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Great Moments
A Measure of Time
Bernard Kalb
From the Print Edition:
Kevin Bacon, May/Jun 00
(continued from page 1)
Think of it: in that era before Vietnam seized all our days, we could get on the evening news with a story about love! But once Washington decided that the future of "the free world" depended upon who won in Vietnam, once GIs began pouring into Danang and Saigon and Cam Ranh beginning in 1965, the rest of Asia vanished as a news story. Asia, off the screen, erased overnight, more than a billion people suddenly gone; now it was Vietnam, appropriately shaped like a question mark, its destiny uncertain. Now it was dominoes, and would they fall.
So, beginning in 1966 and for almost four years, I'd fly out of Hong Kong every other month, on 30-day assignments, shuttling to and from the war, from the early days of gung ho to the later days of quagmire and, watching from afar as a State Department correspondent in Washington, to the final humiliating day of America's escape by helicopter. Through all those years, death never took a moment out for R&R. The KIAs kept piling up, and those trips to Saigon left me with the feeling of being a voyeur of killing, an accountant of death, waiting waiting waiting for the inevitable finale. Vietnam filled my life: the challenge to catch--and report--the maddening reality of what was taking place. And I also counted off those interminable 30 days, day by day.
How did I make it through? Well, here's the secret, declassified at last: I would buy a box of Montecristo No. 1s at the Pedder Street tobacconist in Hong Kong. I'd like to think that if only the good people in Havana who made Montecristo had known about my Vietnam problem, they'd have packed 30 to a box instead of 25. To fill the gap, I'd also buy a box of Cuban Henry Clays. Back in Saigon, in my room at the Caravelle, I'd bless the boxes in a ceremony attended only by me, during which I would incant some mumbo jumbo that miraculously transformed the cigars into a calendar.
The Montecristos were given the place of honor; each cigar symbolized one day in Saigon, and I'd limit myself to one a day, and only one a day, no matter what. The collapsing ash at the end of each cigar meant one less day in Vietnam. When all 25 were gone, the empty box proclaimed that I was now down to my last five days and a "wake-up," as they said in Vietnam. Five Henry Clays, and I'd be on my way back to my wife and small daughters in Hong Kong! Hallelujah! So in the late 1960s, with the number of GIs in the country climbing to more than 500,000, with casualty lists of 500 a week, the trinity of my life was predictable and repetitious: the month, the war, the Montecristos coming to the rescue. Try to think of it as a way of hanging on to a bit of sanity in a Vietnam scenario that sanity had abandoned.
I have a photo of myself that makes me squirm with embarrassment: in a combat helmet and life-preserver jacket, aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer shelling the coast of North Vietnam--and there I am with a cigar jutting from my mouth, surveying the scene, observing death en route. I know it was war, killing on both sides. Yet I can't look at this photo now, 30 years later, without seeing that cigar as a kind of theatrical macho. If the war had won the country's support as something noble instead of as a deadly sorry-about-that, the response would have been different. Instead there was a murderous emptiness about it all, a war that was written off even before it was officially ended, as if everything had been robotically programmed, and could not be stopped. The war was dayless, monthless, yearless--a timeless monster into which I out of private desperation had introduced my own measure of time.
All these years later, whenever I find myself in an airport, I make a nostalgic check at the tobacco shop to see how much more expensive my memories have become. Last time I was in Hong Kong, about a year ago, Montecristo No. 1s were selling for HK$3,125 a box--or about US$400.
But whatever the price, Montecristos always trigger poignant memories: endless Vietnam, the war exploding in the jungle, flares lighting up the night sky, bodies on the battlefield sometimes only a taxi drive away from the Caravelle, and me, desperately trying to escape the marathon horror of it all by smoking my way through my very own calendar.
Bernard Kalb is a former correspondent for The New York Times, CBS News and NBC News and is now a panelist for the weekly CNN program "Reliable Sources." He also moderates global media programs for The Freedom Forum and is co-author with his brother, Marvin Kalb, of two books: Kissinger, a biography, and The Last Ambassador, a novel.
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