Up Country (64 page)

I thought of Mr. Anh, and his father, the army captain, and of Mr. Uyen and the Pham family, and the sixteen-sided restaurant where Susan and I had dinner in the rain, and Tet Eve and the Perfume River, and the cathedral, and the holiday lights and the sky rockets. The Year of the Ox.

Susan wrapped her arms around me, put her mouth to my ear and said, “I always feel sad when I leave a place where I had a good experience.”

I nodded.

The sky was brightening in the east, and Highway One, the Street Without Joy, on which we’d traveled to Quang Tri and back, and hell and back, was filled with morning traffic.

I looked at the foothills in the distance as they caught the first light of the sun rising over the South China Sea. I remembered those hills and the cold rain of February 1968. Most importantly, I remembered the men, who were really boys, grown too old before they’d finished their boyhoods, and who had died too young, before any of their dreams could come true.

I always felt I had been living on borrowed time since 1968, and each day was a day that the others never had; so to the best of my ability, whenever I thought about it, I’d tried to live the days well and to appreciate the extra time.

I reached back and squeezed Susan’s leg.

She held me tighter and closer, and rested her head on my shoulder.

It had been a long, strange journey from Boston, Massachusetts; the destination was unknown, but the journey was a gift from God.

Up Country

W
e continued north on Highway One, and the traffic became heavier as the sky lightened. Now and then I got the motorcycle up to one hundred KPH, and I got good at doing the Vietnamese horn-honking weave.

Susan said into my ear, “Before Cu Chi, when was the last time you drove a bike?”

“About twenty years ago.” I added, “You never forget. Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering.”

We passed the turnoff for Quang Tri City, and we saw the abandoned tank and the destroyed Buddhist high school where this all began. A while later, we crossed the bridge where the pillbox sat with my name inscribed inside.

Fifteen minutes later, we slowed down for Dong Ha Junction and passed slowly through the ugly truck stop town. As we came to the intersection of Highway 9, we saw two policemen in a yellow jeep parked on the opposite side of the road. They barely gave us a glance.

Susan said, “Those cops thought we were Montagnards.”

“I don’t know what they thought we were, but this limited edition bike stands out.”

“Only to you. There are so many new imported goods in this country that the Viets barely notice anymore.”

I wasn’t totally buying that. I had another thought and said, “I don’t see any other Montagnards on motorcycles.”

She replied, “I saw two.”

“Point them out to me next time.”

I continued on toward the DMZ. We were north of Highway 9 now, in the old marine area of operations, and I’d been on this stretch of road only once, when I caught a convoy to go see the Boston friend of mine who was stationed at Con Thien. He was in the field on an operation, so I missed him, but I left a note on his cot that he never saw.

There was a string of market stalls along the highway north of Dong Ha, but once I cleared them, I got the bike back up to one hundred KPH. I could see now from this perspective that it wasn’t as dangerous as Susan had made it look on the road to Cu Chi.

Within fifteen minutes, the landscape changed from bleak to dead, and I said to Susan, “I think we just crossed into the DMZ.”

“God . . . it’s devastated.”

I looked at this no-man’s-land, still uninhabited, pocked with bomb and shell craters, the white soil covered with straggly, stunted vegetation. If the moon had a few inches of rainfall, it would probably look like this.

I saw some barbed wire in the distance, and the wreck of a rusting Jeep, sitting in a posted minefield where even the metal scavengers wouldn’t go.

Up ahead in the mist, I could see the hazy outline of a bridge which I knew must cross the Ben Hai River. I slowed down and said to Susan, “When I was here, the bridge wasn’t.”

I drove onto the middle of the bridge and stopped. I looked at the river that had divided North and South Vietnam for twenty years and said, “This is it. I’m in North Vietnam.”

She said, “I’m still in South Vietnam. Pull up.”

“Walk.”

She got off the motorcycle, opened a saddlebag, and removed the manila envelope that held the photographs from Pyramide Island. With her cigarette lighter, she lit the corner of the envelope. The envelope blazed in her hand, and she held it until the last second, then dropped the flaming photos off the bridge and into the river.

We mounted up and continued on across the bridge.

On this side of the bridge was a statue of a North Vietnamese soldier, complete with pith helmet and an AK-47 rifle. He had the same lifeless eyes of the American statues at the Wall.

We continued on into former enemy territory. The farther we went away
from the DMZ, the better the land looked, though there were still a large number of bomb craters and destroyed buildings dotting the landscape.

The road was no better here, and it was slick from the mist and drizzle. I kept wiping my goggles and face with my Montagnard scarf, and my leather jacket was shiny with moisture.

We passed a motorcycle going south, and the riders were dressed like we were. They waved as they passed, and we waved in return.

Susan said, “See? Even Montagnards think we’re Montagnards.”

Within an hour, we approached a good-sized town that had a sign that read
Dong Hoi
.

We entered the town, and I slowed down and looked around. What struck me was that the place looked more gloomy and run-down than anything I’d seen in the former South Vietnam. The cars and trucks were older, and there were not as many motor scooters or cyclos. Nearly everyone was riding a bicycle or walking, and their clothes looked dirty and worn. Also, there was not nearly as much commercial activity here as south of the DMZ; no bars, no shops, and only a few cafés. It reminded me of the first time I’d crossed from West Germany to East Germany.

Susan said, “This is Mr. Tram’s hometown—our guide at Khe Sanh.”

“I see why he moved.”

Again, we passed a parked yellow police jeep, and again the cop behind the wheel barely looked up from his cigarette. This might actually work.

Up ahead, I could see a convoy of military vehicles: open trucks and jeeps filled with soldiers and a few staff cars. I accelerated and began passing them.

I glanced to my right and saw that the drivers and passengers were all looking at us—actually, they were looking at Susan. Susan’s face was tightly wrapped in scarves, leather cap, and goggles, and for all they knew, she could have looked like their grandmothers, but they recognized a nice ass when they saw one, and they were waving and calling out to her. Susan had her face turned away modestly, which was what a Montagnard woman would do.

I looked at the driver of the open jeep next to me, and we made eye contact. I could see by his expression that he was trying to figure out what tribe I came from. In fact, I didn’t think I was passing for a Montagnard. I gassed the bike, and we accelerated up toward the front of the convoy and passed the lead vehicle.

Highway One was flat and ran near the coast on this stretch of the road, and we made good time, but the road was shared by so many different types of vehicles of varying size and power, along with bicycles, carts and pedestrians, that there was no such thing as cruising; it was an obstacle course, and you needed to keep alert and terrified at all times.

We were about two hundred kilometers from Hue, and it was almost 9
A.M.
, so we’d covered about 120 miles in two and a half hours. And Highway One was the easy part.

Up ahead, a mountain range to the west ran down to the South China Sea, as they have a habit of doing in this country, creating a high pass right beside the sea. As the road rose, bicyclists were walking their bikes, and the ox carts were getting slower. I moved to the left and accelerated. Within twenty minutes, we approached the crest of the twisting mountain pass. It was cold and windy up here, and I had trouble controlling the bike.

Before we got to the crest, I started noticing people on the road. They were wrapped in layers of filthy rags, their faces barely visible, and they were coming out of the rock formations, walking toward us with their hands out. Susan called into my ear, “Beggars.”

Beggars?
They looked like extras in
Revenge of the Mummy
.

Susan yelled at them as we drove past, but some of them actually got their hands on us as we accelerated up the pass, and I had to weave around a bunch of them in the middle of the road.

I reached the crest of the pass, and we started down to the coastal plains. The bike skidded a few times on the slippery blacktop, and I kept downshifting.

Below, I could see that the flat rice paddies were flooded up to the dikes, and small clusters of peasants’ huts sat on little islands of dry ground. There were more pine trees here than palms and more burial mounds than I’d seen in the south. I recalled that North Vietnam had lost about two million people in the war, nearly ten percent of the population, and thus the countless burial mounds. War sucks.

An hour and a half from the mountain pass, we approached a large town. I turned onto a dirt road and drove until I got the bike out of sight of the highway.

Susan and I dismounted and stretched. We also used the facilities, which consisted of a bush.

I took the map out of the zippered leather pouch and looked at it. I said to her, “That town just ahead is Vinh.”

She informed me, “That’s a tourist town. We can stop there if you want to make that phone call to the Century Riverside.”

“Why is it a tourist town?”

“Just outside Vinh is the birthplace of Ho Chi Minh.”

“And there are Westerners there?”

She replied, “I don’t think many Westerners care about Uncle Ho’s birthplace, but you can be sure Vidotour does, so the place is a must-see. Also, it’s about halfway between Hue and Hanoi, so it’s the overnight stop for the tour buses.”

“Okay. We’ll stop there and get Uncle Ho T-shirts.”

She opened a saddlebag and took out two bananas. “You want a banana, or a banana?”

We ate the bananas standing up and drank some bottled water as I studied the map. I said, “About two hundred klicks from here is a town called Thanh Hoa. When we get there, we need to look for a road that heads west. Take a look. We need to get to Route 6, which takes us to . . . well, it’s supposed to take us to Dien Bien Phu, but I see that it ends before it gets there . . . then there’s a smaller road to Dien Bien Phu.”

Susan looked at the map and said, “I don’t think that last stretch qual-ifies as a road.”

I said, “Okay, let’s take off the Montagnard stuff and try to look like Lien Xo on a pilgrimage to Uncle Ho’s birthplace.”

We took off the tribal scarves and the leather hats and stuffed them in a saddlebag.

We mounted up and drove back to Highway One.

Within a few minutes, we were on the outskirts of the town of Vinh. On the right was a painted billboard, and I slowed down so Susan could read it.

She said, “It says . . . ‘The town of Vinh was totally destroyed by American bombers and naval artillery . . . between 1965 and 1972 . . . and has been rebuilt by the people of Vinh . . . with the help of our socialist brothers of the German Democratic Republic . . .’”

“That’s a real tourist draw.”

As we entered the town, it did indeed look like East Berlin on a bad day; block after block of drab, gray concrete housing, and other concrete buildings of indeterminate function.

A few people on the street glanced at us, and I was having second thoughts about stopping. “Are you sure there are Westerners in this town?”

“Maybe it’s off-season.”

We came to a Y-intersection at a park, and Susan said, “Go left.”

I took the left fork and, as it turned out, this was the street that took us to the center of town, another Le Loi Street, on which we made a right turn. I wondered how she knew that.

There were a number of hotels on the left side of the street, and none of them would be mistaken for the Rex. In fact, I’ve never seen such grim-looking places, not even in East Germany, and I wondered if the East Germans were playing a joke on the Viets. In any case, I saw tour buses and Westerners on the street, which made me feel better.

I said to Susan, “Maybe you can try the call from one of these hotels.”

She replied, “I have a better chance of getting through from the post office. Also, if I can’t get through by phone, the GPO will have a fax and telex.” She added, “You can’t choose your long-distance carrier here.”

We drove around awhile and spotted the post office. Susan got off and walked directly into the building.

A few passersby gave me a glance, but thanks to Uncle Ho, I didn’t attract too much attention. After about ten minutes, a yellow jeep pulled up beside me with two cops in it. The cop in the passenger seat was staring at me.

I ignored him, but he yelled something at me, and I had no choice but to look at him.

He was saying something, and I thought he was motioning for me to dismount, then I realized he was asking me about the motorcycle. Recalling that foreigners were not supposed to drive anything this big, and knowing that the BMW had Hue license plates, I said in French, “Le tour de Hanoi à Hue.”

The cop didn’t seem to understand, and quite frankly I don’t understand my own French half the time. I repeated, “Le tour de Hanoi à Hue,” which didn’t fully explain why I was sitting in front of the post office, but the cop in the passenger seat was now speaking to the cop behind the wheel, and I could tell that the driver understood something.

The cop in the passenger seat gave me a hard, cop look, said something in Vietnamese, and the yellow jeep pulled away.

I took a deep breath, and for the first time in my life, I thanked God that I passed for a Frenchman.

I was going to dismount and go find Susan, but I saw her coming out
of the post office. She jumped on, and I drove onto Le Loi Street, which I’d figured out was Highway One, and within five minutes, we were out of Vinh. A sign on the side of the road said in about a dozen languages,
Birthplace of Ho Chi Minh;
1
5 Kilometers
. I said to Susan, “Want to see the log cabin where Uncle Ho was born?”

“Drive.”

We continued north on Highway One.