An hour later we were definitely in Dong Ha this time and I could feel the excitement bubbling. We were picking up a Willys jeep left behind by the Americans after the war, and the thought of driving it through Vietnam of all places would be an extraordinary experience, I was sure.
The station was more of an open-air platform, and there didn’t seem to be much of Dong Ha but dust and sun. We spotted the jeep parked outside a little cafe. It was everything I’d hoped it would be: newly repainted in a dark military green with a cargo net stretched across the bonnet and another wrapping the spare wheel. It was in really good nick and the owner had obviously done a lot of work keeping it together. It dated back to 1971 and still carried everything the US army would have carried: picks and shovels, an axe, and there was even a deep-water fording kit - a lever on the dash that you pressed when crossing a ford and pulled out again when you were through. It was four-wheel drive, of course; twin gear sticks that looked freshly cleaned and oiled. The seats were comfortable, two up front and two in the back, the windscreen was the type that folded flat and was fitted with a couple of straps that doubled as a handhold when you were getting in and out. God was I looking forward to driving it.
My excitement was dashed almost immediately. When I mentioned driving I was told I wasn’t allowed to. No one had said anything before, but foreigners aren’t allowed to drive in Vietnam unless they take a test and get a special licence issued by the government.
Shit. We had a six-hour ride ahead and I wouldn’t be able to drive. Oh well, at least we’d get to ride in it. Gear loaded, we jumped in. The driver was a nice guy who didn’t say much; he was wearing a smart green pith helmet just like the one the disabled cabbie had worn in Hanoi. We were heading for the coast and a place called Vinh Moc that had been just outside the demilitarised zone in the Vietnam War - the demarcation line between North Vietnam and South that had been drawn after the first war back in the fifties. Vinh Moc had been part of the Ho Chi Minh trail, the supply route for arms and supplies. After being bombed incessantly by the US air force the villagers had dug several kilometres of tunnels and hidden in them.
Our driver took us through small towns on dirt roads baked hard by the sun. Flat and smooth, they were really good quality and the jeep rattled along at a fair old pace. It was very comfortable and a great way to see this part of the country especially given our destination and its significance. Weaving through dense, smoky jungle I could begin to imagine what it must have been like to be a GI en route to wherever, never seeing the enemy and never knowing when a couple of bullets might hit you.
Halfway to Vinh Moc the driver decided to hell with the law - he’d let me drive anyway. I wasn’t expecting it, but he knew I was itching to and when the roads were clear he pulled over and we swapped places.
It was fantastic; the gears were smooth, the brakes good, and the whole thing felt really well maintained. The steering wheel had the kind of delicious play you expect in old vehicles. We were in the open air on tightening bends and the deep growl of the engine was immensely satisfying. It wasn’t long before we reached Vinh Moc.
I’d been reading a little of the history before we arrived. The French had colonised Vietnam largely from the south, and they were fighting Ho Chi Minh long before the Americans. When that war ended the Geneva Accords proposed elections for the whole country but the South Vietnamese and the Americans refused to sign. The emperor - who was in exile - appointed a prime minister who then rigged a referendum that got rid of the emperor. Civil war broke out. What we know as the Vietnam War began in 1959, though the Americans didn’t send troops until much later. During the war 58,000 US personnel and close to 350,000 Vietnamese soldiers were killed. It also left over 3,000,000 civilians dead or wounded.
It was very interesting to be here because everything we knew about the country had been from a western perspective, and, as we’d already found out, the Vietnamese are a fiercely proud and independent people. That trait was personified in the guide who showed us the tunnels.
The entrance was hidden in elephant grass and thick vegetation that covered the area all the way to the Gulf of Tongkin. There’s a heritage centre there now, a museum where the village of Vinh Moc had been, and we saw photos of how it looked before the Americans bombed the place: a symmetrical landscape of bamboo and thatch.
Our guide showed us the alarm bell the villagers used to warn of incoming air raids, shrapnel from an old bomb they’d put to some use. The tunnels ran for five kilometres to the sea.
We walked up a narrow, dusty trail into deep jungle before the trail opened and a stone wall indicated the entrance to the underground network. It was hot and narrow, the passage reinforced with wooden bulwarks. We could walk without bending, but as we went deeper the passages became narrower and lower and the walls were polished stone. The tunnels were created over an eighteen-month period between 1966 and late 1967 and the Americans had no idea they were under construction. The villagers dug in the day time and at night they’d ferry the earth and soil off shore, leaving no sign that anything was going on.
Three hundred of them lived underground for six years; each family allotted a tiny living space, a little room carved off one of the tunnels. It was a labyrinth, very close and tight: the tunnels never running straight for very long so that if the enemy found them the people wouldn’t be mown down. There were bends and clefts, security posts where villagers could return fire if they were attacked. We saw rooms where eighty or more people gathered to plan what they were going to do; there were hospitals with operating theatres, schools, communal kitchens and freshwater wells. This place was not only a refuge, though, it became an important staging post: food and arms were carried through the tunnels to an outlet on the beach that doubled as a ventilation shaft. The supplies were then transported to a small island off shore and shipped south to the Viet Cong.
It was hot and dark inside, and I found it hard to imagine whole families living in tiny caves like this cut into the rock. Seventeen children had been born underground and the larger your family the bigger the space you were allotted. We saw rusty pitons fixed in the walls where washing lines had been hung, and carved nooks where petrol lamps were lit. Every tunnel we went down there were tiny rooms left and right, the village partially recreated underground.
‘This is amazing,’ Russ said as we stood at the lip of the tunnel overlooking the sea.‘Most of it was to protect the villagers. It’s horrific to think what it must have been like, your village obliterated by bombs and having to move underground and live like that, survive for six years.’
‘The Americans had very modern weapons,’ our guide told us, as passionate as the student we had met the night before. ‘But Vietnamese people are very brave: we struggle for our freedom, our independence. We have a real purpose.’
Seven miles from the Laos border we stopped at a site commemorating the battle of Khe Sanh: a seventy-seven-day struggle between US marines and the North Vietnamese. Khe Sanh was one of the largest bases in the country and had been established in 1962 as an airfield by US Special Forces. It became an outpost from which they watched the PAVN (People’s Army of Vietnam), many of whom were ensconced in villages along the Laos border.
The battle raged from 21 January to 8 April 1968 with the base under constant attacks from artillery and rockets. Over 200 US marines were killed, and we saw some of them in a series of grim photographs adorning the walls of the museum. There were other reminders too: battered helmets, tunics, boots, artillery belts and webbing . . . outside we could see the twisted remains of rockets, shells and massive bombs. It was impossible to imagine the devastation. There were helicopters, the old Huey you see in the movies and the bigger troop carriers with the twin rotors. In all 197 helicopters were brought down and I remember reading how for a long time the pilots weren’t provided with body armour, even though they were the number one target for snipers. It’s crazy how politicians justify war and this had been a particularly stupid one. I couldn’t get over the bombs, how thick the metal was, how many there were: in the Vinh Moc area alone there had been forty dropped for every villager. ‘Living hell’ is what people had called it.
It was sobering: a first-hand glimpse of what so many people had so tragically been forced to go through. Not just the Vietnamese but young drafted Americans, many of whom must have wondered what on earth they were fighting for. Officially there are still 1,500 US personnel missing in Vietnam.
Seven miles west we crossed the border at a tiny place called Lao Bao. Standing in the immigration hut Russ and I dripped sweat on the entry forms. Apart from the heat it was a breeze of a crossing and there we were in this little town where the streets were wide and the buildings made of wood, many of them with rusting tin roofs and walls that were steadily rotting.
The people of Laos were poorer than their neighbours, that was obvious, but we were greeted with smiles and laughter. The name is pronounced ‘Lao’ with a silent ‘s’, but when we spoke to the older people they did sound the ‘s’. It was only after the war in Vietnam that the pronunciation was changed. We were looking for our next means of transport, a pickup truck where the bed is fitted with a framework canopy and benches to sit on. It was also the local bus service, called a
songthaew
. Unfortunately, there were only two and one had a flat tyre.
We would eventually be heading for Pakse, but tonight we’d only get as far as a place called Keng Tueb, and leaving Mae, our translator, to negotiate a price with the
songthaew
driver, Russ and I took a good look at it.
It was basically an old flat-fronted Toyota pickup. It looked OK. It was what the locals used and that was what we wanted. Mae did the deal and we piled in. The buses operate just like a
dolmus
with the driver stopping off to pick up and drop off passengers. Our first stop was the petrol station: a wooden shack with two oil drums standing outside. On top of each was a clear plastic measuring container marked in litres. The fuel was pumped by hand from the drums into the containers so they could mark the amount before it was drained into the fuel tank. We were filling plastic jerricans fixed on to the side of the flatbed, but first the son of the driver siphoned what was left in them by sucking on a plastic pipe and shoving it into the fuel tank. After that the jerricans were refilled with diesel from the drums.
In the back of the
songthaew
it was bumpy, but we were in the open air and the roads weren’t busy. We passed through wonderful little villages of wattle and daub houses with straw thatched roofs perched on precarious-looking stilts. Kids in shorts and not much else came running out to wave. Everyone seemed to be smiling and my first impression was of laughter.
I took in the smells, the feel of the new country, the different atmosphere. None of it was even vaguely threatening and in fact we’d felt more than safe all the way through India, Nepal, China and Vietnam. The air was thick and humid, the road hard-packed and cutting through farmland or deep jungle. During the Vietnam War Laos had been bombed over and over again - many of Ho Chi Minh’s top brass were thought to be based there. We’d seen a lot of bombs today and we stopped at Keng Tueb to see what the regular people had made of them, and in this case I mean
literally
what they made.
It was a pretty village surrounded by massive bomb craters, some of which had become ponds or muddy lakes. The houses were nicely spread out and linked by clay paths; the stilts allowed air to circulate and kept the people dry if the area flooded. The livestock sheltered in the space underneath - pigs, goats, chickens, and even cows with massive bells made from bits of shrapnel.
Remnants of the war were everywhere; many of the stilts had been made from the casings of cluster bombs dropped by the US air force. Some of them contained as many as seven hundred little bombs which scattered on impact, scything people down indiscriminately. B52s had dumped their long-range fuel tanks in this area: when they finished their mission they’d fly back and just unload the empty tank. Taking a wander down to the river we could see what had become of some of them.
The river was the focal point for the village - people were down there washing clothes and washing themselves, kids splashing about in the muddy water. Lots of people were paddling canoes. They’d taken the old fuel tanks the planes had dumped, cut them in half and made canoes out of them.
An older guy came wandering up the hill, his hair wet from washing. I asked him if he was old enough to remember the war. Nodding vigorously he pointed to where a woman was paddling seven children across the river in a fuel tank canoe.
‘We thought those were bombs,’ he said. ‘They’d come raining down every day and we waited for them to explode like the cluster bombs, but they didn’t.’
‘They dropped bombs every day?’
‘Every day.’
‘What did you do?’
He pointed across the river to where the woman had beached the canoe now and was leading her children up the hill into thick, damp jungle. ‘We hid.’
Another guy told Russ that his father had made the canoe he used today from one of the old tanks: he’d had to patch it up a little but it was still a good boat.
‘It would be great to show this to some of those B52 pilots now,’ I said. ‘See what they thought of what had become of their fuel tanks.’ We headed back towards the village. ‘I’m glad something’s of some use at least. All war is a waste of time but this one was really pointless.’
We spent the night close to the village, and the next morning - 11 June - we were away early with over 250 kilometres to cover to Champasak. Tomorrow we planned to take a boat down the Mekong River before crossing into Cambodia.