VietNAMBLA

Nobody loves a weird-ass.

That's the lesson of Vietnam, when you boil it all down. All the napalm, choppers, unintelligible macho screaming and ping-pong recede into a garish blur one day and only that truth remains. I learned it the hard way. In Vietnam.

It was a cold January morning in Phu Bai and I was out on patrol with little Marky Jujitz, a four-foot-tall paratrooper from Pine Hive, Arkansas. Jujitz was a spastic, both in personality and in medical reality. He could talk faster than a broke man in a cathouse, and he could juggle cats. Or maybe more correctly he had to juggle cats. If there were cats in the room, or sometimes even in the neighborhood, Marky couldn't sit still until those cats were flying through the air all at once, screaming and pissing on the ceiling. According to the story, Jujitz was barred from every pet store and veterinary hospital back in Pine Hive, they even had his picture up. Marky's great regret about being sent to Vietnam was that he had been two weeks into veterinary school at the time, having finally found a loophole that would allow him to handle cats without raising suspicion. They only gave the students dead cats, but Jujitz didn't care. They were easier to juggle.

I told Jujitz to hang back while I took a Vietnamese leak. Marky watched the road for paparazzi as the tendrils of steam curled and peeled away from my piss stream in the bracing Vietnamese cold. It had to be at least 74 degrees out there.

I guess Jujitz only anticipated paparazzi coming from the North, because he never even looked up the road the other way and was run over by a supply truck while I was out pissing. So there you go, requiem for a weird-ass Arkansas spazz midget.

My one salvation inside the gaping maw of wet, jungle hell was Sing-Li, a beautiful Vietnamese woman I met in Saigon and married right before I got my walking papers. She was the only thing pure and good I took out of that godforsaken hellhole, and only thanks to her did I return with my humanity intact.

Some time after we got back to America, I was embarrassed to discover that my wife was actually a 14-year-old Vietnamese boy. What the fuck kind of country is it where they name a boy Sing? Seemed pretty girly to me, even by Asian standards. That's when I finally understood what they meant by the saying, "Vietnam is Hell."

Now I was married to a 14-year-old foreign boy, and worse, I was starting to get NAMBLA flyers in the mail. Those guys are like magic, it's amazing. I could have used that kind of perceptiveness back in 'Nam.

Things got a little uncomfortable for a while there, until Sing got run over by a supply truck on his way to school one day. Turns out I should have taught him about sidewalks, one of the many differences between Vietnam and America.

It was a cold September morning in Planey, no comfort to be found in the relentless powder blue sky. The cruel realities of Vietnam and life bloomed across my mind as I rolled slowly past Sing's poorly-attended funeral, then peeled out and drove to Arby's.

Nobody loves a weird-ass.


For more of this great story, buy Anderson Jeans'
VietNAMBLA

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