Upon arriving in Saigon, he had gone straight to a local watering hole and sat down to reacquaint himself with Saigon. An indeterminate number of bars later and well into the wee hours of the morning, he staggered out onto the street and hailed a passing cyclo. The driver, sensing opportunity, pedaled him down a deserted alley and called his friends. According to Jay, two of them had dragged him out of the cyclo and four surrounded him like a pack of mongrels. He had parried all six by screaming like an Alaskan grizzly bear. At last, desperate for a truce, one of the eight came up to him, slapped him on the shoulder and said, "hey brother." When Jay momentarily lowered his guard the man reached up, tore the gold and silver chain from around his neck and disappeared. The circle closed again, the others feinting and snatching at the camera slung around Jay's waist, his Ray Bans and his money belt. He had at last managed to stagger into a nearby pub, gathered together his shattered nerves and stumbled home.

A preliminary assessment of the damage turned up a broken set of Ray Bans and the loss of his chains, a polarizer, and his composure. He was shaken to the core and thoroughly, unconditionally enraged. I agreed to accompany him to the police to see if anything could be done.

The sargent in charge listened to our tale of woe with polite disinterest, then let us sit for several hours before closing for the day. Come back tomorrow, they said.

Back at the guesthouse many of the missing items gradually emerged; the polarizer, still attached to the lens of his camera; the silver chain among the folds of his dirty clothes. The only thing still missing was the golden chain, worth over four hundred dollars. I dutifully traipsed back to the police. "It's lunchtime," they pointed out, "come back a two." At two they admitted that important people were not present, could we return at three? At three we fell into conversation with two American women, swollen-eyed from crying, who were waiting to report their own worst nightmare. They had arrived only the previous afternoon, the first day of an extended trek through Vietnam, China and Laos. Before checking into a guesthouse they had decided to kick off their holiday with a drink and dropped in at a local bar. One had a brief conversation with a nondescript Vietnamese man and the other pulled out a video camera to film the delightfully exotic setting. She returned the camera to her backpack and became engaged in another conversation When she turned around the nondescript man had disappeared with the camera, their passports, money, travelers checks and plane tickets, all conveniently tucked inside the temporarily neglected bag. The women wanted nothing more than to get new passports and return to America. Unfortunately the US had no official representation in Vietnam so they could not be issued new passports in country. The nearest embassy was in Bangkok, but they couldn't enter Thailand without the very passports they were trying to replace. They were, for the time being, involuntary guests of Vietnam. We left feeling much better about Jay's gold chain.