by Paul Theroux
24. The Saigon-Bien Hoa Passenger Train
I WENT to Vietnam to take the train; people have done stranger things in that country. The Trans-Vietnam Railway, which the French called the Transindochinois, took over thirty-three years to build, but in 1942, a short six years after it was finished, it was blown to bits and never repaired. A colonial confection, like one of those French dishes that take ages to prepare and are devoured swiftly: a brief delicacy that is mostly labour and memory. The line went along the beautiful coast few of our reluctant janizaries have praised, from Saigon to Hanoi; but now it is in pieces, like a worm chopped up for bait, a section here and there twitching with signs of life. It is mined by the Viet Cong – even more furiously since the cease-fire (which is, willy-nilly, a painful euphemism); it is also mined by local truckers, cash-driven terrorists who believe the continuance of these railway fragments (to Dalat, to Hué, to Tuy Hoa) will prevent them from earning the livelihood Americans have taught them to expect. Like much else in Vietnam, the railway is in ruins – in northern Binh Dinh Province the line has been turned into rice fields – but the amazing thing is that part of it is still running. The Deputy Director of Vietnam Railways, Tran Mong Chau, a short man with thick glasses, told me, ‘We can’t stop the railway. We keep it running and we lose money. Maybe we do some repairs. If we stop it everyone will know we’ve lost the war.’
Tran Mong Chau warned me against going from Nha Trang to Tuy Hoa, but said I might enjoy the run from Saigon to Bien Hoa – there were fourteen trips a day. He warned me that it was not like an American train. That particular warning (though how was he to know?) is like a recommendation.
Outside the office I asked Dial, my American translator, a Marine turned cultural-affairs escort (he had – and smiled at the lechery in the phrase – made a ‘lateral entry’): ‘Do you think it’s safe to take the train to Bien Hoa?’
‘About a month ago the VC hit it,’ Dial said. ‘They got six or seven of the passengers in an ambush. They stopped the train with a pillar of salt – then they started shooting.’
‘Maybe we should forget it.’
‘No, it’s secure now. Anyway, I’ve got a gun.’
At breakfast the next morning, Cobra One – this was the code name of my American host in Saigon – told me that the Vietnam Tourist Board wanted to see me before I took the train to Bien Hoa. I said I’d be glad to pay them a visit. We were eating on the roof of Cobra One’s large house, enjoying the coolness and the fragrance of the flowering trees. From time to time a low-flying helicopter paddled past, weaving between the housetops. Cobra One said there was going to be a big campaign to attract tourists to Vietnam. I suggested that the idea might be rather premature – after all, the war was still on.
‘You’d never know it here,’ said Cobra One’s wife, Cobra Two. She looked up from her newspaper. Below us in the centre of the compound there was a swimming pool, set amidst flower beds and rows of palms. A far wall held a coil of barbed wire, but that only made it seem more like Singapore. There was a hedge of red hibiscus along the driveway and clusters of giant ferns, and a man in a yellow shirt raking the gravel paths under the laburnum trees. Cobra Two, striking in her silk robe, kicking a furry slipper up and down, and rattling Stars and Stripes, said, ‘Some of the best – hey, what hemisphere is this?’
‘Eastern,’ said Cobra One.
‘Right. Some of the best lays in the eastern hemisphere are right in this compound.’
The office of the Director of Planning of the Commission for Vietnam Tourism was decorated in red velvet from floor to ceiling, and there were ribbons on the margins of the walls. We seemed to be sitting in an empty box of expensive chocolates. I said I didn’t have much time, since I was going to take the train to Bien Hoa. The Director of Planning and the Deputy Commissioner exchanged uneasy glances. Vo Doan Chau, the Director, said the train was in bad shape – what I should do, he said, was to take a car to Vung Tau and go swimming. ‘Vietnam is famous for its beaches,’ he said.
Famous for its beaches! ‘And much else,’ I was going to say, but Tran Luong Ngoc, the American-trained Deputy Commissioner, launched into the explanation of the campaign. They were going all-out for tourists, he said, and they had devised a publicity gimmick that could not fail, the Follow Me! scheme. Posters were being printed showing pretty Vietnamese girls in places like Danang, Hué, and Phu Quoc Island, and the slogan on the posters would be FOLLOW ME! These posters (PLEIKU – FOLLOW ME!, DALAT – FOLLOW ME!) would be sent all over the world, but most of the campaign money would be spent to encourage tourists in the United States and Japan. Mr Ngoc gave me a stack of brochures with titles like Lovely Hué and Visit Viet-Nam, and he asked me if I had any questions.
‘About those beaches,’ I said.
‘Very nice beaches,’ said Mr Ngoc. ‘Also woods and greenery.’
‘Vietnam has everything,’ said Mr Chau.
‘But the tourists might be a bit worried about getting shot,’ I said.
‘Noncombat areas!’ said Mr Ngoc. ‘What to worry about? You’re travelling around the country yourself, no?’
‘Yes, and I’m worried.’
‘My advice to you,’ said Mr Ngoc, ‘is don’t worry. We expect many tourists. We think they will be Americans, and maybe some Japanese. The Japanese like to travel.’
‘They might prefer to go to Thailand or Malaysia,’ I said. ‘They have nice beaches, too.’
‘They are so commercialized,’ said Mr Chau. ‘They have big hotels and roads and crowds of people. They are not very interesting – I have seen them. In Vietnam the tourists can go back to nature!’
‘And we have hotels,’ said Mr Ngoc. ‘Not five-star hotels, but sometimes air-conditioned or electric fan. Minimum comfort, you can say. And we have that bungalow, built for President Johnson when he visited. It could be turned into something. We don’t have very much at the moment but we have plenty of scope.’
‘Plenty of scope,’ said Mr Chau. ‘We will appeal to their curiosity – people in America. So many had friends or relatives in Vietnam. They have heard so much about this country.’ Sounding distinctly ominous he said, ‘Now they can find out what it is really like.’
Mr Ngoc said, ‘Places like Bangkok and Singapore are just commercial. That’s not interesting. We can offer spontaneity and hospitality, and since our hotels aren’t very good we could also appeal to the more adventurous. There are many people who like to explore the unknown. Then these people can go back to the States and tell their friends they saw where this or that battle was fought –’
‘They can say, “I slept in the bunker at Pleiku!” ’ said Mr Chau.
There were really two selling points, the beaches and the war. But the war was still on, in spite of the fact that nowhere in the forty-four-page booklet entitled Visit Viet-Nam was fighting mentioned, except the oblique statement, ‘English [language] is making rapid progress under the pressure of contemporary events’, which might have been a subtle reference to the American occupation and perhaps to the war. At that time – December 1973 – 70,000 people had been killed since the cease-fire, but the Commission for Vietnam Tourism was advertising Hué (a devastated city of muddy streets, occasionally shelled) as a place of ‘scenic beauty … where historic monuments, yards and porticoes bear the mark of its glorious past’, and urging visitors to Danang to travel six miles south of the city to see ‘brilliant stalactites and stalagmites’, not mentioning the fact that there was still fierce fighting in that very area, where gunmen hid in the grottoes near Marble Mountain.
Before I left the office, Mr Chau took me aside. ‘Don’t go to Bien Hoa by train,’ he said.
I asked him why.
‘That is the worst train in the world,’ he said. He was embarrassed that I should want to take it.
But I insisted, and, wishing him well with his campaign to attract tourists to the battlefields, I set off for the station. There is no sign on Saigon Station, and, though I was perhaps fifty feet away from it,
no one in the area knew where it was. I found it purely by chance, cutting through an Air Vietnam ticket office, but even when I got on the platform I was not sure it was the railway station: there were no passengers and no trains at the platform. The train, it turned out, was a short distance up the line, but it was not due to leave for twenty minutes. The carriages were battered green boxes, some wooden (with protruding splinters) and some metal (with dents). The seating arrangements, a narrow bench running along the walls of the carriage, was neither comfortable nor convenient, and most of the passengers were standing. They smiled, clutching their very discouraged ducks and chickens and their cruelly sunburned half-American infants.
There was another even older train parked on the far side of the yard. Attracted by the wrought-iron railings on the porches – a French feature of the car – I sauntered over. I climbed into this semiderelict train and heard a sharp howl of complaint. A girl jumped up two cars away (I saw her figure framed by the broken doors) and pulled on a pair of jeans. Then I saw a boy fussing with his clothes. I started off in the opposite direction and ran into two sleeping heroin addicts, both pimply girls with tattoos and needle scars on their arms. One woke and shouted at me. I hurried away: there were other lovers on the train, and children, and menacing-looking youths poking through the cars. But the train had no engine: it wasn’t going anywhere.
The stationmaster, wearing a plastic-visored cap, crossed the track, waving to me. I hopped out of the derelict train and went over to shake his hand. Laughing sheepishly, he explained that it was not this train that was going to Bien Hoa but that one, and he pointed to the line of bulging boxcars. I headed for one of the cars and was about to swing myself up when the stationmaster called out, ‘No! No!’
He motioned for me to follow him, and, still laughing, he led me to the tail end of the train, where there was quite a different sort of railway car. This wooden carriage, with a kitchen and three sleeping compartments and a large lounge, was obviously a relic from the Transindochinois, and, though it was not luxurious even by Indian standards, it was comfortable and spacious. It was, said the stationmaster, the directors: the director had requested that I ride in it. We got in; the stationmaster nodded to the signalman, and the train started up.
A free ride in the director’s personal railway car, to confound the unreality of the place still further: it was not what I expected – not in Vietnam. But this emphasis on privilege is a version of American extravagance. It is a function of the war, which produced an obliging system for conditioning the sympathy of visitors, all of whom (for the risks they believed they were taking) wanted to be treated like VIPs. Every visitor was a potential publicist, the irony being that even the most furious dove was afforded the unlimited credit and comfort on which he could preen his sensibilities into outrage. This hospitality, heightened by the natural generosity of the Vietnamese, continues. It was almost shameful to accept it, for it had its origins in the same plan a company develops when it cynically mounts a campaign to popularize an unsuccessful product. It distorted the actual. But I reserved my scorn: the Vietnamese had inherited cumbersome and expensive habits of wastefulness.
We sat around the table in the lounge that took up a third of the director’s carriage. The stationmaster put his cap away and smoothed his hair. He said that after the Second World War he had been offered a number of well-paying jobs, but he chose instead to go back to his old job on the railway. He liked trains and he believed Vietnam Railways had a great future. ‘After we reopen the line to Loc Ninh,’ he said, ‘then we go to Turkey.’
I asked him how this was possible.
‘We go up to Loc Ninh, then we build a line to Phnom Penh. That goes to Bangkok, no? Then somewhere, somewhere and somewhere – maybe India? – then Turkey. There is a railway in Turkey.’
He was certain Turkey was just over the hill, and the only difficulty he envisaged – indeed, it seemed a characteristic of the South Vietnamese grasp of political geography – was getting Loc Ninh out of the hands of the Viet Cong and laying track through the swamps of Cambodia. His transcontinental railway vision, taking in eight vast countries, had a single snag: evicting the enemy from this small local border town. For the Vietnamese citizen the rest of the world is simple and peaceful; he has the egoism of a sick man, who believes he is the only unlucky sufferer in a healthy world.
The stationmaster said, ‘Sometimes we get ambushed here. A few weeks ago some four people were killed by rifle fire.’
I said, ‘Perhaps we should close the windows then.’
‘Ha! Very good!’ he said, and translated the joke for his deputy, who was setting out glasses of Coca-Cola.
It was a single-line track, but squatters had moved their huts so close to it, I could look into their windows and across rooms where children sat playing on the floor; I could smell the cooking food – fish and blistering meat – and see people waking and dressing; at one window a man in a hammock swung inches from my nose. There was fruit on the window sills, and it stirred – an orange beginning to roll – as the train sped by. I have never had a stronger feeling of being in the houses I was passing, and I had a continuous sense of interrupting with my face some domestic routine. But I was imagining the intrusion: the people in those poor houses seemed not to notice the strangers at their windows.
From the back of the train I could see the market women and children reoccupying the track, and once – a swift sight of a leaping man – I thought I saw an American, in beard and flapping pyjamas, tall, light, round-shouldered, but with large revealing feet and a long stride. He disappeared between two tottering wooden buildings and was enclosed by lines of faded laundry. This was in one of the most crowded slums in the Saigon outskirts, and the glimpse of this man, who was the wrong size for the place – his ungainliness emphasizing his height over all the others – made me inquire about him later. Dial told me he was probably a deserter, one of about two hundred who remain in the country, mainly in the Saigon area. Some are heroin addicts, some work at legitimate jobs and have Vietnamese wives, and some are thugs – much of the breaking and entering in Saigon is attributable to the criminally versatile deserters: they know what to take at the PX; they can steal cars with greater anonymity than the Vietnamese. None of these men has identity papers, and Vietnam is a hard country to leave. Their only hope is to take a boat up the Mekong and cross into Thailand; or they could surrender. It was an odd community of practically nameless fugitives, and the idea of them – of that bearded man in pyjamas crossing the track on that very bright day, briefly exposed – filled me with curiosity and pity in the same degree. I saw in them a fictional possibility, a situation containing both a riddle and some clues for solving it. If one were to write about Vietnam in any coherent way one would have to begin with these outsiders.
I left the private car and moved through the train. It was filled with horribly mutilated people, amputees with rounded stumps, soldiers in wrinkled uniforms, and old men with stringy beards, leaning on walking sticks. A blind man wearing a straw Stetson was playing a guitar and singing tunelessly for a group of soldiers. But it was not entirely a train of decrepit and abandoned people. The impression I had on the train to Bien Hoa, one that stayed with me throughout my time in Vietnam, was of the resourcefulness of the Vietnamese. It seemed incredible, but here were schoolgirls with book bags, and women with huge bundles of vegetables, and men with trussed fowl, and others, standing at the doors of what were essentially freight cars, off to work in Bien Hoa. After so many years one expected to see them defeated; the surprise was that they were more than survivors. From the cruel interruptions of war they had stubbornly salvaged a routine: school, market, factory. At least once a month the train was ambushed, and ‘the offensive’ was spoken about with the tone of inevitability people use about monsoons. But these passengers made their daily trip. It was a dangerous journey. They were resigned to danger. For them life would never change, and the menace of the enemy was as predictable and changeless as the weather.
A lady with a half-American baby followed me through the cars, and when I stopped at one coupling to make a cautious jump she tugged my arm and tried to hand him over. It was a child of about two, with fair skin, plump, round-eyed. I smiled and shrugged. She showed me his face, pinching his cheeks, and offered him. He began to cry and then the lady started to speak loudly, and a small group of people gathered to listen. She was pointing at me, gesturing with the child in accusation.