Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (60 page)

Now I was in a seat on a passenger train, rattling north on tracks that ran beside the Street Without Joy, as the retreating French had called it, through sandy hills and gray swamps near the sea. What had been the demilitarized zone along the Ben Hai River, in Quang Tri Province just
north of Hue, remained a litter of unexploded bombs and land mines and so many shattered tanks and shell casings that people still scavenged the area for scrap metal.

Dong Hoi was a town of new houses and bright tile roofs for a reason: having been burned to the ground, it had risen again. (Guidebook: "It was wiped off the map by U.S. bombing.") Here and there among its pink villas and bungalows, people were tending the fires at smoking kilns while others were stacking bricks, the place still being rebuilt. And the same was true of Vinh, a town that had been turned to dust by American bombs and was now rising. Most of the houses I saw beyond the 17th parallel were brand-new, the old ones having been burned or blown up.

But amid the newness the old Vietnam endured. Men up to their knees in mud in paddy fields, driving water buffaloes, a kind of harmony reflected in the geometry of their fields, and their conical hats, and the straight lines of their puddled lanes.

Later on, we passed the sudden humps of massive stone mountains with vertical sides and rounded summits. The train guard told me they were called Ouanh Binh. They extended for miles. Seeing a big domed cathedral in the distance, the conductor blessed himself with the sign of the cross to indicate to me that it was a Christian church.

Hearing us talking, another young man said hello and snatched my sunglasses. He put them on and clowned, jeering at me, for his friends.

"CIA! CIA!" he chanted.

"You think so?" I said.

"Yes. You CIA!" he said and poked his finger at me. But he was laughing. He then put the sunglasses on upside down and goofed around some more, and his friends laughed.

While his friends tried on my sunglasses and made faces, the conductor asked me where I was from, and when I told him, he said, "How do you feel being in Vietnam?"

"Happy that it's prosperous and sad that we bombed it."

"I think that too," he said. He wore a rather severe expression, and he knew that no matter where we were on this line to Hanoi there was a bomb crater. And the other visible fact of the trip was that the TV screen in this coach was showing Tom and Jerry cartoons, dubbed in Vietnamese.

The train was full of traveling Vietnamese, and though some got off at
the smaller stations, most were headed to the capital. They watched the cartoons, they snoozed, they read, they chatted. Boxes of food were handed out to each passenger, containing rice, pickled cabbage, tofu, and something gray and rubbery that might have been meat but could also have been a patch for an inner tube. Outside, whenever we passed a field, people were working, bent over, hoeing or digging or plowing. Everything I saw was like the embodiment of peace and hope.

Even the young man who had fooled with my glasses made me hopeful. "CIA!" he called out when I passed his row to stretch my legs. But he was harmless—I often regard teasing as a form of confidence and affection. When we neared Hanoi, this same man helpfully told me some things I must see: the water puppets, the lakes, the Old Quarter, Ho's mausoleum.

***

MOST OF THE DAYLIGHT WAS
gone by the time the train got to Hanoi, yet the glaring lamps and illuminated boulevards gave the city a greater dignity, the mystery of night shadows, in which glorious lakes and a huge opera house dominated, and that was when I realized what a wondrous place it was, a kind of Asiatic Paris.

I had no idea. But how was I to know? The noble city had always been represented to Americans as the enemy capital, a rat's nest of villains, and belittled by our propaganda, better off bombed and wiped off the map. That was another lesson in the twisted justification of war: demonized people are more deserving of death, rubbishy cities more deserving of destruction. Talk about them as inferior or taunted or pathologically hostile, and they're no great loss when they're gone.

The Parisian glamour had another dimension. I found a hotel on a back street in Frenchtown, near the well-known but much too expensive Metropole. I went for a late-night walk and realized that among the cafés and restaurants and elegant villas, all this Frenchness, there were also noodle shops and street vendors and hawkers huddled near the joints selling fresh beer and smoked fish. The vast, simple-looking, Europeanized city held another city that was more crowded and complex and Asian, and quite a bit cheaper.

Walking back to my hotel, feeling happy, I paused under a tree to watch the bikes and scooters go past when a motorbike bumped up the curb some feet away and came straight at me. Her arms apart on the
handlebars, a young leering cat-faced woman with long hair and white gloves and thigh-high boots revved the engine and made kissing noises at me.

"Get on! You come me!" She hitched forward to make room for me on the seat.

"I come with you?"

"Me madam. Come my hotel. Get on!"

There is a stereotypical women's fantasy of being swept up by a handsome knight on a horse. This was related to it, a male fantasy you never dare think about: being confronted on a dark street and swept up by a long-haired woman astride a motorbike. Even so, I hesitated.

"You want boom-boom?"

"Yes I do," I said and laughed in admiration at the suddenness and ingenuity of it. "But I can't tonight."

"Forty dollar," she said.
Fotty dolla,
a kind of Boston accent.

I had to decline, not because I didn't want to, but because I was an older man and happily married and more interested in finding an Internet café to send my wife an e-mail than in hopping on the bike and being driven through the portals of love. This happened two more times as, unbidden, beauties on bikes mounted the sidewalk and, eagerly smiling, revving their engines, offered to speed me away. Each time they promised the same thing.

"Get on! You want boom-boom?"

***

HANOI WAS A FORMAL CITY
of wide avenues, extravagant topiary and pretentious colonial mansions, picturesque villas with cupolas and mansard roofs, imposing ministerial buildings—every sort of pompous Gallic façade, including the nineteenth-century opera house—and many good restaurants; at the same time it was an improvised city of malodorous neighborhoods, labyrinthine streets, noodle shops, and open-air markets of screeching traders and squashed and stepped-on fruit. It was also a city of stately parks and lakes surrounded by landscaped perimeters. The French capital had been transformed into a Vietnamese capital without any sign that America had been involved. And of course we hadn't been: we had bombed Hanoi and mined Haiphong harbor, and so our history in Hanoi was one of infamy and evil-intentioned outrages directed from the air.

I was continually struck by how most Vietnamese were willing to forgive, or move on, when the subject of the war came up. One exception to this was the memory, by those who had endured it, of what became known as the Christmas bombing of Hanoi. This unambiguously geno-cidal act of pure wickedness took place in December 1972, just weeks before the signing of the cease-fire, like a final spiteful slap, except that it was not a slap but rather a blitz of firebombs intended to incinerate and cow the Vietnamese.

Nixon had ordered this air strike in mid-December, and for eleven days the sky over the capital was black with B-52 bombers. In their circuit, they dropped forty thousand tons of bombs and aerial mines from Hanoi to Haiphong harbor, killing an estimated sixteen hundred Vietnamese. Twenty-three American planes were shot down, and we were outraged when the surviving pilots were imprisoned. "Military targets" was the justification we were given at the time by Nixon and Kissinger, but this lie was transparent propaganda. In one instance, in an old neighborhood of Hanoi, every house on Kham Thien Street was destroyed, with a great loss of civilian life—nearly all women and children, because their husbands and fathers were away fighting.

On my second day in Hanoi a man mentioned this to me. He was in his mid-fifties, and he recalled it, but all he said was "Very bad."

I found photographs of that bombing and others at the Army Museum. Once again, the pictures taken by American photographers were much more shocking than those of the Vietnamese.

In the courtyard of the museum, like an artist's installation, stood the wreckage of American planes, one of them propped upright, as tall as a four-story building, its nose cone approximating a church steeple. The whole assemblage of fuselages and wings and tails and insignia was given a bulging form. A plaque beside it noted that forty thousand American planes had been shot down over North Vietnam between 1961 and 1973. The message was tendentious in its tone and might have exaggerated the numbers, but there was no mistaking the power of this sculpture as a shrine to downed planes and the futility of that war.

How familiar it all was to me, and would have been to any American of my generation. The helmets and shoes, the medals and paraphernalia of captured U.S. soldiers; the excerpt from President Johnson's diary expressing dismay over the progress of the war, and an accompanying photo showing his distress, his fleshy features and comical nose; the
American and European faces in the photographs displayed in the Peace Movement Room—the sort of pictures that are shown in American museums that have areas devoted to the 1960s, images of sign-carrying students, speechifying, picketing, and confrontations. That it showed less of the military history of the country than the human dimension, and that it was presented without any gloating, made it all the more upsetting.

A large square of cloth printed with the Stars and Stripes contained the following message in eight languages, including Vietnamese, Chinese, Lao, and Cambodian:
I am a citizen of the USA. I do not speak your language. Misfortune forces me to seek your assistance in obtaining food, shelter and protection. Please take me to someone who will provide for my safety and see that I am returned to my people. My government will reward you.

This plea was intended to help an isolated American infantryman or downed bomber pilot lost in Vietnam. Its castaway's tone and its helpless appeal were intended to soften the heart of strangers or even of the enemy. I tried to imagine the effect such a printed message would have today, anywhere in America, if it read "I am a citizen of Iran" or "a member of Al Qaeda" or "a Palestinian national," and made the same plaintive requests, with an enemy flag unfurled on it.

Most of the museumgoers were Vietnamese. They and the museum attendants, seeing me, greeted me with a smile, asking where I was from.

"America."

"Welcome."

I wanted to meet someone in Hanoi who had lived through the bombing. Hanoi was a walkable city. I strolled around for a few days, in the Old Quarter and among the huddled shops and temples and through the big market. I saw the water puppets and Ho's mausoleum and the museum dedicated to Ho's life and achievements.

Rather than eating alone in a proper restaurant—a depressing activity anywhere, sitting and staring—I roamed and browsed and grazed, snacking on noodles and bowls of soup, chatting with people in fresh-beer bars and coffee shops, looking for witnesses.

Invariably, while walking, a motorcycle with a biker babe on board would pull up beside me and demand that I get on behind her.

"You come! Boom-boom!"

This even happened in the area of cloisters and villas and temples and
embassies near the National Museum of Fine Arts, where I had gone one day to look at silk paintings and bronzes.

There I found the witness I had hoped to meet, a woman who had been in her early teens at the time of the Christmas bombing. She was now the mother of two girls. Wearing a tissuey silk scarf that accented her fine-boned face and luminous eyes, she was beautiful in the Vietnamese way, slightly built, a dancer's body, svelte, almost skeletal, yet looking indestructible. The delicacy of her fragile-seeming features—and this seemed true of all Vietnamese women I met—was in great contrast to her powerful spirit and her prompt and appreciative manner. This put me in mind of how thirty years of war, successfully defending their country, had given the Vietnamese unshakable faith in themselves and made them unusually resourceful and alert.

She was Vuong Hoa Binh, the daughter of the late Vuong Nhu Chiem, who had been the curator of the museum, where she worked and where I met her, purely by chance. She smiled easily, she was articulate, and she had lived in or near Hanoi throughout the war.

"What is your country?" she had asked.

I told her. She welcomed me. I said, "Was this museum damaged in the war?"

"It was bombed," she said. "The whole city was bombed, of course."

Her father, the curator at that time, had devised a plan for moving the ancient Buddhas, the stelae, the silk paintings, the porcelains, the gold work, and the scrolls to safety.

"He hid it all underground so it wouldn't be damaged by the American bombs," she said. "My father supervised the distribution and hiding of it. He put it in many different places, so even if some of it were bombed, the rest would be intact."

Mr. Vuong used the same systematic logic to disperse his family, scattering his five children to five different locations in or around Hanoi, to give the family a better chance to survive.

"If we had been in the same place, he would have lost us all, had a bomb hit us. Hanoi was bombed all the time by B-52s. Yet we all survived!"

"You knew what a B-52 bomber was?" I was impressed that a twelve-year-old Vietnamese girl would recognize a specific aircraft. It was hard to imagine an American adolescent knowing such a thing, so why should she?

"Everyone knew this plane," she said. "And we were afraid, even in the bomb shelters."

"Do you remember the Christmas bombing?"

"I remember everything. I remember the day the bombs fell on Kham Thien Street," she said, drawing her silk scarf close with her slender fingers. "It was the nineteenth of December. A thousand people died there that day, and most of them were women and children. Every home was destroyed. It was very terrible to see."