The East Wind, Rain was one of several upscale nightclubs that had recently sprung up in Sai Gon, catering to foreigners on expense accounts and younger, well-connected Vietnamese with a penchant for western frills. Condley avoided such places, seeing them as cesspools of the corruption that had invaded the higher reaches of Sai Gon’s business economy. An evening’s bar tab could feed and clothe a family of four in the provinces for a year. Drugs were quietly available for the asking, from old standbys like opium to the most modern western imports such as Ecstasy, which had swept through the upper levels of Sai Gon like an invisible typhoon. Cell phones, designer clothes, and MTV music were the standard fare, with the old notions of dress and ritual courtesy seen as marks of a failed past. And despite the government’s public ranting against corruption and “westernization,” most of the Vietnamese regulars at such clubs were the sons and daughters of communist officials who had pulled strings to send them overseas for schooling or to find them jobs with foreign corporations.

The westerners were no better. The East Wind, Rain was the watering hole for an ever-changing group of young professionals who saw themselves alternatively as financial pioneers in Viet Nam to strike it rich or Conradesque adventurers seeking to live on the fringe. They had come to Sai Gon from Britain, Australia, the Netherlands, France, the United States. They paid four dollars for a beer, eight dollars for a hamburger, and left large tips for some of the most beautiful waitresses in the world. They sat for hours in groups of four and six in the vast, muraled, pastel-orange nightclub, trading boasts and fantasies as clouds of cigarette smoke invaded their lungs and raucous music attacked their eardrums.

They were ever cheerful. Their faces were creamy and luminescent in the glow of glittering chandeliers. The latest music videos from the rock and rap factories of Los Angeles and New York echoed from quadraphonic speakers mounted on the ceiling. They traded hip snippets of Vietnamese street slang. They laughed together at that day’s examples of government and worker stupidity. One or two might even have dared to spend a week or so in the provinces or an evening on the seamy side of Sai Gon.

And it all had a sickly ring to it, a false resonance that reminded Condley of too many foreign correspondents posted to Sai Gon during the war. They could count months and even years spent in Viet Nam. They had written reams about Viet Nam. And yet few of them had ever known much about what happened outside the bars and tennis courts of Sai Gon.