by Tom Bissell
Once known as Little Paris, Da Lat was Vietnam's most Gallic city, as its red-and-white Eiffel Tower replica alone suggested. Developed by French colonialists in the late nineteenth century and once intended to serve as the capital of French Cochin China, Da Lat was less a city than a postcard template. Across its gorgeous central lake floated a dozen pairs of lovers in swan-shaped boats. There were cable cars, massive private gardens in the middle of town, row upon layered row of orange and white and yellow villas, hilltop palaces perimetered by pine. Upon entering the city we saw our first Vietnamese joggers, and within the light (by Vietnamese standards) traffic weaved numerous Ford SUVs. Young Vietnamese men with long hair and tattoos walked beside Vietnamese girls with dyed-blond hair. (A large percentage of Vietnam's counterculture—poets, painters, musicians, and various quidnuncs—made its home in Da Lat.) The old moss- and stucco-covered French mansions looked dingy in the overcast light, but then the sun glowed against their shingled roofs and it was 1920 and I could almost see the mustached, pocket-watched Frenchmen on their way to the cafe and opium den. The horse-and-buggy Xing signs seemed absurd overkill upon an already too-magical veneer.
We had absolutely nothing to do in Da Lat. Read, eat, sleep, and, tomorrow, go back to Saigon. Then, the day after next, my father would leave for home, though I would remain in Vietnam for an additional ten days. While Truong pointed out to Hien a young woman's notably striking backside, I asked my father, “What's your single happiest, most vivid memory of Vietnam?”
His answer was instant. “Leaving.”
“Really?”
“Going home, yeah. Of course.”
“What was that like?”
He moved a flat hand past his eyes. “Relief. I was done.”
“You'd lived. You made it.”
“Yeah, and it was just… it was just good.”
“Did you think you'd ever come back?”
He was quiet for a while. “Yeah, I think I probably did. Before getting on my plane home I probably said to someone, ‘I'd like to come back here someday, revisit all the places.’ I imagine whomever I said that to probably then knocked out my teeth. Though I never, in my wildest dreams, thought I'd be here with you, Tommy, my second son. And for once you have not been an asshole. I'm totally impressed, by the way.”
“Thank you. So would you recommend coming back to all veterans of the war?”
His head shook sternly. “No. Absolutely not.”
This surprised me. “Why?”
“Because many of them have no desire to ever see this place again. Before I came I told a few vets back home I was on my way to Vietnam, and almost all of them said, ‘Why the hell do you want to see that place again?’ “
“Really.”
“‘ I'll never go there again, not ever. I hated it. Why should I go back to something I hate?’ “
My face twisted up. “Assholes. Small-town, ignorant, cow-raping assho—”
“Be kinder, my son. Keep in mind a number of them almost bought it here or had friends of theirs buy it here. Why do you think a guy who has nothing but hatred for what this place represents to him should come back? What good would it do?”
“Because they might see that it's a different place now. They might replace the place that exists in their minds with something better, something healthy. That's how you kill a ghost. You replace it with what's real.”
“That's very easy to say when you're not the haunted one.”
We were stopped at an intersection. No fewer than three wedding processions were either driving across the intersection or waiting to. “I like it here,” my father said, watching one of the processions pass. “This is a really nice little town.”
“The untouched jewel of Vietnam,” I said mildly.
“No,” he said. “The South Vietnamese had it at one point. They had their military academy here or something.”
“I know. It was for ARVN rangers.”
My father was quiet a moment. “Rangers, huh? Well. I imagine the difficult surroundings of Da Lat really drove into their hearts a hardness and a fury.” Then he laughed.
“Why, Father. I think I hear some forgiveness in your voice.”
“I've forgiven everyone. Including myself.”
“What do you feel you need to forgive yourself for?”
He laughed again. He also never answered me.
The next day, back in Saigon, I walked alone through warm rain down Nam Ky Khoi Nghia Street. I was on my way to the War Remnants Museum, which I was unable to interest my father in visiting with me. The museum's previous name, the Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes, best suggests why. He had opted instead for a daylong nap in order to prepare his circadian machinery for its planet-spanning journey the following night. For me it had already been a long day. We had arrived from Da Lat early, and I had spent the morning's remainder wandering Saigon's Chinatown, where I had allowed myself to be swindled by a little boy I paid to be shown where Ngo Dinh Diem had been captured, even though he had no idea who Ngo Dinh Diem was. I then visited the Ho Chi Minh Museum, found my way to Ham Nghi Street (named for the thirteen-year-old king of Vietnam who abandoned his throne to fight the French as a guerrilla in the 1880s), turned onto Le Loi Street (named for the patriot who defeated the Chinese), and recalled the journalist who told Frances FitzGerald during the war, “I finally realized we'd never win this war when I noticed that all of the streets in Saigon were named after Vietnamese heroes who fought against foreign invaders.”
At the park-hemmed dead-end intersection of Le Duan and Nam Ky Khoi Nghia I bought a coconut from a conical-hatted vendor, watched her lop off its crown with a small machete and then dunk into the hole a straw. I stood drinking the sweet, artery-befouling milk before the former Presidential Palace, currently Reunification Palace. Long, splendidly terraced, and mostly eggshell-colored, the palace stood about one hundred yards back from the gate. It had been built on the grounds of a mansion belonging to a former French governor-general of Indochina, which may be one reason why the Saigon regime had such difficulty convincing the Vietnamese of its nationalist legitimacy. The local legend held that everything inside the palace was left the way it had been when President Minh capitulated in 1975, but that seemed unlikely. However, the essential point stood. This was one of the grandest modern structures in all of Vietnam, and the Communists were wise to let it serve as an unused symbol of everything they were overthrowing. Compared with this palace, Ho Chi Minh's living quarters in Hanoi were far less ostentatious. In his biographer's words, Ho Chi Minh's residence amounted to “a small stilt house on the grounds of the presidential palace, just a few yards away from the gardener's cottage he had [formerly] occupied. Built at the Party's order in the simple style of the houses of the mountain minorities settled in the Viet Bac, it served as his main office and residence for the remainder of his life.” How much time Ho actually spent in his stilt house is debated, but as one Vietnamese told the writer William Broyles, Jr., in the early 1980s, “The people could see how Ho lived, that pure simplicity, and they saw how Diem and Thieu lived. They saw how our officers bought their commands, how they sold off their military supplies on the black market, how they kept mistresses and Swiss bank accounts. The people weren't blind.”
But what was their eyesight like today? Coming into town this morning, I had noticed on the edge of Saigon a large Ford Motor billboard: “The first automobile in the world.” Before becoming secretary of defense, of course, Robert McNamara had been the president of Ford Motor—and now there was a Ford factory in Hanoi. Hoa Lo Prison, also known as the Hanoi Hilton, where U.S. pilots had been held and often tortured during the war, was today a deluxe office-and-apartment complex. Today Hanoi really did have a Hilton—called, naturally, the Hanoi Hilton. What was strange was how little comment such ironies elicited from the Vietnamese themselves. Hien, for instance, saw nothing even slightly funny about an actual Hanoi Hilton or a billboard advertising the company once helmed by a man who, in living memor
y, had ordered bombs dropped on Vietnam. This strange Vietnamese mixture of obliv-iousness and shamelessness was not new. At one point during the war, Saigon's Ministry of Tourism had sponsored a campaign that attempted to lure unarmed visitors to Vietnam. The slogan? “Vietnam—you've heard about it, now come see it.”
After I crossed a few streets the War Remnants Museum came into view. Outside its large front gate tourists beat off the children selling pirated copies of Robert McNamara's In Retrospect and Stanley Karnow's Vietnam and ignored the whiskered and ball-capped cyclo drivers looking to pedal them to their next destination. Professional Vietnamese tour guides shooed away the freelancers attempting to shanghai their clients. As I approached to buy my ticket, at least five languages were being spoken around me. It felt like being on the jabbering floor of a stock market apportioning out shares of historical guilt that everyone was eager to sell and buy but no one seemed interested in examining too closely. Why do they come to this place? I wondered, handing over my ticket to the gatekeeper. I then caught the stupidity of the thought. Of course, my motives were different. It occurred to me that “My Motives Were Different” would not be an unfitting slogan for the War Remnants Museum.
The museum is housed in the former U.S. Information Services building. Before that, I had heard, it was a pagoda. lust inside the entrance, in the shade of a large bamboo tree, an older woman sold Happydent gum and cans of Coke and Lipton and water bottles across from a mural that read “Solidarity for a Better World” above an image of a fist smashing a bomb. On these grounds were six separate exhibit rooms, all differently themed. In the central courtyard, around which the rooms were angled, an assemblage of military hardware hulked impotently. Most of it was American. I started my tour by wandering around these relics. All had a small “No Climbing” sign affixed to them. The Huey helicopter, M48 tank, and 105 mm artillery gun had apparently been repainted a Soviet gray and had an old-news, rained-on veneer. Despite its sign, two children were hanging from the barrel of the 175 mm howitzer, and several Asian tourists were photographing, for some reason, the collection's military-grade bulldozer, known as a Rome plow. The most sinister-looking vehicle, as low to the ground and predation-minded as a manta ray, was the M132 Al flamethrowing tank, which was forcefully denounced on an accompanying plaque. Despite how large and forbidding these vehicles and armaments were, up close they seemed somehow cheap and fragile. A waste of metal. The swinging children had the right idea: these death machines made a splendid playground. Finally I came to the CBU bomb. The plaque said: “In 1975 CBU's were dorpped [sic] for the last time in Vietnam.” This was at Xuan Loc, as the war ended. The CBU was a tall, missilelike bomb, topped with a little—in fact, positively adorable—metal nipple. Gazing upon this flechette-throwing cutie was somehow emotionally radioactive. Its plaque also indicated that Americans had “dorpped” the CBU, when, of course, it had been a Vietnamese-on-Vietnamese atrocity.
I started with room six, the theme of which was “The World Supports Vietnam in Its Resistance.” Most of the illustrative photos were either a Xerox or a Xerox of a Xerox, and errors of spelling and fact were profligate. I walked past photos of the Kent State massacre, the My Lai heroes Hugh Thompson and Lance Colburn (how exactly they had supported Vietnam in its resistance was left unelucidated), and Michael Heck, a B-52 pilot who had refused to bomb North Vietnam. Under glass were photocopies of letters Ho had written to his American OSS handlers, as well as a prominent display that showed Sergeant William Brown's medals, among them the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star, and the Silver Star, which Brown himself had sent here in 1990, along with this dedication: “To the People of a United Vietnam. I was wrong. I am sorry.”
I walked along, my Nikes producing some of the only silent footsteps in the room, most of its other occupants swishing along the gritty floor in their sandals. A newer-looking wall of photos highlighted the improved relations between Vietnam and the United States: Robert McNamara talking happily with General Giap, John Kerry standing beside Do Muoi (sometimes called the anti-Gorbachev of Vietnam). At the room's opposite end there was a photo of Fidel Castro holding up an NLF flag, and nearby were the placards of worldly support the room promised. From the USSR: RUKI PROCH OT VIETNAMA! From East Germany: soLiDARiTAT MiT VIETNAM. Finland's progressive movement pitched in with a protest poster featuring laughing-shot photos of McNamara, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon above a Vietnamese woman holding her dead baby. Walking out of room six, I noticed a small photo of Martin Luther King, Jr., who had turned against the war because of the naphthenic and palmitic acid compound known as napalm.
King's was not an unreasonable reaction to napalm, surely one of modern warfare's most horrendous weapons. The most infamous use of napalm in Vietnam occurred on June 8, 1972, when the photographer Huynh Cong Ut snapped a shot of a Vietnamese girl as she ran down Highway One with gobs of napalm still sticking to her flesh. (Not many are aware that the napalm in question was dropped by the South Vietnamese Air Force, not the U.S. Air Force; or that the North Vietnamese and NLF possessed napalm themselves and notoriously employed it against 250 inadequately Communist villagers at Dak Son in 1967.) Napalm—basically bathtub-chemistry gasoline gelatin that, when ignited, burns at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit—was first tested on the Germans in World War II, but was used most effectively against bunkered Japanese during that conflict's ferocious island fighting. Its major manufacturer during the war in Vietnam became Dow Chemical of Midland, Michigan. Dow did not invent napalm, but the company took a tremendous amount of criticism for continuing to provide it to the military. During the napalm debates, people actually took issue with the assertion that napalm melted flesh. After all, napalm's apologists said, cooked turkeys’ flesh is not melted. But then turkeys are not typically prepared at 2,000 degrees. Even within Dow there was a movement to stop making napalm. “If we're found wrong after the war,” Dow's then-president said, “we'll be glad to be hung for it.” Napalm is still used by the United States, despite the now well-documented psychological trauma it wreaks upon those who drop it. One U.S. pilot described to the writer Jonathan Shay how he had gone for his 7.62 mm machine guns, which were capable of firing several thousand rounds per minute, when he wanted to be more merciful: “How could you say bullets are fucking humanized? But they were. To see what napalm does—napalm was for revenge.” In The Quiet American a French pilot tells Fowler that he drops napalm according to his “moods.” Revenge, moods: napalm was a weapon for when the call of Thanatos was particularly clear.
Room five announced how “The War Destroyed the North Vietnam” (Vietnam, I reflected, needed a Ministry of Proofreading) and offered a spooky reconstruction of a South Vietnamese jail, or rather the “Imprisonment system under the Ngo Dinh Diem and Nguyen Van Thieu Government, ” complete with the notorious “tiger cages” that left so many prisoners paralyzed from the waist down. I felt for the family whose house was next door to the museum; their windows looked down into this ghastly simulacrum for a year-round view of barbed wire, gravel flooring, and a guillotine. I hurried through to room four, which was the “Vestige of War Crimes Building,” as well as the most crowded yet. Visitors milled about it looking slapped and broken. Even the children who moments ago had been monkeying around on the howitzer were reduced to staring silently at their shoes before their parents came to their senses and rushed them out.
It began tamely enough: a few photos of U.S. soldiers torturing their captives, parading insurgents on leashes, or dragging corpses behind armored personnel carriers. Then came one's graduation to photos of U.S. soldiers pouring water into Vietnamese men's ears, a snapshot of four grinning Special Forces commandos squatting around the headless corpses of two dead Vietnamese. One of the commandos proprietarily holds the muddy, battered heads by their hair. Beneath the photo was this caption, taken from its source text, which was apparently a U.S. soldier's memoir: “The above picture shows exactly what the brass want you to do in the Nam. The reason for printing the picture is not to put down G.I.’
s but rather to illustrate the fact that the Army can really fuck over your mind if you let it.” Even more clearly destined for the bad-dream slide show was a large photo of a U.S. soldier holding up—a bit as though it were a lake-fished pike—the head, left shoulder, and one half of the left arm of a blown-apart Vietnamese. The museum's caption read, “The American soldier laughed satisfactorily while carrying a part of the body of a liberation soldier.” The soldier was hardly laughing. He instead looked terribly awed. At what point, I wondered, does one think to photograph such a thing, much less offer oneself up as the photo's shared subject? But I had had my answer a moment before. This photographer and soldier had obviously let the Army fuck over their minds.
Believing the worst was over, I began to relax. Then I came to a series of color photos: a woman with a napalm-blackened hand, another woman with her jaw melted to her chest, a baby so warped and deformed it looked like a funhouse-mirror reflection of a baby, and another baby—still alive and lovingly held by his mother—who had a normal baby face and healthily fleshy arms but whose remaining body resembled that of a piglet. Someone beside me laughed in shock. I turned a corner to find a large glass jar filled with flaxen formaldehyde. Inside floated a two-headed baby with gray mutant skin, the features of both pickled faces mashed into a moue of identical agony. Seconds later I stepped outside into the still lightly falling rain and wished my father were here with me, not because I wanted him to have seen any of this, or to have wished this guilt upon him, but rather because I missed him, and loved him, and it felt good to have someone you loved beside you when abstractions such as war or conflict or struggle stood embodied as piglet babies and chopped-off heads.