The
Pied Piper of Hanoi
Landing at Noi Boi is eye-opening, the
runway pockmarked with bomb craters more than 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 I see kids with polio stumble 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 a grim, ghost-filled “Victory Museum” filled with
the rusting wreckage of Huey helicopters and Phantom jets, photographs with
jeering captions, and dusty exhibits of flight suits and bloody fatigues. I
scribble down names, just in case. On Sunday
morning in Ba Dinh Square, I’m buzzed by squadrons of dragonflies as I head for
a long line of peasants waiting to visit the mausoleum where Ho Chi Min sleeps,
like Snow Whit, in a refrigerated glass
coffin. Registering me, the officer in charge solemnly marches me to the front
of the line.
I
march stiffly alongside him.
That
afternoon, 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 as I stare
at this forlorn avatar of my world, imagining its death throes, a sky on fire, the
men inside. Three days later, still no sign of Searcy and I’m here for a month 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, the North Vietnamese “All Quiet on the
Western Front.”
I never
engage with another Westerner. This is long before Vietnam becomes a hot tourist
destination (“Ride a motorcycle down the Ho Chi Minh Trail!”). I meet aged shopkeepers who speak to me in
French, discover the phrase for “American” is “Russian with money,” see a poster
depicting B-52s dropping long strings of Coca Cola over Hanoi, salute a rail-thin
guy waving a dented bicycle pump at passing traffic hoping to sell air. The
clerks manning the front desk of my desolate hotel sleep on the lobby floor. Across
the alley, and behind a modesty screen, a whole family scrub themselves out of
a bucket.
Mornings,
peasant women in non la (conical hats) array baskets of fresh vegetables,
fish, chicken, on the sidewalk—the same sidewalk I’d seen a man defecating the
night before. Pale, beautiful women ride bicycles wearing ao dai and
elbow-length gloves to stave off the sun. (Just like Georgia, “If you’re light,
you’re all right.”) On another street, uniformed children stand at attention. The
times are a-changin’: some are plump, maybe offspring of Communist Party functionaries.
Corruption is everywhere.
Vietnamese
use Latin letters and Arabic numerals so everything seems just on the edge of comprehension.
It’s not. Curbside restaurants feature snake and dog on the menu; cats are delicacies,
so owners keep them leashed. On Gam Cau Street gourmet restaurants feature
forlorn-looking hawks, monkeys, and tortoises. You haven’t arrived until you’ve
eaten an endangered species.
***
One
night, searching for a mystical Italian restaurant that seems to float around
like the Holy Grail, I find myself behind three outsized guys speaking English.
They duck into a bar and I follow into a time warp: Crowded, ‘60s rock music
blasts, beer flows. The red-haired, pony-tailed guy behind the bar looks like
he escaped from a Zap comic. A benevolent Ho Chi Minh and Jerry Garcia, stares
at me from the wall. The guys are New Zealanders, maybe Australians, red
poppies pinned to their lapels, commemorating Anzac Day, and the bloody battle
of Gallipoli, a story I know from a Mel Gibson movie.
Staying
in London’s Earl’s Court, aka “Kangaroo Valley,” I learned “commemorate” means drinking
oneself into oblivion, followed by a mad fight. Others are American—English
teachers, construction workers refurbishing the U.S. embassy, idealistic NGO types,
vets returned to a place where they say they felt “most alive,” aging hippies wandered
from California to Kabul to this seeming last place where living is so cheap
and women, young and willing.
Many
hours later, I stagger outside. Drunk, giggling, no clue where I am, and no cyclo
(three-wheeled taxis with
a passenger seat in front and driver peddling madly in back) in sight. In the bar,
I’d met a much-traveled Dutch blonde who mentioned this club, this wild,
post-war, “you must-visit” scene that makes Berlin’s Kit Kat Klub sound like
a Canarsie nursing home. When she says the club’s name and I’m transfixed, my
original story idea disappeared:
Apocalypse Now.
Grinning, I pull the crinkled, hotel
map from my jeans and start walking. And walking. It’s pitch dark, dead quiet, and
suddenly unsettling. I squint at the few grimy street signs. The lettering that
looked so familiar in daylight is totally unintelligible. Of course it is. It’s
fucking Vietnamese! I have no idea where I am, and sobering quickly. Up ahead, I
see a park bordering a small lake—my tourist map shows many greenspaces, but I
can’t tell one from another. I’ve seen elderly folk going through early morning
Tai Chi movements, martial music blaring through tinny speakers in the trees. I’m
close to my hotel. I’ll just curl up on a bench and wait for rosy-fingered dawn.
So writerly.
I’m cutting through clumps of
scraggly bushes making for a waterside bench when the ground at my feet suddenly
moves. What the fuck! Rice wine can’t do this to me, even with decaying cobra
chaser. I blink, look down at a long undulating wave of movement at my feet. It’s
like the Red Sea parting, only this sea is made of rats, dozens, maybe hundreds,
of brown rats! Not aggressive, but lazy buggers who start and stop with each
step I take, joined by myriad others. I don’t dare look back.
I stagger to the bench, sit
sideways, knees up under my chin, eyes closed tightly. When dawn breaks, I’m
alone. Thirteen thousand miles from home.
CONTINUED
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