Racing Back to Vietnam

by John Pendergrass

  I see war and life much clearer today than I’ve ever seen them. I’m ready to face another challenge, start another day.

  TWENTY-ONE

  RACE DAY

  May 8, 2016

  The triathlon began shortly after dawn.

  This was done as an attempt to minimize the effects of the heat on the athletes. Since it rarely drops below 80 degrees in May, every bit of help was greatly appreciated. Ryszard seemed a little nervous before the swim—he’s a master in the pool, but he hadn’t done that many open water races. It proved to be no problem; Ryszard handled the 1.2 mile swim with ease and reached the first transition area in just over thirty minutes.

  I headed out onto the bike course, anxious to see how I’d feel. Normally, you taper your training in preparation for an Ironman and are well-rested at race time, but a long plane ride and strange food can sometimes throw things out of kilter. Jet lag and foreign cuisine can be deadly for the elderly.

  Thankfully, Ryszard proved to be a strong swimmer and I began the bike leg before the vast majority of the entrants. My time near the front of the race was very brief; over the next three hours I probably set a record for being passed by the most people. It was a little depressing. A few of the bikers would ease past, but most came by me so quickly that I couldn’t even hope to grab onto their rear wheel.

  In the Ironman, like most triathlons, drafting is not allowed. When two cyclists are close enough to one another, the bike in the rear can take advantage of reduced drag by exploiting the lead biker’s slipstream. Any biker can ride a good two miles an hour or faster with the same effort when glued to the rear wheel of another biker, so the temptation to draft is always there. Nonetheless, the rules are clear: you must stay roughly three bike lengths behind the person in front of you, and when overtaking another rider you must complete the pass in fifteen seconds.

  A triathlon is no place for an honor system; the rules are enforced by race officials who patrol the course on motorbikes. If you are unfortunate enough to be caught violating the rules, the race official on the back of the motorbike writes down your race number and notifies you of the infraction. You are then required to stop at a penalty tent, dismount, and wait the appropriate amount of time before continuing. The length of the penalty varies depending on the transgression, but it is usually around four minutes for the first infraction. The penalty increases for repeat offenders.

  Now, I’m not a contender, but I am good at rationalizing bad behavior. If I save a few minutes by drafting, it affects no one but me. I view these violations at most as misdemeanors, the rough equivalent of holding by offensive linemen in football. It’s not a question of whether or not you draft, it’s a question of how discreet you are.

  The course ran along the main road bordering China Beach, past the luxury resorts and public beaches, before turning west across the Son Tra Peninsula. Monkey Mountain loomed high on the right, with the statue of the Goddess of Mercy at the Linh Ung Pagoda. This mountain was a major air control center during the war, but the pagoda and statue are recent additions.

  We cross the Thuan Phuoc Bridge, the last of four bridges traversing the Han River and the only climb on the entire route. The commercial harbor and cruise ship berths lay off to the right. Da Nang, once a war-torn village, is now a major stop for the massive cruise ships that travel the Pacific. Many people were out and about on their daily activities, but they took little notice of us bikers. The Vietnamese view foreigners with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion; whether out of politeness or disdain, they seem to make a conscious effort to avoid encounters. This isn’t surprising for a country that has been occupied by the Japanese, French, and Americans during the last century.

  At each aid station, I came to a near complete stop to make sure that I got a full two bottles of fluids. As the day wore on the temperature continued to rise. The gauge on my odometer said 106 degrees; my seat felt seared, and my shoes were like little ovens. I felt like I’d been baked too long; I was past well-done. The last eight miles or so were directly into the wind and I began to wilt, exhausted and drained of energy.

  I took solace in the fact that I would be done in just a few miles. With no run looming over me, my race was almost over. It’s only a fifty-six mile bike ride, I told myself as I counted down the markers along the course. Everything is in metric in Vietnam, so fifty-six miles becomes ninety kilometers. The military forces you to think and work in the metric system, and for some strange reason, ninety kilometers seems more precise, more achievable than fifty-six miles.

  As I entered the second transition area, Lars waited impatiently. I parked my bike and he was quickly gone—a young man in a hurry. I finished in around three hours and fifteen minutes, just what I expected.

  For a while, I stretched and drank, trying to ward off cramping. Ryszard told me about his swim and the two of us found a shady spot to watch as athletes dropped off their bikes and headed out on the run course. After a few beers, we wandered down to the finish line along the beach and watched the athletes arrive, exhausted and happy. I was amazed that so many people were able to handle the intense heat; a few collapse at the finish, but most seem to be in good shape.

  Lars finished one hour, forty minutes after he started. We shared a few more beers, took some photos, promised to stay in touch, and headed back to our air-conditioned rooms. And just like that, the race was well and truly over.

  The Ironman was a good challenge for me. I was glad to be done, happy to check that box and move on. Coming to this race was just a means to an end, an excuse to visit Vietnam. The real reason I’d come to Southeast Asia was to see the people and the country. I was anxious to get going.

  TWENTY-TWO

  TRAVELS AROUND

  DA NANG

  May 2016

  I had a few days left in Da Nang before I headed to Laos, so I decided to spend the time sightseeing and talking to the locals. Many of the triathletes were recovering from the race by basking in the sun on the sands of China Beach. While there are a lot of foreigners, you rarely see locals sunbathing. If the Vietnamese visit the beach, they come near the end of the day. I decided to take my cue from them; I’d had my quota of sunshine on race day and I wasn’t interested in getting sunburned. I was more interested in what the Vietnamese remember about the war and what they think about Americans.

  For someone like me, trying to get a fair idea of the thoughts and feelings of the local population, there are basically two types of Vietnamese—those who speak English and those who do not. A large number of Vietnamese, especially those working in hotels, restaurants, shops, and such, are fluent in English. Most of them learned the language in local schools and universities. Although there are currently more than twenty thousand Vietnamese studying in the United States, this is a fairly recent phenomenon. For much of its post-war history, there were relatively few opportunities for the Vietnamese to study abroad in English-speaking countries.

  Nowadays, many of the Vietnamese are hard at work picking up as much English as possible, and most are glad to have the chance to practice their skills with an American. I was able to talk with a medical student in Hanoi, a shop owner in Lao Bao, children at an orphanage in Kontum, and many others along the way. Although a hundred years of colonial reign left a strong French heritage in the country, you’d never know it today. You rarely see French written or hear it spoken, English is the lingua franca for the entire world, including Vietnam. The Vietnamese are anxious to learn English; they know that it’s the tongue for anyone who wants to receive a higher education or get ahead in business.

  If you can’t converse in English, there’s also the option of asking an English-speaking Vietnamese to translate for you while you talk to a local. Using an interpreter is a little awkward, but it worked well for me on numerous occasions. Once, I had a desk clerk help me question at length an elderly cleaning woman; another time, a guide assisted me in speaking with an old fisherman working on his boat. I was happy to have these conversations; I was
more likely to get an honest, unscripted answer talking with someone who rarely spoke with foreigners.

  Relatively few of today’s Vietnamese can actually remember the Americans. Since a good three-fourths of the population was born after the war, you would have to be in your fifties or older to have a direct memory of the conflict. For a decade or so after the war, the role of “the white man in Vietnam” was filled by the Russians. In the nineties, when diplomatic relations were established and Americans began returning to Vietnam, they were often confused with the Russians. (Today, the Russians are sometimes known by Vietnamese merchants as “Americans with no dollars.”)

  All the same, everyone has a family story about the war. There are very few Vietnamese who didn’t lose a parent, grandparent, uncle, or some family member during the conflict. The toll the war took on their country was staggering. Anywhere from one to three million Vietnamese were killed, depending on whose figures you believe. The truth probably lies nearer the higher figure. Around four million tons of bombs were dropped in South Vietnam, and another one million tons on the North. Some twenty million gallons of dioxin containing Agent Orange were sprayed, mostly in South Vietnam during Operation Ranch Hand, the U.S. herbicidal warfare program.

  All this damage took place over a roughly eight year period, 1965–1973. The total population of North Vietnam and South Vietnam during the war was around thirty-five million, while the United States’ population was around two hundred million. Our nation lost forty-seven thousand in combat and another eleven thousand to other causes. While the American losses during the war were a tragedy in any sense of the word, they were proportionally much less than those of the Vietnamese. Many people in the United States managed, both literally and figuratively, to skip the war; that wasn’t possible in Vietnam.

  Most of America has long forgotten—if indeed they ever knew—about the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, you couldn’t forget the war even if you tried. The damage from the conflict continues today in the form of unexploded ordnance (UXO). Some fifty years down the road, there are still regular reports of farmers being killed or maimed when bombs are unearthed by accident. Ordnance turns up in cities during construction projects, in rice paddies and dikes, and along newly-built roadways. The problem is especially acute for Cluster Bomb Units (CBUs), the baseball-size bomblets that were packed in a hard shell that would open above the ground, scattering hundreds of deadly missiles over an area the size of a football field. According to some estimates, up to thirty percent of the ordnance failed to explode and remains a danger even decades later.

  Likewise, the legacy of Agent Orange is one that will be with the Vietnamese and Americans both for many years to come. When something is alleged to cause harm to unborn generations and absolute proof one way or the other is difficult to establish, the problem will never be completely resolved.

  Herbicidal warfare wasn’t invented during the Vietnamese War. When the British battled communist insurgents in Malaysia in the 1950s, they employed defoliants. It was a good way to kill everything green and deprive the enemy in a guerilla war of cover. If the crops used by the enemy for food were also destroyed, so much the better.

  The U.S. began spraying Agent Orange and other herbicides from C-123 transport planes early in the war, in a program called Operation Ranch Hand. Agent Orange, named for the color of the stripe on the barrel in which it was shipped, contained a highly toxic strain of dioxin. American scientists expressed concerns about the dioxin; some studies showed birth defects in lab animals, and by 1971 the program was discontinued.

  Today, the Vietnamese government and almost all of the Vietnamese I spoke with firmly believe that the dioxin of Agent Orange is responsible for birth defects affecting thousands of children. Proof positive is sometimes hard to determine. The U.S. government hasn’t acknowledged the connection between Agent Orange and birth defects, but it is helping clean up dioxin-contaminated soil. A plant has been built on the old Da Nang Air Base that heats the dioxin contaminated soil to six hundred degrees Fahrenheit, rendering it harmless. I made an effort to visit the plant while I was there, but while I’m certain the plant exists, no one I spoke with had heard of it, not even soldiers or policeman.

  Today, our federal government grants compensation to American Vietnam veterans for a variety of health problems said to be associated with Agent Orange exposure. Again, direct causation is difficult to prove, but the Vietnamese aren’t the only ones firmly convinced of the dangers of exposure to Agent Orange.

  Even though the people of Vietnam are regularly reminded of the enduring legacy the war through UXO and Agent Orange, they are slow to point fingers. They have lived through the crime, corruption, and poverty of post-war Vietnam, and are well aware of the dismal track record of communism.

  I was surprised that many Vietnamese, especially in the South, were quick to recall the crimes committed by the Viet Cong. Since this isn’t taught in school and isn’t part of the heroic communist saga, I was amazed at how often the issue came up. The Viet Cong killed thousands of innocent civilians with car bombs, roadside bombs, and rocket attacks. Targeted assassinations of anti-communist civilians and their families were standard policy, with some of the killings wholesale in nature.

  Depending on whose numbers you believe, up to five thousand people were massacred during the month-long occupation of Hue by the Viet Cong during the Tet offensive of 1968. Some of the victims are alleged to have been buried alive. During 1972, thousands of civilians fleeing the Battle of Quang Tri on Highway 1 were gunned down by the communists. The road became known as the Highway of Terror, although you won’t see that name on any of today’s road signs. Add in the tens of thousands who died in the communist “re-education camps,” as well as the many thousands of Boat People refugees who perished at sea fleeing the communists, and you can begin to understand why the memory of violence committed by the Viet Cong lingers in the public consciousness.

  Since the winners get to write the records, you’ll hear nothing publicly in Vietnam about the communists’ atrocities. Under the best of circumstances, getting an honest and accurate picture of how the Vietnamese feel about the war can be a challenge. They’ve lived the last forty years under the thumb of communism, and they’ve learned that there’s little to be gained by expressing a personal opinion or criticizing the government in any way.

  While I am interested at looking back at the Vietnam War, that is a luxury that many Vietnamese can’t afford—they’re looking at today and into the future. I think they long ago accepted that the war is finished, that it’s in the past and cannot be changed. The dead are in the ground and can’t come back. Reliving the war isn’t worth the grief.

  Vietnam was and still is a poor country, and no one ever asks poor people if they want war. The Vietnamese probably want to get on with their lives, have a successful rice crop, raise their families, make a little money, and live in peace. Perhaps their Buddhist background points them toward forgiveness. More importantly, they won the war, and it’s always easier for the victors to be magnanimous.

  Another reason the Vietnamese are anxious to put the war behind them is the geopolitical necessity of having a good relationship with the United States. China is the traditional enemy of Vietnam. The two countries have a long history of armed conflict, most recently during a 1979 border war. Today, there is a major dispute over clashing territorial claims in the South China Sea. Both nations are communist in name, but even the brotherly, classless solidarity of communism can show strains. Vietnam and the United States need each other to counterbalance China’s rising power.

  My guide, a Vietnamese woman named Linh, takes me all around Da Nang as I search for places lost to forty-five years of time. There’s very little left from my days in Vietnam. The roads are wide and breezy, the bridges are brand new, there’s not a dirt road or pothole in sight. I recognize a few of the old temples I once visited, but little else.

  Linh, a mother of two, lives in a household that includes her husband and m
other. This is a little unusual in Vietnam; parents normally live with a son, but Linh’s family is better able to support her mother than the family of her brother. She grew up in that lost decade after the war (1975–1985) when the country adhered to a strict, doctrinaire communism. The Vietnamese tried to create a visionary socialist state, but ended up instead with tyranny, corruption, and poverty.

  Her grandfather, a North Vietnamese soldier, was killed in a U.S. bombing strike near Hanoi. His body was never recovered, even after the family enlisted the help of a fortune teller to help find the remains. In the Vietnamese tradition, the soul of a body not given proper burial and respect will not be at rest. This is a source of great anguish to Linh and her family. Ancestor worship is a central part of Vietnamese culture and is practiced in Catholic homes as well as Buddhist ones. A shrine to ancestors is a standard feature in almost all Vietnamese homes.

  Linh’s husband is a policeman, a good job in today’s Vietnam. He and his family had to be thoroughly vetted before he got the position to make sure there were no lingering anti-communist views. Since Linh sometimes works for twelve hours a day guiding tourists, much of the childrearing duties fall on the grandmother.

  Linh studied English at the local university and works hard trying to stay current on American culture, including slang and idioms. I’ve got little to offer Linh—I’m a pop cultural Neanderthal. If she needed to know the titles of some old songs by the Carpenters, I could probably help her, but I rarely watch movies, never go to concerts, and barely know how to operate my cell phone. I learn much more from her than she learns from me.