The Vulcan Disaster

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They were still calling it Saigon that day. They wouldn’t for long. Within thirty hours the town would have not only new rulers but a new name — Ho Chi Minh City — and it’d be full of a lot of new things: new troops, new prisoners, new faces directing traffic. And, most noticeable of all, lots of new pairs of black pajamas. The women of the city had started sewing them when we started moving out. One might call the outfit their trousseau. Only they weren’t getting married. They were getting raped. It was still Saigon, after all, and it was a hellhole. I couldn’t wait to get out of it.

Business comes first in my racket, though, and I couldn’t leave until it was done. The wise thing to do, then, was to ignore the Cong guns banging away down the road, the scattered bursts of M-16 fire in the streets, the sounds of panic below the hotel window. Four divisions of enemy troops were reported only eighteen miles down Highway 1. I’d even seen freelance photographers and wire-service stringers bumming a ride to the Embassy, and they were usually the last rats to desert the ship. But me? I had a job to do, and that was that.

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