Lee Lee

Copyright 2002. Graham Sherrington (Sherro). All rights reserved. No part of this document may be copied, faxed, electronically transmitted, or in any other manner duplicated without express written permission of the author. An Australian soldier on R&C in Vung Tau discovers a beautiful lady and loves and lives a little before going back to the bush.

Lee Lee.

On R&C in Vung Tau I was ambling down the street, trying to shake off the effects of a massive hangover and an all-night boom boom session. A steam bath, haircut and massage had helped, but my colour vision had faded to a sort of monotone brown a bit like a defective colour TV set, and the ‘33’ and Scotch hooch were still engaged in a battle in my head over which could murder more brain cells than the other as painfully as possible.

Then I saw her – in the Saigon Bar. Lee Lee (or Lily), an absolutely stunning Vietnamese/French Eurasian girl. Lee Lee would have stood right up in there in the front ranks of the beauty stakes anywhere in the world and she was sitting just inside the door of the Saigon Bar on a nice couch as the ‘bait’ for unwary passing soldiers. Her full time job was to be there and to be very beautiful. If any GI or Digger was lured in, the rest of the girls would conduct a flanking attack, mob them, grab them by the gristly bits and drag them over to the bar to be fleeced with gallons of Saigon Tea, poisonous whiskey and unsubtle whispers of some very expensive love promises.

I didn’t play that particular game and swiftly walked over and plonked down beside Lee Lee, fending off several feral femme fatales on the way and being roundly abused in the process (“Number 10, Uc Dai Loi, Cheap Charlie! You no like me!!! You no like girl, you like boy???”). Lee Lee looked decidedly uneasy, this wasn’t part of her ‘contract’ with the management, she was a true Bar Girl, not a professional hooker.

Fate and female vanity intervened. Just as I sat down, a Vietnamese street photographer walked in and offered to take our photo together. I assumed he had no film in his camera, so I asked Lee Lee, and I was assured he did, so I said: “Well sure, take our picture and make an extra copy for the beautiful Lee Lee here.”

Now most beautiful women anywhere just love to be photographed, Lee Lee was no exception, and I appeared to be a ‘nice’ Australian – a bad mistake. I wore glasses and spoke passable French with what I was told was a ‘Corsican’ accent, (I think it was just a very bad accent, my Grammar School French teacher would have caned me if he’d heard about this, he spoke wonderful Sorbonne French!). These two things were the obvious mark of a gentleman to the urbane Vietnamese, many of whom had been educated in France.

Later I found out that Lee Lee was the offspring of a high class Vietnamese lady and a French Legionnaire Captain – I have seen the photos and her mother was truly beautiful in the classic high-class Vietnamese sense. The red-haired Captain hadn’t made it out alive from the Indo China war, like many of his comrades in the Legion and indeed, like many of our own comrades.

Lee Lee had beautiful auburn hair, lively brown eyes, ivory clear skin, a lovely figure and she was fluent in a few languages. When she dressed in European clothes and spoke English or French she was a cosmopolitan European, when she spoke Vietnamese she was Vietnamese to all appearances except for the hair.

So started a long wooing. I had an Australian friend who was a Vietnamese Linguist and we teamed up in the place and became back bar fixtures. He had a very cheeky and pretty Vietnamese lass and we used to drink together – but not with Lee Lee. She was still on her patrol station on the couch at the front door and I was barred from there, it was bad for business. To pass the time I used to buy Saigon Teas and drink with a one-eyed bar lady (she was no girl!) who I think may have been left over from the French times. She had been extremely attractive and still was, even with only one eye. Even so, she didn’t get that much passing trade as there were younger models on the showroom floor. She was a real character with a robust sense of humour and she became a good friend.

Anyway, one night I could contain my over-active sex drive no longer and grabbed a good sturdy peasant bar girl with a very healthy chest structure and took her home and had a fairly busy night by any standard. Next morning I was back in the Saigon Bar, on opening time after the usual steam bath and massage, sitting down the back with my one-eyed bar-lady friend when the peasant girl came in. There was a muttered conversation with ‘papasan’ down the front of the bar and then all eyes turned to me with much chattering, laughter and finger pointing. “What the hell did she say?” I asked my one-eyed friend? “She say she too tired to work!”. Uh oh! I thought I’d really blotted my copybook. Strangely (to me) it made no difference at all to the girls, although I was certainly not used to having my exploits and physical characteristics being openly discussed in front of me by a bunch of attractive young women – after all I was a very shy young man.

Papasan and I conducted a fair bit of business with Johnny Walker Black Label and my Australian pal and I became part of the extended family. We used to dine out the back after hours with the girls and children and one night I was there around the communal bowl, rice and little bowls of bits at a big table, being very polite and only eating a little bit of boiled rice- they didn’t have that much to eat. Lee Lee spotted these good manners and fished a choice piece of dried fish head from the bowl with her chopsticks and popped it into my mouth. The same fly-blown dried fish heads I used to see – and smell — when I went past the fish market! I was sick for over a week. My stomach hadn’t been hardened by years of such delicacies.

Anyway, my one-eyed bar-lady friend convinced Lee Lee that I was the finest of human beings and worthy of her favours, and my Australian friend and I repaired to her house along with his girlfriend who also lived there. The girls decided we stank (even after steam baths!) but then they thought all Europeans stank, and to them we probably did. We were banished downstairs to have a bath, and the wash room contained a big man-sized earthenware jar and a ladle. My mate decided that one was supposed to get INTO the jar and bathe – of course we were both falling down drunk and laughing insanely – and the girls thought this was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. He also ruined a week’s supply of bath water.

Next day I went back to the war, lying in the back of a truck, exhausted and being soaked by a tropical deluge. I lost touch with Lee Lee as I had no more in-country leave left, although I tried to find her through the Red Cross when Saigon fell, but with no luck. I shall always remember her with great affection, a little bit of love, feminine softness and humanity in a very vicious war. I still treasure the picture from the street photographer – my ex-wife used to hate it, it made her quite jealous, but I would never destroy it…. J