Enough with this loafing! It's time to try an experiment. I'm out for 8 months and I've been making the exact same first impression on everyone I've met. So the other day I went to a barber shop and died parts of my hair bright, bright red/orange and cut it all short enough to stick up. Thankfully one of clients at the barber shop spoke english enough to translate this request, since nobody could figure out why the hell anybody would want that. In any case, I then went ot the American War market and bought some authentic Taiwanese reproductions of US military clothes (vest, camo shorts, shirt and aviator sunglasses) and proceeded to turn my image around 180 degrees from hippie to war-crazy party GI. I guess the experiment was to see how differently people would treat me.

This goal was accomplished in a major, major way. It might be because the funkiest style these people have seen is a pair of nice sunglasses and a cool shirt, or occasionally you might see somebody with bleach yellow longhair. Or it might be some kind of post-war nostalgia of the G.I. flings (or dads) here on shore leave who must have looked equally nuts. But if people looked at me as another passing tourist before, now they have no idea what to make of me.

I guess the biggest success of this experiment is the reflection of this image back onto myself. In the bars at night, people treat me like a party animal whether I am or not; it's a whole lot easier to be energetic anyway. One night I was tired as all hell, but all it took was a few minutes to round up some people at the local bar and head to Apocalypse now (dressed the way one's supposed to be) and ended up standing on the chairs shouting the lyrics to I Will Survive like it was a war rally song. The music at this club was truly aweful, but for some reason only the guys I was with and I could tell. "If you're going to San Francisco," by the way, is now a horrid techno song that has been following me through every major dance club in Southeast Asia. It's also fun to be a total dick to the really abnoxious tourists for once and, since I'm a bit more intimidating now, I don't get any shit back, yet. In any case, shooting those shotgun rounds at the VietCong tunnels had a whole new meaning.

The pinnacle of success came last night, when I finally gave up any sense of decency about the war and learned the Communist Vietnamese National Anthem from some Vietnamese guy who spoke absolutely no English. At 5AM, after goose-stepping around the pool table singing in aweful Vietnamese for the 30 or so people still in the bar, Charlie took me on his motorbike for a twilight tour around Saigon. It was nice since I had somehow failed to see most of the major sights of the city (aside from the American War museum, where I just felt like an insensitive prick), and they looked so much nicer at dawn while the hordes were sleeping. At some point during our dramatic and brutal reinactment of a VC-US engagement outside some former battleground, I managed to break my digital camera while jumping away from a grenade. Thankfully the rest of me was safe and I managed to shoot the gun right out of Charlie's hand, then shot him twice in the stomach. It was way more fun than Cowboys and Indians, I'll tell you that.

I guess having absolutely no respect for the former conflict is the best way I know how to say sorry. Wearing what I did gave me an instant and undeserved cameraderie with my tour guide of the Cu Chi tunnels (some of the tunnels Charlie dug between Saigon and Cambodia), who had served as a communications officer for the Americans. Today I'm wearing a bright red shirt with a big yellow star in front--the North Vietnamese flag--and still look like an American GI. The kinds of smiles I've been getting from the locals tells me at least some of them get the joke. To the rest, I'm just an excusable tourist.

But the LCD on my camera is still broken. I have pictures up 'till then, and some poorly framed ones after. I might as well burn and send them in the next few days, since I doubt I'll be taking any more photos until I get my camera fixed in Hanoi or Bangkok. I just sent a bunch of pictures the other day, if you didn't get them, email me.




...dogs are chewy.