We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam (17 page)

A few years after that trip Joe and I were at a conference on Vietnam for nongovernmental organizations in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. A woman rushed up to Joe and asked if he had written the book about the Ia Drang. He said he had. She said: “You wrote in your book about General Chu Huy Man?” Joe again said yes. She said: “You’ll never guess who we have sponsored for a scholarship to study at the Colorado School of Mines—General An’s son!” That same year another Vietnamese we met on our first trip, the press counselor at the Vietnam embassy in Bangkok, was studying at Harvard on a Nieman Fellowship.

Our visit to the home of Joe’s good friend Colonel Thuoc was no less interesting. On our trip to the Ia Drang, Joe and the colonel were seatmates on the bus and got acquainted. It was Thuoc who tapped Joe on the chest with one finger and said: “You have the heart of a soldier; the same heart as mine. I am glad I didn’t kill you.” Thuoc showed Joe the little diaries he kept and wrote in every day of his ten years of combat in the south. Now he told Joe he had had the diaries copied and was willing to give him a copy of what he wrote during his time fighting at Dien Bien Phu. Joe asked for a copy of all his journals, and later that evening Thuoc handed them over and expressed the hope that someday he would be able to visit the United States. The translating of our conversation that evening was done by Thuoc’s son, whose command of English was quite good.

At the time we were fighting these men and men like them in our long-ago war there were those on our side who denied them their humanity, who spoke of our enemies as if they were robots who served an alien cause, Communism, only because some commissar had a gun pointed at the back of their heads. No thought was given to the possibility that they were fighting so hard because, like America’s own revolutionaries, they had a burning desire to drive the foreigners out of their native land; that nationalism was a far more compelling reason for them to fight than Communism. They were good soldiers, implacable foes in battle, and now that the guns had fallen silent and peace had returned to their land they proved to be proud fathers, good husbands, loyal citizens, and, yes, good friends.

TEN

The Never-Ending Story

T
he next morning, October 20, our smaller party loaded into the vans and set off down Route 14 through coffee plantation country bound for the old mountain town of Ban Me Thuot, the first provincial capital to fall to the North Vietnamese Army campaign in the early spring of 1975 that ended with the fall of Saigon and the surrender of all South Vietnamese forces.

We stopped the convoy at the Chu Dreh Pass, where the last battalion of the French Groupe Mobile 100 was ambushed and destroyed by the Viet Minh, even as the rest of that proud regiment was slaughtered in a similar ambush in the Mang Yang Pass. It was a perfect site for an ambush—with the narrow road passing through a jungled defile. Once the Vietnamese had knocked out the vehicles leading and trailing the column of trucks, jeeps, and lightly armored vehicles, the French were trapped like sitting ducks. This was where the French fought their last engagement of the Indochina War.

We paused in Ban Me Thuot—where Teddy Roosevelt once hunted tigers on a world tour—and all of us, minus Sergeant Major Plumley, tucked into a lunch of pho, steaming bowls of Vietnamese beef soup. Plumley sat in his front-row seat on the bus chowing down, as before, on his canned sausages and crackers. “I ain’t putting anything in my mouth on this trip that didn’t come over with me in this bag,” the sergeant major told Joe. “I promised Mrs. Plumley that I wouldn’t bring anything unhealthy home with me.”

Our convoy loaded up and headed east on Highway 21—a sparsely traveled remote mountain road that in 1975 was dubbed “the Trail of Tears” as a large, panicked horde of some 200,000 Vietnamese civilian refugees and South Vietnamese soldiers attempting to flee the Central Highlands was ambushed, harassed, and chopped to pieces by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces before they could reach the coast in a scene that would be played out all over the country in the coming weeks. It was estimated that half of the refugees in that ill-fated column on this road died.

For us it was a long rough ride over the narrow, potholed route rising toward yet another remote mountain pass, which we reached long after dark. There we narrowly escaped an ambush. Our drivers slammed on the brakes as their headlights picked out a line of large rocks blocking the road. General An, our escorts and drivers piled out and swiftly cleared the rocks away. A hundred yards past the roadblock we caught up with two barefooted men, AK-47 rifles slung over their backs, pedaling their bicycles furiously down the hill. Since none of our Vietnamese were armed they were left unchallenged to pedal down the mountain toward home.

Had there been only one van, not four, and no uniformed Vietnamese military men, there’s little doubt in my mind that we would have been relieved of our money and valuables by those barefoot highwaymen, whose hard labor building the roadblock was fruitless this time.

We spent that night at a comfortable old hotel on the beach at Nha Trang and enjoyed a late dinner of langouste, a delicious South China Sea relative of the lobster. Another party of 1st Cavalry veterans, traveling separately from us, had already taught the hotel pianist the old 7th Cavalry regimental marching tune “Garry Owen,” and he hammered out that lilting Irish drinking song vigorously, if not well.

The next morning we said our farewells to General An and to colonels Hao and Thuoc, who had arrived in Nha Trang via a different route. They were heading for the airport to catch a flight home to Hanoi. In the case of General An it was a farewell more final than any of us knew. My old enemy and new friend died just three years afterward of heart problems. He didn’t live long enough to follow through on our mutually agreed plan to build a small monument in Landing Zone X-Ray in memory of all the brave soldiers, Vietnamese and American, who had perished there.

Our much-reduced traveling squad now headed south down Highway 1 toward Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, a grueling twelve-hour run. We passed by the huge port facility at Cam Ranh Bay, built by the Americans during the war, and paused for lunch at a seaside café in Phan Thiet. As we drew nearer to the city we passed through Xuan Loc, where the South Vietnamese 18th Division held off the North Vietnamese for ten days in the closing days of the war. It was at Xuan Loc that the South Vietnamese air force dropped a large American-supplied fuel-air bomb on advancing North Vietnamese troops, killing many of them in a particularly hideous fashion. At ground level, the fuel-air bomb releases a cloud of an explosive gas like propane. After a brief delay to allow the gas to settle into bunkers and foxholes a spark ignites the cloud. Those within the invisible gas cloud die a terrible death from the concussion, fire, and lack of oxygen. The North Vietnamese commanders sent a message to the South Vietnamese threatening to put Saigon to the sword if the fuel-air weapon was used again. That ended that.

Once we reached Bien Hoa, a major American air base during the war, we began to get a feel for what had happened to Saigon in the intervening years. Bien Hoa once was a separate town twenty miles outside Saigon with rice paddies and farm fields in between. Now we found that Saigon had grown out to meet Bien Hoa as millions more rural Vietnamese migrated to the big city for economic reasons. The farmland was now filled with shantytowns of small, crudely built shacks with few amenities that housed that population boom.

We saw the new Vietnam that has emerged from the ashes of war. The Saigon we knew had grown topsy-turvy, and as we reached the heart of the old city the streets were jammed with motorbikes, bicycles, cars, trucks, buses, and pedestrians. In this year of our visit, 1993, we bunked down at the old and then unrestored Caravelle Hotel, once headquarters of legions of American war correspondents like Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw and visitors to the war like Walter Cronkite. Across the way, past the old French Opera House, the fabled Continental Hotel had already been refurbished and its “Continental Shelf”—the famous open-air terrace restaurant where journalists from Graham Greene to Hunter Thompson once mingled over cold
citron pressés
with soldiers, diplomats, spies, and adventurers in the afternoon heat—was now glassed in, air-conditioned, and sadly more civilized and less rowdy. Soon other notable downtown Saigon hotels, such as the riverfront Majestic, the Brinks and Rex Officer Quarters, and the Caravelle itself, would be spiffed up and reborn as four-and five-star hotels where a good room costs $300 a night and up.

Another sign of great change: Joe and I went to dinner the next night at the home of the sister of a Vietnamese friend of Joe’s who was a photographer for UPI during the war and now lives in California. She and her husband lived in a huge modern villa, with an Olympic-size swimming pool, in a section of the city known as Beverly Hills. She and her husband are the Vietnam representatives of one of the major Japanese electronics manufacturers. They live like millionaires, and are, their business and many others flourishing as Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party welcomed foreign investments and opened doors to trade and commerce.

Vietnam today—in late 2007, as this is written—is skillfully and delicately balanced between neighboring giant China and its old enemy/new friend the United States; between Communism and capitalism; between a rock and a hard place. Two-way trade with the United States was nearly $9 billion in 2006; over $9 billion with China that same year. There is an American embassy in Hanoi; an American consulate in Ho Chi Minh City. The nation is ruled by the Communist Party politburo and Central Committee, and while it has lifted its foot off the throat of the economy and unleashed the businessman hidden in the heart of every Vietnamese, the hard-liners still brook no word of dissent or protest. The Montagnard and Hmong tribes of the Central Highlands, especially those who have embraced Christianity, have fared badly since the war’s end. U.S. diplomats have pressed the government on the issue of human rights, as did George W. Bush when he became the first American president to visit Vietnam, without notable success.

Both Hanoi and old Saigon have experienced bursts of growth that are phenomenal to those who have visited Vietnam periodically during the years since the American war ended in 1975. High-rise office towers and hotels dot the skylines and the construction of more of both continues unabated. In Hanoi the authorities must patrol the vital dikes that protect the city from the Red River floods, tearing down the houses and shops of squatters who daily encroach on them. There are housing developments for the newly wealthy where building lots go for half a million dollars. In this hothouse economy corruption is endemic. The Ho Chi Minh City of today is crowded beyond belief and navigating across the main boulevards against a phalanx of motor scooters and motorbikes forty or fifty abreast is nothing short of a dance of death. Locals advise visitors on the rules and etiquette of surviving a street crossing as a pedestrian: One must step confidently off the curb and move just as confidently into the stream of traffic, moving at a steady pace without looking at the motorcyclists or making any sudden stop or speedup. The motorcyclists will adjust for you as long as they can count on that. Otherwise you will be hit and a huge pile of motorbikes will land on you when you go down.

The girlie bars of Tu Do, where young women clad in
ao dai
, the graceful and sensuous native dress, hustled GIs for watered-down drinks are long gone. In their place are shops hustling the latest in Japanese electronics, jewelry, and souvenirs for the tourists. But the more things change, the more they remain the same: Young men furtively press brochures on passing visitors that advertise special massages up the stairways that flank the shops. Near the hotels are small stalls whose owners hawk newly produced GI dog tags and knockoff Zippo lighters engraved with the insignia of American combat units and the slogan of a long-ago war to passing tourists: “When I die I’ll go to Heaven, cause I’ve served my time in Hell.”

Vietnam is hooked up to the Internet and more than 20 million Vietnamese have their homes and offices wired in to the rest of the world. Hotels even in distant provincial capitals like Hue and Danang offer your choice of wired or wireless broadband at no extra charge. Cable and satellite television are everywhere.

Joe was in Vietnam in April 2005, when he traveled from Hanoi to Hue to Quang Tri to the Ben Hai River, marking the old border between north and south, then to Ho Chi Minh City for the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of South Vietnam, a strangely muted celebration. The victory parade began at 7:00 a.m. and the public was barred from attending. Police stood guard three blocks on either side of the parade route, turning away all but officially approved spectators and the media. The government sent Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, then ninety-three years of age, to be the top man on the reviewing platform. The old revolutionary stood there and witnessed a parade that included floats advertising American Express and Visa, with pretty Vietnamese girls dancing around waving huge credit cards over their heads. What must the old revolutionary have been thinking of the way things turned out? Had the Communists won the war only to lose the peace?

Because of our many trips, between 1990 and 2005, we have seen the transformation of both Hanoi and the former Saigon: Hanoi, seen first in 1991, was a dingy backwater outpost bent under decades of strict wartime Communist rule, with only one private restaurant, the scars of war plainly evident and the buildings seemingly unpainted since the French left in 1954. From that bleak picture, the Vietnamese capital in just over a decade morphed into a bustling metropolis with hundreds of new restaurants and clubs, from no life to a vibrant nightlife. Cranes tower over construction sites where skyscraper office towers and new hotels are rising.

The other, Ho Chi Minh City, always had a hustler’s heart and soul, and it bowed before its stern new masters from the north with all the mock subservience it showed others who came as occupiers and left, defeated, with empty pockets. Old Saigon taught the newest masters how business is done. The old Saigon is New York to Hanoi’s Washington, D.C.—bigger, busier, throbbing with life, and always ready to make a deal. The new city is better, too. That which is old is made new: open sewers and fetid canals are now covered, garbage is collected, and streets are swept. The familiar stench of those sewers and canals has been traded for the smog of a million motorbikes and fleets of Mercedes-Benzes and Toyotas.