by Paul Theroux
‘We’d better move on,’ said Dial.
He explained that the baby had been abandoned. The woman had found it and was caring for it. But it was not hers – it was an American child. She wanted to give the child to me, and she couldn’t understand why I didn’t want it. She was still shouting – I could hear her clearly as we moved through the next crowded car.
We made our way as far as the engine, a new diesel, and then into the engine itself and along the balcony to the front platform, facing the wind and squinting each time the whistle blew. But the view was not inspiring, and pointing to a hill on the right Dial said, ‘That’s where the VC launched a rocket attack a few weeks ago. But don’t worry – they’re not there now. They rush in, fire a few rockets, and then beat it.’
Hanging on the balcony rail at the front of the train, I could see the line stretching before us, and beyond that the yellow ruined landscape, bare of trees, at the horizon of which Bien Hoa lay, a jumble of grey roofs and chimneys. The wind stank of excrement, and all along the tracks there was a vile flood of shit, worse that anything I had seen in India, brimming right up to the line and still flowing from open drains that led down the bank from settlements of huts. They were not crudely built squatters’ shacks: these were small houses, built by contractors, whose existence had some official sanction. The houses with no drains. They were appropriate in a country where great roads led nowhere, where planes flew to no purpose, and the government was just another self-serving tyranny. The conventional view was that the Americans had been imperialists; but that is an inaccurate jibe. The American mission was purely sententious and military; nowhere was there evidence of the usual municipal preoccupations of a colonizing power – road-mending, drainage, or permanent buildings. In Saigon, the embassy and the Abraham Lincoln Library exhausted the services of the one architect who was sent in nine years. These two buildings will survive an offensive because that architect learned to incorporate a rocket-screen into a decorative feature of the outside wall – but this is not much of an achievement compared to the French-built post office, cathedral, the several schools, the solid clubs like the Cercle Sportif Saigonnais, and all the grand residences, of which Cobra One’s was a fairly modest example. And out here in the suburbs of Bien Hoa, created by the pressure of American occupation, the roads were falling to pieces and cholera streamed into the backyards. Planning and maintenance characterize even the briefest and most brutish empire; apart from the institution of a legal system there aren’t many more imperial virtues. But Americans weren’t pledged to maintain. There is Bien Hoa Station, built fifty years ago. It is falling down, but that is not the point. There is no sign that it was ever mended by the Americans; even sagging under its corona of barbed wire it looks a good deal sturdier than the hangars at Bien Hoa airbase.
‘If the VC had hit this train,’ said Dial at Bien Hoa Station, hopping off the engine, ‘we would have been the first to get snuffed.’
That afternoon I gave a lecture – my usual vapouring about the novel – at Van Hanh University in Saigon. It elicited a number of antagonistic questions about the position of blacks in America, which I replied to as honestly as I could. Afterwards the rector, the Venerable Thich Huyen-Vi, a Buddhist monk, gave me an inscribed copy of his doctoral thesis, ‘A Critical Study of The Life and Works of Sariputta Thera’, and I went off to the Cercle Sportif.
‘Here we are in beleaguered Saigon,’ said Cobra One. He took me around the ten acres where Chinese, Vietnamese, and perhaps a dozen languid Frenchmen were playing games (badminton, tennis, fencing, judo, ping-pong, bowling) under the lighted trees. We had a game of billiards and then went to a restaurant. There were lovers purring at some tables and ‘– opening a branch’ drifted from a group of men. Cobra One said, ‘Here we are in beleaguered Saigon.’ We went to a nightclub on Tu Do, Saigon’s main street. It was very dark inside. We were served with ice cubes in our glasses of beer. Then a red light came on and a Vietnamese girl in a miniskirt sang a quick-tempo version of ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ The heads bobbing in the semidarkness were those of people dancing spiritedly to the song. I saw Cobra One gesturing at the end of the table and heard, just above the singer’s twanging voice, ‘– beleaguered Saigon’.
The next day I flew – there was no train – to the delta town of Can Tho in a plane that had a wrinkled silver fuselage, like tinfoil from an old cigarette pack. Can Tho was once the home of thousands of GIs. With the brothels and bars closed, it had the abandoned look of an unused fairground after a busy summer. In all that decrepitude a wilfulness was revealed: we didn’t want to stay in Vietnam, and so no vision of the country, except abstract notions of political and military order, were ever formed. The airport at Can Tho was almost destroyed and the main street was riddled with potholes; all the recent buildings had a tawdry temporary design – prefabs, huts, shelters of plywood. They will fall down soon – some already have been looted and pulled down for the lumber – and in a matter of time, very few years, there will be little evidence that the Americans were ever there. There are poisoned rice fields between the straggling fingers of the Mekong Delta and there are hundreds of blond and fuzzy-haired children, but in a generation even these unusual features will change.
25. The Hué-Danang Passenger Train
FROM the air, the grey unreflecting water of the South China Sea looked ice cold, there were round Buddhist graves all through the marshes, and the royal city of Hué lay half-buried in drifts of snow. But this was wet sand, not snow, and those circular graves were bomb craters. Hué had a bizarre appearance. There had been plenty of barbed wire on the barricades but little war damage in Saigon; in Bien Hoa there were bombed-out houses; in Can Tho stories of ambushes and a hospital full of casualties. But in Hué I could see and smell the war: it was muddy roads rutted by army trucks and people running through the rain with bundles, bandaged soldiers tramping through the monsoon slime of the wrecked town or peering across their rifle barrels from the backs of overloaded trucks. The movements of the people had a distressed simultaneity. Symmetrical coils of barbed wire obstructed most streets, and houses were sloppily sandbagged. The next day, in the train, Cobra One (who had come with Cobra Two and Dial for the ride) said, ‘Look – every house has its own bullet hole!’ It was true: few houses were without a violent gouge and most had a series of ragged plugs torn out of their walls. The whole town had a dark brown look of violation, the smirches of raids among swelling puddles. It held some traces of imperial design (Vietnamese, French) but this delicacy was little more than a broken promise.
And it was very cold, with the sudden chill from the low sky and the drizzle clinging in damp rooms. I paced up and down, hugging myself to keep warm, during my lecture at the University of Hué – a colonial building, in fact, not academic at all, but rather what was once a fancy shop called Morin Brothers, which outlying planters used as a guest house and provisioner. I lectured in one of the former bedrooms, and from the windy balcony I could see the neglected courtyard, the cracked fishpond, the peeling shutters on the windows of the other rooms.
Later we drove to a bluff above the Royal Tombs, on the Perfume River. ‘That’s VC territory,’ said Mr McTaggart, the local USIS official. He was a genial white-haired man, who cooked his own meals and sometimes rode his bicycle out here and practised his Vietnamese with the sentries on the bluff. Across the river, the Viet Cong territory was a number of scalped hills: it had been defoliated. But there was still shooting now and then. An ARVN boat would chug close to the enemy bank and spend an afternoon firing into the hills, not at a particular target, but more like the French man-of-war in Heart of Darkness that aimlessly – insanely, Conrad says – shells the African jungle. I must come during the hot season, one of the Vietnamese said. Then I could hire a boat and a girl and bring some food, and I could spend a night on the river like this, making love and eating where it was cool.
I promised I would. We went to the tombs next. The older the buildings were in Hué, th
e better their state of preservation: last year’s Quonset huts were falling to bits, Mr McTaggart’s forty-year-old house was seedy but comfortable, the hundred-year-old Royal Tombs were in very good shape, although these had been made with second-hand materials, in accordance with Vietnamese custom (to stress humility) – old lumber and stone, broken pottery, and cracked tiles. There were tangled gardens and carved gateways with panting dragons crouched over the arches; and in the interior rooms, the dusty mausoleums, ancient women hobbled from artifact to artifact, lighting tapers to show us the French clock (its hands missing), the crystal candelabra, the gilt altars and the cabinets inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the peacock fans with moulting feathers (‘She says they’re from the French king’). The hands of the old ladies trembled as they held the flames of the tapers close to the tinder-dry treasures, and I was afraid they’d set the place alight. When we left they blew out all the candles and remained in the dark tombs. It was a city people were constantly fleeing, but here in the tombs the old ladies – retainers to kings of the twenties and thirties – never left. They ate and slept in the precincts of the royal mausoleum.
It was cold that night; dogs barked in the muddy lane, and in spite of the chill my bedroom was filled with tormenting mosquitoes.
At Hué Station the next morning a tiny Vietnamese man in a grey gaberdine suit and porkpie hat rushed forward and took my arm. ‘Welcome to Hué,’ he said. ‘Your carriage is ready.’ This was the stationmaster. He had been notified of my arrival and had shunted on to the Danang passenger train one of the director’s other private cars. Because Vietnam Railways has been blown to pieces, each separate section has a director’s car on one of its sidings. Any other railway would have one such car, but Vietnam Railways is six separate lines, operating with laborious independence. As at Saigon, I boarded the private coach with some misgivings, knowing that my hand would tremble if I ever wrote anything ungenerous about these people. I felt loutish in my empty compartment, in my empty coach, watching Vietnamese lining up to buy tickets so that they could ride in overcrowded cars. The stationmaster had sped me away from the ticket window (‘It is not necessary!’), but I had caught a glimpse of the fare: 143 piastres (twenty-five cents) to go to Danang, perhaps the cheapest seventy-five mile ride in the world.
Dial, the translator, and Cobras One and Two boarded and joined me in the compartment. We sat in silence, peering out the window. The blocky whitewashed station building, a version of the Alamo, was riddled with bullet holes that had broken off pieces of the stucco, revealing red brickwork beneath. But the station, the same vintage as McTaggart’s bay-windowed villa and the Morin Brothers shop, had been built to last – a far cry from the patch of waste ground and cement foundations just outside Hué, where the First Marine Division’s collapsed barracks and splintered obstacle course lay sinking in the mud. It was as if all the apparatus of war had been timed to self-destruct the day the Americans pulled out, leaving no trace of the brutal adventure behind. In the train yard, several armoured vans showed rips in their steel sides where mines had punched them apart. These vans were the homes of a number of sad-looking children. In most tropical countries adults stand, like those posed by William Blake, at the fringe of the echoing green, watching children at play. In Vietnam the children play alone, and the adults appear to have been swept away; you look for the parents among large groups of children, for the background figure of an adult. But (and this distorts the landscape) they are missing. That old woman carrying a child on her back, with the long muddy skirt and rain-drenched hair, is another child.
‘Have you seen the sink in the W.C.?’ asked Dial.
‘No.’
‘You turn on the tap and guess what comes out?’
‘Rust,’ I said.
‘Nothing,’ said Cobra Two.
Dial said, ‘Water!’
‘Right,’ said Cobra One. ‘Paul, take that down. The taps work. Running water available. What do you think of that?’
But this was the only sink in the train.
The stationmaster had said that the line to Danang had been open for four months, having been out of action for five years. So far there had been no recent disruptions. Why its reopening coincided with the American withdrawal no one could explain. My own theory was that there were now no American trucks plying back and forth along the only road that goes between Hué and Danang, Highway One, the poignantly named ‘Street without Joy’; this shrinking of expensive road traffic had forced the Vietnamese into the more sensible course of opening the railway. The war had become not smaller, but less mechanized, less elaborate. Money and foreign troops had complicated it, but now the Vietnamese had reverted from the corporation-style hostilities of the Americans to the colonial superstructure, slower communications, a return to farming, housing in the old buildings, and a transport system based on the railway. The American design of the war had been abandoned – the empty firebases, the skeletons of barracks, and the torn-up roads showed this to be a fact, visible from the passenger train clanking towards Danang with its cargo of Hué-grown vegetables.
The bridges on that line speak of the war; they are recent and have new rust on their girders. Others, broken, simulating gestures without motion, lay beyond them where they had been twisted and pitched into ravines by volumes of explosives. Some rivers contained masses of broken bridges, black knots of steel bunched grotesquely at the level of the water. They were not all recent. In the gorges where there were two or three, I took the oldest ones to be relics of Japanese bombing, and others to be examples of demolition from the later terrorism of the fifties and sixties, each war leaving its own unique wreck. They were impressively mangled, like outrageous metal sculptures. The Vietnamese hung their washing on them.
It was at the rivers – at these bridges – that soldiers were most in evidence. These were strategic points: a bombed bridge could put the line out of action for as long as a year. So at each side of the bridge, just above it on outcrops of rock, there were igloos of sandbags, and pillboxes and bunkers, where sentries, most of them very young, waved to the train with carbines. On their shelters were slogans flying on red and yellow banners. Dial translated them for me. A typical one was, GREET THE PEACE HAPPILY BUT DON’T SLEEP AND FORGET THE WAR. The soldiers stood around in their undershirts; they could be seen swinging in hammocks; some swam in the rivers or were doing their washing. Some watched the train, with their rifles at their shoulders, in those oversize uniforms – a metaphor of mismatching that never failed to remind me that these men – these boys – had been dressed and armed by much larger Americans. With the Americans gone the war looked too big, an uncalled-for size, really, like those shirts whose cuffs reached to the soldiers’ knuckles and the helmets that fell over their eyes.
‘That’s VC up there,’ said Cobra One. He pointed to a series of ridges that grew, off in the distance, into hills. ‘You could say 80 per cent of the country is controlled by the VC, but that doesn’t mean anything because they only have 10 per cent of the population.’
‘I was up there,’ said Dial. I kept forgetting that Dial had been a Marine. ‘We were on patrol for about three weeks. Christ, we were cold! But now and then we’d luck out and get to a village. The people would see us coming and run away, and we’d use their huts – sleep in their beds. I remember a couple of times – it really killed me – we had to burn all their furniture to keep warm. We couldn’t find any firewood.’
The mountains had begun to rise, acquiring the shape of amphitheatres with a prospect of the China Sea; eerie and bare and blue, their summits smothered in mist, they trailed smoke from slash-and-burn fires. We were on the narrow coastal strip, moving south on the patchy shoreline that still belonged to the Saigon government, between the mountains and the sea. The weather had changed, or perhaps we had finally been dragged free of the drizzle that was constant in Hué. Now it was sunny and warm: the Vietnamese climbed up to the roofs of the coaches and sat with their legs hanging past the eaves. We were close enough to
the beach to hear the pounding surf, and ahead in the curving inlets that doubled up the train, fishing smacks and canoes rode the frothy breakers to the shore, where men in parasol hats spun circular webbed nets over the crayfish.
‘God, this is such a beautiful country,’ said Cobra Two. She was snapping pictures out the window, but no picture could duplicate the complexity of the beauty: over there, the sun lighted a bomb scar in the forest, and next to it smoke filled the bowl of a valley; a column of rain from one fugitive cloud slanted on another slope, and the blue gave way to black green, to rice green on the flat fields of shoots, which became, after a strip of sand, an immensity of blue ocean. The distances were enormous and the landscape was so large it had to be studied in parts, like a mural seen by a child.
‘I had no idea,’ I said. Of all the places the railway had taken me since London, this was the loveliest.
‘No one knows it,’ said Cobra Two. ‘No one in the States has the slightest idea how beautiful it is. Look at that – God, look at that!’
We were at the fringes of a bay that was green and sparkling in bright sunlight. Beyond the leaping jade plates of the sea was an overhang of cliffs and the sight of a valley so large it contained sun, smoke, rain, and cloud – all at once – independent quantities of colour. I had been unprepared for this beauty; it surprised and humbled me in the same degree the emptiness had in rural India. Who has mentioned the simple fact that the heights of Vietnam are places of unimaginable grandeur? Though we can hardly blame a frightened draftee for not noticing this magnificence, we should have known all along that the French would not have colonized it, nor would the Americans have fought so long, if such ripeness did not invite the eye to take it.