TENNIS WITH GOD

In 1963 my father accepted an assignment in Saigon, Vietnam and we moved there with him. He was involved with the hamlet counterinsurgency programs that brought American education methods and supplies to children in the villages. I remember Dad walking with us on the weekends to the Cercle Sportif, a fashionable tennis and social club near our house. I watched his matches, looking forward to the day when I would be old enough to join the fun on the courts. 
No matter how hot and humid the weather was, Dad always wore long white pants so that his skinnier left leg would not be noticed. He didn’t know why it was noticeably thinner than the right one, but he never wanted anyone to see a single part of him as weak. 
     By now, Dad had formed an adequate tennis game overall. His groundstrokes were consistent and his court sense and footwork were improving, but his Achilles Heel was his serve. He tossed the ball straight above his head, higher than Maria Sharapova does, and gaped at it with his mouth open as if he was going to swallow it on the way down. Then he sprung upward at it and grunted loudly as he hit the ball as flat and hard as he could. There was very little chance that one of his serves would go in, but whenever one did, it was usually unreturnable. After a few errant first serves stung his doubles partners in the back, they often stood closer to the sideline to avoid getting blasted. 
     Dad’s doubles partners suffered equally on his second serves. He patty-caked the ball over the net without a hint of pace or a slice. The slow, soft bounce set the ball up just right for the player hitting the return. In the interest of self-preservation, his partners at the net often curled up into a defensive pose after his second serves and hoped for the best. There was an unspoken rule in those days that you never retreated from the net unless they lobbed over you, and even then it was frowned upon. Saigon spun more out of control each month and nothing signified that more than the time a Buddhist monk set himself on fire to protest how the South Vietnamese government was oppressing the Buddhists. The smell of burning flesh and gasoline drifted throughout the city and into our home as we always had our windows open to catch a breeze.   
     Things escalated further when one morning two Vietnamese pilots diverted from their airborne mission and attacked the presidential palace in retaliation for the government’s crackdown on the Buddhists. The palace was two blocks away from our house. After hearing the commotion, Mom rushed me into a downstairs room for safety. The planes strafed the palace and dropped napalm and a 500-pound bomb, but the president escaped unharmed. Not long after the unsuccessful coup, White House Cable 243 was sent by President John Kennedy to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. This sealed South Vietnamese President Diem’s fate and a second coup d’etat took place with tacit approval from the United States. During the ruckus, Danny and a friend left the movie theater downtown to try and make it home. 
     They crawled under tanks that blocked the streets and avoided running gun battles along the way. With faces covered in soot from the dark smoke drifting through the streets, they made it home breathless but safe. Our front yard was littered with empty shell casings. Not long after that the movie theater was bombed by anti-government forces, and a bomb exploded at the American School. Soon after that, armed U.S. military personnel guarded the hallways and pep rallies with M-16 rifles at the ready. Then one of our friends died from injuries from a bomb explosion at one of the floating restaurants on the Saigon River. 
     My brother was now a teenager with promising athletic talent and had finally beat Dad in two sets of tennis. This hurt my father’s ego so much that he never again played tennis with Danny. Dad’s discipline was strict to begin with, but over time he became increasingly harsh on Danny. The rhinoceros-hide whip from Africa was Dad’s primary instrument of inflicting pain. Mom eventually talked Dad into sending Danny away to a boarding school in Virginia. She felt it was the only way to save him from a possible violent fight with Dad. The following month we took my brother to Tan Son Nhut airport and he was gone.