Whether profiteering or pride, Vietnam can’t get enough of its revolution. Neither can Western tourists.
Day 7, Vietnam Military History Museum, Hanoi, 17 March 2019: The view from the stone fort built in the early 19th century that defended Hanoi from colonial powers. From it, visitors look down on a courtyard of large-scale war souvenirs — tanks, planes and helicopters — captured from the Americans during the Vietnam War (to the Vietnamese, the Second Indochina War). Popular with the Vietnamese and Europeans, this museum, which opened in mid-1950s, did not find favor with Dad for its “over-the-top” perspective on the Vietnamese victory.
Núi Bà Đen. Tây Ninh. Phu-Loi. Củ Chi. These were the names of places I had heard over and over growing up, but had little meaning to me. I knew these villages existed in Vietnam — the country invoked in the 1980s whenever Americans wanted to pontificate about either American patriotism or American imperialism. And I knew that my father had served in the Vietnam War in the early 1970s.
Other than that, meh. I had better things to do — friends to make, tennis to play, colleges to which I needed to apply.
But as I entered my late 30s and early 40s, and began to identify my father as more of a persona and less of a parent, I began to wonder what he was like as a younger man. Nearly 35 years later, when the opportunity to visit Japan arose, I suggested a seven-day detour to Vietnam. Dad went for it, and before three months elapsed, I was standing in a long, winding and seemingly never-ending queue of Americans, Canadians and French nationals while waiting for my visa approval at the very same place my father landed some 49 years ago: Tan Son Nhut International Airport. To me, Tan Son Nhut looked like any other extremely busy airport in a developing country; to my father, it was unrecognizable from the U.S./Republic of Vietnam Air Force (VNAF) air base where he landed for official duty in the fall of 1970.
I came to Vietnam with a basic education about my father, but I didn’t really “know” him. Dad had always been bookish, formal, inclined toward intellectualization and wary of wading into personal waters — ponds or other. When it came to Dad’s experience in Vietnam, he proved a lesson in contradiction. As Dad talked of the Vietnam War with friends or fellow veterans, he would sometimes puff out his chest like a marine (although he was Army), deepen his voice and refer to lessons taught to him by Colonel So-and-So or Captain What’s-His-Name. But his second wife actually found the combat medals he won in an old cigar box stuffed deep in his closet; she was the one to have them framed for him, along with a photograph: my fresh-faced father with a full pompadour, speaking into a radio transmitter — slightly feigned for effect. Dad had still always delved into any book, play, or movie about the Vietnam War that he came across. He felt Apocalypse Now was a bit over the top for his pre-adolescent children, but I do recall falling asleep on the couch while he watched The Deer Hunter on VHS.
It’s general family lore that in 1968, my father was enrolled in the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, where he was studying poetry just about the time that U.S. President Lyndon Johnson decided to lift educational deferments for the draft. This threw him. He had the course of his life set: English professor, marriage to his high school sweetheart, gentleman farmer, maybe a published author. But when faced with the choice of boarding that bus for basic training in Fort Polk, Louisiana or running off to Canada, my father “accepted a calling his country made and got on with it.” He enlisted and then, because he had a college degree, transferred to Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia. This way, he could better control the outcome of his Vietnam experience. Or so he thought.
Day 3, Firing Range, Củ Chi Tunnel Complex, Củ Chi District, Vietnam, 12 March 2019: Dad takes aim at drawings of small animals firing off the same M-60 gun he used as First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army during the war. The firing range was at the complex located about 50 west of Ho Chi Minh City. Dad and I were among the first tourists of the day — just hours later, throngs of people swarmed the grounds. The gun firing rang loudly throughout the trees the rest of our stay.
“Vietnam changed everything,” my 73-year-old father said in a van from Ho Chi Minh City to Tây Ninh, on the border of Cambodia. To begin with, Dad met my mother at an Officers Club dance at Fort Knox, Kentucky — they married in three months — just before he deployed. When he returned, he finished his English degree, moved to Oklahoma for law school and became a respected attorney in Tulsa. Facts I did not previously know, I would only learn as two of us were on the way to Núi Bà Đen — the “‘Black Virgin Mountain” — a former U.S. Army Signal Corps base where he was stationed in 1970. His job: call out orders and protect the ridge line. That meant keeping all the Viet Cong tunneled deep inside the butte away from all the expensive equipment the U.S. used to signal the time and place for an artillery battery of men — or a napalm bomb strike.
Dad also performed other administrative tasks, normal day-to-day stuff, except armed with a M-60. He rode a helicopter to distribute paychecks, official letters and other dispatches to the troops. He made sure the Vietnamese nationals who served as cooks and cleaners at Núi Bà Đen and Phu-Loi were transported to and from work, sometimes picking up soldiers who spent the night in their villages. And he ventured on occasion to Tây Ninh, the nearest town, on behalf of the colonel in command. “We were on a road just like this one,” he told me as we drove by rice fields through disheveled villages — some lined with “dollar” homes built with money from U.S. refugees. “We saw something rustling. My driver hit the gas and we turned around to see the Viet Cong walking off.” He meant to imply that the Viet Cong had missed their target — Dad’s jeep — by about two seconds.
I never thought of my father as particularly heroic for being a Vietnam veteran. Neither, did he, it seems. But as I watched my father interact with the dozens of sites and people we would visit over the following week, my perception of him evolved. No, Dad wasn’t shot down and imprisoned in the Hanoi Hilton and he wasn’t attacked in the Mekong Delta with nowhere to go aside from the waters beset with snakes and crocodiles. He accepted a job he did not want, in a war he felt was misconceived and risked his life to thwart four American presidents’ fear of encroaching Communism. He did it quietly and without fuss, defending his signal base at Núi Bà Đen from advancing Viet Cong during a particularly bad firefight one night in the summer of 1971. When the Colonel he served awarded him a Bronze Star and offered to promote him to Captain if he signed up for full-time military, Dad declined. He sold his dress blues when he returned to campus and just “got on with it”: law school, a family of three children, divorce, some losses, some tragedies and well, life.
After our trip, however, I believed Dad heroic for going back to Vietnam — for seeing for himself the flaws of American exceptionalism and the war itself; for speaking with, extensively, the sons and daughters of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters to hear their perspectives; and for witnessing the fierceness of Vietnam’s right to independence, and even vocally supporting that. A lot of Vietnam veterans take this trip; the majority do not. It’s much easier to allow politicians to wrap up their service in adjectives of patriotism and allegiance of than to take a hard look at the thorny paths of the complicity and ideology of the past, especially regrettable ones.
Day 2, Mekong Delta, 11 March 2019: A local resident steers one of the homemade boats that ferry riders across the comma-shaped flatland that stretches from Ho Chi Minh City to the Gulf of Thailand. The delta is Vietnam’s rice bowl, an agricultural machine that pumps out more than a third of the country’s annual food crop. During the war, the Delta provided valuable cover for the Viet Cong which sought to overthrow the Americans, who strafed the area with bombs and defoliants in return.
Still, I kept eyeing Dad for something, some totally irrational, a-ha moment, blaze of glory scene that would summarize the reasons we came 5,000 miles for this. Friends who had their preconceived notions about what a ‘special’ and ‘life-changing’ trip this would be didn’t help. I wanted to visit a Saigon nightclub, where a lounge singer had chased down my Dad on a sultry R&R weekend. I wanted stories of Army pals with whom he shared poems and pot before these comrades in arms went off to fight. I wanted pictures of Dad kneeling at the spot where he rescued a fellow soldier — or maybe a mother and child — from advancing danger. But just like Vietnam’s government and economy, Dad had moved on. My only satisfaction came just after we entered the gates of the Núi Bà Đen gondola park, built in 1980 when the country began to reopen to the rest of the world. After paying our entrance fee, taking photos by the rows of peonies that spelled out “NUI BA DINH” and getting whisked by golf cart to the cable car that would take us over the jungle treetops to the top, we stopped at the Linh Sơn Thiên Thạch pagoda dedicated to Bà Đen, who, according to legend, threw herself off a mountain — after she was raped and with child — as punishment for betraying her commitment to Buddhist celibacy. Finally, the prodigious moment: Dad did a 360-degree spin, looked around and loudly said, “Now this, THIS is TOTALLY weird.”
Day 1, War Remnants Museum, Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), 10 March 2019: Dad walks through the photography halls of the War Remnants Museum. Starting its life as the ‘Exhibition House for U.S. and Puppet Crimes’ to showcase U.S. atrocities against the Vietnamese after the South Vietnamese government surrendered in 1975, the museum has toned down its take on the ‘American invasion’, since normalization of U.S. relations. In the 1990s, it took on the moniker ‘Exhibition House for Crimes of War and Aggression’ before finally settling with the name it has today — a diplomatic trade-off for the lifting of economic sanctions.
Day 1, Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), 10 March 2019: A view of a propaganda posters surrounded by the ubiquitous motorbikes that have become a fixture of the modern Vietnam. After Vietnam partitioned following the 1954 Geneva Accords, North Vietnamese artists took up pens and mantle to illustrate Ho Chi Minh’s vision for Vietnam. Now the posters serve as a reminder that the government will bring prosperity, even if Communist in name only. Almost all honor “Uncle Ho” in some manner.
Day 1, Reunification Palace, Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), 10 March 2019: Our tour guide, Trang, shows Dad the specific areas targeted by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) not long before Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, president from 1967 to 1975, fled the country. Trang had come from the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam and was born after his father served in the Viet Cong, the common name for the People’s Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam (PLAF), Uncle Ho’s guerilla army of the South.
Day 3, Củ Chi Tunnel Complex, Củ Chi District, Vietnam, 12 March 2019: Dad takes a photo of tour guide, Kong, a native of the Mekong Delta whose uncle served in the communist guerrilla troops known as the Viet Cong (VC). Surrounding him are mannequins recreating scenes of the tunnel war, featuring mannequins representing the people of the Củ Chi district, who dug tens of thousands of miles of small-animal sized passgeways to combat better-supplied American and South Vietnamese forces during the Vietnam War.
Day 3, Củ Chi Tunnel Complex, Củ Chi District, Vietnam, 12 March 2019: A mural depicting the outcome when American and South Vietnamese soldiers fell in the booby traps — often armed with sharpened bamboo “punji” stakes coated in cow pox — laid by the Viet Cong during the war. To combat these guerrilla tactics, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces trained soldiers known as “tunnel rats” to sniff out the traps and enemy troop presence.
Day 3, Củ Chi Tunnel Complex, Củ Chi District, Vietnam, 12 March 2019: Dad and tour guide Kong look in silent admiration at a portrait of Ho Chi Minh located in a bunker that served as Viet Cong Headquarters during the Tet Offensive. Ho Chi Minh continues to loom large in modern Vietnam as the man who led the long fight for Vietnamese independence against the French, Japanese and Americans. Prominent portraits of him are in every classroom, tourist attraction and amenity in the country.
Núi Bà Đen, Tây Ninh Province, Just East of Cambodian Border, 12 March 2019: “Now this, THIS is weird.” Dad’s first reaction upon encountering the cable cars of Nui Ba Dinh. Rising nearly 1000 meters (3,268 feet) above the table-flat, rice-growing country, the “Black Lady” is an extinct volcano covered in large black basalt boulders and visible for many miles in all directions. Sacred to Buddhists and Cao Dai, a regional religion, most of her served as storage and a repair shop for Viet Cong equipment. The U.S. had a radio re-transmission facility for units of the 1st Infantry Division that could not establish communications with headquarters.
Núi Bà Đen, Tây Ninh Province, Just East of Cambodian Border, 12 March 2019: Dad and his mountain 49 years from when he last left it. The mountain and the surrounding area are revered by the Vietnamese people having held an important place in their history for centuries. Variations of the legend of Núi Bà Đen go something to the effect of: a woman, Bà Đen, falls in love with a soldier, is raped by him and rather than betray her vow to Buddhism, throws herself off the side of the 3,268-foot mountain. The Linh Sơn Tiên Thạche pagoda, dedicated to Bà Đen, was built in 1997 two-thirds up the side of Núi Bà Đen.
Cable Car, Truong Son Mountains, SunWorld Ba Na Hills, 13 Miles West of Da Nang City, 14 March 2019: A new cable car overlooking the Truong Son Mountains and SunWorld Ba Na Hills, one of the new amusement parks in Vietnam featuring an Sino-European fusion atmosphere. SunWorld — part of the SunGroup, the largest real estate developers in Vietnam founded by four prominent Communist party members — takes up part of Annamite mountain range that connects Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. The Truong Son hosted the Ho Chi Minh trail, the main supply route for the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army during the Vietnam War.
Day 5, Golden Bridge, Ba Na Hills, 13 Miles West of Da Nang City, 14 March 2019: Designed by TA Landscape Architecture, a Saigon–based firm. the Golden Bridge has been called the “giant hands of Gods” cradling a golden thread. Although the focus of the world’s adulation has been on the stony hands emerging from the Truong Son Mountains of central Vietnam, there are many other body parts emerging from the grounds of the Euro-Sino fusion SunWorld Ba Na Hills amusement park. The hands look ancient, but are brand-new, made of wire mesh and fiberglass to hold up the striking footbridge that soars 3,280 ft. above sea level.
Hỏa Lò Prison (the ‘Hanoi Hilton’), Hanoi, 15 March 2019: Our tour guide, Andi, shows Dad (bottom left) the exterior of Hỏa Lò Prison, in a central district of Hanoi. A prison used by the French colonists for political prisoners, the prison came to be known as the “Hanoi Hilton” for its containment of U.S. prisoners of war during the Vietnam War. On this particular day, the prison museum was celebrating the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union, which was founded by Ho Chi Minh and still exists as the oldest and largest youth group dedicated to communist culture in the country.
Day 7, Bái Đính Temple and Pagoda, Bai Dinh Mountain, Ninh Bình Province, Vietnam, 16 March 2019: The new Bai Đính Temple, the biggest pagoda in Vietnam situated in the Trang An Landscape Complex, is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. Built over several phases starting in 2003 and finally completed in 2010, the pagoda’s three-kilometer hallway has 500 Arhat statues made of stone, each dedicated to a different deity. Visitors walk the hallway and touch all statues as they go, in hope of luck and prosperity.
Day 7, Tomb of Ho Chi Minh, during a run in Hanoi, 16 March 2019: Despite President Ho Chi Minh’s stated wish to be cremated, the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum has housed the first president of Vietnam’s perfectly preserved remains in Ba Dinh Square, where Ho read Vietnam’s Declaration of Independence, since August 1975. The monument — guarded at all times — contains a glass casket, which holds Uncle Ho’s dimly lit body. Or quite possibly a model of Ho Chi Minh, since even an embalmed body would eventually decay. His body has not.
Day 8, Vietnam Military History Museum, Hanoi, 17 March 2019: A photograph of a female fighter dragging a piece of a shot-down U.S. military plane in a sculpture made of downed plane and artillery parts in the museum’s court. While the Americans had a singular focus in Vietnam — anti-Communism — for the Vietnamese, the war was a chapter in a much longer history of armed struggle against foreign domination, fought previously against the Chinese, the Japanese, and the French. The sculpture, whose creator remains unknown, has pieces from all wars.
Day 8, Ho Chi Minh Museum, Hanoi, 17 March 2019: Categorized into eight different categories, the museum chronicles Ho Chi Minh’s life from 1890, when he was just a simple villager, through his world travels and his life as a Vietnamese icon, who translated Marxism and Leninism into the ideology behind independence. The four-story tribute — a stone’s throw from the mausoleum — has artifacts from around the world, including his original desk.
