Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

THE MEKONG EXPRESS

TRAVEL IS AT ITS most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life.

One morning in Phnom Penh, around eight o'clock, I left my hotel, walked along the riverfront on the embankment, A Cha Xao Street, to a certain street corner, and caught the bus to Saigon. The trip was only 150 miles, but it took all day because it involved a slow passenger ferry across the Mekong and the usual delays, hours of them, at the border crossing, two sets of immigration checks, into Vietnam. On the side of the bus was a gaily painted sign: Mekong Express. The passengers were mainly Vietnamese and Cambodian, and a backpacking husband and wife from England, all smiles, as well as four middle-aged French travelers, peevish because they had to speak English (almost no Cambodians speak French anymore) and pay for everything in American dollars.

Two rivers, the Tonle Sap and the Mekong, converge at Phnom Penh, flowing from the north, and they split again into two rivers, which flow southerly: the Bassac and the continuation of the Mekong. Phnom Penh sits at the western edge of the X that these rivers create, a point the French called Quatre-Bras because of the four wide branching streams.

We crossed the Bassac River on the Monivong Bridge, heading southeast towards the border. Just over the bridge were poor neighborhoods and the broad, flat countryside of villages, stilt houses overlooking swamps, cows, herd boys, lame dogs, and an unbroken expanse of paddy fields. I couldn't read or scribble notes on the bus. I gazed at the laboring Cambodians, who had been unfairly punished for decades by successive regimes and foreign interests, unlucky people still struggling to survive, all the sadder for their politeness.

A few hours down the bad road we came again to the Mekong, waited for the Neak Luong ferry (hardly larger than the three-car Edgartown ferry), then drove onto it and crossed the turbulent water. Hours later, the road improved near the town of Bavet, on the Cambodian border. We walked through the grandiose gateway—immigration and customs—carrying our bags. No inspection: I could have been carrying a treasure. Then another long walk, across the border to Vietnam immigration and customs, in the town of Moc Bai, as the sun set. And beyond another gateway, a different world.

On this stretch, the look of confidence was immediate. The Vietnamese road was well paved and the houses were in better repair, more substantial in size. There was better lighting, more activity, and finally, like a howl of hope, a great flow of scooters and motorbikes, buzzing outriders beside the bus, building to a bright noisy flow, the riders dipping and weaving, no one wearing a helmet. These motorbikes wobbled along the road, eight abreast, inches apart. The overwhelming density of the stream of bike traffic seemed to bear our little bus onward into the city center. And for the hour it took to get to the middle of Saigon, the unbroken line of shops, markets, and factories gave some credence to the many Thais who had said to me, "We're worried about Vietnam taking our business."

Because this was a sentimental journey, and so that I could get my bearings, I asked to be dropped at a certain spot near the Saigon River. Then I walked west to a familiar district: the Continental Hotel, the Rex, the Caravelle, a little park, and the main post office.

What I had remembered of the Saigon of 1973 were trashed and empty streets, the colonial façades of the post office and the French-looking city hall, the pinkish brick of Notre Dame Cathedral with its twin spires, some people on bicycles, and at night almost no one out except a few hopeful prostitutes, lingering under the lights at the broken curbs of street corners. That, and war fear and war weariness, like stinks in the smoke-darkened air.

This was the opposite—mobs of people and blatting traffic at ten P.M. Almost the first thing I saw was a great crowd on an apron of sidewalk, parents and small children, their faces gleaming, in a line to enter "Candyland," a bright display of goodies in a department store: children dressed up as elves, candy, music, happy moms, smiling dads yakking on cell phones, everyone well dressed. If there was an image that was the opposite of the Vietnam War, or any war—peace, prosperity, rejuvenation—this was it.

Cambodia was now a dusty memory of subdued chaos, and unlike Cambodians, who had tended to cling and softly importune, these Vietnamese were indifferent to me. They had other things to do.

That was my first impression. But the next night, while I was strolling back to my hotel on a busy street, a young man on a motorcycle pulled near me and said, "Mister, you want massage? You want girl? Nice girl?" and I knew that some things had not changed.

After that, many touts on motorbikes offered me women and massages, and seemed eager to whisk me away to be massaged, or perhaps mugged.

Saigon, revitalized, hectic, not beautiful but energetic, was a city driven by work and money and young people, a place of opportunities, big and bright and loud, yet strangely orderly and tidy. I had seen it before, under a bad moon; I could say it had been reborn. One of the greatest aspects of the new Vietnam was its compassion, its absence of ill will or recrimination. Blaming and complaining and looking for pity are regarded as weak traits in Vietnamese culture; revenge is wasteful. They won the war against us because they were tenacious, united, and resourceful, and that was also how they were building their economy.

It was possible to see the effects of positive thinking in their work ethic and their view of the future. Nominally Buddhist, the Vietnamese seemed no more spiritual than any other people I met, but they were practical and efficient and worked well together. In traveling the entire length of the country, introducing myself as an American (because it was usual for Vietnamese to ask), no one ever said, "Look what you did to us." Yet war damage was visible all over the place: land mines littering the jungle, bomb craters, many amputees hobbling in the cities, and—quietly dying in villages and hospitals—thousands of cancer victims who had been poisoned by the millions of gallons of Agent Orange we had sprayed on their trees and on them.

The older Vietnamese remembered everything. I was hoping to meet one, and I did. Walking in the city one day, looking conspicuous—a strolling American among hurrying Vietnamese—I bumped into a gray-haired man who volunteered a hello.

"Where ya going?" he asked. He was Vietnamese, but his accent was American. Stocky, bluff, coarse in an offhand way, he said he had a motorbike—did I want a ride anywhere?

I said I wanted to find the bar where they sold "fresh beer."

"You don't want to see the war museum and the other stuff?"

"Some other time."

I didn't say so, but because he looked about my age I wanted to hear his story. He took me to Trung Tam Bia Tuoi, a saloon in a barracks-like building in a fenced-in compound, where we drank beer and ate spring rolls until I could barely stand.

He wouldn't tell me his Vietnamese name. He said everyone knew him as Omar, a name he had bestowed on himself, "because in Doctor Zhivago, Omar Sharif has a wife and a girlfriend—and I do too. Three girlfriends—forty-four, thirty-one, and twenty-one. How do I do it?"

But I hadn't asked.

"Blue diamond, you know? Viagra!"

"Did you fight in the war?" I asked.

"Yeah. For the Americans. I was a Marine. Ninth Infantry, in the Delta. Then they shipped me to Danang."

"I was in Danang after the pullout," I said. "Spooky place."

"Like I don't know that?" Omar said. "After Saigon fell I was arrested and put in prison. My daughter had cancer from Agent Orange. I wanted to go to the U.S., but the embassy said I hadn't been in prison long enough, only four months. My brother-in-law was in prison from 1975 to '84"

"What happened to him?"

"The U.S. looks after people like him. They keep their word. They said 'Okay.' And gave him a visa. He's in Houston. Another cousin's in Portland. One's in LA. I got forty-seven members of my family in the U.S., but not me. And now I'm too old to go."

"Why were you put in prison?"

"They grabbed me because I'd been a soldier with the U.S. They put me in a camp near the Cambodian border. It was shit. We worked all day and studied all night." Then he chanted, "Lenin-Marx-Ho-Chi-Minh, Lenin-Marx-Ho-Chi-Minh."

He nodded his head as he chanted, holding up a big glass of fresh beer in one hand, a spring roll in the other.

"They said, 'Your brain is fucked, boy. Come back inside. We gotta make it better.'"

"So you were reeducated?"

"If you want to call it that." He was laughing tipsily. "You think you're there for a few days, then it's weeks. Then months. Years for some people. My brother-in-law worked for the CIA. That's why he got nine years."

All this was after the fall of Saigon, he said, when the embassy was abandoned and the last of the Americans fled in helicopters, with people clinging to the landing slats.

"They found out who I was," he said of the Vietcong who had occupied the city. "They said, 'Prison for you, boy.' It was like River of No Return. You know that movie? Good one—Gary Cooper, or John Wayne."

Neither of them, actually. I checked later and found it starred Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe. Odd that Omar, a professed womanizer, had forgotten Marilyn.

There were still some people in prison, he said. He had begun to glance around the big beer hall, where loud music was playing, a TV was showing music videos, and men were guzzling beer and smoking.

"But it's not like Cambodia. In Cambodia they kill you in prison. Here they make you work and read politics. They don't kill you."

He became cautious, overly confidential, the way drunks sometimes do, but always in a conspicuous way, talking in pompous stage whispers and making foolish faces when they think they're being discreet.

"Let's move. I've got to be careful." He swiveled his head at the waiter, who was emptying ashtrays. "People listen."

He was now drunker, and like many drunks he became mildly abusive in a matey way, pestering me to have another beer, to drive with him to Cholon to pick up girls. He was also ranting about George W. Bush, who had recently visited Vietnam with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "She's his girlfriend! I know it! I can tell. I know women!" Meanwhile, the bar had become noisy and crowded, and to complete this picture of disorder, the TV was showing footage of a typhoon that had just killed a thousand people in the Philippines and was bearing down on Vietnam.

Omar was better natured the next day, but still self-dramatizing, and occasionally he alluded, with exaggerated facial expressions, to the sinister ways of the current Vietnamese government. He was somewhat unusual in this. Most people shrugged off political philosophy as humbug and simply got on with their jobs.

We were standing outside a little antique shop and I asked a woman who was showing me a carving what she thought of the government.

"Politics!" Omar said. "Say nothing! People are listening!" He said it loudly enough to be heard on the next block.

On the way to the War Remnants Museum (my suggestion—he'd said "It's just propaganda"), he told me that he'd been born in Hanoi and brought south as a child, because his father was a soldier in the French army. We swung past the American consulate, where a great crowd of Vietnamese were lined up, waiting for visas to enter the United States. Near them was a monument dedicated to the memory of 168 Vietcong soldiers who were killed on this spot in a skirmish in January 1968.

"Now everyone must respect them for being heroes," Omar said. "That's what it says."

"I'd like the exact wording."

"We can't stop. There are cops all over the place. They'll ask for my papers if they see you writing things down."

That was another thing. The Vietnamese who were Omar's age were paranoid and skittish. Younger people didn't know dates or names, didn't care, weren't interested.

The War Remnants Museum was a visual history of Vietnam's road to independence—a bloody road of corpses and land mines that occupied most of the twentieth century and began with the war against the French. "Vietnam has the right to enjoy its freedom and independence," Ho Chi Minh had written, and he shouted this to cheering crowds in Ba Dinh Square in 1945. This defiance had the French oiling up their guillotine (also on display), but less than ten years later the French army was humiliated and destroyed at Dien Bien Phu. And then it was our turn.

This ghastly pictorial of torture, massacre, carpet bombing, herbicide, defoliant, terror, dioxin sprayed from planes, Vietcong soldiers pushed out of helicopters or dragged to their deaths, civilian killings, and tanker trucks of napalm driven by grinning American soldiers and lettered The Purple People Eater—this gallery of horrific condemning photographs, in ten rooms, was all the more shocking for being the work of mostly American or foreign photographers. These men, among them Larry Burrows, Robert Ellison, Sean Flynn, Oliver Noonan, Kyoishi Sawada, and Henri Huet, produced much grimmer pictures than the official Vietnamese photographers. In their pictures the American soldier was an isolated, tormented, or injured man fighting a rear-guard action, while the Vietcong photographs showed groups of spirited Vietnamese soldiers, maneuvers, teams of men, few individuals.

Several rooms in the museum were devoted to protests against the Vietnam War, not just in the United States (the Kent State shootings were featured), but also in Britain, Holland, West Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere.

Omar said, "I'm telling you. Propaganda."

I pointed to a photograph and said, "That's me."

It wasn't me, but it could have been: the same wild hair and hornrimmed glasses, the same winter-pale face, as I picketed the White House in the rain with a few hundred others. And in my memory there arose a vivid, frustrating scene.

You're wasting your time, my embarrassed older brother was saying. You should have stayed in Amherst.

Did you hear what Paul just said? his hawkish, mocking wife cried, and she screamed with laughter after hearing me quote a line from one of Ho Chi Minh's Prison Diary poems: "The poet also should know how to lead an attack."

In early- and mid-sixties America it was regarded as treasonous to be a war resister, but that period was chronicled in detail and gratefully remembered in the War Remnants Museum. I liked being in this room commemorating the defiant ones, the sign carriers, the shouters and chanters against a policy that meant the massacre of Vietnamese and the sending of American soldiers to their deaths. I was reminded that, as a reply, I had joined the Peace Corps, and stayed on in Africa as a teacher. I had nothing to regret.

"Let's get a beer," Omar said. And at the beer joint he said, "You're funny, you know that?"

"Tell me why."

"All that time at the museum. I saw you writing in your notebook."

"So what?"

"You think people here are interested?" He laughed. "No one wants to hear about it." He drank some more, then stared into his empty glass as though he'd seen a spider at the bottom. "Maybe that's why I like you. It was terrible, man. Terrible."

He told me he was too old to think about going anywhere else. I didn't want to remind him that everything had worked out for the best.

I said, "I read somewhere that seven million tons of bombs were dropped on Vietnam."

"It was terrible." He was still staring into his empty glass. "I could go to Bangkok. I could live there. But it would be River of No Return."

He was aging in a country where young people with no memory of the war—no bitterness and little sense of history—were the driving force. Omar was right. The visitors to the war museums (there was another one, the city museum, which chronicled the fall of Saigon) were mostly foreign tourists, not Vietnamese. Omar, like many others his age, had been consumed by the American war effort, and by the French, whom his father had served. And while he meditated on defeat and betrayal, the young were thinking about the future.

It was possible to see in the photographs that one of the aims of the American generals was to flatten Vietnam, to burn it to the ground in order to flush out the Vietcong—the fury, the revenge, the despair, the irrationality, the nihilism that possess the demoralized warrior when he sees there is no way out. And we failed.

The Vietnamese have had their own revenge in the expression of the most rampant, selfish, and opportunistic capitalism. Copyright infringement, Mickey Mouse piracy, fake Rolex watches, knockoff designer goods, bootleg books and CDs and DVDs of popular music and successful films—it was all available, as was the wholesale imitation and manufacture of virtually everything we've ever tried to make. It was an astonishing paradox that, after we had failed to destroy their dream of a socialist paradise, divide their loyalties, and visit ruin upon them for our own profit, they had risen—in spite of all our efforts to demolish them—and become businessmen and entrepreneurs. Saigon was one big bazaar of ruthless capitalism, of frenzied moneymaking, of beating us at our own game.

I went to Cholon, just to look. And one day I had a meal at the Hotel Continental—the "Continental shelf," the veranda where I'd gotten drunk before Saigon fell, watching the smoke rise from the city's outskirts, had been enclosed and was now an Italian restaurant.

The Vietnam I had seen in 1973 did not exist anymore. And for most young people in the south, the war was not even a memory. One reason for this was that in all the years of war, from our first appearance as military advisers in 1961 until the fall of Saigon in 1975, we did not put up a single permanent structure. The French had left some graceful old churches, colonial schools, handsome villas, and grand municipal buildings, but in fourteen years and after the billions of dollars spent, the United States had not left behind one useful building. Apart from the land mines and bomb craters and amputees, it was as though we'd never been there.

Over breakfast one morning in Saigon, I read an item in the English-language Vietnam News headed "Today in History": "In 1976, the Trans-Vietnam Railway is officially reopened after 30 years of the division of the country. Construction of the 1700 km line was completed in 1936."

In 1973, I had traveled as far north as I could go on a train from Saigon, though some sections had been bombed out. I had reached the end of the line, the dreary and besieged city of Hue, near the coast. After that were some forward fire bases and the demilitarized zone—a no-go area.

After breakfast, I got two train tickets. Mr. Lien, who helped me buy them, was fluent in English. He had been born in 1973, in November, the month I'd been here. He was bright, efficient, optimistic, and funny—no chip on his shoulder. One ticket was for the sleeper to Hue, where I'd been before, another from Hue to Hanoi, where I'd never been.