Talk to Wooster
Winter 2006
On The Ho Chi Minh Trail
Marking the thirtieth anniversary of war, revisiting a beautiful country
Vietnam
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HO
CHI MINH WOULD BE PISSED .
The North Vietnamese leader asked to be cremated, to have his ashes spread in the three regions of Vietnam as a symbol of reunification. Instead, the Communist Party built a massive, Soviet-style mausoleum in downtown Hanoi, then pickled the old man to display his body forever, under glass, in a light that turns his face and hands a glowing orange. Strict guards hush the crowds that file past his cosmetized remains, and they move people along smartly.Who would want to linger in that cold, dark room with the corpse and stern soldiers with AK47s?
Ho Chi Minh’s real legacy is an independent Vietnam, vibrant with the energy and potential of eighty-three million people, and the eponymous highway that enabled his soldiers to defeat the most powerful military nation on earth.
I first saw the road in 1967, on a photo interpreter’s light table near Saigon. The Ho Chi Minh Trail then was a thin, broken thread of two tracks hidden by overhanging trees and camouflage in the mountainous terrain near Laos, bracketed by bomb craters thicker than acne. High-altitude photo resolution in the late 1960s was supposed to be good enough to see an antenna, but the photos on the targeting table showed stillness, empty tracks, not a hint of the thousands of soldiers and trucks moving south, or the tens of thousands of road repair workers who kept them moving.
Every year during what the Viet namese call the American War, the Ho Chi Minh Trail grew more sophisticated. Under heavy bombing from B-52s, Phantoms, Intruders and Thunderchiefs, North Vietnamese engineers built bridges and riverbed bypasses, culverts, pull-off parks and truck repair centers, rest and recreation facilities, hardline communication networks, even an oil pipeline. As early as 1968, they began to move armor down the Trail. On April 30, 1975, one of those tanks smashed through the ornate gates of the presidential palace in Saigon, ending a fight for independence that had lasted more than thirty years.
The tank, painted and shellacked to an unmilitary shine, still points its cannon at the palace today. I saw it on the lawn when I returned to Vietnam to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the war, to remember colleagues killed in combat, and to see again a beautiful country.
Vietnam has been transformed in these decades: hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of motorbikes teem in the streets of Saigon; first-class hotels embrace the white sand beaches of the South China Sea; glass and steel office buildings and the graceful towers of international banks rise in every major city; the harbors and rivers are crowded with international shipping and noisy with rivet guns and building cranes; Mercedes and BMW sedans and air-conditioned tourist buses breast astonishing traffic that includes water buffalo, bicycles, and herds of goats; new three-story fireand four-story houses painted green and purple or salmon and fuchsia rise in even the smallest villages.
One of the most extraordinary changes is the billion-dollar Ho Chi Minh Highway, an engineering miracle through the mountains of central Vietnam that is transforming the old infiltration trails and two-tracks into an engine for economic development — and a lasting monument to the quiet intellectual, steady poet, and steely revolutionary who dedicated his life to independence for his country. The road is the best in Vietnam, with concrete sluiceways and stepped runoffs to handle the monsoon rains, scores of new bridges and viaducts, steel guardrails, falling rock shields, riprap reinforcement of the steeper slopes, scenic pull-offs, and monuments to sacrifice. The highway winds through extremely difficult terrain, with steep drop-offs at every bend. A few days before I arrived in Saigon, where the government planned the largest celebrations of Reunification Day, a bus carrying thirty North Vietnamese Army veterans, old men who had negotiated the trail on foot forty years earlier and who were to be honored in Saigon, plunged off the road, carrying all to their deaths. Two weeks later, I saw two couples bowing in the Buddhist way at a small shrine built where the bus left the road. Scented smoke lifted from joss sticks past pictures of the dead.
