“Tet 1968 will be uneventful,” my Saigon sources assured me when I contacted them during my Christmas break at my new home in Hong Kong. They said that both sides would call a seven-day ceasefire from January 27 until February 3, enabling the Vietnamese to celebrate the dawn of the Year of the Monkey. Good! This allowed me to take a brief leave of absence from Vietnam and turn my attention to another part of my territory. I was after all my employers’ “Far Eastern correspondent,” which meant that in theory I was to cover most of Asia, though the constant changes of events in Vietnam obliged me to neglect even its next-door neighbors. Now I had an opportunity to even out this deficit.

I went to Laos.

               I was looking forward to this trip, which I hoped to be an excursion into a less intense theater, not that the “Land of a Million Elephants” didn’t have its own nasty war to keep an eye on. But Laos was a mellow, pleasant, though slightly goofy place filled with placid citizens who were less highly-strung, but to my mind also less intriguing, than the Vietnamese. They had a benign king by the name of Sri Savang Vatthana who had learned every Marcel Proust novel by heart, or so I was told; a few years later the Communists interned this gentle monarch, his wife, his son, the crown prince, and his brothers in the hellish “Reeducation Camp Number One,” where he is thought to have died one year later.

Laos was also richly endowed with adolescent Buddhist monks who were definitely no radicals. After sundown they slunk about the grounds of their pagodas, smoking cigarettes and pinching the bottoms of Western female visitors tenderly, which, I believe, enticed many women to stroll around these holy grounds in the cool of the evening!

               I once asked the abbot of a large pagoda in Vientiane why he and most of his colleagues at the helm of Laotian monasteries were imported clerics from Thailand. “Well, young man,” he answered, “Laos does not seem to produce serious Buddhist scholars.”

                Getting to Laos was half the fun. Not having to fly to Vientiane spared me the irritation of wartime airports, which always made arrivals at Tan Son Nhut in Saigon an ordeal. Instead, I took the leisurely sleeper train from Bangkok to Nong Khai in northeastern Thailand. In those days there was no bridge connecting Nong Khai with Vientiane, the administrative capital of Laos on the other side of the Mekong, and so I was treated to a marvelously hilarious border crossing.

               After my arrival at Nong Khai station early in the morning, I chartered two pedicabs, one for myself and another one for my luggage. We glided past mendicant monks in saffron-colored cowls on our way to a structure resembling the airline terminal of a Western city. It featured porters, immigrations and customs booths staffed with officious and crisply uniformed public servants, plus ticket counters fit for handling Boeing 707 passengers. I purchased an airline-style ticket, checked in my suitcases, and proceeded to the waiting area.

               Eventually my ferry’s departure was announced. I went to the gate, and what did I see outside? Rickety, shaky, slippery steps leading down a muddy embankment to an “international ferry” for which the Thais and Laotians had built architecturally pretentious terminals on the Mekong’s southern and northern shores.  The boat looked as if it had been designed by the British cartoonist William Heath Robinson and was propelled by the diesel engine of a retired pre-World War II London bus. It was an alarmingly leaky vessel but Eban, my Ivy-League traveling companion, assured me that the 15-minute trip across the river was too short for this boat to sink.

               “I know, I know, Eban,” I said, “I have been on this floating coffin before, and I can swim. Still, I wouldn’t like to be bitten by a poisonous water snake.”

               “Or eaten by Penis Head Fish roaming these muddy waters,” he continued my sentence. Both of us laughed moronically; we had drunk too much during the previous night.

               I met Eban in the train’s dining car, which offered Thai whisky, appropriately called Mekong, for only three dollars per 70-centiliter bottle.  Eban had been an agricultural advisor to Laotian farmers before being promoted to a senior USAID position based in the Philippines. Now he was embarking on an inspection of his former place of work.

“When I was stationed in Laos, my job was to teach farmers in one particular area how to produce two rice harvests every year,” he told me with a wry smile. “This has turned out to be a frustrating but funny business.”

               “Why frustrating?” I asked.

               “Well, when I returned to the same area last year, I found the farmers frolicking or snoozing under shady trees, while their fields lay fallow.”

               “It seems your agricultural wisdom did not impress them,” I taunted him.

               “I must have made an impression on them, though,” Eban replied. “I shook the village chief awake and asked:  ‘Did I not teach you last year how to produce two harvests?’ The chief smiled and answered, ‘O yes, you did, and we are very grateful. We had two harvests last year. So now we don’t need a harvest this year.’ With that he dozed off again.”

               Eban and I parted ways in Vientiane. As a high-powered civil servant he checked into the antiseptic western-style Lan Xang Hotel on the banks of the Mekong, where American officials and media pundits liked to stay because it offered air conditioning, an international cuisine, and a swimming pool.

I, on the other hand, preferred the spooky ambiance of the Hôtel Constellation on dusty downtown Rue Samsenthai, which featured in John Le Carré’s spy thriller The Honourable Schoolboy. There was no air conditioning in my $25-room, just a ceiling fan and a mosquito net above my bed, a cold-water shower, a bidet, a toilet, and a window overlooking not the Mekong, but a duck pond. The Constellation resembled the simple French country inns most of which have since sadly fallen victim to modernity.  The Constellation’s cuisine matched its setting: sturdy French fare accompanied by chilled Beaujolais wine in pop-top cans, but always served at the innkeeper’s insistence with an immaculate white napkin slung over the waiter’s right wrist.

“Welcome back! Your favorite dish is on the menu today,” said Maurice Cavaliere, the Constellation’s proprietor as the taxi dropped me off at lunchtime, “Pigeon rôti aux Petits Pois! I found very good pigeons in the market this morning, fresh and succulent!”

Chain-smoking Maurice was one of my favorite characters in all of Indochina. Born in Kunming the son of a French botanist and a Chinese noblewoman, and a graduate of the prestigious École Supérieure de Commerce” in Paris, he was more than just a great hotelier: he was also a reliable source of information, and for good reason. The Constellation was the watering hole of a most eclectic crowd of people. There were spies from all over the world, including a luscious Chinese woman in her early forties whom regulars at Maurice’s bar knew to be in the employ of Mao Zedong’s régime at the height of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution; her French colleagues told me that it was her job to seduce American spooks and flyboys and spy on them in compromising situations right there, at the Constellation, perhaps in the room next to mine.

There were German veterans of the French Foreign Legion on obscure missions. There were smugglers and cops and many pilots on perilous assignments. Of the 24-odd airlines operating out of Laos only one, Royal Air Lao, was a legitimate carrier. Another, Air America, was owned and operated by the CIA and flew the most daredevil missions, including bombing raids on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. I once foolishly had an Air America helicopter drop me under heavy fire into a mountaintop base of a Laotian tribe allied with the United States. Amazingly, the chopper returned the next morning, still under heavy enemy fire, to get me safely back to Vientiane. These were the bravest men I ever met – and I met them all at Maurice’s bar.

There were 20-odd other “charter” airlines shuttling between the Golden Triangle in the Thai-Laotian-Burmese tri-border area and Vientiane, Saigon and destinations beyond. At one point I covered the strange encounter between one of these planes and the Royal Air Force over an outer island of Hong Kong. The RAF forced the alien intruders to land in what was then a British Crown Colony. The plane was registered in Laos; on board the British airmen found huge amounts of gold destined to be dropped over a rendezvous point off Hong Kong and picked up by a junk; gold smuggling was big business in Laos then, and its operators and pilots got drunk telling great stories at the bar of Maurice Cavaliere’s Hotel Constellation.

Maurice brought me a Pastis, a refreshing anise-flavored liqueur that turns milky with the addition of water and is the perfect aperitif for the tropics.

“It gives me pleasure to have you stay with us again. But why are you here. Shouldn’t you be in Saigon?” he asked.

“Occasionally I do have to produce copy from other parts of my territory, Maurice, and this seems as good a time as any,” I said. “The Americans told me they didn’t expect any trouble during the truce that will begin tomorrow.”

“Well, I don’t know. Do you trust their information? Do they still know what they are talking about? We get different intelligence here, and it is quite troubling,” said Maurice. “But check with Mee. She really has her ears to the ground. I’ve taken the liberty to tell her that you were coming. She’ll have dinner with you here tonight. Is that alright with you?”

“Very much so, thanks!!

“Pigeon for two then,” Maurice said with a chuckle and turned to the other guests at his bar.

So I was going to see Mee again, and that was good news. Mee was not her real name. I just chose it from a list of Akha tribal names as a nom de guerre for this strange and fierce beauty I had met a couple of years earlier.

The bizarre beginning of our friendship merits a lengthy flashback to a late Thursday afternoon in the monsoon season and the wild days that followed. I sat in the Constellation’s lounge putting my notes in order. To keep the rain out, Maurice had shut the French windows on the Rue Samsenthai side of his hotel. Suddenly, crash, bang, wallop, a strange object broke through the door violently, shattering its glass and wooden frame. It turned out to be a leather-clad creature resembling a curvaceous boudin noir (blood sausage) in the saddle of a Harley Davidson.

She stopped at the bar. She yelled, “Maurice, mon Pastis s’il te plait!” Utterly unperturbed, with his Gitane cigarette dangling from his lower lip, Maurice handed her the potent aperitif. As she drank I noticed a strange tattoo on the top of her left hand. Then she went into reverse gear, a unique feature of Harley Davidson motorbikes, backed her machine away from the bar, glass crunching under her tires, and roared off into the tropical downpour.

“Maurice, what on earth was that?” I asked.

“That was Mee,” he replied with a shrug, “She comes every Thursday evening for her Pastis when she is in town. I forgot it is Thursday.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“What about your shattered French windows?” I wanted to know.

“O that! She’ll send over a couple of people to clean up the mess and repair the damage first thing in the morning. I’ll just lower my metal shutters now and call it a day. There won’t be any more guests on a rainy night like this. Let’s have dinner in the back room.

“Who is Mee?” I asked Maurice while we were eating.

“An amazing woman, very, very rich and still only in her mid-thirties. She is a retired freelance opium courier! Until last year she owned a large truck and regularly drove it by herself loaded with opium from the Golden Triangle (a poppy-growing region in the Thai-Laotian-Burmese tri-border area) across Laos and the Ho Chi Minh Trail into South Vietnam.”

“Was she never stopped?” I inquired.

“I am sure she was, but she had her way to pacify nosey officials. She invited them to the top of her cargo and persuaded them that what there were smelling was not opium,” said Maurice with a deadpan face.

“But opium reeks, how could they miss it?”

“Cher ami, she is a very beautiful woman, haven’t you noticed?”

“I have, Maurice, and I’ll be at your bar next Thursday.”

“I’ll leave my new door open, rain or shine.”

“One more thing, Maurice,” I went on. “What is that weird tattoo on her left hand all about?”

“Ah, that’s an Akha tribal mark. She belongs to the ferocious Akha, a mountain people living in the Golden Triangle, though her mother is a Meo, also called Hmong. Most Akha are illiterate, so is Mee.”

“But, Maurice, I just heard her speak French to you!”

“Yes, she speaks French, plus a dozen other languages, even German. She likes Germans, having been in the arms of a Foreign Legionnaire or two in her day. But she can’t read or write any language; that’s not part of the Akha upbringing. Yet she is very intelligent. As you might have noticed, she is also rather tall for a mountain tribeswoman.”

“Like Charlemagne! He was multilingual, illiterate, willful, bright, and very tall,” I interjected.

Maurice burst out laughing: “Félicitations (congratulations)! Charlemagne! You just coined the perfect nickname for that imperious lady!” He popped open another can of Beaujolais. The Sino-French hotelier in Laos and his German guest ended the day lifting their glasses to honor a 9^th-century emperor.

The following Thursday, the door was open. I was at the bar at cocktail time. She rode in on her Harley, stopped next to me, engine running and placed her order: “Maurice, mon Pastis, s’il te plaît!” Then she noticed me and asked:

“Qui êtes vous?” – Who are you?

“Un journaliste allemand.” A German journalist.

“Warum sitzen Sie dann hier herum statt sich auf dem Lande umzusehen, wo viel passiert?” she told me off in German: Why are you hanging around here instead of looking around the countryside where so much is happening?

“To meet you, Mee. I watched you crash through the French windows last week.”

“Ah yes,” she replied. “That was quite wild, wasn’t it? Be ready tomorrow morning at seven. I’ll pick you up for a ride.”

With that, Mee went into reverse and left the bar.

Punctual like a Prussian, she arrived at the Constellation at seven o’clock sharp and beckoned me to sit behind her. As we roared off in a northeasterly direction, I clung to her leathery waist, indulging in the scent of her black ponytail flapping against my face. She had obviously washed her thick mane that morning with a very expensive French shampoo.

What happened during this wild two-day outing is a different story for a different day, except to say that we visited areas in Eastern Laos controlled by three competing armies: the royalists, the neutralists, and the Communist Pathet Lao. All three welcomed Mee, whom they obviously knew well, and tolerated me because she introduced me not as a journalist but as her lover from Europe, which, in truth, I was not and would never become. But this turned out to be a useful white lie. At the Pathet Lao post we were warned to go no further lest we risk falling into North Vietnamese hands. “The North Vietnamese are not very nice people,” the Pathet Lao officer told Mee, ogling at her leather-covered curves lustfully.

“It’s getting dark, Mee,” I said as we drove back.

“You are right. It’s too dangerous to return to Vientiane tonight,” she replied.

“So where are we going to sleep?”

“On the porch of that house on stilts over there.”

“Do you know the owners?” I asked.

“No. We just go there and unroll our sleeping mats. That’s what these porches are there for. Hospitality to strangers is a Laotian tradition.”

So we stopped at the farmhouse. Mee asked me to help her carry her duffle bag, two sleeping mats, light blankets and mosquito nets. An old lady came out of the house and brought us two bowls of chicken and rice with a pot of tea, which we used to clean our teeth with after the meal.

Mee had brought along two pop-top cans of Beaujolais to accompany dinner. Before she shed her leather gear to crawl under her blanket, she dug into her duffle bag again and produced two Colt 0.45-inch pistols, handing me one of the guns. “It is always good to have one of these by your bedside, just in case we get surprise visitors tonight,” she said and throwing me a kiss, she fell asleep.

We arrived at her walled-in compound in the center of Vientiane at mid-day. In the courtyard I made out an E-Type Jaguar and a brand-new black Mercedes 280. Mee directed me to a luxurious bathroom to take a shower; a servant brought me a fresh shirt and fresh underwear..

When I came out she had changed into a plain shirt and jeans. “Please stay for lunch,” she said guiding me to a large but sparsely furnished dining room, the most memorable feature of which was its floor covered with blackish tiles. During the beautifully prepared French meal served by a uniformed butler, she asked me point-blank:

“What do you think a Akha-Meo-German baby would look like?”

“Probably very pretty,” I replied.

“We could have one. I am only 35. I would love to have children. Would you like to marry me?”

“But, Mee, I am happily married, and I love my wife.”

“That can be taken care of with one or two of those,” she said coolly, pointing at the tiles on the floor.

“What, slay her with a tile?”

“No, no, no! Buy her out! These tiles are pure gold. I used to be in the gold trade, you know. These are my savings,” she said making circular motions with her arms to indicate that all her floors were covered with this precious metal.

Well, in Asia it is bad form to say “no” outright and it might have been a dangerous thing to do, given Mee’s fierce nature. So I answered evasively: “I must discuss this with Gillian first.”

“You do that, lieber Freund (dear friend),” she responded with a smile. “My driver will take you back to the Constellation now.”

When I told Gillian about this episode, she said, hopefully in jest: “You should have accepted: imagine, two bricks of gold! We could have divorced and remained lovers.”

As it turned out, Gillian and I stayed married, and I gained a fascinating friend in Laos. We saw each other every time I visited Vientiane, but the question of siring an Akha-Meo-German amalgam never came up again. I thought about this spectacular episode in my life with a grateful smile as I dressed for my pigeon dinner with Mee on that Saturday, the 27^th of January 1968, the day the Tet ceasefire in Saigon commenced. In retrospect, it became the day when my career as a journalist was saved.

 Mee arrived at the Constellation in her Jaguar E-Type, looking magnificent in her white dress with blue polka dots, which she had just brought back from a “business trip” to Bangkok, as she told me while having her Pastis.

“I didn’t expect you here this time of the year,” she said, “You are a reporter. Shouldn’t you be in Saigon for Tet?”

I told her what my American sources had said. She sighed, “It is frightening to see how confused the Americans have become. This is scary for those of us not wanting to live under Communism. My sources predict that something horrific is going to happen in Vietnam over Tet. But I have an idea: check with the French in Paksong. Go tomorrow. I’ll announce you to their commanding officer.”

Paksong was the coffee capital of Laos at the Bolaven Plateau in the Laotian Panhandle. Because of its refreshing climate the French Military Advisory Mission to the Royal Lao Army had established a comfortable rest and recuperation camp there for its officers. As I was to discover, it was also an important French listening post given of its proximity to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the westernmost branches of which were only 40 miles away from the French R&R center.

After dinner Mee called Paksong and told me, “The major is expecting you tomorrow for lunch. I’ll drive you to the airport first thing in the morning.  You’ll fly to Pakse, rent a car at the airport, and drive 50 kilometers east. It’s an easy trip.”

In the morning at Vientiane airport, she gave me a warm hug and said, “I really do believe you should be in Saigon now. Call me from Paksong as soon as you know more.”

I can’t remember the French major’s name. He briefed me well about the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and then assigned me a room above the Center’s entrance. I woke in the middle of the night hearing Vietnamese voices below my window. One was a woman’s voice belonging to the Center’s Vietnamese housekeeper. The other voice was male, grating, and thoroughly unpleasant.

I heard him say repeatedly, “Mỹ,” meaning American. She replied, “Báo Chí Đức,” meaning German journalist. The two squabbled agitatedly for a while, clearly about me, and I fell asleep again.

The next morning at breakfast, the major told me: “We had a visitor last night.”

“I know, I heard him. He sounded like a North Vietnamese talking to your housekeeper about me,” I said.

“Indeed, about you and some other things I can’t talk to you about. You are of course welcome to stay here as long as you wish, but if I were a journalist I would hurry back to Saigon. That’s where the big story is going to be.”

By that time I had been around French military and intelligence types long enough to heed the major’s advice without any further argument. These people were better informed about the former French Indochina than anybody else.

I called Mee to tell her I was returning to Vientiane that evening. “Do you know anyone at the South Vietnamese embassy?”

“All of them. What do you need?”

“I must renew my visa and I fear that the embassy will be closed tomorrow in anticipation of Tet,” I said.

“You are right. They will be closed, but that’s not a problem a $100 donation in an envelope with New Years’ greetings couldn’t solve. I’ll fix this for you. All you have to contribute is a crisp $100 note.”

She picked me up at Vientiane Airport, drove me to the Constellation and sent her chauffeur to the South Vietnamese vice consul’s home the next morning to take him to his office, where Mee and I were already waiting in her E-Type with my passport and the envelope including my $100 note.”

The vice consul gave me my visa. I wished him “hạnh phúc tet,” meaning, happy New Year.

“Let’s hurry,” said Mee, “Your Royal Air Lao plane to Bangkok leaves in a little over an hour. You are booked on the last Air Vietnam flight from Bangkok to Saigon tonight. Here’s your ticket.”

At the airport I reimbursed her for the fare and embraced her.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have done this. You are flying into hell. I don’t want you to get killed,” she told me in an uncharacteristic emotional outburst.

I gave her a kiss and boarded my plane. In Bangkok I ran into my teammate Friedhelm Kemna, who worked exclusively for Die Welt  but not for the other Axel Springer papers, although we filled in for each other when one of us was “on the road.”

“What are you doing here? You are supposed to be in Laos,” he said.

“The French and my Lao friends told me that something big was going to happen in Vietnam. And you? Weren’t you supposed to hold the fort in Hong Kong?”

Kemna, a bachelor in his forties who had served as a young German cavalry lieutenant in World War II, gave me a sheepish look and said, “Sometimes my desire for European women gets the better of me.  Pan American has beautiful German stewardesses and they always stay in the Siam Intercontinental. So I had a little outing to Bangkok.”

“And were you also warned of a big crisis in Saigon?”

“Yes, at the German embassy,” he said. “That’s why I am also booked on the last plane to Tan Son Nhut today.”

When we arrived, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were in the streets. We were later told that nearly half a million had come out to enjoy the first evening without a curfew. Firecrackers detonated all around us as a taxi took us to the Continental.

I was too exchausted to go out to dinner. With the noise of firecrackers in my ears, I fell asleep. When I awoke a few hours later in the middle of the night, it became clear that my American sources had been woefully wrong prognosticators and Maurice, Mee and the French major in Paksong dead right: Nothing was uneventful about Tet 1968 in South Vietnam, and thanks to Maurice, Mee and the major I did not commit the massive blunder of missing the Tet Offensive that started while I was in bed that night – in Saigon.