“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 . . .’”
&nbs
p; “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; 15 Kilometers. I said to Susan, “Want to see the log cabin where Uncle Ho was born?”
“Drive.”
We continued north on Highway One.
Susan said to me, “I couldn’t get through by phone, so I telexed and faxed. I had to wait for a reply.”
“Bottom line.”
“The book hasn’t arrived, or so Mr. Tin said in his telex.”
I didn’t reply.
She said, “But the book is worth about fifteen bucks to a backpacker or a tourist who doesn’t have a guidebook . . . and we’re not there . . . so, it’s possible that Mr. Tin did get it, and it’s now for sale. That’s a lot of bucks here.”
Again, I didn’t reply.
Susan said, “There was a message, however, from Colonel Mang. For me.”
I didn’t ask what it said, but Susan told me. “Colonel Mang wishes me a safe trip and hopes I enjoyed the photographs.”
I didn’t reply.
She added, “He also said he noticed bathing suits in my apartment, and he’s sorry I forgot them.”
We approached the turnoff for Ho Chi Minh’s birthplace, where two mini-buses of Western tourists were turning in. I pulled over and took Susan’s camera out of the backpack and snapped a photo of the sign, in case this film wound up in the hands of the local police. I said to Susan, “I got the once-over from a couple of cops in a jeep. I convinced them I was a Frenchman on a cross-country motorcycle race. My Parisian accent impressed them.”
“The North Viets have some positive feelings for the French.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure. But in Hanoi, you’ll see middle-aged men wearing berets, and it’s still très chic to speak a little French among that age group and to affect French manners and read French literature. In Hanoi, they consider the French to be cultured, and the Americans to be uncouth, materialistic, war-mongering capitalists.”
“That doesn’t make us bad people.”
She tried to smile, then got pensive. She said, “I’m upset about those photographs.”
I replied, “I’m upset about the book not showing up.”
She looked at me and nodded. “Sorry.” She asked, “What do we do about the book not showing up?”
I thought about that. Mr. Anh could have spent some time strapped to a table as Colonel Mang clipped electrodes to his testicles and cranked up the juice. If that was the case, Mr. Anh would have said, “Dien Bien Phu! Ban Hin!” and anything else that Colonel Mang wanted to hear.
Susan asked again, “What do you want to do?”
“Well . . . we could go to Hanoi and try to get out of here on the first flight to anywhere. Or we can go to Dien Bien Phu. For sure, we can’t sit here all day.”
She thought a moment, then said, “Dien Bien Phu.”
I reminded her, “You said my Vietnam luck has run out.”
“It has; you were mistaken for a Frenchman. My luck is still good, notwithstanding my Playboy centerfold. Let’s roll.”
I kicked the BMW into gear and accelerated onto the highway.
Susan leaned forward and looked at the gas gauge. She said, “We need gas. We just passed a station. Turn around.”
“There should be another one up ahead. Some of them give away rice bowls with a fill-up.”
“Paul, turn around.”
I made a sharp U-turn, and we pulled into the gas station and up to a hand crank pump. I shut off the engine, and we dismounted.
The attendant sat in a small open concrete structure and watched us, but didn’t move. Clearly, this was a state-owned facility, and unlike anything I’d seen south of the DMZ. It was still very socialist here, and the good news about capitalist greed and consumer marketing had not reached into Uncle Ho territory yet.
I turned the hand crank, and Susan held the nozzle in the gas fill.
Susan said, “Crank faster.”
“I’m cranking as fast as a European socialist would crank.”
She said to me, “When we pay this guy, we’re French.”
“Bon.”
I squeezed thirty-five liters into the big tank, and I looked at the total. I said, “Twenty-one thousand dong. That’s not bad. About two bucks.”
She said, “It’s in hundreds, Paul. Two hundred and ten thousand dong. Still cheap.”
“Good. You pay.”
The gas station attendant had wandered over, and Susan said to him, “Bonjour, monsieur.”
I added, “Comment ça va?”
He didn’t reply in any language, but looked at the bike as Susan counted out 210,000 dong with Uncle Ho’s picture on the notes. I pointed to Uncle Ho and said, “Numero uno hombre,” which may have been the wrong language. Susan kicked my ankle.
The attendant looked us over, then looked again at the bike. We mounted up, and Susan said to the guy, “Le tour de Hue”Hanoi.”
I accelerated out of there before the guy got wise to us.
We continued north on Highway One, then we pulled over and got into our Montagnard scarves and the fur-trimmed leather hats.
Susan said to me, “Why the hell did you say ‘numero uno hombre’?”
“You k
now—Uncle Ho is a number one guy.”
“That was Spanish.”
“What difference does it make? You’re French, I’m Spanish.”
“Sometimes your joking around is inappropriate for the situation.”
I thought about that and replied, “It’s an old habit. Infantry guys do that when it gets tense. Cops, too. Maybe it’s a guy thing.”
She informed me, “Sometimes you make the situation worse with your smart-ass remarks—like with Colonel Mang, and you and Bill going to Princeton together.”
Susan was in a bitchy mood, and I hoped it was PMS and not morning sickness.
Highway One was the only major north”south artery in this congested country, and even though traffic was supposed to be light because of the holiday, it seemed like half the population was using the two pathetic lanes of bad blacktop. We never got above sixty KPH, and every inch of the road was a challenge.
It took us nearly two hours to travel the hundred kilometers to the next major town of Thanh Hoa. It was pushing 3 P.M., and it was getting cold. The sky was heavy with gray clouds, and now and then we passed through an area of light rain; crachin, rain dust. My stomach was growling.
I called back to Susan, “This should be Thanh Hoa. This is the first place we can head west and north toward Route 6.”
“Your call.”
I looked at the odometer. We’d come almost 560 kilometers from Hue, and it had taken us over eight hours. It was now 3:16 P.M., and we had less than four hours of daylight left.
I played around with a few options and decided that since it wasn’t raining, I should get on the bad road now, and get as close as I could to Route 6 before the sun set; tomorrow could be raining and the next secondary road to Route 6 could be impassable, which was what Mr. Anh had been trying to tell me in his little briefing. I said to Susan, “We’ll take the road out of Thanh Hoa. If we don’t like it, we can go back and try the next one.”
We entered the town of Thanh Hoa, still wearing our Montagnard scarves and leather hats. The town apparently hadn’t been obliterated in the war, and it had a little charm. In fact, I saw an old gent wearing a beret, and there were a few hotels and cafés that hadn’t been built by the East Germans.
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