Night In Vietnam

My plane was leaving at dawn for Singapore, and I planned to sleep in the civil airport. In the dusk, I flagged down a taxi and we bumped out of the last suburbs across a rain-sodden wasteland. I was set down in front of a military enclave that I did not recognize. Behind the barbed wire, helmeted heads muttered and coalesced.

Suddenly, as I hesitated there, I was bathed in floodlights. It was like being caught naked. I imagined myself in American military eyes – a figure in idiotic jacket and disintegrating boots (a civilian in wartime feels unmanned). But under the helmets the faces were all Vietnamese. When I shouted for the civil airport they merely raised the barrier-pole. They couldn't speak English. They waved me on.

I blundered down a malebolge of barbed-wire compounds and exercise grounds, through deepening rings of windowless barracks and ranked jeeps. Occasionally, a lorry or an armoured personnel carrier went grinding past me, and on either side dim constellations of lights were moving back and forth to muffled engines. Whenever I reached a checkpoint, the Vietnamese guards would peer into my face, salute, and lift the barrier. I was assumed to be an American. Nobody halted or questioned me. By now I was deep in the heart of the largest military airbase in Saigon.

I was appalled at this ease of penetration. My intrusion grew more incriminating at every step.

At the next military police barrier, I shouted: 'Are there any Americans here? I want an American!'

A sentry called into the dark, while I waited. A three-quarter moon was tangled in the barbed wire above me. I felt suddenly tired. My rucksack was buckling my shoulders forwards instead of bracing them back. I wanted to sleep somewhere: anywhere.

'Where the hell's the civil airport?'

Then a military police sergeant appeared. He was formidably big for a Vietnamese, and swung a baton. But as he advanced on me he grew more and more deferential. Even in clothes like mine, six feet of lanky Westerner was a bone fide American.

'Sir yes, sir yes,' he mumbled – it was the only English he knew. He gave an order. The pole-bar lifted. The sentry saluted. I marched through in secret despair.

Ten minutes later the concrete barracks and blockhouses fell away, and I found myself on the edge of the military airstrip – an asphalt plain gleaming with rain and faintly reflected lights. It was utterly still. The noise of lorry engines had thinned behind me to a susurration, indistinguishable from the sifting of wind through the stubbled grass. And there in front of me, in moonlit ranks of silver, spread scores of American jet bombers. They gleamed like ghosts on the asphalt sea. It was hard to believe in them. The breeze had died, and there was a sultry, almost liquid weight in the air.

Quarter of a mile across the runway, I saw the beacon of the civil airport. It beckoned with a fitful promise of sleep. It was eleven o'clock. My feet felt numb. Partly because the bombers looked so intangible, so unreal, I started to march across the runway towards the beacon. My boots scraped and rang with a desolate loneliness. I remembered war stories of soldiers too tired to care if they were shot. I understood. Weariness can pass for heroism.

Even the next moments held a dreamlike stupor. I saw a jeep slide over the tarmac and caught the wink of bayonets as its soldiers jumped out. They clattered towards me. I should have raised my hands, but the gesture was too melodramatic, too un-British. Instead I stood stock-still, like a witness at my own execution. They panted up to me.

My voice sounded oddly angry and unpleading: 'I'm looking for the civil airport.'

I'd walked clean across the military one and into its forbidden heart. Who would believe me? But the faces surrounding me were Vietnamese, bewildered. Their rifle-points dropped from my chest to my unshining boots and were then eased behind their shoulders. They muttered together a moment, then saluted ashamedly. The jeep glided away and disappeared.

I made for the airport beacon, racked by sudden, nervous laughter. I indulged a fantasy of myself as a Soviet saboteur with a rucksack full of limpet mines. I could have stuck one to each bomber as I went by. I imagined their detonation in the moonlight, like fat cigars exploding from their silver paper. Then I squirmed through a gap in the perimeter wire and trudged into the terminal.

It was almost empty. I peeled off my rucksack and stretched out across three seats in the shadow of a pillar. I closed my eyes. But something refused me sleep. My body was dog-tired and heavy as rock, but my head seemed detached from it and felt light with sensation. The whole day had been so steeped in unreality that I thought I might levitate.

But the day wasn't over. Voices rasped above me. I opened my eyes to see helmeted heads staring down: military police, Americans.

'You can't stay here,' they said.

'But I'm leaving early in the morning.'

'You can't stay here. Security risk.' But even they concluded I was a soldier. 'Are you British in this war now?'

I felt a quiver of submerged patriotism. Were the British so insignificant that American military police didn't know if we were fighting alongside them? 'Not yet,' I said.

'We'll drive you back into Saigon. Curfew starts at midnight, so get off the streets. They shoot on sight.'