Sunday, January 9, 1994
The Seattle Times.
Vietnam Why Go/ — A Persistent Question Haunts A Traveler’s Reaction To A Country Bustling With New Enterprise And Images Of An Old War
Terry McDermott
HO CHI MINH CITY – The open-air rooftop bar of the Rex Hotel is one of the weirdest places on earth.
It looks as if Edward Scissorshands, the movie boy with clippers for hands, has been paroled and taken up residence.
Topiary is everywhere – rabbits, tigers, birds. There are live songbirds, too, in a cage; and plaster elephants, goldfish in a tank, stuffed little brown bears, and a tiled mosaic of fishing boats at sea.
An altar complete with a small Buddha and incense burner has been carved out of bonsai in one corner. Above it Christmas tree lights flash REX in foot-high letters.
None of it makes much sense.
If you were suddenly set down here without knowing where you were, you would be hard-pressed to guess. But in its kitschy made-up-ness, it’s artifice, it is the prototypical Saigon spot.
Lights are strung over everything except the songbirds and the customers, who form a little zoo of their own, a collection of the curious and commercially aggressive from every corner of the globe.
The French come to Vietnam out of nostalgia, the Scandinavians out of adventure, the Russians habit, the Taiwanese desire. The Cubans come for solidarity. The Japanese come to make things – mainly money. The Chinese come to sell. The overseas Vietnamese return because they are Vietnamese.
Everybody knows why they’re here except the Americans who seem to wander around looking for something they can’t quite grasp.
What is there about Vietnam that makes it one of the fastest growing – albeit still puny – tourist markets in the world? It is inconvenient, at times inhospitable and always difficult.
Why would you come here?
The tourists come looking for something new.
The veterans come looking for something old.
There are no battlefields. There are places where battles took place, but they are often hard to find, even more often hard to recognize.
Vietnam has propagandized the war more than it has sentimentalized it. Where battles were, there is as apt to be a rice paddy as a plaque.
Until recently, a couple of bars appealed straightforwardly to nostalgists. They were named not after events in the war, but movies about it – “Apocalypse Now” and “Good Morning, Vietnam.”
The bars have been closed by local authorities in one of their occasional outbursts of socialist decorum. The bars apparently were too authentic in their representation of the war-era, Tu Do Street beer-joint-whorehouse combinations they were modeled after.
It’s odd, when you think about it. The memories of the movies have already crowded out the memories of the war.
A perfect pepper
Why would you come here?
Some of the simplest things tourists usually do – looking and eating – are here to be done in abundance. In Southeast Asia generally and Vietnam particularly, there are feasts for the eyes or the palate nearly everywhere you turn.
One of the unmitigated pleasures of Saigon is the food, everything from elegant French to Nouvelle Vietnam to noodles. Especially noodles. Simple pho, the classic Vietnamese rice noodle soup, can become a feast at any street stall.
At the Vy Restaurant, where the new Saigon is announced by a wall poster advertising condominiums and a long-drive contest at the Song Be Golf Resort, 20 kilometers out of town, the old Saigon is kept on a menu offering hog heads and snake in a dozen different preparations – souped, sauteed, boiled and broiled.
You can also get a dozen delicious eggrolls, with a mountain of fresh basil and lettuce and rice noodles and a peppery vinegar sauce, and peppers themselves, and rice pancakes for 40 cents.
At the upscale Vietnam House, you can sit amid muted peach walls and white woodwork while waiters in elegant black monk’s robes bring plates of spare, delicious, artfully presented food: the grilled fish accompanied by a single star anise, the sauteed morning glory by a single, perfect red pepper.
So you contemplate that perfect pepper and wonder what the war was all about? The main question is: Why? If we wonder this, what must the Vietnamese think? They fought and died by the hundreds of thousands. They lived in caves and tunnels. For what?
So that now they could, if they had the means, buy VCRs and Toyotas? So that former party cadre can run import-export scams? So somebody can manufacture fake Zippo lighters, inscribed with some grunt slogans of another time?
Sau, a cyclo driver, some days goes the whole day without a fare. While he waits in the neighborhood of the old American embassy (now a health club) he sits in his cyclo playing Brick on a Sony Game Boy.
The band at Saigon Headlines, a trendy bar, includes two electronic keyboards, one electronic drum machine, three nearly electronic singers singing interchangeably bad songs from interchangeably bad movies with something that might be called electronic emotion.
The exotic and the mundane
Why would you come here?
There is a mix of the truly exotic and the dreadfully mundane.
How exotic?
On the way back from the tunnels at Cu Chi, Harley Soltes, a Times photographer, was cajoled into drinking fresh cobra blood.
You did what? I said.
Harley had hired Omar, a street guide, to take him to see the Viet Cong tunnel complex at Cu Chi, a village just north of Ho Chi Minh City. The tunnels are astonishing for the human capacity for discomfort and dedication they represent. People lived in them for years.
But they are not much to look at and I had visited them several years ago and decided to stay in town.
You had to be there, Harley said. It was a fertility rite.
Yours or Omar’s? I wanted to ask.
Some guy they ran into at a restaurant had bought his fiancee a live cobra as a pre-nuptial treat. They drained the blood into a cup and invited Omar to join them. Omar invited Harley.
Sissy American, he said.
Harley’s from Texas and once in a while acts like it. They mixed the blood with a bit of rum and threw it down.
How mundane?
The beaches are filthy, the roads generally awful, the traffic somewhat worse.
Dong’s brake pedal went all the way to the floor every time he touched it, which wasn’t often. Brakes are not well regarded as a means of controlling a car’s passage down a crowded road. Horns, on the other hand, are esteemed.
We honked our way pass the Bich family en route to the beach at Vung Tau, all four of them on the same motorbike. At Baria, we saw a collection of dilapidated fishing boats on the Saigon river, one with a TV antenna sticking out of it.
On the beach at Vung Tau, a crew was filming a dream sequence for a 17th-century Samurai movie. They couldn’t have imagined a more surreal dream than the one surrounding them. Vacationing Saigonese got plastered on homemade wine. Some went swimming fully clothed. Across the street from the beach was a water slide. Next door was a massage parlor owned by the local Communist Party Central Committee. Up on the mountain surveying the scene was an immense, white Jesus.
We were besieged by venders. A folding chair and umbrella for the day cost a dollar. Cold, boiled peanuts cost a dollar and a half. Lobsters go for the high price of $7 each. A doleful little girl sold roast corn for 50 cents an ear.
People bought.
Dong and Omar, our driver and guide, prowled. Dong, a sailor of the highways, had at least one girl in every port and was diligent about recruiting more.
An old soldier, mistaking us for Russians, stopped to sing in solidarity with the workers of the world.
Nguyen Van Coi said he was 65, a veteran from up North. He joined the NVA at 17, one of Ho’s boys. He came South after the war.
He’s now a beggar who sings songs on the beach. He’s a human jukebox. What would you like? A little May Day march? Maybe some old socialist camp songs?
We’re Americans, we said. USA.
USA? he said. George Bush forever.
Told that Bush’s tenure was somewhat less than forever, Nguyen shrugged. For 2,000 dong, he would skip the details and get down to something more basic.
Long live America, he sang, so tunelessly I wondered if he was charging too much. But we had, as a country, spent a lot more for a lot less.
The country wears the history of those who moved through it. At Vung Tau, it is all arrayed in one place. The human jukebox, the pagodas and gun emplacements and three-star hotels with air conditioning and minibars. The gleaming white Jesus, built by the French, is now joined by two huge satellite antennas, courtesy of the Russians. Offshore are the Vietsov Petro platforms.
Nobody stayed but they all left pieces of themselves behind. Now that the country is reopening, they’re coming back to collect it.
The stuff of people’s lives
Why would you come here?
I first went to Vietnam more than half my life ago.
It will be 24 years this 4th of July that I came into Tan Son Nhut aboard a jam-packed, DC-8 charter.
The sky over Saigon that night was filled with color and noise, which I mistook for fireworks. They were instead the tracks of tracers and the thud of artillery, the direction – incoming or outgoing – of either was impossible to tell.
Everything was so bright and loud, yet so uncertain, irresolute.
I was an Air Force photo interpreter. My job was part of what was called, in the icily neutered language of the intelligence bureaucracy, “target acquisition.” This made it seem a lot more definite than it was. It sounded so simple, a matter of, “Hey, Bob, let’s go down to the store and pick up some targets.”
What I remember most was nearly the opposite, never knowing quite what I was doing. Sitting there, hunched over a glass-topped table. A light, which was supposed to be accompanied by clarity, beamed up from below, illuminating the landscape on the film.
I saw there on the light table the stuff of war and people’s lives. I imagined I saw the lives themselves.
By the time I got there, 1970, it was nearly inconceivable that we would have discovered things that hadn’t been seen before. We were mainly concerned with finding things others had discounted as potential targets. This meant that each time you circled something with a grease pencil and entered its description on a sheet of paper – some building, say, that you supposed was an ammunition dump, but that others before you had supposed was a granary – you were declaring that either the world or the American armed forces’ judgment of it had changed.
I was 19. I was not ready to remake the world. I was not supposed to be the final authority on these things. Other specialists, who I imagined knew more, were supposed to examine my work and make the decisions on what would be bombed and what would not.
In practice, it seldom worked that way. I can’t remember a single target I selected that was not bombed, and there are times when I seem to remember them all. The real choice over what was struck was exercised by the sheer, chaotic difficulty of hitting anything at all.
Most days we didn’t hit diddly.
Pilots, especially fighter pilots, would often get lost within minutes of leaving Tan Son Nhut. Frequently, they would dump their ordnance wherever it was convenient, turn east toward the South China Sea – they could usually find that – and follow the coastline home.
We would sometimes look at the film from their gun cameras and sit in slack-jawed amazement at the ineptitude of it all, at the carelessness with which death was tossed around the countryside.
Now I write.
At some level, it’s not much different. I don’t mean to denigrate what we do, but there is seldom the sort of clarity that we might wish in journalism, either. That’s what we get paid to do: give order.
We seek discovery. More often, I’m afraid, we make do with invention.
So, why come here?
Why would you come here?
That first night in Saigon, the 4th of July, 1970, when the artillery was either coming or going, and I was too scared to know which, the world was announcing itself to me. I wasn’t listening then. I am now. Here is what I hear:
We live in a world full of incorrect alternatives, where every act is constrained, every choice ambiguous.
The lesson of Vietnam is not that we were right, or wrong, in being there. The lesson of Vietnam is that we do not know which we were. The further lesson of Vietnam is that we cannot now find out.