Cam Ranh Caribou Squadron Hooch Life “Baby San must have been in her thirties, but it was hard to tell. She was fairly attractive and about five feet tall. However, I never knew of her cavorting with any of the clientele. She was all business. She would wash our clothes, shine our shoes, and clean our hooch in exchange for the meager salary the military paid her and for the presents we brought her from Saigon, usually nuoc mam fish sauce. She walked with that sashaying, turkey-toed sway of peasant women and usually wore black pajamas and the ubiquitous conical straw hat, our own Viet Cong look-alike. I got along with her well, except the time I thought she had lost my socks. I looked everywhere for them and decided she had taken them to the washing machines and lost them or sold them downtown. I told her my socks were missing, with the clear implication she was responsible. Bad move, Lacklen! She ripped open the bottom drawer of my dresser, pulled back a shirt, and there they were, all the allegedly missing socks. I then endured a severe, finger-wagging tongue lashing in Vietnamese that I’m not sure I’d want to have translated, a real school-boy lecture—richly deserved— about bad manners and the improper slander of hooch maids. It took two bottles of nuoc mam to calm her down.” (Excerpt from memoir “Flying the Line, an Air Force Pilot’s Journey.”) Photo by Stan Owens.
Posted on: Sun, 01 Jun 2014 17:59:52 +0000
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