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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IN HANOI, WE joined crowds of tourists from Asia to visit
the colonialera buildings that house the government, and the simple house
of wood and screen that Ho Chi Minh chose instead. We stopped at the “Hanoi
Hilton,” the prison where John McCain and hundreds of American pilots
spent very difficult years, and the B-52 museum where the splayed skeletons
of two bombers lay on the front lawn. Surface-to-air missiles stand over them
and rows of anti-aircraft guns line the drive, the whole panoply of twisted
metal and killing machines softened by a garden of bonsai. In an old part
of the city, we found the complete undercarriage of a B-52 jutting from one
of Hanoi’s polluted lakes. It came groaning out of the sky on Christmas
Eve 1972, a huge chunk of one of the fifteen bombers shot down that week.
The neighbors are grateful it didn’t smash a house or hurt anyone. It’s
kept as a reminder of the war, but nobody is going to wade out into that scum-green,
trashfilled pond to clear the wreckage.
NO SINGLE PLACE shaped today’s Vietnam more than the remote valley of Dienbienphu, where in 1954 French paratroopers, colonial soldiers, and Foreign Legion battalions took on the legions of Vo Nguyen Giap. In a savage, hand-tohand, mud and blood battle of unbelievable intensity, the Vietnamese overwhelmed 15,000 defenders and won independence after more than eighty years of colonial cruelties. They won because Vo Nguyen Giap moved big artillery through impossible terrain and kept it supplied with bicycles rigged to carry heavy shells. They won because the soldiers knew victory meant freedom. The Vietnamese hurled themselves at the French.
The city of Dienbienphu grows over the old battlefield today, though some of the hills and the steel bunker where French Colonel de Castries surrendered his command have been preserved. The museum, with a diorama showing how Giap pulverized the French with artillery and then strangled them with trenches and infantry assaults, displays its material better than any other war museum in Vietnam. In one of the combat films, the intensity of Giap’s resolve burns like fire for a few brief seconds. The pictures of hundreds of men with ropes, wrestling artillery pieces through the jungle, up steep slopes and across rivers, could be snapshots of the Ho Chi Minh Trail twelve years later. The somber cemetery that commemorates the Vietnamese dead, with one of the hills in the French defenses looming above it, gives this place an aura of great sacrifice and significance.
But Vietnam seems too young and busy to notice. The broad plaza in front of the cemetery has been marked with painted white lines so that teenage girls and their mothers can test themselves on motor bikes, driving to stay inside the lines and to make one hundred-eighty-degree turns at slow speed without falling off. Dienbienphu was a remote, sparsely settled outpost when the armies gathered for one of the most significant battles in history; today it boasts an up-to-date airport, wide boulevards and roundabouts, a new post office, new army-built sewers, and army-dug reflecting pools for the public buildings. Like Vietnam itself, it’s ready to take its place in the sun.
In Dong Hoi, another coastal city with new hotels rising on the beaches, five young American officers and enlisted men talked about their search for the remains of soldiers and airmen still listed as “missing.” They study maps, talk with villagers, walk the ground, look for evidence that suggests a crash site or a strong possibility that a body might have been buried there, and then turn the most promising sites over to a forensic team for excavation, sifting, and bone analysis. In Lost over Laos, Richard Pyle reports that the United States spends about a million dollars for each forensic search and has expanded the hunt to Korea and World War II sites in the Pacific.
Our little bus drove across the bridge at Thanh Hoa, a narrow road and railway span that became infamous in the ready rooms of American bomber pilots. Scores of U.S. warplanes were shot down trying to put a bomb on it. To maximize the chance of a hit, they had to fly the length of the bridge, putting themselves in a shooting gallery between two prominent hills. One of our party said the first laser-guided bomb was created to hit this particular bridge. And then the North Vietnamese did what they had done before the bridge — they shipped supplies across by barge.
NO CITY IN VIETNAM was bombed more heavily than Vinh. American warplanes frustrated by cloud cover elsewhere could always make the rubble bounce in Vinh, and they did. Ho Chi Minh was born in the province, and the city was the starting point of the Trail, the terrible road of tears for hundreds of thousands of young men. Now the city pumps with new energy, with a huge downtown park and lake and heroic statue honoring Ho Chi Minh, new hotels and banks and office buildings, broad thoroughfares, beachfront resorts, and a burgeoning shipbuilding industry. On every block, it seems, young Vietnamese men and women, boys and girls, crowd into Internet cafes to write and read love letters, or to Yahoo or Google, at five cents for a half hour.
There are few signs of warfare thirty years after the guns stopped firing. The flattened buildings, fire-scorched ruins, and bullet-riddled facades that were Vietnam in 1968 are all gone. Military cemeteries are almost part of the landscape — in every town and city, every province, and at every important battle site. The war is slipping into memory, and the cemetery gates are sometimes locked now, the trees not as faithfully trimmed. There is no place of honored rest for the soldiers who fought beside the United States military.
One memorial stands out on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, at Dong Loc, where ten identical white burial vaults hold the remains of ten young women, eighteen to twenty-five years old. They had worked this section of the trail as a road crew, filling in craters, shoring up berms, and smoothing the roadway.
“We work at night by the light of lamps,” one nineteen-year-old wrote to her mother. “In the daytime, the bombs shake the mountains and the forests, but they do not shake our hearts.”
Her letter hangs in the small museum nearby that honors the road crews, along with the simple tools, baskets, and carts they used. Photographs from the time show a moonscape of craters and fire-blasted trees, with camouflaged trucks hurrying across the open ground. Memorial plantations of trees have softened the countryside, but the overlapping bomb craters of forty years ago are still obvious. On June 24, 1968, the ten young women were bathing together in a crater at first light when a bomb killed them all. Today visitors light sticks of incense on their graves, and leave barrettes, combs, and lipsticks for the girls who died to keep the Ho Chi Minh Trail open.
