Snapshots

Mr. T picked us up at 8 a.m. and we headed out of Hue for a day trip. In just a few days, a United States Navy hospital ship offering free healthcare will be arriving in Da Nang with 1000 beds and 12 operating suites. This is something Secretary of State John Kerry and Senator John McCain arranged and the people are very happy about this relationship. Unlike Donald Trump, Mr. T uses the word hero when he describes John McCain’s experience as a fighter pilot who was shot down, parachuted into Ha Noi Lake, was hospitalized and then held as a POW at the Ha Noi Hilton for five years.

Mr. T started our day by suggesting a change in the next day’s itinerary. We were scheduled to do a motorcycle tour of the city

, but he believes it is too dangerous and we’re inclined to agree. There are traffic laws here but they are the opposite of everything we know: for instance, all passing is done on the left instead of the right and one yields to the person behind them instead of ahead of them, and I don’t suspect it’s easy to acclimate in a single morning. There is a different speed limit for every type of vehicle, the bigger the faster, and every day in Vietnam there is an average of 35 people killed in traffic accidents. We’ve all decided that using a car is a better option.

We drove through the remains of Camp Evans, a huge airport base that housed 430 planes in its heyday, and which is now nothing but abandoned patches of pavement in the middle of fields and forests. I recently had dinner with my sister and a friend of hers who knows someone who knows someone who lives in the house I grew up in and reached out to ask if my dad could tour the place that he renovated by hand singlehandedly over the course of two decades and it has left me thinking about nostalgia and sentimentalism. We want things to be as we remember them and while I’m excited to tour the house I loved with my family when I get back to Chicago, I won’t like the changes that others have made in the 20 odd years since we lived there. But the house remains, the neighbor houses remain, the corner remains. It’s all still there. Here, nothing remains. Mr. T has talked a lot about what it is like for American vets who book tours with him because they want to go back and see their bunker, they want to go back and see where their friend died, they want to go back and see the setting of the experience that informed the rest of their lives. But they can’t because everything is gone and it’s a strange sensation for them and for him, too. The North Vietnamese Army symbolically tore down every bit of above ground infrastructure that America left behind and sold things off. Mr. T says that sandbags were for sale for a long time and that people wanted every bit of it for their own nostalgia’s sake. In any case, there are tapioca fields where Camp Evans used to be.

As a different kind of symbol, the NVA left standing two war-torn structures in Quang Tri town: a school and a church and we visited both.

Quang Tri was the site of 81 days of fighting in 1972 and ultimately led to the fall of the Quang Tri Province to North Vietnamese control. The town was completely destroyed and all that remains from that time period are the Long Hung Church which was only built in the 1950s but which now looks ancient with its open air and bullet torn façade. There is a municipal sign there that explains ity is a site of victory and Mr. T says it is hard for him to read it because it does not describe his experience or his history but that he was there and knows what really happened. Further into town there is the Bo De School which is similarly bullet riddled and in which there is a worship table where Mr. T lit incense for the dead. There is a massive memorial in this town for the North Vietnamese soldiers who died during the 81 days of fighting and people come from the north to honor their dead and it must be terribly painful for Mr. T that it isn’t possible here to commemorate the fallen soldiers of South Vietnam. It forces me to consider the current controversy in the United States about the Confederate flag in a different light.

Mr. T said it was very difficult after the war to keep in touch with his American friends because communication with Americans was criminalized and there were spies everywhere. It has become easier in the last 10 years, he says, but there are still spies everywhere and again he asked that I not use his full name or “they cut my throat.” There is this and then there is his telling me that Vietnam is a very good place to live now and that most people are happy as long as they follow the rules.

We went to the border between North and South Vietnam and stood at the bridge that divided the two—the same bridge that remained open for 100 days while people decided in which country they would live after the Geneva Convention—and Mr. T told us about the heavy artillery fire in the demilitarized zone during the war. The DMZ is now coffee farms. There is a monument at the site: a statue of a woman and child adorned by cocoa leaves. They are waiting for the soldiers to come home safely. Mr. T said Vietnamese people do not look back and remember the past with anger; the war was too terrible and anger is too exhausting. He says it is easier to just be friendly now.

There are water buffalo everywhere, a prehistoric remnant in a modern world. Mr. T says they are still used to harvest rice and for that reason they are not eaten anywhere in this country. The Vietnamese people also do not eat carp because, according to Buddha, in the future the carp will be a dragon. He also said that fewer and fewer people eat dog in Hue because dogs have become friendly with families. We saw many fishing hooches in the waters along the road to the Vinh Moc Tunnels. In Vinh Moc, a small coastal fishing village, the artillery fire was so awful the people built a three-tiered tunnel system and moved their entire village underground for the duration of the war. It took the people 18 months to build the tunnels and the network is large with meeting rooms, family homes, classrooms and an infirmary. All of these are just hollowed out spaces in the earth but, because the war was not so very long ago and the people from the village still live here, it is well documented for what purpose each space was used. During the war, about 250 people lived underground at Vinh Moc. It is very dark and relatively narrow and I’m lucky I’m so short because I was able to walk through them upright most of the time. The steps up and down are steep and the ground is slippery at times because it is dry and dusty and at other times because it is slick with moisture. At one point, the tunnel Mr. T led me through deposited us at the sea and it is because of the tunnels opening to the sea that it remained cool, though humid, inside.  We traveled down and down and down again until we found ourselves (and this should have been no surprise because I didn’t sign up to live in the tunnels myself) at the bottom of a very long staircase that brought us back to ground level and out where we met Chris, who didn’t make the trip into the Earth because of the close quarters and his relative height, but he sat in the jungle listening to a Steve Dahl podcast while he waited for us.  

One of the best parts of this fellowship has been listening to our very different tour guides share their experiences. In the car on the way back to Hue, Mr. T pulled out his phone and scrolled through his camera roll. Time and again he would pass his phone to me or to Chris and then tell us about the people with whom he was pictured. The former GI who had a picture of Mr. T from the war and before he left the States to visit Vietnam ran an ad in the local papers here with the picture asking if anyone knew what had happened to that soldier and then once he was in the country he showed the same picture to everyone with whom he had contact. He asked people working in the hotels he stayed. He asked people on the street. Finally, on the last day he was in Hue, he was outside of town on a daytrip and took the picture out just to look at and remember and he heard a voice from behind him say, “I know the man that was the boy in that picture.” It was another tour guide and she was able to put the two old friends in touch with one another. Snapshot. There was the American general who lost 200 men in one battle and asked Mr. T to take him back to see the place where each of those men had fallen. Snapshot. There was the woman who wanted to see where her husband’s plane was shot down. Snapshot. There was the daughter of the same man. Snapshot. Mr. T helps these people grieve and come to terms with their experience and understand and remember. And it isn’t easy because after 1975, all the towns in the south were re-named and all of the markers of that time were destroyed. He has as many stories about other people’s generosity: the Australian vets who came to Vietnam and were so taken with him as a tour guide that they badgered the Vietnamese government to give him a visa to travel to Sydney and they hosted him there for 32 days. Snapshot.

Mr. T has asked us to find his old friend, an American GI from Chicago who was in the 101^st, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 3^rd Brigade and who clearly meant a great deal to him but who he was never in touch with again after the war. We’ll do what we can to find out what happened to this man and if he’s still alive well, maybe: snapshot.