Howdy Doody & the Vietnamese Businessmen

Howdy Doody & the Vietnamese Businessmen

By: Bill the Butcher

Long after that last helicopter flew off the embassy roof in Saigon with panicked people clinging to the Oleo Struts, I found myself selling apartment complexes to Vietnamese businessmen in beautiful downtown Killeen, Texas. They had flown in to check out investment opportunities in America and wanted to buy some discount properties. There wasn’t anything more discounted than apartments on Root Street! The apartments were small, very near whatever downtown Killeen had to offer, and the investors were quite at home with drive by shootings.

The listing agent told us that he had the perfect property on Root Street. Access to the highway, right downtown, and rib joints in the neighborhood. I knew the area well. When I was a cable auditor years before I frequently found myself there tracking down illegal hookups because nobody on the north side of Killeen paid for their cable TV!

As a special bonus attraction he said that he had an on site manager on the grounds who spoke Vietnamese and several dialects of Chinese. You see, over here we call it an accent, over there they call it a dialect. Anyway, he spoke it.

We picked up the investors around ten and took them to the property. They were middle aged, properly attired, and slightly overweight. Being around people from strange lands was nothing new to someone who’d been raised at the East Gate of Fort Hood. I’d met many foreigners in my time. Germans, Koreans, people from California. So I was right at home with these gentlemen who came from the land that Fort Hood had incinerated years before. And they were quite friendly! They spoke the traditional chopped up English so I could understand them, (I spoke Ebonics) and they smelled good. So off to the races we went.

The property manager met us on the parking lot. I could surmise, having been told of his linguistic abilities, that he’d seen action during the war, but he . . . well, he wasn’t exactly Rambo. The years had not been kind to him. Standing far less than six feet, he had obviously found that rib joint I mentioned earlier, and his girth displayed it quite well. He had colorful red Walmart cowboy boots, blue jeans, a camo jacket, and the whole thing was topped off with a Howdy Doody cowboy hat which was too small for his head. For the uninitiated, a Howdy Doody hat was a semi felt job with a string you could put around your chin to hold it on. Around the brim was this intertwined cord for whatever reason I have no idea. Suffice to say the management of the complex did not look like Buffalo Bob. Who was that! Do I have to tell you people everything? Let’s move on.

The investors took to him like white on rice. Oh, sorry. Bad choice of words. (That racist enough for you?) Anyway, in no time at all they were chatting away in Vietnamese and seemed very pleased with the property. I remember they were taken with the Kenmore washing machines, so there’s that.

As noon approached I suggested lunch, letting our guests know we had some nice Oriental Restaurants in town to which they let me know they wanted “chicken flied steak” at which time I led them to the Hallmark Cafe, internationally famous for their $7.95 heart attack special.

So, we all settled in for chicken fried everything while the property manager and investors continued discussing various things in their native tongue completely oblivious to me, finally switching to English when the Vietnamese expressed surprise at something Howdy Doody had said.

“When you in Republic Vietnam?” one asked.

“I deployed early ‘68. Got captured right off and reported back to my unit before ‘69.”

A few old memories and some quick math later and one of the investors said, “We no release POWs ‘69.”

Wiping his mouth with a napkin with a wry grin the fat man with the funny hat said, “I know.”

The Vietnamese became quiet, looked at him and slowly nodded there heads. It was between warriors.

Thank you for your service.

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