Landing at Noi Boi airport is eye-opening—the runway is still pockmarked with bomb craters a decade after the war ended. I’m here to see Chuck Searcy, a Vietnam vet returned to assist a generation of children suffering the aftereffects of Agent Orange—spina bifida, cleft palates, limb deformities, heart defects—and the indignities of life in a brutal, war-ravaged place with a per capita income of $70. I see kids with polio stumbling around in braces fashioned of bamboo and leather, hawking ragged copies of “The Sorrow of War.”
I’ll say.
Everything is crowded, deafeningly loud, insanely hot, and of course, Searcy is nowhere to be found. I wander around Hoa Lo, the “Hanoi Hilton,” where John McCain was tortured for six years, then visit a haunted, empty “Victory Museum” filled with the rusting wreckage of Huey helicopters and Phantom jets, photographs with jeering captions, and grimy exhibits of flight suits and bloody fatigues. I scribble down names, just in case.
Sunday morning in Ba Dinh Square: I’m buzzed by squadrons of dragonflies as I stand in a long line of peasants waiting to visit the mausoleum where Ho Chi Minh sleeps like Snow White in a refrigerated glass coffin. Registering my skin, the officer in charge solemnly marches me to the front of the line.
I march stiffly alongside him.
I come across the wreckage of a B-52 Stratofortress half-submerged where it fell in a lake in December 1972. A terrible sadness grips me, staring at this forlorn relic of my world.
No sign of Searcy and I’m here for a month, existing in a twilight world, not a tourist and no journalist with a government “minder” dogging my every step. I walk around scribbling notes, followed by packs of goofy 10-year-old boys hawking soft drinks, rice wine spiked with decomposing baby cobras, knock-off fashions—one kid wears a tee-shirt emblazoned “International Polio Club,” and the ever-present Sorrow of War, apparently the North Vietnamese “All Quiet on the Western Front.”
I never engage with another Westerner. This is decades before Vietnam becomes a hot tourist destination. I meet aged shopkeepers who speak to me in French. I discover the phrase for “American” is “Russian with money.” Vietnamese use the Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals, so everything seems just on the edge of comprehension.
It’s not. Curbside restaurants feature dog on the menu; felines are in such gustatory demand cat owners keep them leashed. On Gam Cau Street the delicacies are forlorn-looking, hawks, monkeys, tortoises. You haven’t arrived until you’ve eaten an endangered species. It will get worse.
Continued
