Jimmy Pappas
Saigon Guard Duty — 1970
I taught English as a second
language to South Vietnamese
soldiers before they worked
with American helicopter pilots.
The teachers took turns
walking around the school
looking for bombs and watching
out for assaults on the building.
For one week I walked down
a narrow alley between us
and an apartment complex.
My first day on guard duty
I found a dead man on the ground.
Vietnamese soldiers helped me
carry the body to a vehicle
that took him away.
For some, the street was home.
A few woke up. Others slept.
A pedicab driver in his vehicle
snored with his mouth agape.
Students in traditional uniforms
set off for school. A young man
had little luck trying to catch
a Lambretta bus. He checked
his watch and shook his head.
Addicts were everywhere. An old
man passed a hypodermic needle
filled with a deep purple liquid
to another man. He held the needle
up to me as an offer. Not today,
papa-san. We both laughed.
A Vietnamese civilian told me
it was morphine to kill the pain.
A young boy in a French Catholic
school uniform sat on the front steps
of his family’s apartment playing
with pet cockroaches he kept
in empty match boxes.
Curious to see how he used
his little living toys in a game,
I squatted down and smiled
at him, but that caused him
to pick up his insects, put them
away in their small homes, go
back inside, and leave me
looking at a closed door.
At the end of the alley, young men
gathered in a circle playing cards
for money. A GI squatted among them.
They spoke in loud voices with much
laughter. I wished I could join them.
An old man walked by with hand-
made toys he wanted to sell. He kept
spinning one of them to make
a whistling sound that attracted
children who followed him as if
he were the ice cream man ringing
his bell. He never even turned
around to look at them, just kept
on walking with his head down
like a figure on a Greek urn.