We hardly think of Vietnam as a place to go to study.  But the land has its own long tradition of scholarship and poetry, and the French added to this all their own learning.  The Investigators will eventually come to the point at which they wish to read up on things, and here are the notes on how to run this.  Note that this ticket, although listed in order, may be arrived at and returned to at any point.  Whenever the players have opportunity for research, they are essentially in this ticket. 

Research. 
Research may be conducted at any time.  The answers to likely questions are mostly above.  Remember that the players are at war.  Idle hours in the base library usually end the loafer washing dishes.  The answers below are by topic.  Judge the amount of data released to the players by the degree of success on the roll and the reliability of the source. 

     The Cao Dai 
     Refer to the section devoted to this faith.  Give the players a little information at first, and more as the research progresses. 

Charleston, South Carolina 
     A charming place.  Terence Alexander Baldwin, 1926-1944,  is buried in Saint Johns Church yard, in the family plot dating to the eighteenth century.  His death is not discussed.  The November 2,1944 Charleston Ledger-Star records it as an accident, nature unspecified.  His parents are dead.  His sister, Marjorie Marilyn Baldwin Marion, married well and is now a society matron.  She knows about her brother's friendship with Jake; he visits her on occasion.  She recalls that the last visit was July 5, 1968. 

    The Ledger-Star records an unusual crime on that date.  A grave in the Baldwin family plot was dug up by night, the coffin opened, the remains removed.  The police were called but found only booted footprints, and have closed the case since.  Of course, Schwärmer took the body to cook it down to its salts, for the grisly resurrection in chapter 10. 

Richmond, Chatham, Hargrave 
     Hargrave Military Academy was founded in 1909 in the town of Chatham, Virginia.  According to school records a Terence Alexander Baldwin matriculated there in 1938 and graduated 1944.  A Jacob Francis Schwärmer entered a year later and graduated the same year with honors.  An old teacher,  Mrs. Otelia Watts, recalls them.  They were wild, brilliant, inseparable.  The Clarion, the Hargrave yearbook, records their scholastic and academic success; they were nicknamed the 'Bedlam Boys'.  Mrs. Watts tells anyone who asks a lot of things. (Mrs.  Watts tells anyone who asks a lot of stories about the two. ) 

     The News-Leader records a crime in Richmond that somehow rings a bell.  On May 14, 1944, a woman not referred to by name or profession reported that two young men in military fatigues approached her with indecent intent.  They took her to a house where they outraged her violently and repeatedly, each encouraging the other.  She thought them off-duty GIs, but no men answering her detailed description were stationed nearby. 

     The crime was unsolved, because Schwärmer doesn't like hassles.  Alec wanted a woman; Jake liked to watch.  James König was born in Richmond, Virginia on February 14, 1945.  Only Schwärmer knows the truth.  His use for König is explained in Chapter 10. 

    The Corpse Mutilation 
    Research will reveal no historical reason for the mutilations  in Vietnam, despite the widespread practice of cremation.  Tibetans are known, however, to practice excarnation (the removal of flesh prior to disposal of the body) and there is some suggestion that Tibetan and Himalayan forces may be operating under the control of the Red Chinese in the area described. The idea that they did it is a red herring, but the Mythos sea holds stranger fish. 

    Ho Chi Minh 
     Ho died in 1969, ending an era of Vietnamese history.  The grim determination to finish what he had begun won the war.  In the months after his death, the US thought that with him gone, the North Vietnamese would give up the fight. 

     The Mountain  in Laos 
       Spies have managed to get close enough to realize that the base holds something important.  It is off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and not a center in the drug trade.  In actuality, this place is the climactic center of the adventure, the cult center where the fungi, assuming the human shapes of powerful guerrilla leaders,  meet with Party officials to direct the ongoing war, which is a front for their own plots.  Ho Chi Minh sought them in order to avoid his own death.  He knew well what they taught others long before. 

    The wizard Joseph Curwen, of New England, learned evil magic  enabling him to send his spirit beyond death into Yog-Sothoth, the Gate and the Key, where it would exist until a descendant  revived him through a complex magical process involving the essential salts of his body.  When Curwen died in the seventeenth century, his body was buried in an unmarked grave, but his descendant James Julius Page, called "Charles Dexter Ward" in a story by H. P. Lovecraft, managed to find it, reduce it to its essential salts, and conduct the magic ritual.  Page returned Curwen to life, but Curwen, the wiser and wickeder, took the place of the callow boy who had been foolish enough to call him back from death.  His masterful plot to unearth the corpses of the world's great men and through their returned shades rule the human species was thwarted by a clever New England doctor. 

     Space Travel, the Moon 
     American astronauts landed on Earth's Moon for the first time in July 1969.  This activity included the confirmation that the Moon's surface held no air, water, or life.  While on the Moon, Armstrong and Aldrin did not sleep or dream, and spent less than a day. 

     Mutilation of Animals 
     Mutilation similar to that described above seems to happen rather frequently in North America, near the Rocky and Appalachian mountain ranges.  It was discussed by many authors who dealt with the paranormal or supernatural, especially Charles Fort.  The removal of muscle tissue is nowhere recorded, and in North America, the victims are usually cattle.  More sane authorities agree that the mutilations are the result of buzzard and blowfly action. 

     Geography, Rivers. 
     The rivers of Vietnam and China, the Mekong, Red, Yellow, and Brown, flow from the Himalayas.  Together with the Indus and Brahmaputra-Ganges systems of India, they provide water for fifty-four percent of the human species.  Those wise to the Mythos will notice that India and China are centers of the cult of the Great Old Ones.  These nations are seldom visited by American investigators owing to language difficulties, but cult practices continue to this day in India, and China veils herself in Marxist orthodoxy.  Those who myopically see New England as the center of paranormal activity may read Lovecraft, who spoke of  a world center of the Cthulhu Cult in the mountains of China.  This can be an allusion to no other place than that occupied by the Chinese so long, the center of occult and mystical practice, the source of the long Asian rivers, none other than Tibet. 

The Green Berets 
     British Rangers adopted the beret as their symbol during World War Two.  At the foundation of the US Army Special Forces, the beret became their symbol as well.  The Green Berets practice special warfare in Vietnam.  They sabotage enemy installations, kill enemy leaders, run spy rings, infiltrate, and train native soldiers to do these things. 

 Schwärmer 
    The captain of the Special Forces team attached to HI25 is one of the most decorated men in the US Army.  A Stars and Stripes article will reveal the basic facts of his life(his Belgian parentage, his graduation from the Citadel, his early commission and rapid promotion)  but is mostly a record of his awards and decorations.  He has almost everything that you don't have  to die to get, including a Congressional Medal of Honor if the Keeper feels like it.  He is the kind of hero that makes young men excited and old men nervous.  Any further look into his life will mean that the Keeper has to go into the section on his life and choose what to say. 

  Nurse Davidson 
   As one of the few American women left in Vietnam, she naturally attracts some attention.  She has no Mythos knowledge, but does have an odd story about the Captain.  When he first achieved his rank, and formed his own Special Forces team, she still had her little boy, Scottie, with her.  He was blond, blue-eyed, and handsome at age two.  The Captain would often stop by her base housing or the play yard and play with the little boy, who liked him very much.  One day she had to work late at the hospital, and the Captain offered to take the tike for a while.  She agreed; after all, he was a hero, and her son loved him.  Schwärmer went off and rounded up the men in his command.  A friend told her what he saw.  The men formed a circle and sat the baby in the middle, then joined hands.  They chanted a long verse in a language that the watcher, an orderly, did not know.  It sounded like German.  The child laughed at the new game that he was playing.  The men then went off to a bar and got drunk, while the Captain returned the sleeping toddler to his mother.  She had no idea what had happened and has never confronted the Captain, as her baby was unharmed. 

ETHNICITY IN TICKETS 
The present character-generation system for Call of Cthulhu is, laudably enough, ethnicity-neutral.  Lovecraft's stories, while they involve a variety of people from all over the world, usually center on white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males from New England.  Lovecraft himself was one, and took much pride(perhaps too much) in his heritage.  For purposes of the usual Cthulhu 20s game, the assumption that all Investigators are white Anglo-Saxons is perfectly tenable-and perfectly in keeping with the spirit of Lovecraft.  This idea breaks down in the heat of Tickets for a Prayer Wheel. 

The Anglo-Saxon Protestants of the old Mythos stories avoided Vietnam as much as possible, and the American army was, as is now well known, a mad hodgepodge of regional and ethnic rivalries.  Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, and other minority groups all took part in the war and may appear as characters in the game. 

      The Chinese found Vietnam dominated by the Viets, the people of the sacred phoenix.  The Viets migrated from south China into the Red River delta about 200 BC.  They practiced wet rice culture in paddies and were Mahayana Buddhists.  They drove before them the Champa, a darker people .   Pockets of Champa remain along the coast. Khmer, or Cambodians, live further south.  Many are Muslims. 

          The city of Saigon is also the home of about one million ethnic Chinese.  These are mostly Cantonese and  keep the old ways. Saigon Chinatown, or Cholon, is the location of Green Flower Street, where some of the first ticket takes place.  The Chinese suffer much from Vietnamese prejudice, as the Vietnamese think that they own all the money and businesses in the cities. 

      The montagnard people are remote hill communities,  in villages or chiefdoms, and make their living by slash-and burn agriculture, with a variety of religions.  They can be divided linguistically into the northern groups who speak Mon-Khmer tongues, and Malayo-Polynesian language speakers in the south.  Allegiances shifted often, and only a few groups were consistently loyal to one side in the war.  All the tribes hate the Viets. 

      North Vietnam has such montagnards, and also tribes speaking Thai-based languages.  These minority groups practice wet-rice cultivation as the Viets do, and are similar to the Zhuong of Yunnan.  The North Vietnamese government afforded them a measure of autonomy, or pretended to do so. 

      Across the border in Laos, opium cultivation was rampant, and encouraged by the US-backed chieftains.  The governments of Laos were powerless to affect the opium trade.  Laos served as a route for the VC to enter South Vietnam while technically immune from American attack on its neutral territory.  American covert operations, however, continued throughout the war.  A rather unusual one forms the climax of Tickets, in which the players attempt to find and kill the mad Captain Schwärmer. 

THE GREEN BERET BUNKER 
      The Special Forces team occupies a bunker of its own down the hill from the main troop barracks at Firebase HI25.  The investigators will quickly become aware of the location and nature of this building, but the team will never invite them inside.  The investigators may eventually try to get there anyway. 

     The bunker is perhaps thirty feet long, dug into the side of the hill.  The door is bamboo and boobytrapped.  It's open when the team is at home and Frank sleeps inside the entry.  When they are gone, it's closed, and any attempt to open it must begin with a stealthy shove on the left side of the door frame to disarm the trap.  If this isn't done, then the crossbow hidden in the frame fires a poisoned bolt.  The bolt does 1D4 damage, plus one point every ten minutes until the victim is treated or dies. 

     The entry holds muddy boots and sandals, ponchos, a low table for reading in the daylight from the door, the tall brass kettle that Frank uses for cooking on an outdoor fire.  There are two doors.  The left leads to a bunkroom for the team.  Eleven beds stretch the length of the room, though seldom are all occupied at once.  Footlockers sit at their feet.  There is also a bench and a long table stained with body fluids, leather manacles attached at the corners.  Implements of torture and sexual deviance line the walls.  There are dozens of lamps and candles everywhere.  The men's uniforms and weapons hang here. 

     The right door leads to the storage room.  This has every kind of weapon used in the war and then some, including an eight-foot spear, bolt action rifles, and montagnard crossbows and blowpipes.  There are costumes for all walks of life, including European, Vietnamese, and Australian uniforms for the team, black pajamas, mandarin robes, and women's clothes that might fit the houseboy(they do, if anyone gets a chance).  There is a locked chest that Müller has the key to, holding ten thousand dollars, a million piasters,  ten thousand dollars in gold, ten kg of opium, the same of heroin, ten grams of hammer, twenty of the dreamlands drug, and three sets of fake passports for the team-German, Australian, Canadian. 

     Beyond is the captain's bedroom.  There is a bed of bamboo, wide enough for one soldier or two good friends.  There is a small bookcase that locks and serves to carry the books, a desk and a footlocker.   The books include many racist and occult classics.  The locker is locked and has a STR of 10.  It holds spare clothes, a knife, an untouched bottle of cologne twenty-five years old.  The battered leather picture frame is at the bottom.  Behind the left-hand picture are two yellow newspaper clippings, cited above under research.  Behind the right is a two-inch lock of fine straight sandy hair.  The left picture is two boys in the full uniform of a Southeastern military school.  The taller is the younger Schwärmer, the other a delicate-featured youth with light sandy hair.  The right-hand picture shows the same two arms round shoulders at poolside, with an old Tidewater townhouse behind them.  On the back is written in a clear copperplate hand, "Me & Alec 1943".