Chris doesn't really fit in the VC tunnel...

We slept dense, deep sleep and woke in time for a quick breakfast in our hotel restaurant before heading out for the day, which meant we started the day faced with dozens of choices of dishes most Americans would consider dinner fare. Chris discovered a fondness for sticky rice and I’ll need to continue having pineapple jam on my toast moving forward.

Mr. Hung met us in our hotel lobby precisely at 8 and presented each of us with a quite nice portfolio for our travel documents (a bit bigger than the one we currently use which doesn’t always fit all of our documents if we have more than one leg in our journey) and a phone we could use while in Vietnam if at any time we were dissatisfied with our service or had questions our guide(s) were unable to answer. Part of my initial worry about this trip—that nagging anxiety that kept me from sleeping restfully on the plane--was that we would arrive and all of my planning would be for naught… there would be no tour guide to meet us, the hotel arrangements would have been in print only: there is a degree of faith we exercise when making purchases via the internet; it could be a heavy investment in illusion. Now that we are here and it all appears to be real, I couldn’t recommend V’explore more highly. Mr. Hung is an excellent guide.

We are staying close to the center of town and driving through the neighborhood this morning revealed the traffic and congestion and electricity of being downtown. There are 10 million people living in Saigon and there are 7 million motorbikes/scooters registered in the city, as well. Motorbikes are the primary mode of transportation here and this morning it seemed all 7 million were crowding the streets at once. People carry an unbelievable amount of heft with them on the back of their motorbikes… boxes bigger than the drivers, cages of puppies, trees. Mr. Hung mentioned that one must pass a test to get a license to ride a motorbike, which suggests there are some rules of the road to be followed, but they aren’t immediately apparent and crossing the street as a pedestrian seems a death defying act. He said there are three rules: be confident, go slow but keep moving and don’t look back. I amended his list and added a fourth: stay close to Mr. Hung’s side. He said the motorbikes are parked in the street or on the sidewalk during the day but are brought inside overnight to guard against theft. He keeps three (one for himself, his wife and his son) in his living room next to his couch overnight and said that larger families have to fill their living rooms and kitchens with their bikes overnight and it doesn’t leave room for much else. Typically men use motorbikes and women use scooters and women are completely shrouded on the street from head to toe: floppy hats, sunglasses, scarves covering the faces and necks, long sleeves, gloves and pants or skirts down to their ankles, often with socks and sandals or heels. Mr. Hung suggested they looked like colorful ninjas and said many tourists ask him if they are Muslim. In fact, the standard of beauty here motivates women to protect their skin from the sun in order to keep their skin as light as possible so whenever women are outside they cover themselves as completely as possible.

We spent an hour and a half in the car moving outside of the city to visit the Cu Chi tunnels north of Saigon and Mr. Hung presented us with an overwhelming amount of facts and information: during the war, the Saigon Airport tied with O’Hare for busiest because it continued to be a commercial airport while also being commandeered for military use. The Chinese dominated Vietnam for 1000 years before French missionaries arrived in 1857. They were not well received and quickly the French government sent troops to protect the missionaries and then colonized the region. The French influence remains today in the Vietnamese language which uses the Roman characters the French brought with them. There are 29 letters in the Vietnamese alphabet and six distinct tones but combinations of tones make it seem like there are even more. For instance, the word “ma” means ghost, but, mom, grave, horse and seedling depending on the tonal pronunciation. When Vietnam converted to Roman characters at the start of the 20^th Century, it was the first Asian country to do so. The surrounding countries of Cambodia and Laos still use Sanskrit characters brought to them by Indian influence. We also learned—because there is so much we didn’t know about this region of the world—that the term Indochina, which refers to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, is so-called because it is the geographic place in the world where Buddhism from China meets and combines with Buddhism from India creating its own unique brand of Indochinese Buddhism.

Like so many conflicts that lead to so much death, the roots of the Vietnam War are complex and deep. The 1954 Geneva Agreement expelled the French and divided North and South Vietnam into two separate countries. Mr. Hung asked us to remember that it was a civil war and that 90% of the people in Vietnam at the time had strong ties to both sides in the war. Like our own Civil War, it was not uncommon for families to be divided geographically between the north and the south and to find themselves fighting on opposite sides during the war which lead to an emotional devastation different than the political one. There were also other tensions in the region: it mattered a great deal whose communism a country followed. Cambodia for instance was under Chinese rule and Vietnam was under the rule of the Soviet Union and this created conflict between the two neighboring countries. Ultimately American involvement was driven by the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the South Vietnamese have a different attitude about the Americans who fought here than do the North Vietnamese.

The Cu Chi Tunnels represent the longest tunnel system in all the world and were created and used by the Viet Cong in order to combat American and South Vietnamese troops. Using the tunnels it was possible for a very few soldiers to appear to be a much larger group because one man could fire on their enemy from one tunnel opening and then dash underground and fire from the opposite direction making it seem that a platoon was surrounded. Each VC soldier was issued a rifle and a hoe to fight and to dig and their days and nights alternated between fighting and digging. The tunnels were narrow—wide enough only for one man at a time to move through in a crouch—and women took the displaced soil generated by the creation of the tunnels and moved it bomb sites where there was so much displaced soil it was easy to masquerade a little more. In addition to building the tunnels, the area was also booby-trapped with several different types of traps, many of which were also poisoned using snake venom. The tunnels are in three levels: the first is only 10 feet deep, the second 20 and the last 30 feet below ground. In order to foil American military dogs which were used to scent out the tunnels, the VC collected the cigarette butts of American GIs and mixed them into Gillette shaving cream and sprayed that mixture at the base of the entrances and air holes. When the dogs came by, they only identified American GI scents and not VC so did not alert their masters to the tunnels. There’s no question the VC were clever in these guerilla tactics and Mr. Hung showed us how they repurposed American weapons against American soldiers… cutting open undetonated bombs in order to make use of the combustible gun powder within and melting the metals into tools for booby-traps among other things. We went into the tunnels but only for a very short segment and I’m glad because it was overwhelming in more than one way. It was a tiny space and dark and extremely hot and required me to crouch and Chris to practically crawl because he’s so tall, but it was also painful to consider the literal depths people will go to in order to protect themselves and in doing so harm others.

After the tunnel tour, we stopped for hot green tea and a regional treat: boiled strips of tapioca dipped in ground salt, peanuts, sugar and sesame. It was delicious and while we ate, Mr. Hung told us about how his mother would send him this comfort food when he was in a Communist prison for six months 29 years ago. He later learned she was only able to do that because she sold her wedding ring in order to afford extra food to send him.

In the car on the way back to Saigon, Mr. Hung talked both about his own history and contemporary politics in Vietnam. He considers himself lucky because he was a star basketball player in high school and in 1979 when he was a senior, students were mobilized to fight in the Cambodian War. Because of his athleticism, he was able to continue playing basketball and was not required to fight. His English is excellent because he learned it in school. When he was a student, it was required that everyone learn English and French in addition to Vietnamese. That changed in 1975 when speaking English was considered a sign of capitalism and Russian was a required language instead. That has changed again with the “door opening” in 1989 and now more people speak English than ever before. He considers that the time from 1975 until 1989 was filled with nothing but propaganda and talked a bit about censorship during that time. Radio was censored but Mr. Hung’s father found ways to listen to BBC and VOA underground so his family had access to Western ideas and culture. He loves music and sang a lot of bits of songs when we were together with him. He would sing Cielito Lindo when he was young but he told people it was a Cuban song and not a Mexican one. Today, he says things are different. While the technical name of the country is the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and it is a monoparty system with that single party being the Communist Party, he described the country like an egg. The shell—so thin but surrounding the whole—is Communism. There are 92 million people in Vietnam and only 4% of them belong to the Communist Party. The yolk is all the people who live inside the shell and the yolk is Capitalism. He did say they are still watching. You’ll have no trouble if you visit an anti-Communist website on the internet but you’ll have a great deal of trouble if you post comments on that website and the trouble will be surprisingly immediate. Currently, the Vietnamese people are allowed access to Facebook and YouTube and the same unwritten rules apply there.

We stopped at a rubber plantation on the way back to the city. Rubber trees are like maple trees in that latex drips out of them the same way syrup drips and it is collected much the same way. Instead of tapping a tree, grooves are cut into the bark and the latex seeps out that way. Until 1975, Michelin owned all of the rubber forests in Vietnam; since 1975, they are owned by the government.

Mr. Hung brought us to the Palace Hotel for a buffet lunch when we returned to Saigon and there must have been fifty choices. We had spring rolls and pork with noodles and dumplings and stews and porridges and sweet soup and were stuffed. During lunch as we talked, I realized the flaw in my fellowship goals. I wanted to come here to learn about the Vietnamese perspective on the war to better teach my students but now I know I’ve been foiled by my own assumptions because, of course, there is no one Vietnamese perspective and Mr. Hung drove that point home.

After lunch we went to the Reunification Palace, which is the sight of the former Presidential Palace

built by the French and bombed during the coup against Diem (Mr. Hung says “Everyone knows CIA kill him.”) then rebuilt in the 1960s and renamed in the 1970s when the goal was reuniting North and South Vietnam into a single country. It was there that we saw the radio room where the last telegram of the war was sent: “Communists arrived already. We surrendered. Goodbye.” On the night of the fall of Saigon, when the Vietnamese listened to the radio to learn what was happening every station was playing Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” They later learned this was a signal to the Americans to evacuate. About so many of these things Mr. Hung says “I never forget.”

As overwhelming to me as the Cu Chi Tunnels was our trip to the War Remnants Museum. Before we went, Mr. Hung warned us that it was full of propaganda and upsetting to some people. There were four galleries, each with a different theme: Historic Truths, Requiem—Photo Collection of the U.S. Aggressive War in Vietnam, Aggression—War Crimes and Effects of Agent Orange. The museum walls are covered with photos and the captions leave nothing to a person’s interpretation. It’s an excellent lesson in language: what effect does it have when the Viet Cong is referred to as the Liberation Army when, from Mr. Hung’s perspective, the Americans were attempting to help liberate the South Vietnamese from the VC? Still, the photos reveal a devastation in which we took part and they left me saddened by the disregard for human life that emerges during war.

We ended our tour with stops at the Saigon Post Office—designed by the famous French architect Eiffel and the Cathedral of Notre Dame for which every stone was imported from France. It was no small irony that when we stopped in the plaza there to look at the CIA building everyone would recognize from the iconic photo of Americans loading into a helicopter on the roof following the fall of Saigon that there was a man begging for money with a sign (in English) that said he was an Agent Orange victim and in need of help.

Mr. Hung deposited us at our hotel eight hours after he picked us up and shortly after Mrs. Chi and Mr. Hao from V’explore picked us up to take us to dinner to make us feel welcome in Vietnam. We went to a traditional Hue restaurant offering dishes popular in the middle of the country and we had plates and plates of family style dishes including tiny rice gelatin cups with shrimp, steamed rice paper with shrimp, fresh spring rolls, vermicelli soup with beef, fried spring rolls with noodles, beer and tangerine juice. The instructions are to put fish sauce on everything and enjoy. Mrs. Chi served each of us which made me uncomfortable at first but then Mr. Hao broke the tension by having a good laugh about how at least she didn’t have to do the dishes since we were dining out. Her eyes got wide when Chris said that we both cook and wash dishes in our home. She said it was a lot to do in Vietnam that women are now in the workforce and still are responsible for the household chores.

It was a good long day full of information and new experiences and possibly we’re still reeling from the plane and then the other plane because we were both sound asleep within minutes of getting back from dinner.