"Laningham, I Van - The Working Girls Go By" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laningham Ivan)

The Working Girls Go By
by I. Van Laningham
Copyright © 2001


"...brother Billy's got both guns drawn,
He ain't been right since Vietnam."
--Play it All Night Long, Warren Zevon

Her name was Tuyen, which means angel.
She was a working girl at the Sunset Grill, a run-down bar in a run-down
country in a run-down war, but it was a bar that gave us the illusion of
love and the hope of home. She was breathtakingly lovely, and she lived
in a country that smelled like burning shit.
If you stood in just the right place on top of Nъi Lуn, Big Mountain,
where 369th Signal Battalion HQ was, you could look down on the South
China Sea and on Bгi Sau, Back Beach. You could see the long row of
bars on Back Beach run by Viкtnamese civilians. At the South end of
that row, with a porch extending from the front and around the side, was
the bar that we called the Sunset Grill. I don't think any of us ever
knew what the Viкtnamese called it, and we didn't much care. All we
knew was that it promised escape from the heat that covered the country
like a thick flannel blanket, relief from the Army bullshit and a place
away from the war that we could call our own. We went to drink and get
drunk and watch the working girls go by. In the afternoons, you could
see the girls, walking or riding bikes; in their aу-daм's they looked
like flocks of birds making their way through the tree-lined streets of
French Colonial Cape St. Jacques. You could have mistaken them for
schoolgirls, except that schoolgirls only wore white, and the working
girls wore every color there was. Everywhere you looked in Vung Tau you
saw the ghosts and shadows of an imperial architecture, except on Back
Beach where the buildings were made of stucco and tin and salvaged wood,
furnished in mismatched castoff, with walls papered in centerfolds..
I'm Andi--Andrea--Holmes; in 1970, I was the battalion clerk for the
369th, on top of Big Mountain, and I was a WAC Spec 4. I wasn't
interested in the working girls, or so I told myself. I told myself a
lot, in those days. I was 23, the daughter of missionaries, patriotic
and embarassingly close to being a virgin. I grew up in Indonesia, the
Philippines and Ecuador before my parents returned to Chicago, where my
brothers enlisted. Where I enlisted after Dana died.
Two months incountry had ruined my mouth; after a year and a couple of
months in the Army, I swore and drank as well as all the other GIs. My
mother would have been appalled to hear me; she would have washed out my
mouth with soap, just the way she had when I was little and told her
what I really thought of the dolls she kept trying to make me play with.

In some sense, I was always on duty; like all the women serving in
Viкtnam; it was our unspoken, but mandatory, duty to keep up the troops'
morale. The troops being defined as only men, of course. Our morale