Thursday, May 25, 1972
On Tu Do, Just Haircuts - & Don't Order Steak
SAIGON (AP) --Tan Linh, the tailor, bemoans national mobilization and the new wartime morality. It all prevents him from keeping up with his Hong Kong rivals in whipping out a suit in two days."Now take two, three week," wailed Linh, seated crosslegged on the counter of his downtown Saigon shop. "All my cutters and helpers mobilized. Only men with six children under 18 years old or with very old parents now can stay out of army."Linh, who has eight children under 18 and another on the way, considers himself lucky to be in business at all.The girlie bar next door is shuttered and padlocked. The one across the street, called "The Sexy Bar," is trying to make a go of it as an ice cream parlor. The steam bath and massage parlor at the corner suddenly became a magazine and souvenir shop.In proclaiming national mobilization early this month to cope with the North Vietnamese offensive, President Nguyen Van Thieu banned night clubs, girlie bars, steam baths, massage parlors and similar pleasure palaces. They were looked upon as being swingingly out of step with the new seriousness of national purpose.The new wartime morality approved by the National Assembly in the mobilization powers given the president, bans all non-essential travel within the country and out of the country, and puts just about all males over 17 on call for mobilization into the military or at least a form of home guard called the People's Self Defense Forces.Once again Saigon's famous Phu Tho race track has been shut down. A fear around town is that some of its less successful thoroughbreds will begin showing up on the menus of the newly opened restaurants.All Saigon's civil servants, including the garbage collectors, are undergoing two hours of military training a day to help defend the city, particularly their own offices and vehicles, in event of attack. More than 400 national police on duty in the city are practicing how to use a long white tube called a "mobile tank killer," a bazooka-like weapon capable of taking out a tank with a single round in the right place."Anyone planning to come to town with tanks had better have a lot of infantry with them. Those weapons are pretty effective fired from buildings in narrow streets," said Hatcher James, the U.S. adviser to the mayor.Saigon's downtown bars, already hard hit by the U.S. troop withdrawals and scheduled to move across the river to the swampy, deserted ninth precincts by June 1, overnight transformed themselves into restaurants, travel agencies, photo shops and what not.The Golden Hands massage parlor got the message and now offers only manicures and pedicures, relegating the rest of the human anatomy to a Demilitarized Zone for the time being. Other more intimate establishments, known to the men in the ranks as "boom-boom parlors," have become barber shops. There, at least, business should be clipping right along, since Saigon Mayor Do Kien Nhieu called on all local long-haired cowboys to get haircuts "to show their acceptance of sharing with their compatriots the present national hardships."Mayor Nhieu, a tough army colonel and former province chief who has been in office four years, rolled Saigon's curfew back an hour earlier to 10 p.m. and cracked down hard on the bars and nightclubs. His idea was to "let the people know we are at war... Saigon tends to forget that unless there is a rocket attack or fighting in the streets like Tet '68."Veteran war watchers in the capital city have never before seen so complete a crackdown on Saigon's pleasure palaces, but it's still difficult to take the new wartime morality seriously in the roaring presence of the city's chaotic traffic.Saigon with a current population of two million people, including refugees, has an incredible 934,000 registered vehicles, almost one for every other person. The city throbs with a constant whine of more than 600,000 motor bikes. The downtown streets this week were choked with motor bikes parked five-deep on the sidewalks, due to an influx of sightseers for a display of captured North Vietnamese weapons. On ordinary days, they only go three deep.Five years ago somebody with the U.S. aid mission dreamed up the idea of importing motorbikes from Japan to soak up the piasters and prevent inflation. They proceeded to soak up most of the atmosphere and assault the city with noise levels just this side of mass neurosis. The tall tamarind trees sharing Saigon's pleasant streets died from the fumes. Those that held on were cut down to make room for additional traffic lanes.Before it was hit by Communist shot or shell, Saigon, under the heavy hand of U.S. military planners and embassy economists, disintegrated from one of the loveliest cities in the world to one of the ugliest.A greedy consumer goods economy centered around motorbikes, hi-fi sets and air-contioners, (sic) plus black market luxury items stolen from the American PX, frustrated any great municipal passion for the war effort.Saigon today has twice as many motorbikes as it had people when the French left in 1954.Last year President Thieu's government called a halt to importing any more motorbikes. Mayor Nhieu had done an admirable job in cleaning up Saigon's fetid garbage heaps, creating new parks and replanting trees along the downtown streets.The new national emergency, for the moment, has put anti-Americanism out of fashion. Until Vietnamization fares better than it did at Quang Tri, the feeling seems to be it's nice having the Americans around for awhile, even if there is no place for them to spend money downtown."In the field," said on U.S. adviser, "the Viets have almost gotten to the point where they listen to their advisers again."He shook his head, more in sorrow than relief."Maybe that's where it all went wrong. Basically, an adviser is a guy in a bunker on a radio calling in air strikes."At the street corner level, the new wartime morality breeds similar skepticism. The bars turned into restaurants bring to memory the crackdown after Tet '68 on the girlie bars and sex parlors that blossomed in the shanty town outside the U.S. 1st Air Cavalry's base camp in the highlands. Then the new morality spelled itself out in a sign proclaiming a drastic change in management policies at one celebrated emporium:"No more whorehouse, just laundry.""On Tu Do, Just Haircuts - & Don't Order Steak", by (AP), published in the Pacific Stars and Stripes Thursday, May 25, 1972 and reprinted from European and Pacific Stars and Stripes, a Department of Defense publication copyright, 2002 European and Pacific Stars and Stripes.