Palm-Prints

Photography and Writing by Edward F. Palm

There is nothing like a corpse to confirm a premonition.  It sounds like a war movie cliché, I realize, but I'd had a bad feeling about this trip.   At least two weeks before we were due to leave, I found myself tempted to e-mail Bill, suggesting, "Sarge, let's not go."   It was not that I thought anything would actually happen to either of us.  It was more like an attack of good sense.   I had begun to wonder whether traveling halfway around the world, and spending a lot of money, would accomplish anything other than to reawaken feelings and recover memories better left in the past.   I suppose that's why coming across the dead man in Dong Ha hit me like a kind of flashback, suggesting that, underneath all the progress, this was still the heartbreaking, hard-luck place I had left thirty-four years ago.

He was so much like the dead men I'd seen here before--young, no older than his early twenties, maybe still in his late teens.   This time, however, there was no obvious gore, not even any blood.   The injuries must have been mostly internal, but instantly fatal nevertheless.  He was lying on his stomach, with his head turned toward us, both eyes closed, and with one hand in front of his mouth, as if he were trying to stifle a burp.   He looked rather peaceful actually, as if he had suddenly succumbed to the urge to take a nap.   But who takes a nap in the middle of an intersection between the front and rear wheels of an "IFA" dump truck?   A small crowd had gathered, but it was evident that there was nothing to be done except to wait for the police and to stare at the dead man or his motorbike, which lay on its side some 20 or 30 feet past the intersection.   It was a "Honda Dream." 

Obviously, the body count continues in Vietnam today--only this time, let's rack one up for Western-style consumerism instead of Communism or what we used to characterize as democracy.   Don't get me wrong:  unlike so many of my academic colleagues, I have no quarrel with capitalism or with Western civilization.    But already in the trip I was finding it incredibly sad that so many had had to die on both sides just so that Vietnam could westernize according to their timetable instead of ours.   

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We came across this scene three days into a seven-day "trip back."    The "we" in this case was myself; another former Marine named Bill Cooke, who had been my sergeant when we were here before; our Vietnamese guide, whom I'll introduce later; and our Vietnamese driver.    The irony is that we had had a very good morning.   We had crossed the Ben Hai River into what in our day had been North Vietnam.   We had marveled at the Vinh Moc tunnels and at the determination of the village that had pulled together to dig and live in them for seven years.   There are no longer any vestiges of the "temporary" partition we had tried to make permanent with carpet bombing, and I remember thinking that this was a very good thing.    Throughout the trip, however, it seemed that every time my mood would lighten, something would happen to bring back that same depressing feeling--something akin to the old realization that the more things change, the more they remain the same.               

I really thought my initial feelings of apprehension would pass once I got caught up in the excitement of the trip, but I still felt that way as we began our final approach into Ho Chi Minh City, or "Saigon" as almost everyone still calls it.  Looking out the window of our EVA 757, I suddenly realized that I was seeing suburbs and paved roads and even water parks complete with slides and wave pools.   We could have been over Georgia or Florida instead of Vietnam.   We were coming up from the south, working our way north along the coast.   I remember thinking, "Isn't this supposed to be the Mekong Delta, Apocalypse Now territory?"    But, then, that had been Coppola's point, hadn't it?    The Vietnam of his imagination was a place of absurd and surrealistic juxtapositions.   Much of what I would see over the next week, ironically, would vindicate Coppola's vision.  

I couldn't help but remember what it had been like flying here before.   It was late in November 1966.  There were over 200 of us, all crowded into a 707.   The trip took even longer in those days.  We'd had to make refueling stops in Hawaii and Wake Island before landing in Okinawa, where we had a two-day layover before catching another 707 for a four- or five-hour flight "Down South," as the troop handlers used to say.   But I had possessed the resilience and stamina of youth back then.    And I was a Marine corporal.  I wasn't supposed to admit that anything ever got me down.  Our destination that time, however, had been Danang.  

I would spend my entire thirteen-month-tour in what the U.S. Command designated as "Northern I Corps," the most significant part of it in Quang Tri Province.   I never got to Saigon.   I was 19 when I got to Vietnam, 20 when I left.   Now, at age 55, I was doing something I had once vowed I would never do, professed to have no need to do.   I was going back.

I was going back, mainly, to revisit the site of the most significant set of experiences I had had in Vietnam.   As I look back on it now, it's tempting, along with Hamlet, to insist that there is indeed "a divinity that shapes our ends,/Rough-hew them how we will."   Right after high school, I ran off and joined the Marine Corps.  I was in flight from the industrial-strength boredom that had seemed to be my legacy as a working-class kid growing up in northern Delaware.  I had done all I could, to borrow a line from a romantic song from my day, to "cast my fate to the winds."   But the "winds" kept spitting my "fate" right back in my face--either that, or something, for whatever reason, seemed strangely intent on saving me from myself.

 

      Much to my embarrassment, I started off my Vietnam tour in the rear with the beer.   I was a supply clerk assigned to an engineer battalion "rear," or headquarters, which moved through a series of reasonably safe and secure areas during my first six months in country.   It was the sort of job that any number of guys out in the field would have killed for, and for which many did. But I couldn't see it that way at the time.   I thought that the greatest humiliation I could suffer would be to return home, after thirteen long months in Vietnam, only to have to admit I'd never heard a shot fired in anger.   Accordingly, I waged guerrilla war against my own side, doing all I could to establish my ineptitude as a supply clerk and volunteering for anything that seemed to promise a look at the war.  

Eventually, it worked.  I wound up as a rifleman and patrol leader with the Marine Corps' Combined Action Program.   The Marine Corps, recognizing that the loyalty and support of the people were key in this kind of war, early on began to experiment with sending squads of Marines out to live and work in villages alongside local village defense forces called "Popular Forces," or "PFs" for short.   By the spring of 1967, the program had become formalized and was expanding at a great rate.    That's where I came in; the Corps' leadership had dropped the requirement that all Combined Action Marines be combat veterans, and they required every major command to supply a certain number of "volunteers."   After a perfunctory interview, I, of course, became one of those "volunteers."   Hence, in Vietnam, mine was not to search and destroy; mine was to win hearts and minds.

Like the war itself, Combined Action seemed like a good idea at the time but ultimately rested on a set of tragically wrong presuppositions about the land, the people, and even the nature of the war we were fighting.   We completely discounted the enemy infrastructure and the prestige it still enjoyed as a result of the victory over France.   We presumed that the enemy was an alien force and the peace-loving villagers and local defense forces, given half a chance, would welcome our help in rooting them out and keeping them out of their villages.   As some of us would come to learn the hard way, the situation was never that simple.   Many of the PFs were VC sympathizers, if not active VC, and the great majority of them were trying to straddle the fence by keeping us away from the enemy and generally in the dark about what was going on in the village.   Still, as I've come to realize, the Marine Corps does deserve high marks for at least making an enlightened gesture of dissent against a search and destroy strategy that clearly was not working and which would ultimately prove self-defeating.  

I wound up serving most of my Combined Action tour with the third platoon of Papa Company, or "Papa Three," as we called it, located about halfway between Dong Ha and Cam Lo alongside Highway 9.   We were in Quang Tri Province, only about ten kilometers from the DMZ.   We were in "Cam Hieu" hamlet, a part of a larger village complex called "Thon Vinh Dai," or "large village of tranquility and long life."   But I didn't know these names, or their significance, until much later in life.  To us, the quasi-ugly young Americans assigned to Papa Three, all Vietnamese villages looked alike.   Ours was simply the "ville" for the whole time I was there. 

There were only 12 to 14 of us Americans out there at any given time--a Marine rifle squad augmented with a Navy corpsman.    A young, first-term sergeant was in charge.   The only officer we ever saw was our company commander, and he only occasionally came out to check on us.   Most of the time, he stayed back in the Papa Company headquarters in Cam Lo.   For the most part, we were on our own--"all alone out there in Indian country," as some of the more romantic CAP veterans like to say.   That characterization, however, ignores our supposed "allies."    At Papa Three, we found ourselves working with a loosely organized platoon of PFs.   There seemed to be between 20 and 40; we never could get an accurate count.   Sometimes our PFs went with us on patrols and night ambushes; sometimes not.   Usually, six to ten of them spent the night in our compound, helping us to guard it, but not always.   The PFs answered to a sergeant of their own, one "Trung-si Quang," and our sergeant had no power to get Trung-si Quang and the other PFs to do anything they didn't want to do.   The PFs seemed to have their own agenda, one we weren't privy to. Therein lay the crux of the problem. 

A long time ago (1988, to be precise), I told the story of Papa Three in the pages of Marine Corps Gazette, the Corps' professional journal.    I called it "Tiger Papa Three," after the colorful radio call sign we used day in and day out throughout my time in Papa Three.  I won an award with "Tiger Papa Three" and attracted quite a bit of attention, especially since I seem to be the lone iconoclast when it comes to the Combined Action Program.  My fellow veterans and the leadership of the Corps both have invested heavily in promoting Combined Action as one of the few things we did right in a war gone wrong.   I still think CAP Marines bore the brunt of friendly folly as well as enemy fire.    But, unlike the Marines and soldiers in conventional infantry units, just by virtue of being thrown together with the Vietnamese, we did make some human connections; and in my case, if I say so myself, those connections did at least result in some good Kodak moments.  

My great ambition back then was to become a photojournalist.   I carried my Yashica 35 mm single-lens reflex with me almost everywhere, even on patrol.   I took hundreds of photos, mostly slides, of the people and of my fellow Marines.   I would buy film and pre-paid processing mailers at the PX in Dong Ha.   When I would finish a roll, I would mail it off to Kodak for processing, designating my home as the return address.   Hence, I never saw my slides until I got home.   Early on, however, I realized that some of my images just may have the power to move people.   On only the second or third day after my return, while I was still trying to make sense of my Vietnam experience and to sort it all out in my own mind, my mother browbeat me into showing my still unedited slides at an impromptu family gathering.    When I got to one photo of a young Marine who had been killed when we were ambushed on December 4, 1967, followed by some images of a couple of forlorn-looking VC prisoners, my uncle, himself a World War II veteran, delivered his judgment.   "I can't see this god-damned war," he said.    "Just kids killing kids!"  I couldn't disagree.

While I didn't go on to become a photojournalist--I became a Marine officer and an academic instead--I've probably gotten just as much mileage out of my CAP photography as I have from my personal or academic writing on the war.  I've won a few regional contests and even had a small show.   I've shown my slides in various venues ranging from academic conferences to Rotary clubs.  Lately, my "Palm-Prints," as I like to call them, have even graced the cover of a new academic journal devoted to the study of the war and the Vietnam era within the broader contexts of American history and popular culture.  Always, however, my images seemed to elicit the same questions:   "Have I been back since the war?"   "Do I plan to go back?"

Frankly, I never felt a compelling need.   My own share of trauma, as I related in "Tiger Papa Three," had been minimal.   Like many vets, I felt uncentered and adrift for a year or so after I got back.   But I had been luckier than most.  I was able to go on to college and even to graduate school.  I had managed to subsume and even give voice to my own personal trauma through my subsequent academic work on Vietnam and American culture.   I had gotten on with my life; I had taken my opportunities where I could find them.  

When I couldn't get an academic job, I went back in the Marine Corps as an officer and even managed to piece together a twenty-year career, retiring as a major.  In between military stints, I finished my Ph.D.   After the Marine Corps, I got back to academe, where I worked my way up to tenure and a full professorship before becoming a dean, the position I now hold.    I've been married to the same woman for 32 years and counting.   We raised a good son.  Along the way, I've probably had more than my share of problems with the passages of adult life, but I've always made it a point not to use Vietnam as an excuse for any of my own bad decisions or foolishness.   

Personally, I had never felt the need to go "back in order to go forward," to quote an academic colleague, although I saw and experienced enough to respect that need in other veterans.    Still, I've always thought that, if the opportunity ever arose, I'd like to go back to find out what became of that enigmatic village I spent six months wandering around and wondering about and to try to find and photograph some of the people I'd photographed in 1967.

The problem, of course, was the expense.   It seemed like such a terribly self-indulgent thing to do.   I would tell people that, yes, I'd go back if and when I could get a grant or find some other funding source.   Two events, however, conspired to change my mind.

First, about three years ago, my old Papa Three sergeant and compound leader--Bill Cooke--found me through photos I had posted on the Internet.  We hadn't seen or communicated with one another since my rotation from Papa Three on January 4, 1968.  I remembered him well and had even written about him extensively in "Tiger Papa Three," but ironically, neither of us could remember the other's name until that day three years ago when, surfing the net for CAP photos and stories, he realized that he was looking at a photo of himself.   He e-mailed me, and we've since gone on to become fast friends.   A former small business owner, Bill is now an insurance adjuster based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.   He and his wife have come to visit with us, and Bill and I even flew out to California together to meet with and interview another Papa Three Marine for a story I was hoping to write.   Since reuniting, Bill and I had spoken about the possibility of going back someday to retrace our steps and to see what the area was like now, but it just didn't seem practical or even especially desirable to me at first.

Then, last March, I landed in the hospital.   Fortunately, it was nothing serious--just a minor problem with my heart rhythm--but it made me realize that, at age 55, I can't make all the old assumptions about my health and even my continuing mobility.   At about the same time, Bill discovered that he had a hernia that needed immediate attention.   I suppose there's nothing like a stay in the hospital, especially your first, to put you in a carpe diem frame of mind.   My old "Sarge" must have been feeling the same way.   Commiserating with me by e-mail, he wrote, "If we're ever going to take that trip to Vietnam, we better do it soon, before we have to carry too many meds."  

Through an academic acquaintance, I found Jerry Landman and Nine Dragons Travel, and I discovered that the trip Bill and I had in mind would cost half as much as I thought it would.   Bill and I decided, what the hell!   Like the first time, it seemed like the thing to do.

So that's how Bill Cooke and I ended up on final approach flying into Ho Chi Minh City's Ton Son Nhat International Airport.   As soon as we were down and taxiing toward the terminal, I saw my first remnants of the war.   We passed a large metal hanger and a row of open-ended, cylindrical revetments, all empty and rusty now but which had clearly been built to house fighter aircraft.   I found myself wondering what this airport must have looked like in 1967, with military and commercial aircraft all vying against one another to take off and land.  Now it seemed like a sleepy sort of place as a "Follow Me" sedan met our plane and led us to the gate.   No other planes seemed to be landing or taking off.  But, mainly, I was wondering about the heat.

That was generally the first thing people asked about in learning that I was going back to Vietnam:  How did I think I would hold up against the heat?   As a Marine, I'd never gotten down to Saigon.   Over the years, however, I've invited other veterans to visit a class I've taught called "Vietnam in Fact, Fiction, and Film."   More than one of the Army veterans told of stepping off the plane in Saigon only to get slapped by a heat that literally took their breath away.   I always thought they were just being melodramatic.  I hadn't remembered the heat being that bad up north, where I had spent my time and where we would be spending most of our time again.   To the contrary, my dominant memory of the weather was of being cold and wet, especially overnight, after being drenched by the unrelenting monsoon rains up near the DMZ.   But, as soon as I stepped out of the plane into the jetway, I realized that those veterans hadn't been exaggerating by much.   The temperature was in the 90s, the humidity 100 per cent.   It really did feel like stepping into a sauna--one that wasn't quite working at full capacity, but a sauna nevertheless.   I resolved never to complain again about the St. Louis summer I had left some 20 hours before. 

Everything I'd read about Vietnam today, ranging from Nine Dragons' promotional materials to David Lamb's recent book Vietnam, Now, led me to expect Vietnamese people to be warm, friendly, and openly curious about Americans.   Our customs official, however, must have been in the ten percent that never gets the word.  A young man who had clearly been born since our war, he seemed neither welcoming nor especially interested in who we were or why we were there.   He examined our documents, stamped our passports, and waived us through without so much as a word or a smile.  

Fortunately, the young man holding up a sign with our names on it, waiting just outside the baggage area, was a good bit friendlier.  He was our Saigon guide.   His name was "Nguyen Le Thien Phuong," or "Phuong" for short.    He was about 30, too young to remember our war.   His father, however, had been a communications officer with the South Vietnamese Army and had spent three years in a reeducation camp before emigrating to the States.   His father and the rest of his family, Phong related, now live in Cleveland but have been back to visit in recent years.   Bill asked him why he too didn't go to the States, and he became hesitant and vague, suggesting that he liked it "here, in Saigon."   It had probably been an indiscreet question.

One of the lures Nine Dragons uses is the promise of being chauffeured around in air-conditioned vans.   Phong indeed led us to a van, and the van was air-conditioned, but only after a fashion.   It never seemed to get ahead of the heat and humidity.    Our attention, however, was riveted on the traffic.   There seemed to be motorbikes everywhere, converging from all directions. The main reason the roads are so congested, our driver explained, is that even the poorest family, these days, can scrape together enough money to get one of the inexpensive Chinese motorbikes.    It's not uncommon, especially in the evenings, to see whole families riding on that one bike--the father driving, with the mother sitting behind, often holding a baby, and an older child crammed in between the adults or sitting in front of the driver.   Every other motorbike, moreover, seemed to be carrying an amazingly precarious load of cargo, ranging from bunches of bananas to stacks of lumber.   

To make matters worse, no one stayed in his or her lane or waited for the right of way, including our driver.   He would just force his way into a lane of traffic, and somehow, motorbikes would either veer around him or stop.   We soon realized that that was the way people had to drive in Saigon and elsewhere throughout Vietnam.   A driver who waited for the right of way would never get anywhere.   This readiness to force one's way in, perhaps, led to the accident we would later come across in Dong Ha.   On average, we learned, 20 people a day die in Saigon as a result of traffic accidents.   

On this, our first day back "in country," however, the sea of motorbikes parted around us, and we made our way without incident to Vien Dong Hotel.   Checking into a hotel in Vietnam is probably the first real indication most people get that they are not in Kansas anymore.   The hotel insists on keeping your passport for the duration of your stay.   It comes home to you that, despite having opened up to a great degree, Vietnam remains suspicious of foreigners.   Still, in all our travels through Ho Chi Minh City, Hue, and Dong Ha, I noticed only one uniformed policeman, an absence I would later bring to the attention of our northern guide.   Giving me a wry smile, he replied that we won't "see" them but that the police are everywhere.   They are "intelligent" police, he said (he probably meant "intelligence" or even "secret").   He went on to explain that most of the police in Vietnam today wear plain clothes and that you can't tell who they are until they want you to know.

The Vien Dong turned out to be a reasonably good ten-story hotel.   It was built around an open court-yard, with access to the rooms provided via inside balconies on every floor.   While the roof was open, no air circulated.   The balconies were stifling.   The rooms themselves, however, were air-conditioned, provided you left the key holder in a slot by the door.   There was a thermos of boiled water, for tooth-brushing.   For drinking, there was mineral water, soda, and beer in a small refrigerator.   There was a TV, which would introduce me to a pattern I'd see repeated in Hue and Dong Ha.  

It would appear that everywhere you go in Vietnam today you can count on having at least three channels.    There is the state-run Vietnam TV, or "VTV" for short; there is a French language station, via satellite from France, I presume; and there is MTV-Asia.   

The French station especially surprised me.   I would have thought that the prevailing ideology would have dictated that the Vietnamese turn their backs on any and all vestiges of their colonial past.   But such is clearly not the case.    From our guide, I learned that many of the people our age and older (fifty plus) retain their attachment to French language and culture and that Vietnam remains a French tourist mecca.   I did my own little test and determined that all the shopkeepers and street vendors, even the kids, spoke some French--much more than I can, in fact.   Still, I was surprised to discover that the government doesn't seem to mind and could even be said to encourage this attachment.  

On VTV, for instance, I happened to catch a documentary on two Vietnamese artists, a man and a woman, both of whom appeared to be in their sixties or even seventies.   They were speaking Vietnamese, so I couldn't understand what they were saying about their work, but two of the things I could see for myself did surprise me very much:  first, their work looked very much like an imitation of the French impressionists instead of the social realism I would have expected to find touted in a Communist country; and, second, both wore berets.   Later in the week, in Dong Ha one evening, I happened to catch an eighteenth-century French farce, complete with a young woman pretending to be a man and a young woman in love with the man this woman was pretending to be.  This pretender, in turn, was in love with a man who had befriended the man he thought her to be.   Since electricity and TV are now pervasive, reaching into virtually every part of Vietnam, I found myself wondering what people out in the countryside might make of such a gender-bending drama.

American movies too make their way on to Vietnamese TV.   The Vietnamese, however, seem to have a maddening habit of turning the volume down on the English soundtrack and overlaying it with a commentary in Vietnamese on what is happening and what the actors are saying.   I suspect that the commentary contains a good bit of editorializing on our manners, mores, and values.  And, of course, what can you say about kids out in the countryside, along with those in the cities, growing up watching MTV-Asia?    What came to my mind was that if the Party hardliners think they can forestall or even control the rate of change, they're sadly mistaken.      

The really big TV draw throughout the week we in Vietnam, however, was the World Cup Soccer Tournament.   It seemed that every hotel and every restaurant we stopped at, ranging from fairly cosmopolitan places in Saigon or Hue to the country kitchens of Dong Ha and Khe Sahn, people were glued to their TV sets rooting for Korea or Germany or Brazil, places the average Vietnamese probably could not have found on a map 34 years ago.   Even our guide and driver were caught up in it. Every morning, we'd get the report on who had had to buy the beer the night before, our guide or our driver.   Globalization has come to Vietnam, in a big way.

After lunch on that first day we took in the "War Remnants Museum," a clumsy euphemism for a museum dedicated more to the documentation of war crimes than to preservation of actual artifacts.    As great American guiltfests go, a visit there is second only to the Peace Park Museum at Hiroshima.   The curators seem to have managed to get copies of all the gruesome photos to come out of the war.   All the infamous atrocities are there on display--My Lai in mural size, for instance--along with photos of anonymous young Americans blithely mutilating and otherwise mistreating corpses.   One I'd seen before was a photo of a couple of VC bodies being dragged behind an amtrac.    One I hadn't seen was a smiling young American holding up a Vietnamese head with only half a backbone and one shoulder still attached.   Perhaps because I'd been to Hiroshima and I've spent years studying our Vietnam commitment, and coming to terms with it, I managed to tour the museum with greater sang-froid than Bill.   "I never saw any guys do anything like this," he said while we were off in one corner by ourselves.   "And you know," he added, "that they did worse things."  Personally, I've never subscribed to the point of view that, because we were wrong, the other side was saintly.    But I saw no point then and there in reminding Bill that the other side didn't have B-52s or Agent Orange.  

"Saigon.   I'm still in Saigon," Martin Sheen's Captain Willard complains in Apocalypse Now.   I must confess that I never felt that way during our short stay in Saigon, even though our main objective, Papa Three's ville, lay much farther north.   I found it fascinating, at long last, to see the place that had been at the center of it all while I was out there on the periphery.  

The Presidential Palace alone affords a fascinating insight into the conflicting, and conflicted, priorities of a regime that in so many other respects seems eager to erase all vestiges of neocolonial collaboration between the Vietnamese and the United States.   To their credit, I think, the government has opted to restore and preserve the Presidential Palace the way it was prior to April 30, 1975.    All the opulent furnishings, even the rugs and drapes, are still there and are still in good condition.    Even the gate the first two North Vietnamese tanks crashed through has been repaired or replaced.  (The first tank, our guide explained, got stuck.)   The only obvious concessions to that recent history are the tanks themselves, now on display on the front lawn with reasonably understated signs, and the new flag that now flies over the building, one consisting of a gold star against a red background.

I am not the sort of Vietnam veteran who believes that ours was a noble cause, nor do I think the politicians forced us to fight with one hand tied behind our backs, or even that the press and the antiwar movement weakened our resolve.   I think that, for a whole host of reasons, political as well as cultural, we blundered into the wrong war on the wrong side and that, tragically for both sides, our national hubris would not allow us to admit our mistake.   Still, I found the sight of that red and gold Communist flag strangely disturbing.  I'm not sure why I felt that way except that it signified how the world I had grown up in had been turned upside down, and along with that, a worldview I had had some emotional investment in had been discredited.   Knowing these things on an intellectual level and really confronting them for the first time, I suppose, are two very different things.   But, fortunately, I found myself distracted by the realization that, in both Vietnam and America, an entire generation has since grown up who don't feel these things and for which our war is ancient history.

I saw it in the eyes and in the body language of an obviously bored group of northern teenagers who were being shepherded from one part of the Presidential Palace to another by a young Vietnamese woman in a blue and white ao dai.   I watched her give her spiel in a couple of places; she wasn't too hard to look at.   But, even though I don't speak or understand Vietnamese, something about her languid delivery and her blank expression suggested that she too was not especially moved by, or personally interested in, what her people had overcome in getting to the point at which an authentically Vietnamese flag could fly over the building we were in.

        Later, while her charges too were taking a break, I happened to run into her at the refreshment stand on the roof.   Despite the open-portico, tropical construction, much of the building was stifling hot that day, and I found myself behind her in line to buy mineral water.   Taking hers and plopping down on a box next to where I was still standing, she looked up at me in an almost conspiratorial way and said, "Need water."   Maybe I'm reading too much into a clearly casual and very brief encounter, but something in her eyes and in her own bored expression suggested that her life wasn't keeping pace with today's media fueled capacity for wonder.  

And, then, maybe not.  I only really know that I missed an opportunity by not photographing that face and that posture.

The next day we set out for Ton Son Nhat for the flight to Hue.   Vietnam airlines turned out to be a wonder.    I had expected third-world service.   Instead, I was impressed to find the announcements delivered in clear, crisp English as well as Vietnamese, the equipment to be up-to-date and clean, and the schedule to be reliable.   We landed at the Hue/Phu Bai Airport right on time.  

I'd been to this airport before, in 1967.   I'd flown from here to Dong Ha on my way to Papa Company, and I'd passed back through it in rotating home in January 1968.   It was the same terminal building, but ironically, it looks better now than it did then.   The outside has been painted, the inside remodeled.   Gone, of course, are all the military aircraft that had once been parked on the tarmac, the only exception being a decrepit-looking Russian helicopter with long, drooping blades.   Its use was not apparent.

Waiting for us outside the terminal was the guide with whom we would spend the bulk of our trip, Nguyen Chanh Trieu.  Trieu, or "Tango," as he liked to be called, had been an interpreter with the Marines throughout our war.   Hence, the nickname "Tango," the phonetic alphabet designation for the letter "T" (the phonetic alphabet being a simple system aimed at ensuring the accurate transmission of information despite the vagaries of radio reception and individual pronunciation and accent).   Trieu was a university graduate who had studied French and English literature and who had planned to be a teacher.   For reasons he never divulged, he enlisted in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (the "ARVN") and was assigned as an interpreter to the Marines and, apparently, went on to accommodate himself to the Marine sensibility.   

Trieu was 59 years old when we met him.   He is a pleasant, cheerful man who seems to be doing well now as a licensed "free-lance" tour guide, but he has paid a high price over the years for his association with Americans.   Within an hour of meeting us and ascertaining our own USMC backgrounds, he was showing us his scars.   He had been shot twice, once through the face and again through the upper arm.   Because he had never become an officer--he never wanted to be one, he said--he hadn't qualified for the "Orderly Departure" program.   He'd spent three years in a reeducation camp, working in the fields and being told everyday that he was "a mother fucker" for siding with us.   The constant taunting, he said, inevitably came back to the same cruel, rhetorical question:   "Why didn't you leave with the Americans so that you could eat butter in America?"  

Maybe it was just me, but Trieu's story came as just one of a number of depressing reminders of all the sadness that lay just beneath the surface in the new Vietnam.   Trieu himself, however, hardly seemed consumed by bitterness or self-pity.  He has a wife, five children, and thirteen grandchildren, several of whom still live with him and his wife in a small house in Danang.  When he told me, after learning what I do for a living, that the highest paid professor in Vietnam makes about $40.00 a month, I realized that Trieu must be doing fairly well by Vietnamese standards.   Bill and I tipped him $50.00 for only four days' work, and other tourists probably end up even more moved by his history than we were.   But the fact remains that he is a good guide--personable, thoughtful, and well-informed.  

The first place Trieu took us was to the Citadel in Hue.   Along with a tour, Trieu gave us a masterful synopsis of the history of the Citadel, from its nineteenth-century inception to our twenty-one day siege during the Tet Offensive of 1968.   I personally hadn't taken part in that battle, and I found myself amazed at the size of the complex and astounded at the thought of how many North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops had to have infiltrated undetected into the city in order to hold the place for twenty-one days.  

Little by little and mostly with the help of private donations, Trieu explained, the government was trying to restore the Citadel to its former glory.   Bullet and shell damage, however, was still clearly visible throughout the complex, especially on the large perimeter wall along the moat.    In the area where the oldest buildings had long stood, moreover, there are still only foundations and weeds.   When the Americans refused to bomb this historic site, the South Vietnamese Air Force, Trieu explained, had no such qualms.    As Trieu was leading us around, I found myself thinking of all the people on both sides who had died here and of the new billboards the Ministry of Tourism seems to have put up everywhere.   They proudly proclaim Vietnam to be "a destination for the new millennium."  Personally, I think that a lot of history and a lot of Americans remain to be buried before Vietnam the Theme Park catches on.

The next day, we drove north along Highway 1, the legendary "Street without Joy," through Quang Tri and Dong Ha, all the way up to the former DMZ-area and the Ben Hai river that used to separate North from South Vietnam.   Highway 1 is still barely two lanes wide, but it is completely paved, and a surprising number of billboards and modern stucco buildings now line the route.   We stopped at the new modern Ben Hai bridge and walked across.   Adjacent to the new bridge are the pilings from the original one, destroyed soon after the 1954 partition.   It is now being restored as a historical monument.   Another river or tributary appears to join the Ben Hai just west of  the bridge, forming a wide confluence and a wonderfully beautiful scene .   Nature appears to have recovered completely from all the bombs and the defoliants we spread over the region, and the very serenity of the scene belies the history, my history.   It felt strange to walk blithely about in what in my day had been a free-fire zone and enemy territory.

Our next stop that afternoon was at the tunnels of Vinh Moc, where I saw firsthand evidence that I had been right in what I used to tell students about why we lost the Vietnam War.   We lost, it has always seemed to me, because, while we had grown cynical and jaded about our national narrative, Vietnam's national mythology, when we were there at least, still held the power to inspire their people to great sacrifice.   At Vinh Moc, a small seaside village on the northern edge of the DMZ, the entire populace had opted to dig in, literally spending the entire American war underground rather than flee in the face of our bombs.   They also took on the job of supplying a North Vietnamese Army regiment stationed on a small island some twenty miles off the coast, rowing out eight hours each way in small boats with food and water.   The people of Vinh Moc burrowed in and lived like moles for nearly seven years.   Whole families crowded into alcoves no larger than the average American bathroom or jail cell, about six by eight feet.   People were born and died in the tunnels.   What can motivate people to live that way?    I only know that Honda Dream motorbikes and MTV won't do it.   More to the point, I wonder what the mole people of Vinh Moc think of the Vietnam they helped create?   

As if by way of dramatic counterpoint, on the way back to Dong Ha that afternoon, we came across the scene of the motorbike accident I've already described.   The previous generation of Vietnamese people were told that it was their duty to die for Vietnam, and they did, in astounding numbers, until we grew too tired and too ashamed to keep killing them.   The present generation, just like us, is free to die "getting and spending."   That's progress, of a kind, I suppose.

Before leaving us that evening, apropos of nothing really, Trieu advised us to be wary of the "young ladies":  "They try bullshit you," he warned.    The warning, of course, is entirely unnecessary for any male who was in Vietnam circa 1967.   Prostitution was pervasive back then.   The prostitutes were known as "boom-boom" girls, after the Vietnamese word for butterfly.   The implication was that, just as a butterfly flies from flower to flower, these girls flit promiscuously from customer to customer.   In our day, the more sophisticated and aggressive boom-boom girls, hoping to land you as a regular customer, would plead, or even sometimes threaten, "You no 'butterfly' me!"   From what Bill and I could tell, the authorities in Vietnam today--the "intelligent police" Trieu told us about, perhaps--seem to have succeeded in driving prostitution underground.   Of course, as fifty-something old farts who had all we could do to drag ourselves around in Vietnam's wet heat during the day, Bill and I didn't spend our evenings frequenting the clubs and bars where the girls probably still hang out.   I was, however, accosted once out on the street.

I believe it was that very same evening, following Trieu's warning.   I was leaving our hotel in Hue, only going across the street to look in some shops, when a young woman fell in behind me, asking me where I was from and what my name was.   She apparently had been waiting a discreet distance away from the hotel.  (The hotel probably does not allow prostitutes to loiter on their property.)    When it was clear that I intended to keep walking, she hit me with her best shot, telling me, "You beaucoup handsome."   I replied, "No, I'm beaucoup old."   Undeterred, she shot back, "You beaucoup old and beaucoup handsome."    Frankly, I thought she couldn't hold a candle to the girls of old, but I guess you have to make allowances for the scarcity of clients and the lack of practice available in Vietnam today.   

Early on, Trieu had hinted at problems in doing what we had ostensibly come to do, to revisit the village where Bill and I had tried to win hearts and minds as Combined Action Marines.   We would have to get the permission of and be escorted by the local "policeman," as Trieu called him.   This is required, Trieu explained, any time a tourist wishes to go anywhere but the established tourist spots where "they sell tickets"which, judging from other places we went, wasn't quite accurate but was probably as good as Trieu could do in designating anything unusual or anywhere off the beaten path.   In return for the policeman's trouble, Trieu added, we would be expected to tip.   Trieu told us that five dollars would be plenty.  

Personally, I suspected that something was not on the up and up when, in setting out that morning, we pulled up not at a police station or other government building but at the office of DMZ Tours located within a rundown hotel across the street from ours in Dong Ha.  The "policeman" we were going to meet turned out to be the deputy manager of DMZ Tours.  His name was Nguyen Thanh Duy, or "Duy" ("pronounced "Dwee") as Trieu would later introduce him.  Duy was a short (even by Vietnamese standards), mild-manner, pudgy middle-aged man with a pleasant demeanor that seemed to belie whatever authority or clout he had.  His dress too--a white polo shirt and red ball cap--suggested that he was no more than the tour promoter that his business card proclaimed him to be.  If indeed he was one of the "intelligent police" that Trieu had told us about, he was well-chosen to fit the bill.  No one would have singled Duy out as an undercover policeman.   Looking back on it, I suspect that Duy was just the local Party hack who had the State-sponsored monopoly on tourism in that area.   But, whatever he was, Duy seemed to have the power to keep us from doing what we had come to Vietnam to do, and he probably had the power to make life difficult for Trieu.   For both reasons, we went along with him.    

Trieu went in to Duy's office first, telling us to wait in the lobby.   They were in there at least 15 minutes, suggesting that, contrary to what Nine Dragons Travel led us to expect, no prior arrangements had been made.   Bill and I were finally summoned in, and, after brief introductions and handshakes all around, Trieu instructed me to show Duy the photographs I had brought and to explain to him our purpose in wanting to visit the village.   Duy didn't say anything or seem to react at all as I was showing and explaining the photographs.   The only indication we had at all that our trip was approved was when, after a brief exchange between Duy and Trieu in Vietnamese, Trieu said that Duy knew where the village was; and the next thing I knew, we were heading out the door to the car.   Later, Trieu would confide that Duy expressed two concerns during their initial interview: first, he told Trieu that the people in the countryside were not supposed to become too familiar with Americans; and, second, he asked if we were good tippers.

Bill and I had really thought that our village would be easy to find.   After all, it was located right alongside Highway 9, about halfway between Dong Ha and Cam Lo, and could be distinguished by at least three prominent landmarks.   The river, the Song Cam Lo, cut in close to the highway in our area; there was a major tributary and a bridge just east of where our compound stood; and a well-established trail ran north-south into the village and just across the highway from the prominent hill our compound was on.   Also, a fairly large one-room schoolhouse stood only a couple hundred yards down (or so I had remembered), and to the left (west) side of, the trail that led into the village.    From looking at maps, we even knew the name of the overall village complex, Thon Vinh Dai, and of the actual hamlet we were in, Cam Hieu.   Finding the area, however, turned out to be tougher than we expected.

Highway 9 was just a dirt road in our day.  Now it is completely paved.   We expected that.   We didn't expect the area to be so heavily built up, especially along the southern side of the road, nor did we expect the vegetation to have grown up so high that it makes the river hard to see from the highway.   We especially didn't expect that the major tributary that used to bisect the highway just east of our compound would have dried up into a small stream or that all the bridges now would be even with the roadbed and thereby easy to miss even as you were driving over them.   In short, all our prominent landmarks were gone, and we began by overshooting our old ville by at least five kilometers.   

The first place we stopped looked like it could have been it.   There was high ground on the southern side of the road and a prominent trail leading down into a village on the northern side.   There was also a small store at the trailhead, alongside the road.  We stopped in, and Trieu showed a man there my photos and asked him if this was the place where Marines had been stationed.   The man replied that, no, this was not the place, that the village we wanted was about five kilometers back to the east.   He did, however, profess to recognize some of the people in my photos.

We turned around and set out back the way we had come.   After what seemed like four or five kilometers, we stopped again at a place that seemed likely.  The people there, however, said we were still about a kilometer short of our destination.   Third time is a charm.  Sure enough, about one kilometer farther east, there was a prominent hill on the southern side of the road and a trail leading off into a village on the northern side.   Suddenly, Bill and I both realized that we were there.

What had thrown us, I think, was the proximity of a large brick factory that now sits along the southern side of the road on the high ground just east of the bridge and of the hill where Papa Three had once stood.   Somehow, Papa Three's immediate environs still haunted my imagination as a place of the pastoral.   It had proved impervious to western influences back then.  I never imagined that industrialization could encroach upon it, but it has.   The dislocations that industrialization can bring, moreover, further seemed evident in our old ville.   On the hill, where only our compound had stood, now sits a shantytown of sorts, a collection of improvised cinder block and tin buildings, many of which are open to one side, suggesting a cross between traditional Vietnamese houses and a squatters' camp.          

People who go back in adulthood to revisit their childhood haunts typically report finding places to be much smaller than they had remembered.   Bill and I both, I think, had the opposite experience.   One of the prominent landmarks we were looking for was a one-room cinderblock schoolhouse, with a tin roof, that had stood, as I remembered it, on the left side of the trail only a couple hundred yards north of the highway.    The school building was gone, but as we would discover later, its foundation was still there, and a new family had even built a house on it.   But that site turned out to be at least five hundred yards, if not a little more, down the trail from the highway.   Similarly, as I recalled, splitting off from that main north-south trail there was another trail that led off to the east, down to the main part of the village and to the river.    I had remembered that trail as relatively short.  It too turned out to be at least three hundred yards long.   In fairness to myself, I had remembered that rice paddies lined both sides of this trail, leading up to the tree line and the edge of the village proper.   The area was still open, and the indented squares were still visible, but the rice paddies long ago seem to have dried up and been overgown with grass.     

The original Papa Three (before a bad flood had forced us to relocate on the high ground to the south) had stood in an open area north of the highway; just to the west of the trail and within a stone's throw of the schoolhouse to the north.  That much I knew was true; one of my 1967 slides confirms it.  But I also had thought that our pre-flood compound had stood only a couple hundred yards from the highway.   When I saw the house that now stands on the schoolhouse site, I realized my mistake. The original Papa Three had stood at least five hundred yards from the highway and the school was less than a hundred feet beyond that.   As for that original Papa Three site, a large copse of bamboo and elephant grass has reclaimed the area.   Our guides made it known that we were not to walk off the trails and into the bush.   (It would be bad for the tourist trade if one of us were to step on one of the mines or trip one of the booby traps either side forgot to remove.)   But even if our guides hadn't objected, the brush looked virtually impenetrable, and the heat and humidity were winning out over any sentimental attachment I may have been feeling.   Hence, we walked on by with nary a backward glance.  

Our first stop was the site of the former school.   The foundation and concrete floor of the old schoolhouse building are still evident.   An older woman, her two grown sons, and the wife and baby of one of the sons now live there.   They built their house on one end of the foundation and now use most of the old floor as a kind of patio.   They seemed unfriendly and even apprehensive at first, perhaps because they didn't have a clear title or even permission to build on that site.   After a few minutes of explanations about who we were and why we were there, however, they seemed to relax and even consented to show us around a bit.  

Apparently, one wall of the original structure had still been standing when they arrived, and they built on to it, using it to form the back of their house.   Taking us around back, they showed us where one of the original blackboards had been.   Fragments of it were still affixed to the wall.   They either couldn't or wouldn't tell us what had happened to the original schoolhouse building.   They had only been living there three years, they said, so they also professed not to know anyone in my photos.    But they did point us toward a house that stood at the end of the east-west trail, near the edge of the village.    A long-time resident of the village, an old woman, lived in that house, they said.

As I wrote in that 1988 memoir "Tiger Papa Three," the people of Thon Vinh Dai had seemed aloof and largely indifferent to our presence in 1967--the result, we would learn, of a well-entrenched VC infrastructure.   A few of the children and some of the PFs, who had no choice but to associate with us, were the only real exceptions.   One of the principal lures that tour promoters, ideologues, and even Vietnam's National Administration of Tourism dangle in front of us these days is the image of a warm, friendly, and outgoing people who especially like Americans.   That longtime resident, the old woman we visited next, was the only one to live up to that billing.   Everyone else we visited, including the other members of the old woman's family, seemed standoffish and more than a little suspicious of us and our motives.    In short, I found myself feeling the way I had felt when I was there the first time--unwelcome. 

But not at that one woman's house.   She reacted with exuberant delight to our presence.   After Duy explained who we were, she literally danced from one of us to the other, chattering excitedly in Vietnamese, and squeezing each of our arms.   She seemed to live with two middle-aged daughters and a slightly younger son in a traditional Vietnamese house, one of the few we saw without electricity.   The daughters were reserved.   The son may have actually been hostile.  While I was off to the side taking pictures, he came up to me.   Pointing in the direction of the hill on which our compound had stood, he said, "You leave here," or "You live here."  I'm still not sure which.   (Bill didn't witness the exchange, but he thought the guy had been friendly.)  In an effort to show my appreciation, I offered to take some Polaroid snapshots that the family could keep.   The old woman insisted on first changing into her best blouse.   I offered to take a Polaroid of the son.  He refused. 

Before we left, of course, we showed the old woman and her family my photos.  They recognized only one person, Trung-si (sergeant) Quang, the PF leader and, ironically, the only PF we had really known by name.   They pointed over toward the northern corner of the village and said he was still there.   The next day, Trieu confided that, as soon as he heard that Quang was alive and still living in the village, Duy reached up and pinched him on the back of the arm, a gesture Trieu interpreted as meaning that we were not to go looking for our old ally.  We said our goodbyes and moved on.

I had thought that Bill would ask to go see Quang.   As the Marine compound leader, Bill had been closer to him than any of the rest of us.   Many an evening, as Bill remembered it, he and Quang had gone down to a little café in the village and had drunk "33" beer together.   Right after we set out from the old lady's house, however, Bill dropped back to where I was hanging back, still taking pictures, and told me that Trieu had taken him aside and said we had to keep moving.   When I asked him if it was because the old lady's son didn't want us here, Bill said, no, that it was because Duy didn't want the people out in the countryside becoming too familiar with Americans.   Perhaps we should have balked at Duy's lead, but our concern for Trieu and his position, the heat, and the realization that is indeed their country now all kept us in check.

Since that day, I have given a lot of thought to why the authorities may be trying to discourage contact between Americans and people out in the countryside.   The answer, I've decided, may have less to do with any residual bitterness toward us, or even toward Vietnamese who supported us, than something our first guide had told us about Saigon.   The official population is set at six million, he said, but the actual population is about eight million.   Our old village, on the other hand, had clearly lost population since 1967, and more than one of the people in my photos, we would learn, had long since moved to Saigon.   I have to wonder whether other villages, too many villages, have suffered the same fate, especially now that electricity and television are bringing images of a wider world and a different way of life to a receptive younger generation.   The authorities are probably hoping to stem that tide, or at least to slow it down.  Then there is also the question of embarrassment.   Governments everywhere want to impress tourists, and depressed, half-emptied villages project an image of a country uncomfortably caught between two worlds--a pastoral world the Vietnamese have clearly outgrown and a world of western-style progress that, as of yet, seems "powerless to be born."         

Duy himself, probably hoping to get us away from people, suggested that we walk down to the river to see the spot where we used to have to cross in small boats.   The tall, thick hedgerows that I had remembered as lining the path down to the river are still there.   As we walked along the path almost thirty-four years later, still unable to see what lay beyond the bamboo and the brush on both sides, I found myself wondering if it were indeed really safe.   Finally, we found ourselves at our old crossing point, a set of concrete steps that led down into the river.   We found the steps fairly well covered with dirt, leaves, and other debris.   Also, the brush had grown up dramatically on both sides.  We were clearly the first to walk down those steps in a good while.   The small-boat ferry service no longer exists.   There is a nice new suspension bridge now, just a few hundred yards east of the village.  

From the river, we doubled back the way we had come, retracing our steps back to Highway 9.    I stopped just long enough to photograph a small group of kids who had gotten the word and were following us by then.   Forewarned by Nine Dragons Travel that we should bring something to give the kids, I had brought some pairs of inexpensive sunglasses (three for a dollar at our local Dollar Store).   I gave each kid a pair and photographed the kids wearing them.   Duy, I could tell, didn't like that.   He asked if he could have one for his daughter.  I told him I had plenty and continued with my give-away.  

Duy, for some reason, didn't seem to mind our visiting and mixing with the people who live in the shantytown that has grown up on the hill where our compound had been, perhaps because he thought these people were newcomers.  Most were, but when, at my insistence, we showed my photographs, a man in his thirties claimed that one of my photos was of his mother and younger brother.   Another man, who looked to be old enough, claimed that he had been a PF.  He took us over to the eastern side of a row of buildings and pointed up a blind alley, where a long chicken-coop-like building now sat, perpendicular to the others.  That building, this man indicated, was where our compound had sat.   Walking up through that alley would have involved trekking through some formidable-looking mud and brush and what, ostensibly, were people's back yards.    Unlike in our day, when we acted as if we owned the whole country, the Papa Three hill looked and felt like private property now.   We did try walking up the hill on the right, the western side, but likewise found our way blocked, this time by heavy brush, and going off trails and roads, of course, was supposed to be a "no-no" for us.   We were at least on the periphery of the old compound, perhaps even within the perimeter we had marked out with barbed wire.  That was enough, all things considered.

Over the years, I've always assumed that I had little or no exposure to Agent Orange.   The dramatic contrast in foliage between now and then, however, has left me wondering.   In 1967, for whatever reason, the hills south of Highway 9, including our own hill, had had only low scrub, rather like what you find in arid areas such as Southern California.  The hills behind our compound even seemed eroded and were crisscrossed with a lot of small gullies and ravines, most of which had little or no plant life.   Today, the area seems lush with vegetation.  

My first thought was that the difference may have been due to Agent Orange; perhaps the hills south of the highway had been sprayed long before we got there.   I mentioned this theory to a Vietnam-veteran friend recently.    He told me that he had researched this issue long ago, when he and his wife were first considering having children, and that he had found records indicating that the Marine Corps didn't use defoliants in I-Corps until 1969, long after both of us had left the area.   Also, I asked a biologist whether anything short of chemical defoliants could have accounted for such a dramatic difference in the foliage between 1967 and 2002.   He said that heavy bombing, leading to extensive brush fires, could have left the area looking arid and eroded.  Still, I have to wonder whether the records my friend consulted were complete or whether the Army command structure (the Army was in charge, after all) didn't spray the area without the Marine Corps' knowledge or consent. 

Regardless of when we actually started using defoliants in Quang Tri Province, the effects, according to Duy, have been horrendous.  The statistics Duy trotted out made me realize that underneath his mild-mannered tour guide exterior lurks the heart of a party loyalist.   At least 16,000 people in Quang Tri Province remain affected, he said.  He further claimed to know one family in which five of seven children are paralyzed as a result of Agent Orange contamination.    Similarly, according to Duy, there have been 5,500 land mine casualties throughout the province since the war's end.   The numbers may be exaggerated, but the problems themselves do put an ironic spin on Duy and Trieu's translation of "Thon Vinh Dai," our village's name--"large village of tranquility and long life."

It had certainly not turned out to be an area of tranquility or even of longevity for us.  In the short six or seven months that I was there, we were flooded out and had to rebuild on the high ground to the south of Highway 9; we were strafed by one of our own gunships; twice, while on patrol, we were almost killed by our own harassment and interdiction artillery fire; we took sniper and harassing fire, both out on patrol and in our compound; we fished a dead, badly decomposed Marine out of the river; we witnessed a truck hit a command-detonated mine almost in front of our compound, much to our embarrassment; we fought with our PFs, who had  rebelled, refusing to go out on patrol with us, especially on the northern side of the river;  and we were ambushed, on December 4, 1967. 

As a result of all that, five Papa Three Marines had been wounded and one had been killed.   Three PFs had been wounded, two fatally, and one had been killed outright.   Another Marine had been medevaced for amoebic dysentery.   Most of us, in visiting the Papa Company "rear" in Dong Ha, had had to run for the bunkers because of incoming artillery.  And, on Christmas day, 1967, we had suffered the indignity of having to watch an NVA or Main Force VC platoon saunter along unimpeded, out in the open some seven or eight hundred yards to the north of our compound; it was the Christmas truce after all.   The ironic thing was that I had had to fight to get to see some of the war; and, when I finally left Papa Three (on the second or third day of January, 1968), I felt that I had indeed seen as much as I cared to see.  As I would later write in "Tiger Papa Three," recalling the words to one of the old "Jodies" we used to chant while double-timing, "Got what I asked for, got what I came for;/I got Marine Corps!"

And now I was back, after a hiatus of 34 years.   I found it all difficult to fathom.  I had expected it all to be terribly moving and to be swept with waves of nostalgia for the "way we were."   Instead, I felt numb and even strangely dissociated from the experience.  I suppose that was because I had always felt that we just didn't belong there in the first place; and the way things worked out, I really didn't feel any more welcome the second time around.   There was that.   And, also, the place we had been to in 1967, I realized, was more existential than physical.   Every thing had changed in the interim.   But, most importantly, we had too.   Talk about not being able to go home again!   Thomas Wolfe had nothing on us.  

In his otherwise hauntingly prophetic novel The Quiet American, Graham Green has his cynical narrator, Thomas Fowler, make at least one prophecy that won't come true.    "I'd bet my future harp against your golden crown," Fowler tells the title character, the naïvely "innocent" Alden Pyle, "that in five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they'll be growing paddy in these fields, they'll be carrying their produce to market on long poles wearing their pointed hats . . . [and] the small boys will be sitting on the buffaloes."   In teaching about the war, especially in relating my Papa Three experiences "out in the ville," I too used to subscribe to that romantic view of a pastoral world impervious to our influence.   As it turns out, I was deluded by my own romantic preconceptions and cultural constructions, no less than Graham Greene had been.  The truth is that, in early 1968, I had left a thriving, traditional village.  In 2002, I came back to a slum of the city of Dong Ha. 

No trip back to greater Thon Vinh Dai would be complete, of course, without at least setting foot on the northern bank of the Song Cam Lo, the river of our discontent.   Over half of our Tactical Area of Responsibility (TAOR), the area we were supposed to patrol regularly and thoroughly, lay on that northern side.   To make matters worse, the only way to get there in our day was to cross two or three at a time in small boats rowed by an elderly man and woman.    I used to wonder why the enemy never took advantage of our obvious vulnerability, opening fire on us while we were out in the middle.   I realize now that, despite their reputation for ruthlessness, they probably didn't want to risk hitting the innocent old people who had no choice but to row us across.   Still, while we always got across safely, that river would nevertheless occasion our downfall.   Without warning, our PFs, one day in the early fall of 1967, would sit down just short of our crossing point, refusing to go across.   "Beaucoup VC" was their common sense excuse.   No amount of pleading, cajoling, or threatening would get them across the river on that day or for the rest of my time at Papa Three.   We Marines began patrolling the northern side of the river alone, usually in groups of five or six.   So much for "combined action."

I can't say that I blamed the PFs overly much for their refusal to cross the river.   They were only part-time soldiers.   Most nights, they slept out in the village with their families and away from our protection.   (More to the point perhaps, according to Trieu, most PFs were VC sympathizers and a good many were active VC.)   And that northern village was a scary place.   Generally, only kids and old people were in evidence over there, and they all kept their distance.   Finally, on December 4, 1967, our patrol was ambushed out on the far northeastern corner of our TAOR, at the edge of the village that had always seemed so strange and forbidding.  One Marine was killed and two were wounded, one seriously.   Fortunately, it was a bright, sunny day and our headquarters was able to get two helicopter gunships.   The enemy was quickly routed, but not before one of the gunships mistakenly fired on our own reaction force, seriously wounding another Marine.  No PFs had been along that day.

In returning to our compound, the surviving members of the patrol came across two VC who were attempting to hide in a rice paddy.   Both surrendered without incident.  During their interrogation, however, we learned that our PFs had known what they were talking about.  There were indeed "beaucoup VC" on the northern side of the river.   Our prisoners were main force VC, members of an entire psychological operations company that had North Vietnamese advisers and whose mission was surprisingly similar to ours--that is, to train the local VC and to win the hearts and minds of the populace.   

The local VC, one of our prisoners confided, had been wanting to ambush us for some time, but the NVA advisers had been counseling against it.   The reason, I now suspect, was the coming Tet Offensive; having more important objectives in mind, they didn't want to risk calling undue attention to themselves.   Finally, however, the locals had worn down their northern advisers and had gotten their way.   The ambush had not gone as well as they had hoped, even though our patrol had virtually invited it by taking a break in the same hut we had repeatedly used for that purpose.   As one member of that patrol remembers it, our company commander had literally ordered us to set a pattern in an effort to entice the enemy.   I honestly don't recall, but, if that recollection is not true, it should be.   Of course, no one was left any the wiser about the impending Tet Offensive.   But we were all left with a healthy respect for that northern side of the river.            

Imagine, then, what it felt like to find myself, some thirty-four years later, walking calmly and peacefully across a new steel suspension bridge into that same area.   It was like stepping through the looking glass in more ways than one.    In our day, our village, on the southern side of the river, had been the more prosperous and the more heavily populated of the two.  Now the reverse was true.   Our old ville had clearly lost population, while the ville on the other side of the river seemed to have grown and even to have prospered.   The Catholic church was gone, but in its place stood one of the new two-story stucco schools a foreign construction firm is building all over Vietnam.   There seemed to be more houses.  There were also several shops, including a small photo shop complete with a one-hour processing machine.   Does the relative prosperity of the northern village have anything to do with their steadfast commitment to the Communist cause?   Maybe, maybe not.  Perhaps it is just an accident of demographics.   But, again, Lamb in his book Vietnam, Now does decry the obstinate refusal of the victors to forgive and forget in Vietnam.    That same obstinacy certainly kept us from Trung-si Quang.   I suspect that it also played some role in the relative fortunes of the villages to the north and south of the river.    The irony is that the people to the south, in my experience, were never more than nominally on our side, and most were probably sitting on the fence.   But insofar as the other side was concerned, I suspect, if you weren't for them, you were against them.

(One aside on Trung-si Quang before moving on:  Later that day, after we got clear of Duy, Trieu volunteered the opinion that Quang must have been a "good man" or Bill and I would be dead.   He said that because, in his experience, 90 percent of Popular Force soldiers were VC sympathizers or active VC.  Trieu was probably overstating the case.   But I've always suspected that our PFs had at least worked out a modus vivendi with the other side, and I have long known that we owed our survival at Papa Three to dumb luck rather than tactical competence.)

Duy didn't seem to mind our loitering on the northern side of the river.   We took a leisurely stroll along the river to the west.   When we got to the new school, we noticed that one of the concrete posts to the fence that had surrounded the old churchyard was still standing.   The top, however, was rough and had a couple of twisted iron rods sticking out of it.   A crucifix had no doubt adorned it.   Bill asked me how much farther I wanted to walk.    We had come there with the half-baked idea of trying to retrace that December 4th patrol route.   Once we were there, both of us realized that too much had changed; we would never find the site of the ambush.   Besides, it was hot, and wandering around in search of our past suddenly seemed a lost cause and an imposition on Trieu and even Duy.    I told Bill that I was ready to go if he was.

From the old Papa Three area, we traveled west along Highway 9, turning around at the Laotian border and finally driving back to Dong Ha.   Along the way, we stopped to look at the Rockpile and the Razor Back, two of Bill's old pre-CAP haunts, from when he was still with the grunts.   From the Rockpile/Razorback area, we continued west and started to climb up into the mountains that had served as only part of the backdrop throughout my Vietnam tour.   When we were just into the foothills, however, Duy suggested another stop, this time at the site of the former Lang Vei Special Forces Camp.  

Lang Vei was overrun and destroyed on February 6, 1968.   The battle marked the first use of tanks by the North Vietnamese in the war, a turn of events that had been inconceivable prior to that time.   Today, alongside Highway 9, the site is marked by a tank on a pedestal with an inscription commemorating the Communist victory.   Directly across from the memorial, on the other side of the road, sits one of the Ministry of Tourism's billboards featuring a beautiful young woman wearing the traditional conical hat and proclaiming Vietnam to be a "destination for the new millennium."    The area back from the road, where the camp had stood and the battle took place, is now a banana plantation.   There is nothing to see, unless you know where to look.

Duy, for whatever reason, knew where to look.   Of his own volition, and breaking the rules, he led us along a trail about a hundred yards past the tank monument and into a thick copse of banana trees.   On the way, he had to warn us away from a rusty, unexpended 60 mm mortar shell that must have washed up during the last rainy season.  Before we knew it, we were standing at the ruins of a concrete bunker.   Duy said it had been the medical bunker.  Most of the materials must have been carried off long ago.   Only a couple of waist-high segments of the wall remain. 

Duy led us on another 50 yards or so, this time showing us the remains of the communications bunker.  Even less of it remained than of the medical bunker.  I found it depressing to think that so many people had fought and died here, unmarked and largely unremarked (the vainglorious tank monument doesn't count), on ground that was now being put to the distinctly unhallowed use of growing bananas.  (There would be a sick joke in that, except that nothing that happened at Lang Vei was remotely funny.)  And then, within a stone's throw, across the street, there is that crass sign marketing Vietnam the Theme Park.   Something of my mood must have shown, as Duy asked me if I had been "here" for the battle.   Surely he knew that I had been a Marine, not a Special Forces soldier, and that I had spent my time down the road at Papa Three.    

On the way back, we did make one stop, this time at Duy's suggestion.   About ten kilometers west of Cam Lo a road branches off of Highway 9 leading to a gleaming new suspension bridge over the Song Cam Lo and to the beginnings of a new north-south highway that will follow one of the principal branches of the Ho Chi Minh Trail all the way to Hanoi.   The suspension bridge is necessary because Highway 9 at that point hugs  a high ridge along a wide canyon that the river has cut out over millennia.   We got out of the car and walked across the bridge.  

From the center, Duy pointed out the remains of an old dirt road leading down to the river's edge from both sides of the canyon.   This, according to Duy, was one of the branches of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.   In our day, of course, the banks of the river had been overgrown with thick vegetation, obscuring this road.   (A construction concern was now mining sand from the canyon, so all the area was now completely cleared.)  I marveled at the realization that the Ho Chi Minh Trail could have come so close to where I had been stationed.   I had always imagined it to be much farther west.   But I hadn't been alone in that assumption.  Our command too, I take it, had always thought so.

The next day, we drove down Highway 1 across the Hai Van Pass and into Danang.   Along the way, we made one unscheduled stop.   Trieu noticed a man irrigating a rice paddy the old-fashioned way, using a dipper on a swing-like contraption to move water, perhaps a half-gallon at a time, from one paddy to another.    It was hard, tedious work, and the man seemed to have finished and was working on something else by the time we got to the edge of the paddies in which he was working.   Trieu hollered over to him, apparently asking him to move some more water so that we could take pictures.   Only after we were all walking away and the man was hollering angrily after us, did Trieu confide that the man had asked for a $5.00 tip.   Trieu and our driver both seemed to think that the whole episode had been funny.   

The plan called for us to fly back to Saigon that evening.   But, even after spending our morning at China Beach followed by a leisurely lunch and stops at embroidery and sculpture shops, we were way ahead of schedule.   Trieu, who lives in Danang, took us to a little outdoor café where he often spends his evenings.   I think it was there (it should have been there) that, his tongue loosened by our second or third round of beer, Trieu told us how unhappy he was about how the Americans, in the end, had simply abandoned the Vietnamese who had helped them.  He urged us to write to former Marines like Chuck Robb and Oliver North.   I didn't have the heart to tell him that neither Robb nor North had the influence to right the wrongs of the past.  Still, it was pleasant sitting out on that sidewalk, talking and drinking beer and watching people coming home from work.  

Later, at the airport, I slipped Trieu and the driver envelopes containing their tips.   Trieu hugged us both and wished us a safe trip back.   We checked in and passed through security.   As we were taxiing away from the terminal in the dark, I looked out at the lights of the terminal receding in the distance.   It can't be the same terminal building, I realize, but something about it all seemed eerily familiar.   The lights looked the same.   The mixed feelings were similar.  Just for a few seconds, thirty-four years seemed to slip away.   I imagined that this was still Danang Air Force Base and that I was still young and leaving to go find my future.

Epilogue.     The chills hit on the last leg of our trip, the flight from San Francisco to St. Louis.   Suddenly, I began to shiver and to shake, almost uncontrollably.   I grabbed one of the thin airline blankets, but I couldn't get warm enough.   Malaria crossed my mind.   But I had been taking an antibiotic as a preventative, and it seemed too soon for something like that to show up.   Fortunately, the chills seemed to ease up within an hour.   I felt wrung out when we landed, but I rationalized that as just the effects of jet lag and not enough sleep.   I tried to tell myself that whatever had caused my chills was only transient and that I would be fine after a good, long nap.

But the chills started again after I got home, and the diarrhea began.   My wife took my temperature.   It was 103-point-something.   The diarrhea never became bad, but my temperature kept cycling up and down.   At one point later in the day, I must have been mildly delirious.   My wife asked a question, and even I realized that my answer wasn't making much sense.  But I couldn't seem to make it come out otherwise.   When, the next morning, the diarrhea and fever were still there, we set out for the emergency room.   A round of the antibiotic Cipro fixed me up in short order, although I continued to feel out of sorts and generally tired for fully two weeks.   As it turns out, I had contracted Campylobacter, a bacterial form of food poisoning commonly caused by fecal contamination.   According to my wife, it had been a statement of sorts.   Once again, Vietnam had told me to "eat shit and die."   She had a point.  

Because I didn't really play sports as a kid, I never learned to be a good loser.   I guess that is what is behind the conflicted feelings I still have about Vietnam today.   I have known, ever since my undergraduate days, that we intervened on the wrong side and that, by all the traditional standards, Vietnam could not be called a just war.   The means were horribly disproportionate to the ends we sought.  To the world, it really did look as if America, a modern industrial society, was unleashing all its technological might to destroy the last vestige of the pastoral world, largely because we thought we could and because it was there.  

The terrible irony is that Vietnam in the sixties probably was the closest realization of that myth left in the modern world.   But Vietnam is not that way now and it never will be again.   We couldn't prevail militarily, but culturally and economically, the war continues, and we're winning.   This time around, our weapons aren't B-52s or M-16s or Agent Orange.   They are much more potent. They are MTV, the Internet, and Honda Dream motorbikes. 

A bit of alternative Shakespeare comes to mind:   "Rightly to be great/Is not to stir without great argument,/But greatly to find quarrel in a straw/When [markets are] at the stake."     

Now, as I write this, two recent developments have helped me put my trip back to Vietnam and my war in some perspective.   The Ken Burns "Civil War" series has recently been rerun on PBS, and our country is about to embark upon yet another war.   Our Civil War, of course, was a horrible bloodbath; the American experience in Vietnam pales in comparison.  But watching bits and pieces of the "Civil War" series again, I found myself envying the soldiers of that war in at least one respect.   Lincoln found a way to ennoble the Civil War and to make it about a universal principle and not just about states' rights or preserving the union.   Because of that, I found myself wondering if some of the veterans, the northern ones at least, in later life didn't find themselves feeling the way that Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth predicts that his soldiers will someday feel--that they had indeed cohered into a "band of brothers" and that together they had prevailed in a cause more important than themselves.   The World War II generation certainly felt that way.   It is my sincere wish that the young people of today come away from this next war feeling that way again and not like they have merely assisted in the dirty work of empire.  

--St. Louis, October, 2002   (A return-to-home button, an e-mail button, and a Palm-Print should appear below.)

Saying Goodbye to All That:

Vietnam and Tiger Papa Three Revisited

(copyright 2002; all rights reserved)

Remember Ho Chi Minh was a poet:

please, do not let it all come down to nothing.

        --W. D. Ehrhart, "Letter"

I think that Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

  --Michael Herr, Dispatches