Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (rm book recommendations .TXT) 📕

Vietnamese living in Southern California see it as an opportunity to come home. “People who left want to come back and die here. They’re miserable in the United States. They can’t contribute anything to the family, they can’t understand their grand-children, they miss the life here.”

With our chopsticks we excavated chunks of fish, added mint and cucumber, wrapped the combination in lettuce, dipped it in vinegar sauce, and ate. Lunch for three, beer included, cost $13.

The seafood at this meal was the best I would eat in Saigon. Another search, for the finest Chinese food, turned out to be more difficult. At the well-regarded Phuong Hong, I immediately became discouraged by the menu, which included specialties such as sea ginseng on deer veins and the highly euphonious fried frogs in foil. (Any traveler desirous of epicurean extremes is advised to seek out restaurant Vinh Loi, where a signboard outside promises great taste. . . great variety. . . great service. special dishes: cobra. turtle. bat. everyone welcome!) While I was dispiritedly picking away at my Phuong Hong entree, fried rice with an egg on top, two young girls at a birthday celebration one table away started giggling uncontrollably. I believe they were wildly amused by my ineptness with chopsticks.

Well, this burned me up, so I did what any former American fighting man would do under the circumstances: I stuck a chopstick up each nostril. This incited such hilarity that I knew my presence would be missed at future gatherings of the family for years to come. My friend Ron and I were each given a slice of cake, included in a majority of birthday photos, and invited to dinner the following night.

That’s how we came to be at Ha Ky, located on a block of Duong Ta Uyen Street lined with stands selling whole roasted chickens and pigs. The restaurant is tiny and un–air-conditioned, with four big round tables in the front room. Appropriately, the chicken was superb, easily the 9 0

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best I tasted in Saigon, and so were the large fried crabs, the kind that demand endless cracking to expose a few bites of incredibly sweet meat.

A few days later we reassembled again at the Yellow Umbrella Cook Shop, a slightly more upscale storefront spot located on Mac Thi Buoi Street in the heart of what passes for Saigon’s nightlife district. On the same street is the Hard Rock Cafe, no resemblance whatsoever to any establishment of the same name in capitalist society, and Apocalypse Now, the best known of the city’s expat bars. It caters to European back-packers and middle-aged Americans in T-shirts. The recorded sixties and seventies rock is played so loud it could drown out an air strike.

Nobody shot at me during the war. I never thought anybody would.

Because I had never fired an M16, the army’s new combat rifle, I selected my own weapons: a .45-caliber pistol that I could use pretty well and an M79 grenade launcher that I had only the remotest idea how to operate. Then again, with a grenade I only had to come close.

One problem with being in my unit was that ammunition wasn’t easily obtained. For administrative purposes we worked under a logis-tical command whose mission was to unload ships. This had advantages, since the soldiers who did the unloading were the very ones who stole the steaks and lobster tails I kept in the freezer compartment of the full-sized refrigerator in my quarters, but these guys had little use for ammunition. The only people likely to pull a gun on them were the captains of the American freighters they were plundering. The way we got most of our ammunition was to trade for it or to steal it.

Since we belonged to the unit that towed ammunition upriver, all that we required was within reach. What I most needed were the 40-mm grenades I enjoyed firing at the trees along the Dong Nai. (Officially, this was known as a reconnaissance-by-fire.) It didn’t make sense to break into a pallet and steal a single box of grenades, because the theft would be noted and investigated. It was better to break into a pallet, take a single box of grenades, and throw the rest into the river. That way nobody would notice a thing. Now you know yet another reason why the Vietnam War cost so much.

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I was reminded of our ammunition-procurement procedures when I browsed the gift shop of the Majestic Hotel and found souvenir cigarette lighters made from 40-mm grenades. Everywhere in Saigon I found war souvenirs for sale. At first glance it seems as though every bit of military equipment abandoned by American forces has been sal-vaged, cleaned, and put on the market. Certainly the legendary profli-gacy of the American soldier would tend to support this conclusion, as would the equally renowned resourcefulness of the Vietnamese people. In reality, almost all the goods are fake.

On my first morning in Saigon, I was walking down Dong Khoi Street, formerly Tu Do Street, in its day the Rodeo Drive of Southeast Asia. I gulped with nostalgia as I passed display cases filled with snap-top Zippo lighters engraved with the disheartening aphorisms of those who fought in Vietnam. “Live by chance . . . Love by choice . . . Kill by profession.” Or: “If I had a farm in Vietnam and a home in hell, I’d sell my farm and go home.” Later I realized they, too, were counterfeit.

The so-called American Market is filled with all manner of ersatz war-surplus material, even helmet liners with yellowing instruction booklets inside. They’re fakes. In all the dozens of booths and shops of the market I saw one item, a canteen, that might have been real. For friendly service and good prices on fake watches, I liked the War Time Souvenir Shop of the War