Winter 2006

On The Ho Chi Minh Trail

Marking the thirtieth anniversary of war, revisiting a beautiful country
Vietnam

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THE BEST ROADSIDE COFFEE SHOPS, especially the ones farthest from town, have the best collections of bombs. Farmers and woodsmen bring in the stuff to trade for sweetened coffee or pho, the noodle soup that made Hanoi famous. We were sitting in a place on the road to Mu Gia Pass, watching coffee drip into glasses and listening to the pigs root in the sty behind the kitchen, when a scrap metal dealer drove up in a truck with two scales.We watched him count and weigh 60mm and 82mm mortar shells, 105mm artillery shells, an anti-tank mine, a brass bomb fuse built in the U.S. in 1969, an eighty-pound bomb fragment, and hundreds of pieces of twisted metal and rusted shrapnel. He paid 3,000 dong a kilo (about ten cents a pound).

West of Da Nang, in a region that U.S. Marines called “The Arizona,” we pulled off the highway near a two-track to a small village nestled in trees and rice paddies. The Canadian Broadcasting Company wanted to film an interview there with Bruce Olson, who fought in The Arizona as a Marine sergeant. Raised in Hartford, Connecticut, Olson joined the Marines at seventeen and served three combat tours in Vietnam. He looked at the fruit trees and flowers of the village, the neat paddies and fields, and said he couldn’t recognize anything.

“It was a free-fire zone when I was here.We bombed ’em, we napalmed ’em, we called in artillery, and we got in close to kill with rifles and grenades and mortars.We killed everything here. No quarter.”

In the village, over every gate a bright sign proclaimed, “Nothing is More Precious than Independence and Freedom” or “Remember Ho Chi Minh Forever and a Day.” On the steps of one house stood an old man in shorts and tee shirt; in 1968 he would have been a senior commander.

“I’m an old man,” he said, when asked if he’d served in the war. “I have forgotten more than I remember.”

Did the war come to this village? Were you here?

“It’s a long time ago,” he said, brushing it into the past with his hand, lightly.

“Please, come into my house.”

He maintained a small shrine to his ancestors in his one room (his daughter and grandchildren lived in an adjoining room); a picture of Ho Chi Minh hung above the shrine. The room had a beaten- earth floor, his bed, an eating table, and some chairs. A 40-year-old cup, the American-made aluminum cup that held a canteen on every soldier’s hip, sat on the old man’s table, polished by his fingers to the glow of old pewter. He walked across the room, shielded the cup with his body and carried it to the other room, out of sight. He could not remember the war anymore, he said.

Olson remembers the war. He emigrated to Australia, did twenty-five years in the National Park Service there, and now travels the world with his wife, practicing his Aussie so he almost sounds like one. He’s been to Vietnam five times, once bicycling the length of the country. He looked out at the fields and the mountains beyond.

“You look at this terrain and these people and you wonder:What the hell were we thinking?”

The rice harvest was underway, women bending low in the fields with short sickles to cut the stalks, then tying them in bundles to be carried away in baskets balanced on a bamboo shoulder pole. Some farmers spread the grain for drying and winnowing, some hired small threshing machines to separate seed from chaff. Chickens and ducks and cows were let into the paddy to eat whatever grain or green had been missed in harvest, then a team with water buffalos and single point plows quickly prepared the field for a new planting. Young men and women rhythmically lifted water from canals to paddies in the pre-wheel practice of swinging scoops.

“We killed people for planting rice and for harvesting rice,” Olson said.

“Women and children were not exempt.”

IN THE A SHAU VALLEY, one of the Ho Chi Minh Trail’s most significant trailheads, not five miles from Hamburger Hill, our small bus pulled into A Loui. On a dirt street where brown cows stood tethered to fences, we found the Early Sunrise restaurant. Bamboo poles down the center of the room took the sag out of the tin roof, fans turned lazily on the walls, and a dove with a speckled neck cooed in a cage on the ceiling.

The owner and cook, a woman in her thirties who had moved from the north to seek opportunity, apologized that she had no wild boar or goat, but promised to do her best. She brought out a dozen cold Huda beers, brewed by a Danish company in Vietnam’s old imperial capi- WINTER 2006 23 Caroline Morrell at Persepolis, Iran, an ancient Persian capital. RARE WATER, THUNDER AND FIGS An Iranian journey TEHRAN, IRAN By Caroline Morrell ’01 7. 10 TRIPS OF A LIFETIME The rice harvest was underway, women bending low in the fields with short sickles to cut the stalks, then tying them in bundles to be carried away in baskets balanced on a bamboo shoulder pole. Some farmers spread the grain for drying and winnowing, some hired small threshing machines to separate seed from chaff. tal, Hue, and then she put this meal on the table, one course at a time, in thirtyfive minutes:

• Stewed golden chicken with the head on, with wild mushrooms and onions.
• Long green tendrils of winter melon vines, stir-fried with fresh garlic.
• Slow-cooked pork, as pink as rare beef.
• Grilled fox with crispy skin, lemon grass, and hot chilies.
• Slices of beef, tomatoes, and eggs on a bed of fresh watercress.
• Grilled anteater, with chopped stems and shoots of lemon grass and a sauce of chilies, salt, and lime juice pounded in a mortar and pestle.
• Chunks of steamed duck, glazed with ginger and spices.
• Sour soup with fresh mudfish, tomato, and pineapple, in a tamarind-based broth with fresh cumin and bamboo shoots.
• Bowls of rice.
• Platters of fresh watermelon, dragon fruit, and pineapple.

The bill was seven dollars U.S. for the whole table.We paid thirty cents a bottle for the beer. The cook and owner smiled in triumph, as though she had finally realized her dream. She had moved from the north to homestead along the new highway in the central mountains, risking everything to make a better life for her family.

Ho Chi Minh would be pleased.

Robert L. Pisor reported from Vietnam in 1967-1968 for The Detroit News, then the nation’s largest afternoon daily. His book on the siege of Khe Sanh, The End of the Line (W.W. Norton, 1982, 2002), won the Best Nonfiction Prize from the Society of Midland Authors. He lives with Ellen Waters Pisor ’62, his wife of fortythree years, on a farm near Leland, Michigan.

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