Vung Tau Hats
Long
Casper
Beached Ship

McDonald

Hjelle

The town was beautiful, the women were beautiful, the mountains were beautiful and so was the ocean.

• The French had named this place the Cape of St. Jacques. The well to do of Europe vacationed here in the 1920's and 1930's.
• Prostitution was "legal," the women were supposed to carry a three by five yellow card, to show that they were "clean" of VD.
• Vung Tau was, for the most part, deactivated as an R&R Center while I was there.
• In either August of 1969 or 1970 Argosy Magazine ran an article "Vung Tau, Vietnam, Pleasure Capital of the World."
• It was safe enough that an American civilian lived on the side of Lighthouse mountain with his wife and young teenage children.

• It was so desirable there that people didn't take R&R because they were afraid they would be transferred out of Vung Tau when they got back.
• It wasn't unusual, when walking down the streets of the "Business District," to be propositioned by a young boy to buy a pack of Kool cigarettes, which in reality were marijuana. The pack of filtered cigarettes had been opened and the tobacco had been replaced with pot. You could not detect that the pack had even been tampered with. If you didn't want the cigarettes the boy would ask if you wanted to "Boom Boom" his sister, "She number one cherry girl."
• Some of the bars in town were joint ventures between Americans and Vietnamese. There were over 100 bars in this town of 25,000.