Another sea story…
My two cruises to Vietnam on a Navy minesweeper consisted of uneventful coastal patrol, boarding and searching fishing junks as part of Operation Market Time to prevent the North Vietnamese from shipping arms and supplies to the Viet Cong.
These encounters were nearly always friendly. We gave away lots of cigarettes, our hospital corpsman tended to any aches and pains among the fishermen (they loved pills) and once we towed a disabled junk back to port.
When we moved into a new patrol area I went ashore for a briefing and was issued what they called a psychological warfare kit. So what do we do, insult their mothers? No, you give them these here leaflets. The leaflets were printed in Vietnamese (which none of us spoke). The accompanying English translation sounded a little awkward, as translations always do, but the gist of it was that we were there to rid their peaceful land of the hated Viet Cong.
The last line of the leaflet translated as “May the sea spirit powerful catch for you many fishes.” This sounded a little odd, but we knew the Chinese painted eyes on the bows of their boats for good luck and it was plausible that the Vietnamese believed in sea spirits. We figured the guys at headquarters in Saigon had studied Vietnamese culture and knew what they were doing.
Boarding a fishing junk
When we next boarded a junk I eagerly passed out leaflets. The fishermen squatted down on the deck and studied the leaflet carefully, making approving sounds as they read. (They did not like the Viet Cong, either.) But when they got to the last line they burst out laughing. They were convulsed with laughter, rolling on the deck, pointing at us, pointing at our ship. “What’s with these guys?” we wondered.
So we tried the leaflets on the next junk, and the next. Same reaction: The Vietnamese got to the last line of the leaflet and burst out laughing.
We never figured out what the leaflets really said. I threw the rest of them overboard.