsy. This was neither the flesh-and-blood Dragon Lady I knew nor the exotic she-devil I’d fantasized.
“I really
really
like your dress, Mai.
Really.”
“Thank you, Joe,” she said demurely.
Mai took my hand and gave me a tour of her pad. The main room held a bed, a nightstand, a wardrobe, and a small dining table. A ceiling fan slowly paddled slabs of warm, moist air. An adjoining bath contained a shower and bidet. The latter had me wondering yet again about French hygiene habits. The kitchen was narrow and efficiently laid out, a sink, small fridge and gas range side-by-side. An open porch held an enclosed toilet. It was the European style, featuring an upper tank and a pull chain.
A small bookcase atop her bedside nightstand caught my eye. Some titles were in Vietnamese, some in French, some in English. They were college texts. The English titles: Engineering Drawing, Principles of Trigonometry, Intermediate Surveying, Solid Geometry.
“Impressive,” I said.
“Yours?”
She hesitated.
“My father’s.”
“He was an engineer?”
“It was long time ago, Joe.”
“Where’s your family from?”
“The north.”
“Dien Bien Phu?”
“Why you say that?” she asked, startled.
“No reason.”
“Father dead long time,” she said.
“I’m sorry I’ll never meet him. I know some math.
A little.
I know exponents.”
“Are you hungry? I am,” she said, abruptly ending the subject.
Mai was making a stir-fry, and I insisted on assisting her in chopping vegetables. To a Vietnamese male, kitchen duty was probably emasculating, totally unthinkable. No matter. We were side-by-side, shoulders grazing. The business of food preparation kept conversation banal.
I was all thumbs, fortunate that I didn’t lose one. Some greens I recognized, some not. Mai seemed not to mind that I hacked them into uneven sizes and shapes.
In the early 2000s, in one of the last restaurants at which I was executive chef, and one of the most successful, I introduced The Dragon Lady, a highly popular dinner entrée. The meat and vegetables I remembered from this memorable evening were sliced expertly by my staff, then sautéed rapidly in sesame oil and a high-octane mix of peppers and herbs.
Mai cooked them with the pork in a wok. She served the luscious mix, a steaming rainbow, over a bed of rice. It’d dawned on me far too late to bring a bottle of wine. It wasn’t a normal accompaniment to Vietnamese cuisine, but a nice Western touch that Mai had anticipated, as she went to a cupboard for a bottle of a
California
white with a 1963 date and a PX price stamp.
“I buy dress today,” she said, as I popped the cork. “You like?”
“Oh, yeah.
I like it very, very much,” I said, understating.
“Cartoon lady in your wallet, I want to be pretty as her.”
Be cool, be cool. This is not the Friday afternoon sock hop. I am not in the seventh grade. Think romance. Think suave. Think
Cary
Grant.
“She should be half as pretty as you,” I said as we
clinked
glasses.
A sip by her, a gulp by me.
We ate a quiet dinner and killed the wine, mostly my doing. I got up to take the dishes to the sink. Instead, I bent behind her. I kissed her ear and cheek and lips, first gently, then less gently.
She rose and turned into my arms. My hands slid to perfect buttocks as I kissed her lips, her neck,
her
cheeks. She pushed me back.
“Joe, we leave dish. I go bathroom. You go bed.”
Just like that. I didn’t have to be asked twice. Mai switched off all lights but the
kitchen’s
. It cast intriguing shadows. She brought out another red garment from the wardrobe, this one flimsy and gauzy, and went into the bathroom with it.
I didn’t know if I was disappointed that she was so compliant or whether I was elated. Fast and easy were relative terms, I rationalized as I peeled off my clothes in record time and got under the bedding, a sheet and a lightweight blanket.
This was a war zone, after all. Locals lived in an inflationary economy inflamed by us aliens and our money and our appetites. The wishes of our hosts, these strange little yellow people,
be
damned. A lady did what a lady had to do. But this lady was feeding me and breeding me, and she hadn’t asked for a single piaster.
As Mai ran the water, I lay on my side, up on an elbow, facing the bathroom. Speculation on what she was doing in there had me on the ragged edge of shooting my wad.
I tried to concentrate on the technical books, contemplating vectors and theorems and exponents. If that didn’t control my hair-trigger glands when she returned, I’d conjure myself falling out of an airplane, driving a car over a cliff, chatting with my stepdad, any distraction to settle me down, to spare me sticky mortification.
Complex geometric angles and parachuting sans a chute were not doing the trick. I could focus only on that closed bathroom and what she might be doing in there. I forced my gaze to the wardrobe, an ordinary assemblage of shellacked wood. I noticed that Mai had left a door ajar. There was a blouse hanging in it that was too long for my Dragon Lady.
I slipped out of bed and investigated. The blouse wasn’t a blouse. Nor was it red and filmy and gauzy. It was a familiar shade of green, baby-shit green, better known as olive drab. It had the consistency of cardboard. It was a set of United States Army fatigues, shirt over pants on wire hangers. On one collar was a silver colonel’s eagle, on the other the crossed muskets of the infantry. The name strip above a pocket: LANYARD.
The colonel had requisitioned more from Captain Papersmith than an air conditioner. This is where he’d been earlier tonight. No wonder Papersmith had been tearing Lanyard’s office apart for the Polaroid. He knew perfectly well where the colonel went on his overnight business trips.
I hadn’t
an inkling
what Mai was wearing or not wearing when she came out of the can. I was in bed, in shock, staring at the ceiling fan, thinking that sloppy seconds was the last thing in the world I wanted. She got in beside me and snuggled against rigor mortis.
“Joe, what wrong?”
She knew good and goddamn well what was wrong or she’d have exercised discretion and shut the closet tightly. “Who’s paying the rent here, Mai?”
She reached for me and repeated, “Joe, what wrong?”
Thanks to that wardrobe and its contents, my equipment was as limp as her lily. “Erectile dysfunction” and the myriad therapists who treated it were in the distant future, along with the miracle stiffener pills advertised on NFL games. But whatever you wanna call it, it was a literal anticlimax to what should have been the most glorious evening in my twenty-four years.
“Mai, Who.
Is.
Paying.
The.
Fucking.
Rent?”
My Dragon Lady got my message and got into my face, eyeball to eyeball.
“You are first man I know, Joe?” she counterpunched. “I wait all my life to starve to death waiting for you?”
She had a valid point, I again rationalized. It was my own fault for putting her on a pedestal that extended into the stratosphere. She did have to eat. She could be a housemaid for Americans or a shop clerk and make a lousy $50 US per month, or do what she was doing for big paydays. That she was a “bad” girl should have heightened my desire, not extinguished it. But I was too immature to stop pouting.
Behind the scenes, Terry Lee’s Dragon Lady was no cherry. I had come to that realization when I’d learned what a cherry was. So what was my problem?
Mai straddled me and fumbled.
Same pathetic result.
She fellated me expertly and futilely, another wobble in her pedestal. I should’ve responded instantly to her advanced skills, but I contracted further.
She sighed angrily and sat up, cross-legged, immodestly displaying all. “Okay Joe, I know Dean. I know Jakie. I know many men. You think me virgin who wait for you forever, Joe?
You and Dean and Jakie same
same
.
All American same
same
, American think you fuck me, you own me.”
The “fuck” jolted me, another ludicrous and confused reaction to my idealized Dragon Lady’s behavior. I had to admit that fear was also a major factor in sending my family jewels scrambling for cover. If Colonel “Jakie” Lanyard walked in, the unpleasant surprise would be mine. I continued my pout.
“Okay, Joe. You be baby-san. I thought you like me.”
“I do like you. I like you a whole big bunch,” I said. “Tell me, Mai, where do I fit in? My army rank is way, way below colonel and captain and everybody. I’m twelve grades below nobody.”
Mai was all seriousness, she and her exposed womanhood. She was as unsexy as it got. “Joe, you listen to me. Dean
talk
big shot. He talk computer. He
say
he boss of computer.
Dean afraid to come here.
He
know
Jakie come here. Jakie pay rent. Dean go to sister me, Quyen, where you see me, I see you.”
“Yeah, Quyen.
What’s she all about?”
She glared. “No talk Quyen.”
“Why not?”
“Jakie no talk.
Even when I spank him like he like.
Jakie no talk 803rd and what they do.
But he sometime talk in his sleep.
No understand. He
grind
teeth. He
scare
me when he sleep.”
No comment on Quyen and, aha, the top-secret computer thingamabob at the Annex. It’s what the officers and I were to her. Papersmith and his blabbermouth, what’d he told her?
“Dean doesn’t know as much as he has you thinking he does,” I said.
“Dean, he
drink
and drink. He
pass
out. He
speak
Mildred in sleep. Sometimes wake up in cold sweat.”
Who could blame him? “You really spank Jakie?”
“Spank hard as I can.
He
like
.”
I had blackmail leverage over the colonel if I were foolish enough to give it a whirl. The sick puppy had a .45 on his hip and ached to use it. He’d put an end to my extortion attempt with a lead slug.
“Why are you so curious what the Fighting 803rd does?”
“What you do in Annex, Joe? Tell me.”
I shrugged. “I don’t do anything in the Annex. Ask Dean. Ask Jakie.”
“Dean
start
to talk. Then he
stop
and say nothing.”