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The piles of garbage that accumulated during the first two weeks after Tet have mercifully been cleared away, even so, Saigon remains the dirtiest city in Asia, and the marks of war further blotch the city's face. In the Chinese quarter of Cholon, the heaviest damaged area, only rubble and fragments of walls mark the places where row upon row of one-story houses once stood. Patched up and painted, the U.S. embassy shows few scars from its dust-up with the Viet Cong, but many buildings elsewhere are pockmarked by bullets and bomb fragments.
Saigon-Hanoi Tea. Because of the curfew, there is almost no entertainment in Saigon. The state-controlled television now dedicates 90% of its programming to anti-V.C. propaganda. Cinemas and theaters are closed. President Nguyen Van Thieu also ordered all Saigon bars and nightclubs to shut down, but only about half of them have complied with the order. The others try to beat the early curfew by opening early.
Saigon's bars provide an interesting insight into the city's mentality. Some bars have changed the name of the drink guzzled by the bar girls from "Saigon tea" to "Saigon-Hanoi tea." Many of the girls, mindful of Viet Cong retribution for consorting with Americans, now alter the traditional toast, chin-chin—to your health—to chin-chin, Ho Chi Minh. They also bring a change of clothing to work so that they can slip out of their conspicuous B-girl tight pants and into the traditional flowing Ao-Dais for the evening trip home to the suburbs.
Foreigners in Saigon still congregate on the veranda of the Continental Hotel in the early evening, and there the talk is, as previously, all about the war. Many American civilians in Saigon have taken to carrying their own weapons—.357 Magnum revolvers, Beretta automatics, M-16 rifles, some privately owned and some issued by the military. Since many of the Americans apparently have never handled loaded weapons before and tend to gesture with the barrels as they talk, the guns sometimes go off by mistake.
Grim Search. The Americans, much less the Saigonese, can hardly be blamed for some nervousness. The battalions of U.S. troops that were brought into Saigon to root out the V.C. gunmen have mostly been withdrawn, but platoons of South Vietnamese airborne troopers last week continued a grim house-to-house clearing operation in Saigon's environs. Hard-core V.C. snipers continued to fire on U.S. military police and Vietnamese army patrols from rooftops and windows in Cholon. The government makes its presence felt all over Saigon. Police or soldiers guard almost every corner, have set up checkpoints throughout the city.
The unpleasant fact is that the Viet Cong used the Tet assault to infiltrate into Saigon hundreds and perhaps even thousands of agents who pose as normal Vietnamese going about their jobs. The chief mission of such agents is to try to turn the resentment of the Saigonese against the government and the Americans, charging them with the destruction of the city after the V.C. invasion. Meanwhile, V.C. assassination squads operate in broad daylight. The results of their handiwork turn up—hands bound and bodies mutilated—in the river. The V.C. have been active in Saigon for years but, in a city under siege, their presence is more unnerving than ever.