by Paul Theroux
One thing struck me more than anything else in Hue. Never mind for the moment my memory of the lifelessness and apprehension, the weirdness of war: frenzy one minute and boredom the next, the bureaucracy and clumsy formality, the suspense that was also part of the terror. The difference was so great as almost to erase the memory.
I had been conscious of it since entering the country, though I had not remarked on it or made a note. It was the people's clothes—the whiteness of the white dresses, the starched collars, the decorous ao dais, many men in shirtsleeves or in suits, the daintiness of children's tidy outfits, and not their newness but their cleanliness, a crisp and well-turned-out population that spoke with confidence and self-respect; even in the muddiest districts of Hue, the clothes were freshly laundered.
All this was new to me, the Hue of peacetime that did not in the least resemble the Hue of the war. The Vietcong gun emplacements and pillboxes on the old city walls looked more like antiquated follies than leftovers of battle. Apart from the citadel, it was not a rebuilt or restored place but rather a reincarnation, like much else in Vietnam, a whole city risen from the ashes of war.
I was praising the fish soup to a man in Hue who said, "You should try the eel soup."
Looking for eel soup, I found Mr. Son, whose shophouse, on a corner in the southeast part of the city, was another open kitchen that could have been a family's kitchen, because it contained only two tables and some stools. A hand-lettered sign said Chao Luon—eel soup. He had no other customers. He also sold beer, whiskey, canned meat, and dry noodles; his wife took in laundry. He had fish soup but no eel soup.
"Business is slow," Mr. Son said. "If I get more customers, I'll find another table."
"Your English is good."
"I worked for the American army. That's why."
"What years?"
"The bad years. 'Sixty-eight to the time they left. I was a cook at Camp Eagle. First Airborne." He explained that this camp was about ten miles outside Hue—the U.S. troops stayed away from the city.
When I finished eating, he said that if I came back the next day he would have eel soup for me. It was his grandmother's recipe.
Mr. Son was waiting for me the next night. I had looked forward to seeing him, because he was my age and spoke English, and he had been in Hue when I'd last visited, in that haunted and suspenseful period between the American withdrawal in 1972 and the fall of Saigon three years later.
Again I was the only customer. I drank beer and Mr. Son sat with me and served me eel soup and explained his grandmother's recipe. She had been a cook in the royal palace from 1917 onward, when an emperor of the Nguyen dynasty had ruled from there.
Madame Son's eel soup: In a large pot, add a quantity of pork bones to a lot of water and simmer with vegetables for five hours. Strain and save the stock. Sauté onions and garlic in another large pot. Add delicate mushrooms, chilies, spices (anise and cardamom), green beans and white beans, and chopped eel. Add the stock. Bring to a boil and then simmer for about an hour.
I ate it and we talked about the war. He said it was odd, but few people mentioned it anymore. Most people were too young to remember, or had been born in better times. The war, he said, was a miserable time, but he had learned to be a chef then and had enjoyed his work.
"I liked the Americans," he said. "They were good to me."
On a salary of about $30 a month—$300 in military scrip; the U.S. Army in Vietnam had printed its own money—he had started at the bottom in the kitchen.
"First, because I could write English, I made lists. 'Beans,' 'bread,' 'meat,' 'flour.' And I did some easy cooking. Spaghetti is easy. Hamburgers—easy too. The men ate the food."
He drank tea while I had the eel soup, which was spicy and thick from the beans and the chopped eel.
"Many of those men died," he said. "And many of my friends also died."
"What did you think?" I asked.
"It was terrible." He made a face. "And there was nothing here in Hue. Nothing! Just trouble. No people. Fighting now and then, and bombs."
"The American soldiers had left by the time I got here."
"They just went away." He was smiling, not in mirth but at the horror of it. "That was '72. The end of my work. I didn't know what to do. We all waited, and then it came—the VC."
"Where were you then?"
"Here, but I didn't stay. I ran. I had a motorbike and hid in the countryside. My house here was ruined. There were no records. No one knew what I had been doing. When I came back to Hue the soldiers found me."
"Were you scared?"
"Yes. I said to them, 'I like peace!' It was true."
"No prison time?"
"No prison." He got up and opened another bottle of beer for me. Then, settling again on his stool, he said, "The years after that were very bad. From '75 to '78 we had no food, no money, no clothes, nothing. It was almost worse than the war."
Those were the years of the American trade embargo—which lasted until 1994—when, petty-minded in defeat, we had hoped to make the Vietnamese regret that they'd won the war, and had punished them by withholding aid and food. And we had stood by while China invaded the north and became an army of occupation. Those were the first years of America's friendship with China, the hovering presence and ancient enemy of Vietnam.
While we were talking, Mr. Son's elderly father walked in from the street. He was a small, finely made man with a kindly face, a wispy beard, and bony hands. He was slightly built but seemed healthy.
"No smoking, no drinking," Mr. Son said of his father.
The man was in his early eighties and, as a lifelong resident of Hue, had seen a great deal—at least one emperor of the Nguyen dynasty at the royal palace, the French colonials, the Japanese, and the ructions of numerous battles, of which the massacres and beheadings of Tet in 1968 represented just one episode of many upheavals.
"He looks like Uncle Ho," I said.
"Ho was a good man," Mr. Son said. "He grew up near here. Even when he was important he wore simple clothes, not good ones." He laughed, thinking of it. "Just like you and me!"
The old man was smiling now. I commented on that.
"My father worked for the Americans. They liked him," Mr. Son said. "Things got better. They're good now. We're happy."
THE DAY TRAIN TO HANOI
EVEN DURING THE WAR, when I had traveled here, I had thought that if Vietnam hadn't been so beautiful we would not have ravished it, nor would the French have bothered to colonize and plunder it. Its cool, steep, humped-up mountains and jungle-thick valleys and cloud forests sloped past fertile fields to the coastal heat of palmy, white sand beaches; its people were graceful and hard-working and willing; the warmth of its tropical enveloping climate made it seem a kind of Eden. Of course foreigners wanted to possess the land and its people, even if it meant bombing them to smithereens. But the Vietnamese were tenacious and self-possessed and had triumphed.
Up to this point I had not seen Hanoi, which was as stately as a precinct of Paris, as it was meant to be when it was the capital of French Indochina. The French had been humiliated in battle, had surrendered by the thousands, been taken captive, and driven out; but at least they had left long boulevards of imposing buildings behind. And we had left nothing except a multitude of scars and the trauma of the whole miserable business, ten years of terror and seven million tons of bombs.
We had occupied Hue but hadn't improved anything there. The small pink-and-white train station, sitting like a stale birthday cake on its own avenue, was a French colonial confection. It had been a wreck when I'd last seen it. It was back in business, thronged with people, efficient, with a clean waiting room and frequent trains. I got a ticket for the twelve-hour trip to Hanoi, something I had longed to do all those years ago.
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 demilitariz
ed 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.