The Vietnam peace

Did he ever feel frightened? Alang Bay, an impish-looking 85-year-old, looked puzzled. It was a stupid question. “No! When the Americans see me they shit in their trousers and run away!” Mr Bay is a Vietnamese war hero. During the war with the US he shot down five American helicopters with single shots from a carbine rifle – “Easy!” he said, pointing at the ceiling and grinning – and he has the medals to prove it.

Mr Bay popped out of his spider hole in history while I was passing through the Truong Son Mountains, the spine of blinding-green wilderness that divides the mid-region of Vietnam from Laos and Cambodia in the west and funnels south in to the Central Highlands. In that classic of Vietnam War literature, Dispatches, the American journalist Michael Herr described these hills as “ghost-story country” – and when you see the sinister beauty of the landscape, the plunging valleys and the way the sun plays chromatic tricks on the jungle foliage, you’ll understand what he meant.

For Americans the ghosts were the enemy, like Mr Bay, who struck then melted away in to the jungle’s endless hall of mirrors. But they were also the US soldiers helicoptered out in body bags, their anguished confusion about the war written in the graffiti on their helmets: Make War Not Love, Hell Sucks and, if you’re to believe the film Full Metal Jacket, Born To Kill.

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Forty years on, the ghosts of a war which claimed the lives of millions of Vietnamese and 58,000 US combatants are less populous than they used to be in Vietnam. The conflict officially ended on April 30, 1975 when the North Vietnamese Army overran the presidential palace in Saigon (the US having pulled out its troops two years before) and most Vietnamese alive today have no direct memory of the event they refer to as the American War, or the Second Indo-China War (the First having been against the colonial French).

But war-related sites feature on tourist itineraries and the killing years of 1965 to 1973 still exercise an historical and cultural fascination – perhaps because they prefigure, in their insanity and horror, current global conflicts. At the same time what we in the West know of the Vietnam War probably comes through American films and books alone. I downloaded several accounts to my tablet for the trip – and quickly realised that real Vietnamese people barely feature in them.

So here was a chance to see things from the other perspective. On my two-week car journey (with a driver) south from Hanoi, in which I roughly followed the Ho Chi Minh (HCM) Trail, the Communist supply route to the Viet Cong in the south, through the Central Highlands and down to Saigon’s old presidential palace, I gathered many blurry snapshots. Everyone born before about 1965 had memories, and consequent thoughtfulness.

Nguyen Duc was a boy and remembers seeing the Hanoi skyline from his home 25 miles away, lit up with explosions. This was Christmas 1972, when American B-52 bombers pummelled the city for 10 days (the aircrews took a break on Christmas Day itself). Huddled beneath those bombardments, in a shelter beneath the Metropole Hotel, was the American folk singer, Joan Baez, who had been visiting Hanoi as part of a peace mission.

Two years ago Baez revisited the Metropole – and Mr Duc was on hand to show her round. As the hotel’s official historian he conducts guided tours of the shelter, an echoey concrete vault which was recently rediscovered under the Bamboo Bar during building work. She had recorded one side of her album, Where Are You Now, My Son? here, while the sirens were wailing and the bombs dropping above, so it was an “emotional” moment when he took her back down in 2013: “There were tears. And she started to sing Oh, Freedom. She is a lady of heart. Lovely.”

The citizens of Hanoi took to the shelters whenever the sirens sounded but elsewhere, at the height of US bombing raids, some Vietnamese people were living their entire lives underground. In the De-Militarised Zone (DMZ), the seven-mile-wide band of no-man’s-land marking the North-South divide some 300 miles south of Hanoi, one village reinvented itself deep in the rust-red laterite earth.

Vinh Moc is a fishing community on the South China Sea (on the Falklands/Malvinas principle, Vietnamese people call this the East Sea) but in the late 1960s it was a supply route to the North Vietnamese garrison on the Con Co Islands, 17 miles out in the ocean. When American bombers blitzed the area the people took permanent cover in the clay beneath their feet. The 2,000 yards of tunnels they built, some as deep as 70ft, have been preserved as a monument and museum.

A tiny man who was born in one of the tunnels during the bombardments lent me a torch and escorted me down. Due to lack of light and nourishment he had suffered arrested physical development and he could not speak nor hear. What stories he would tell if he could talk, I thought. And then he did talk in a way. When we reached the tiny chamber that was used as a maternity ward (17 babies were born here, including my friend) he paused to caress the plaster model of the mother and child that was on display.

I visited Vinh Moc as part of a day-trip from Hue to the DMZ. Returning along Hwy 9 we stopped at a village of thatched houses on stilts belonging to the Bru ethnic group, one of more than 50 minority peoples in Vietnam. Because they lived mostly in hilly areas these minorities were referred to collectively as montagnards by the French – a word also used by the Americans who recruited many during the war to harass and ambush the North Vietnamese along the HCM Trail.

An elderly Bru woman drawing water from the village well delivered a history lesson wrapped in an anecdote. Of course she remembered the war, she said – an American tank had taken a direct hit on the hillside facing the village and she had watched it burning. After the war some enterprising people from Dong Ha had salvaged the wreckage and sold it to the Japanese for scrap. “Six months later it came back as a Honda motorbike,” she said.

Other ethnic groups fought with the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) – including Mr Bay, the war hero, whom I came across in his home village of Bho Hoong in the foothills of the Truong Son Mountains. Here five thatched bungalows – very comfortable, with marble bathrooms – have been set up for tourists to stay in and get to know something of minority village life (there’s also an honesty bar, and excellent food).

After wandering lanes overhung with fruit as exotic as an Ocado shopping list – longan, lychee, jackfruit, rambutan – I sat down to tea at Mr Bay’s house, served on a table with newspaper and magazine articles about him preserved beneath its glass top.

Mr Bay was certainly proud of his exploits, gleeful even, but he was also reflective about war itself. “We didn’t want to fight the Americans but they came over without an invitation,” he said, then added a line that could have been scripted by the tourist board: “North fought South, brother killed brother, father killed son, but now it’s one country, we’re all together.”

The next morning I continued on the HCM Trail, Highway 14. Forty years ago the hills I passed through were scorched down to the rock and earth by US bombs and defoliants. Now they are draped in rainforest – but as I moved south something strange happened. The landscape progressively took on a war-torn appearance, the hillsides and summits turned to piebald ugliness by rubber and coffee plantations and illegal logging.

Vietnam’s beautiful hardwood forests are disappearing down the river. By the Dakbla River near Kon Tum my guide for the day, Nguyen Dinh Son, pointed out several inner-tube rafts floating serenely downstream with snoozing pilots – and contraband timber strapped below the waterline. At the time Mr Son was explaining his theory of how the Communists defeated the US Army – “with bees’ nests and bags of snakes!”

His father had fought, and died, for the Americans and – a child at the time – he had vivid and strange memories of the war, not least of a prowling tiger that villagers had killed by booby-trapping a dead cow with an American hand grenade. He was a jovial character, Mr Son, but the war was really no laughing matter. “I lose my father, my cousin, my uncle,” he said. “I am frightened of war.”

So I continued south, past Soviet-style war memorials and cemeteries and places with names to freeze the hearts of America’s Vietnam generation: Kham Duc, Dak To, Kon Tum, Pleiku. These days the name that probably has most traction for tourists is Cu Chi, the tunnel complex north of Ho Chi Minh City where flabby Westerners marvel at how tiny the Viet Cong guerrillas who hid out here must have been, and how fiendish their booby traps were.

The day I was there the average age of visitors looked to be about the same as that of the American soldiers who died in Vietnam – around 23. Vietnam’s war sites, so firmly incorporated into tourist itineraries, may – or may not – be a salutary experience for them. At Cu Chi there’s a firing range where you can pay to pop off war-vintage weapons such as M16s and AK-47s. Ker-pow!! A young South African woman punched the air and pronounced it “an awesome release” while, next to her, young men in beach wear lined up for their turn to pull the trigger. If hell sucks, they don’t know it yet.

Published in the Daily Telegraph on April 30, 2015