March 1995
Vietnam sticks in my mind as a never-ending circle, the place I learned there is no Santa Claus. I was 7 years old when I learned about St. Nick, and 18 when I learned about prison. Some memories, more than two decades old, are like photos in an album, loosened and scattered by decay and time.
The family pictures from when I was a child are in an old album, hidden in the darkest corner of one of my parents' closet. I've asked them in the last few years to bring them out, but they still seem to be doing their best to forget that time.
My father, Fred Graham Sr., had brought us to Saigon when I was 4, just after the February offensive of 1968, called Tet. He thought it would be safe. He says he didn't know what would followÑLittle TetÑalso called the May offensive.
As I remember one of the pictures, Dad is on the roof of our condominium that looked out over the Saigon River. The day is cold. I know it's cold because I'm dressed from head to toe in warm woolens and a wool cap on my head. I seem to be having a ball riding my little hobby horse.
Dad, a big, robust man, who refused to believe it got cold in Vietnam, wears a V-neck T-shirt and Bermuda shorts, and sits on a chair, a wide grin under his black horn-rimmed glasses, a bottle of beer in his hand. My mother is to the side with my brother, doting on him the way mothers do with their youngest.
What you don't get from the picture is that across the river in which I would soon learn how to water ski, a Navy skyraider is swooping down in an airstrike on a hot Vietcong hamlet.
As the prop plane lifts away and turns, a loud rumbling comes over the city and a large black cloud erupts and rises above the palms on the island, the machine gunfire from the Vietcong suddenly silenced.
"Oooh, Daddy," I said. I thought it simply a great show of fireworks.
We moved from that condominium with the intention of getting a larger place. My parents found a three-story house that had been left by the French. I remember it as a mansion. There are a lot of places and situations in my memory that seem larger than they really were. And others that were much larger than I realized they were.
My mother, a woman of Ecuadorian descent, looks 10 years younger than she is. She attributes her young and beautiful skin to having lived in a tropical climate. A beautiful woman, she has always tried to surround herself with beauty.
It still amazes me how her interests were so contrary to what she was given in terms of her experiences and the experiences of our family. Too bad beautiful things are like lights that draw bugs.
Thugs had begun targeting our house, always striking while we were away. One night after we returned from a restaurant, our Vietnamese amah (maid), met us at the door and bared her forearms. Scratch marks covered them. She said that three men had just stolen Dad's collection of Beatles tapes. In a huff, Dad made a resolution to stay up for the next three nights and wait for them.
His frustration stemmed not only from the many thefts, but also from the uselessness of the "White Mice." White Mice is what we called the police, because all they did was wear white uniforms and give out tickets to Americans, in hopes of landing a bribe. Whenever shooting started, they'd scatter like their namesake.
Dad stayed true to his promise by sitting up all three nights, his eyes watching the entrance; but to his dismay, they never showed. A week after my father's last night of guard duty, while he was taking a shower, he noticed a shadow moving across the bamboo curtain that separated the bathroom from the second-story balcony.
With a war whoop he learned in the Marine Corps during Korea, Dad tore open the blinds. Stumbling over himself, as Dad tried in vain to get a good hold on him, the thief pulled himself up higher and away to the third floor. Dad thought that was the end of him. He didn't know how right he was.
The next morning as mother was preparing breakfast, the amah came running into the kitchen and rushed my mother out back to the carport. Blood, blackened by time, had pooled at the bottom of a drain pipe leading up to the roof.
On the roof, we had an old brick chimney, barely supported by wires. While Mom and the amah sopped up the blood with a mop, Dad pieced together what had happened. He told the White Mice that the thief had probably run across the roof, and in the dark and confusion, had tripped on the wires and brought the chimney down on his skull.
My parents tried to shield us from that event by keeping my brother and me in our rooms until the blood stains were bleached. Though the physical evidence was gone, they were not able to keep us from knowing. They just kept us from knowing why.
Many of my memories of being with my father during my youth are tainted by pain. That was because he was gone most of the time.
In Saigon, he worked for the American Trading Company, one of the many companies that folded after the war. International trade in electronics was his business. Part of his job for AMTRACO was to instruct Army communications specialists and go out with them when they set up these large radios in the jungle. The job took him away from the family quite a bit. So when it came to communications at home, the lines seemed cut down.
Dad always had gifts for my brother and me when he returned. He made good money when we lived in Southeast Asia, and the U.S. dollar went far back then. I remember him surrounded by gifts, whether it was my birthday, mom's birthday, my brother's birthday or any excuse for a gift, any type of celebration.
When I remember the war in Vietnam, I remember the white and red of hospitals. I was 7 when my parents took me to Tan Son Nhut U.S. Army hospital. My tonsils had to be removed.
"You'll have all the ice cream you want," my father said as he left me and my comic books alone in the hospital room. Though scared, it being my first night away from them, I smiled naively as they left.
In the morning, a blond nurse, dressed in olive, like the female characters in the sitcom M*A*S*H, rushed in and asked to me roll over and bare my bottom. I cried in shock at learning that a woman as beautiful as she could inflict so much pain with a needle prick as she said, "It doesn't hurt."
Drowsy soon after, I felt myself lifted onto a gurney and was wheeled out of my room down a long hall, that except for a roof and columns, was open to the air. I was maneuvered around the gurney of another. I looked into the face of a black soldier, who even in his own sedateness looked at me as though I were in his hallucination. As he passed me, just before my eyes closed, I saw his bandaged stump, stained by his own blood.
After the operation, as I came to, my throat hurt and I heard Vietnamese being spoken. Visions of blood, amputations, mothers holding their wounded babies filled my eyes. Ignoring the pain in my throat, I screamed, "No!" and pleaded for a nurse to take me away from this communal recovery room.
That was the last time I thought the view from the top of our condominium had been simply a great fireworks display.
Tan Son Nhut was also where Americans gathered to celebrate Christmas. I wasn't too keen on returning to the base that year. Christmas was held in an Air Force hangar.
Presents and food covered a long table that stretched the length of the hangar. Mom, dressed in an elegant ao-dai, her long brown hair up in a beehive, cradled my brother in her arm and led me by her free hand.
She chatted with friends from the Club Nautique, a water-ski club left by the French, and then after leaving my brother with her friend, led me to Santa Claus. For a moment, I wondered where Dad wasÑhe had driven us to the base. But then I remembered he was hardly ever there.
"What do you want for Christmas?" Santa Claus asked me, as my mother lifted me onto his lap.
As I told him, I suddenly realized that Santa Claus had the same kind of horn-rimmed glasses my father did. Stunned by the realization that Santa Claus was really just my father in a red suit and fake beard, I sat quietly and confused.
Two years later, after my father's business moved us to Singapore, I had a friend who still believed in Santa Claus. The idea surprised me, and then I became jealous. I, too, still desperately wanted to believe in Santa Claus.
Eleven years later, in 1983, I was again in Saigon. I was 18 and had returned to Vietnam as the photojournalist covering an Indiana Jones-style archaeological raid. The result of that failed treasure hunt was my imprisonment on trumped-up charges of espionage.
During the first two weeks of my imprisonment, the Vietnamese wrongly accused me of being a member of the CIA, and said if I didn't admit to being a spy, I would be taken out and shot.
At the end of those two weeks, they blindfolded me, and put me up against a wall. I should have realized immediately why the interrogator gave the command to fire in English, but all my attention was on freeing myself from the tight bindings around my elbows.
Shaken by the command and the firing pin of the executioner's weapon striking an empty chamber, I crumpled to the ground. The next day I was taken to Saigon and spent 11 months being bounced from one prison to another, punctuated by a mock trial held in a theater whose posters advertised melodramatic Soviet movies.
My release took 11 months to occur because the United States had no embassy in Vietnam, and Vietnam tried to use my capture as a tool to open better communications. Previously, according to a contact at the Pentagon's POW/MIA Division, who remains nameless because of the sensitivity of the situation and his position, Vietnam used the bones of dead American servicemen to influence American policy by releasing them at opportune moments.
And, even though President Clinton lifted the trade embargo, the United States has yet to have an embassy in Vietnam. So, according to the State Department's Consular Information Sheet, dated March 21, 1994, "the United States government is unable to provide normal consular protective services to U.S. citizens."
It's said that a person's life flashes before his eyes when he's about to die. While I waited for the snail's pace interaction between my country and Vietnam that culminated in a ransom of $10,000 which my father raised to pay the Vietnamese, I spent seven of those months in isolation looking at my life flash by after I crumpled to the ground during the mock execution.
The psychologist who debriefed me upon my return to California said that it was the first experience in Vietnam that was most traumatic, and that my imprisonment was the best experience I could have had.
I had again spent Christmas in Vietnam and remembered Santa Claus and how Dad, because he was big and round, had played Santa Claus all four years we lived there. But, I never realized he was Santa Claus until the end.