ANDREW
LAM
Voices
HUFFINGTON
12.02.12
The
Petraeus
Scandal
and the
Untold
Stories
L
ONG BEFORE COMING TO AMERICA, the first English
phrase I ever uttered was, oddly enough, “No money, no
honey.” The painted girls in impossibly tight, colorful
miniskirts who strutted on the sidewalks near my school
in downtown Saigon said it shamelessly, and loudly, as
they plied their trades with the American GIs during the
Vietnam War. It became an expression among us pubescent schoolboys. ¶ That childhood memory comes back
now, decades later, as I think of the political scandal that
engulfed our nation right after the U.S. presidential election, and how, incredibly, a little honey and a lot of amorous email missives could take down America’s most
admired general, and threaten to ruin the career of yet
another. ¶ Gen. David Petraeus, erstwhile CIA chief and
U.S. commander of the Iraq theater, and one of the most
respected military generals and tacticians in modern time,
ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL FISHEL
Andrew Lam
is the author
of Perfume
Dreams:
Reflections
on the Vietnamese Diaspora. His next
book, Birds
of Paradise
Lost, is due
out in 2013.