Through a series of connecting journeys, we had come full circle to Hanoi. To understand communist Indochina, one must comprehend Hanoi, a bellwether for events that shaped my youth and now the early 21st century of Vietnam and Indochina.
I was living in Nairobi, Kenya in 1998 when my wife was asked to head a reproductive health program in Vietnam. Once the decision was made and we settled in Hanoi, I became fascinated with the ironies of living in the bosom of the former beast. Inevitably I became good friends with a few American veterans doing humanitarian work in Vietnam.
It was an interesting juncture: the end of the 20th century and Vietnam had been the only crack in the invincibility of the U.S. military. So it was fascinating to watch firsthand as one of the last bastions of communism—our Cold War domino—wobbled toward free markets under peaceful circumstances. It was perceptible every day in the streets, a passage of eras, the last days of a long and arduous epic.
Yet in many ways, Vietnam’s present and future are entombed in the past. Over two and a half millennia ago, before the appearance of three historical luminaries of the East—Confucius, Lao Tse and Siddhartha Gautama Buddha—the Red River Basin provided the fertile ground for the origin myth of Vietnam. Percolating down through China, the precepts of the three prophets would trickle into local spirit and ancestor worship, and over centuries distill into Vietnam’s potent cosmology.
As described by historian Keith Taylor in his book The Birth of Vietnam, Lac Long Quan, a dragon lord residing in the sea, came to the Red River Basin on a prehistoric mission civilisatrice. After the dragon lord dispersed the resident demons, he taught the indigenes to wear clothes, to cultivate rice, and to call upon him in times of trouble, once he returned to his sea abode. When a Chinese monarch came south and claimed the Red River Basin for his kingdom, Quan avoided a pitched battle and absconded with the monarch’s wife, Au Co, taking her to the top of Mt.Tan-vien, overlooking the Red River. Absent his wife, the disappointed Chinese monarch returned home. The mythical union of Au Co, the princess of the mountains, and Lac Long Quan, the prince of the sea, produced the first of the Hung kings, out of which came the bronze-age culture of Dong Son and the historical beginnings of Vietnam and the Vietnamese.
The poetic marriage of land and sea and the seminal conflict with the Chinese would foreshadow Vietnam’s complex weave of myth and history. In 1428, over four centuries after Ly Thai To founded Thang Long—the city of the Ascending Dragon (later named Hanoi)—Emperor Le Loi, aided by a magic sword, liberated the Vietnamese yet again from the Chinese yoke.
In a tale redolent of a Loch Ness monster meeting King Arthur’s Excalibur, a golden tortoise rose out of a Hanoi lake while Le Loi was boating. It snatched the prize sword from the emperor’s sheath. Before retreating to the bottom of the lake, the tortoise returned the sword to its divine keeper. Le Loi thus named the oxbow lake Hoan Kiem, the Lake of the Restored Sword.
Carved by the meanderings of the Red River, the 17 lakes of Hanoi endow the urban clutter with open space and a graceful magic. The last of the region’s big cities oozing old Asian charm, Hanoi’s confluence of lakes and street scenes provide its burnish. The mosaic of Hanoi’s Sino-Viet traditions, colonial architecture, and vibrant people is undergoing a cultural renaissance, as the heavy hand of communism slowly but steadily relaxes its grip.
Walking Hanoi’s streets, with names of ancient Vietnamese heroes who defeated the Chinese, the women cover their arms in stockings to keep their skin pale like their northern neighbors—perhaps shallow as an aesthetic but bone deep as a cultural trait. As Vietnam unfolds from its communist cocoon, it is their former occupiers and enemies—China, Japan, France and America—who hold the carrot of globalization. Perhaps this accounts for Vietnam’s stubborn xenophobia.
Yet more important to Vietnam than outside opinion, is what their people think: in a recent global survey conducted by the Pew Foundation, Vietnam was ranked number one in the world in terms of its citizens’ satisfaction with the direction in which the country is headed. Progress comes in baby steps and can’t be imposed from outside, sometimes overlooked by zealots of democracy and human rights.
Vietnam sees the mistakes Russia made in exiting socialism: their headlong embrace of globalization and the mafia’s usurpation of national wealth. The reformists are winning the battle, but remain wary of a plunge into free marketism.
In 1954, when France left Vietnam, 10 percent of the population was literate; today over 90 percent of Vietnamese can read and write. They are ever curious. As Nabokov wrote of Russian totalitarianism, “Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.” Coupled with the universal guarantee that every new generation is born innocent, the dark days of indoctrination are slowly being diffused. By dint of a youthful population—60 percent of Vietnam’s population is under 30 years old—the Internet firewalls are slowly falling, international television is becoming the norm and parents are hocking the farm for their children to have a first rate international education.
Even today, the ruling class, the Politburo, an 18-member committee that runs Vietnam, comprises only college graduates. Just a few years ago, the committee had only a single college graduate during its 50-year history among some 100 members. They were all conservative military types who won their positions through military service, not through any ability to govern. Vietnam’s National Assembly is diverse in gender terms—one in four members is a woman, the highest ratio in Asia. One in 10 members is from an ethnic minority, in proportion to their share of the populace. By degrees they are finding an equilibrium between their autocratic past—their ancient traditions—and the present era of modernization.
Today, there are still occasional sea turtle sightings around the sacred lake of Hoan Kiem. Every dawn, women in baggy garments do tai chi beside the mystical waters. Some move with the grace of swans, most flail and thrash as if they’d woken up on an anthill. Men in undershirts and shorts swat shuttlecocks across imaginary nets amid a steady stream of joggers. Beneath shade trees, stooped crones charge a pittance to weigh in on a set of old scales. It’s a fitness center with ambiance.
Later in the morning, Hoan Kiem fills with old timers, many sprouting wisps of long gray hair from facial moles, an auspicious mark by Sino-Viet tradition. They circle for card games and co tuong, Chinese chess. Once in a while an optimistic angler might wet a hook, sitting in idle reverie on a park bench. Students approach foreigners to practice their English while moneychangers chase them for dollars. When darkness descends and the lake twinkles like a pool of stars, lovers and those looking-for-lovers fill the park benches, the shadowed nooks behind trees, or circle the lake on motorcycles in frozen embraces. Always working the fringes are boys hawking postcards, spotting tourists with falcon-like acuity.
The jade lake mirrors the seasons with a garden of plants and trees from around the world, rooted in the bomb shelters that once rimmed the lake. Brightening the spring in an Impressionist tapestry are red-orange flame trees from South America, the violet crowns of Queen’s Crepe Myrtles from the south of Vietnam, and the golden yellow Batai, a Chinese tree. Willows from old Babylonia drape the lake like women’s hair. Tamarinds from India grow tall next to a medicinal tree brought by the French from Senegal. The Buddhist holy tree, an ancient banyan, buttressed in a gnarl of its own roots, bathes a sidewalk coffee shop in year-round shade. In spring, it bears a yellow fruit that birds enjoy.
During the Mid-Autumn Festival, the first full moon of the eighth lunar month, the lake is traced in silver and tempered by a fall breeze. The lonesome Tortoise Pagoda, perched on a solitary islet in the middle, is shrouded in a melting light. In the shadow of a couple of modernist buildings, the modest Jade Mountain Temple, reached by the low arc of a candy-apple red bridge—known as the Rising Sun—is situated in a copse of trees on an islet at the north end of the waters.
Children pour into the streets around the lake, wearing paper-mâché masks of auspicious mythical beasts—unicorns, dragons, phoenixes, frogs-on-the-moon. It’s not unlike Halloween. During the festival—originating in China as a celebration for a bountiful harvest—Hang Ma Street vibrates in a cicada chorus of clickers and whistles. The street is lined with a dazzling array of shops and stands selling the masks, pinwheels, five-star Chinese lanterns, tins of traditional moon cakes, and less traditional high-tech toys arriving from China.
Branching out into the pulsing labyrinth of the Old Quarter, each of the 36 historical streets is named for its main industry or craft—Hang Bac (Silver Street), Hang Bong (Cotton Street), Hang Dieu (Pipe Street) and more. Bedrocked on a millennium of family toil, the Old Quarter’s century-old buildings and medieval rhythms are the living history of Hanoi.
Sprinkled into the Old Quarter’s past are several modern art galleries. The most popular and progressive—Art Vietnam—exhibits the best of Vietnam’s established and up-and-coming artists. It was there that Simon launched his folio of The Ten Courts of the Kings of Hell. He took five years to complete the collector’s series of Bosch-like depictions of the Sino-Viet belief system that determines one’s fate and next incarnation. He collaborated with Nguyen Manh Duc, a noteworthy local sculptor, who provided statues of Chinese mandarins to go with each court of hell. Prior to becoming a famous sculptor, Duc was an NVA sniper along the DMZ. Attended by the American and British ambassadors, and a host of scholarly Vietnamese, the opening included Russian champagne and clashing gongs as background music.
South of the Old Quarter and two blocks east of the lake, at the end of historic Trang Tien Street, is the majestic Hanoi Opera House. The crown jewel of colonial edifices in Hanoi, the Opera House was built by the French in 1911 as a replica of the Palais Garnier in Paris.
After World War II, circumstances heavily favored a popular uprising: Japan had occupied Vietnam during the war and had just surrendered to the United States; the Vichy French colonials had been imprisoned or contained by the Japanese; a war-related famine had taken the lives of a million people in the North; the literacy rate was between five and ten percent; industrial production was low and inflation high.
On August 17, 1945, on the balcony steps of the Municipal Theater, as the Opera House was then known, Ho Chi Minh’s army of communist Vietminh took command. In front of 20,000 people, the Vietminh tore down the tired old imperial flag and for the first time, raised the newly-conceived communist red flag with the yellow, five-pointed star—symbolizing laborers, farmers, intellectuals, soldiers and traders. The August Revolution had begun, galvanized by Ho Chi Minh’s Independence speech two weeks later.
My wife and I soon fell under the spell of living in Hoan Kiem District, encompassing the French and Old Quarters. In our brief residence there, many events happening in front of the Opera House have both mirrored and signaled the rapid and larger changes sweeping Vietnam.
Bizarrely, the State Department classifies Hanoi as a hardship tour for embassy staff and donees of aid money. Those people no longer receive the war-era hazardous duty pay of $65 a month, but instead take home an extra 15 percent of their base salary as a post-differential for enduring the rigors of Hanoi. Our hardships fall along the lines of cheap prices, having house staff, and living next to Hanoi’s Opera House.
In 1998, on New Year’s Eve, Joellen, our son Wes and I watched President Luong rally a legion of faithful as he stood on a stage before the Opera House. Dressed in red, the crowd sang patriotic music and waved miniature Vietminh flags.
Two years later, Simon, Joellen and I drank beer and wine across the square at the Paris Deli as the government of Vietnam hosted President Clinton at the Opera House on his historic trip. Hanoians lined the neighborhood streets to get a passing glimpse of my fellow Arkansan. He was so well received in Saigon that the communes cranked up the loudspeakers for two hours to remind everyone that Vietnam was still a communist country. In a vain attempt to outdo the public outpouring for Clinton, the next year the government feted President Putin, and we took the same seats at the Paris Deli.
For Christmas in 2001, in the first official Hanoi celebration of the religious holiday (at least that I have witnessed), the outdoor stage in front of the Opera House was forested in Christmas trees and flocked with a troupe of 100-pound dancing Santa Clauses. In a swirl of circling Santas backed up by an English-singing chorus, the Elvis of Vietnam belted out We Wish You a Merry Christmas in Vietnamese. High on the same stage, whipping in the winds, were two huge banners, Nokia and Nescafe, the foreign sponsors.
Today, the Paris Deli has moved down the street, and the whole block of buildings facing the Opera House will soon open as the Hanoi Stock Exchange. Simon’s streetside barber—who arrives by bicycle each day, hangs his mirror on a tree near the Opera House, and unfolds a stool below—now wears an earring, Sun Silk-brand hennaed hair, and Capri pants. Like time travel with fashion as sign posts, the older men wear berets of the French, their soldierly sons in olive drab pith helmets, and grandchildren in Gucci accessories.
In the heart of the French Quarter, our neighborhood is fairly typical of central Hanoi. During the day, the sidewalks were blazed colorfully with market ladies and choked with white-shirted students coming to and from a nearby school. All corners are occupied by pho stands, portable cauldrons set on charcoal fires, bubbling over with translucent noodles. Each night, to one side of our house, the popular Jungle Bar came to life, on the other side was the Smiling Karaoke Bar, an undisguised brothel, and across the street was a massage parlor. In addition to a motorcycle mechanic shop, our closest neighbors made incense; their second-story roof was lined in racks of saffron and deep pink joss sticks.
Around the corner, abutting the trade ministry building—where the U.S.Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement was hatched—was the most popular CD-DVD store in Hanoi. It was guaranteed to have pirated copies of American movies out within two weeks of the U.S. premiere. In the opposite direction was the Western Store, next door to the American club. There I bought Kroger’s salsa and American-grown pistachios—I know because I routinely saw employees of the store filling retail packages with the salty nuts and then placing labels on them that said “Made in America.”
Our street is changing though. The Jungle Bar is now an Italian restaurant, and the Smiling Karaoke Bar is an upscale art gallery catering to foreign tourists. In an aggressive campaign intended to beautify Hanoi for the SEA (Southeast Asia) Games, even the market ladies have been swept from the streets.
Every morning, no later than seven, we are entertained by the crackle of the antiquated Tannoy loudspeakers hung on the utility pole across the street. It’s a racket that could suck the sleep from the ancestral dead. Whether shouting commands like a drill sergeant, reading public service announcements, playing a classical arrangement of Schubert or a sappy, operatic Vietnamese love song, the loudspeaker ensures everyone is awake and often out in the street in their pajamas.
Although Hanoi’s population is a mere three million people, it is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and yet the safest. Property taxes are assessed on street frontage, so homes are built tall and narrow, Chinese-shopkeeper style, with room for trading at the street level and a residence above. People live on top of each other, and even if they could afford privacy, Vietnamese prefer not to be alone.
By regulation, everyone in Hanoi is entitled to 21.5 square feet, a meager space of roughly three by seven feet. The population concentration in the Hoan Kiem District of Hanoi—my neighborhood—is reported to be over 100,000 people per square mile, said to be the highest density of people in the world. The streets are just an extension of the home—there is nowhere else to go. That’s why in the early mornings and late evenings people stroll around neighborhood streets in pajamas as if in the privacy of their own living rooms. It’s a big tropical pajama party!
There is, however, a street side chauvinism that goes unnoticed by most Westerners. A friend of mine, Nate Pullin, was walking through his Hanoi neighborhood one afternoon with his pregnant Vietnamese wife, Nga. A motorcycle came out of nowhere and knocked her to the pavement. As Nate tended to his wife, the assailant appeared to be trying to take off. So Nate cuffed him and told him to stay put. In seconds, a mob of a few hundred people led by an English-speaking university professor converged, stepping over Nga—calling her a “fucking American whore”—to get to Nate. Their anger subsided mildly only when she wisely lied and told them that her husband was Canadian.
Then they locked themselves into a taxi until the police came, while the crowd beat on the windows and continued shouting foul epithets. The police were unconcerned with her lacerated abdomen, and detained them for another 30 minutes before allowing her to go to the hospital. The neighborhood fix was on; the police spent months to no avail trying to extort a bribe from Nate. Nga recovered and had a healthy baby boy.
As well-funded expatriates do, we lived in a very spacious home—a tropical peach chock-a-block of four stories with two balconies and a verandah on top. As on most Hanoi streets, hidden behind the fancy French-Vietnamese facades are a maze of swarming and shabby extended dwellings. The passageways are concretized tunnels, crawling with life and reeking of ammonia. Our neighbors always seize unused space, often rattling our walls with hammers and drills. From our rear verandah, we had a view of a ramshackle of makeshift roofs, ragged pennons of drying clothes, and as many rats moving as people. Yet when looked at as a whole, all the scrofulous disarray came together with the cohesive logic of a jigsaw puzzle.
Simon lived on the ground floor. We shared the kitchen and an elaborately decorated dining room. The humidity in Hanoi is so thick the paint on the walls peeled like burnt skin, requiring a new layer of color each year. The dining room hosted a nice collection of inexpensive antiques and two wall-size paintings by Nguyen Cong Tru, a friend and arguably Vietnam’s finest artist. One of the paintings, Anthem, had won many accolades in the art world outside Vietnam. It is a modernist vision of a symphony orchestra of tortured characters, taunting the ugliness of totalitarianism. The conductor is a multi-armed bodhisattva, bronzed in gold like some kind of robot, looming and imperious. Perched above this figure atop a cross is an apelike face, a composite of Ho Chi Minh and Lenin. How the painting made it past the culture police to win all its accolades and then into my house was fodder for many happy-hour conversations.
Three or four nights a week Ms. Quy, Simon’s Hanoi girlfriend of four years’ standing, stayed over. Ms. Quy has been in the army for almost 24 years, and often wears her uniform to the house. Daring and romantic, Ms. Quy and Simon first consummated their affair in the cracker-box confines of her army barracks. Routinely appearing on VTV (Vietnam Television), she is an army actress, and in the Bob Hope, USO vein, has performed for troops across Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. She is also a member of the Communist Party, a privilege only 3 percent of the Vietnamese enjoy. Often, when we saw her in uniform, she was on her way to or from a study session on Lenin and Marx.
On Christmas Day 2001, we had several friends over for all the yuletide fixings—ham, turkey, dressing, yams, potatoes, apple and cherry pies—and many bottles of holiday spirits. Ms. Quy and Simon were there. The new district commune policeman paid us a visit midway through the bacchanal. His timing was deliberate—Viet officials often choose to negotiate with Americans on Tet or Christmas. This year his holiday greeting was to tell my wife and me that Ms. Quy could no longer sleep over.
Beautiful if not still in fresh bloom, Ms. Quy is in her mid-40s with a child in her early 20s. Yet it is against the law for a Vietnamese woman to spend the night with a foreign man. At the time, she had openly been staying at our house for over two years. The cop was shaking us down.
We paid a healthy expatriate rent so I complained to the landlord. She assured me that the meddling cop would be paid tea money the next day. He returned twice over the next two days, and each time I put the two of them back together. They finally settled the tea money. He continued to pass our house almost daily, paying us no notice as he walked his beat.
The police were usually not a problem. During all the time we lived in Hanoi, almost every week I sent Nhuong, our house girl, around the corner to have banned books copied for friends, much like in the days of the samizdat in the Soviet Union. No one ever said anything.
One day as I worked at home in my office on the third floor, writing a chapter on Vietnam, with maps and books spread about the floor and my desk covered in notes and diaries, I looked up and a man was standing at the door. Dressed in a suit, he said, in impeccable English, “I am Mr. Huong with the Ministry of Culture and Information. I am here to find out what you do.”
Nhuong had let Mr. Huong in the house without telling me. He was part of the secret police apparatus, now much less feared by foreigners and locals alike than in the old days.
Nonplussed, I pushed the maps aside, stood and said, “Well, I have investments. I was just checking them on the computer. Why don’t we go downstairs and talk?”
Once settled into the living room, Mr. Huong asked questions, took notes on my answers, and then wanted to know more about my wife. He said he needed to visit her, too. As he was asking me for her work address and phone number, I was looking at his notes; he already had her coordinates. He was probably playing me for money. He told me he was going straight to her office. He never showed up.
As expatriates, our freedoms were almost limitless. Standing on a street corner and denouncing the communist party or Ho Chi Minh would be a problem, otherwise damn near anything goes. Expats, after all, bring benefits to Vietnam—often dollars but sometimes just as important is a kindred way of thinking on important humanitarian issues that can have an influence in Washington.
During the war, the police and army shared common cause. Today they are committed to nothing. Like the masses they police, the police ignore the existing laws if they don’t benefit from them.
Hanoi is a drinking town; the gutters are wide and welcoming. If you arrive in Hanoi with bad habits, they probably aren’t going to get any better. Until the recent campaign to clear the sidewalks, every block in Hanoi had at least one outdoor drinking space, usually called a bia hoi, or “fresh beer” place. Going to bia hois in Hanoi is one of my favorite pastimes: sitting beneath shade trees, circled around plastic tables with steins of beer, smoke wafting in the air from the spicy chicken barbecuing nearby.
I watched people and marveled at the cosmic circulation of Hanoi’s constantly beeping traffic. It is an incomparable procession of monks coming and going from a nearby temple; of well-dressed businesswomen in miniskirts driving or riding pillion on Honda Dreams; families of five piled on motorbikes with dad talking on his cell phone while a farmer blasts by with three pigs trussed on back. Or a decrepit old man pushing a rusted bicycle to schlepp a new refrigerator, who doesn’t bother even to glance as his passage brings a 50-ton bus to a screeching halt.
Lottery ticket vendors roost on every street corner, pecking away at the Vietnamese vulnerability for games of chance. As dark approaches, peasant ladies in conical hats weave through the sidewalk bia hoi stools. Swaying to the rhythm of their step, their shoulder poles hoist empty woks, infant children or the last of their fruits and vegetables, as they vanish into the recesses of Hanoi.
When I arrived in Hanoi, I fell in with a mixed crowd of expatriates and locals at a bia hoi next to the Relax Bar on Ly Thuong Kiet. Joellen warned me, “Expatriates are here today and gone tomorrow. More likely than not, you will never know who they really are.” She was right.
Since the beers were three for a dollar, the bia hoi attracted a crowd of frugal Australians overflowing from the Relax Bar. UNICEFers were regulars, officing up the block. Also such nefarious characters as Richard Petit and Phil Mulvey, editors across the street at the government-run, English newspaper, the Vietnam News, who came every day.
Our group was diverse, and the bia hoi was usually the only time I saw these people. For many of them, life was flipflopped: their work by day was surreal, debauching at night brought them back to a kind of reality.
Most of us arrived a bit past five o’clock. Editor Phil Mulvey, a Scotsman, and former golden boy in news circles back in England, would already be beet-red with drink. His fellow newspaperman Richard Petit would arrive by bicycle but never joined any of us at the bia hoi. He would sit by himself, lean against a wall about 20 feet away, chain smoke, drink coffee, get pumped up for the paper’s night shift. Always in sunglasses, hair slicked back, he reminded us all of a broken-down Jack Nicholson.
Ricky from San Francisco was a font of street wisdom and amusing stories, including tales from his Black Panther days. Ricky taught Korean kids how to speak English, especially black American vernacular, which they loved. He drove a chopped-up Bonus motorcycle, and was always showing up with exhaust burns and flesh-torn knees. He was in Vietnam to take a break from the obligations associated with supporting a bunch of kids and ex-wives back in the States.
Hans, a hydrologist at UNICEF, was there almost every day. Stocky, pudgy, rounded like a cannonball, Hans is a family man, married to a Burmese woman with two children. They have a farm across the Mekong in Thailand that some day Hans hopes to retire on. During some of the worst guerrilla violence perpetrated by the ousted Khmer Rouge, he spent seven years digging wells for impoverished villages in Cambodia.
I once asked Hans, an educated person who grew up in communist East Germany, “Weren’t you frustrated with being told what you could read?”
His reply had a familiar ring, “I had many sex books, that’s all I need,” giving a menacing chuckle, skin tags framing his squinty eyes. Hans knows every brothel in Indochina, and while living in Hanoi, frequented the ones used nightly by high-level Party members.
Paul Copeland was a high-flying kid from Seattle, who had squandered a few hundred thousand dollars of his stepdad’s money in a start-up computer business in Vietnam. One night he created a minor diplomatic incident when he clocked a high-ranking officer from the British High Commission. Other times he was peaceable, spending most of his time at the Buddha Belly hangout, The Spotted Cow, playing darts and talking up local investment opportunities.
Then there were the usual suspects whom I routinely saw in other places as well as the bia hoi: a local Kung Fu master, two Australians teaching English, an Australian publisher of a private business newsletter, an American couple from Boston, both working for NGOs, Jason Rush of UNICEF, John Lancaster, Simon, Chuck Searcy, and a few others.
Phil Mulvey, known for telling outlandish tales, joined us later than usual one evening at the miniature plastic stools. He began carrying on about having sex with prostitutes at the old Hanoi Hilton, officially known as Hoa Lo, or Fiery Furnace. “You know, blow jobs in the guillotine room, an orgy in the John McCain suite, shackled on death row,” he gushed in Scottish glory. We had heard it before but Jason and I didn’t believe him.
Still early but after dark, I gave Jason a ride home on my motorcycle. With no great effort, we detoured around the corner, making an innocent pass by Hoa Lo Prison. As we pulled up to the main gate, four prostitutes materialized from the shadows. I began bantering with the ladies. It became apparent that $20, no further negotiation needed, would provide just the sort of follies in the Hanoi Hilton that Phil had been reminiscing about.
Then, from behind the sliphole in the massive iron-reinforced wooden doors, the night watchman’s eyes appeared. Encouraged by the sight of foreigners, he slung open the door and waved us in, girls and all.
I had taken the charade as far as good sense and my marital vows would allow. I assured all the players we would return later. Phil Mulvey’s credibility soared. It all made sense, I later realized. The prison is a big empty building at night—a non-performing asset—and the ladies need a place to take their clients.
The next day I had lunch with Mark McDonald, the Asian correspondent for the San Jose Mercury News, and told him about the events of the night before. He pounced on the story, asking me to accompany him on another nighttime trip to Hoa Lo. Feeling like a snitch, two weeks later I agreed to go. We had a few beers around the corner at the bia hoi with John, waiting for darkness. The scene unfolded in front of the prison almost identically to the night with Jason, except as I was flashing cash at the girls and talking to the night watchman, John came rolling by and gave a crisp salute. “As you were, boys,” he commanded.
Mark got his story that night. The next morning he interviewed the prison’s curator, Nguyen Van Tu, who denied such escapades ever happened at Hoa Lo, “This is a spiritual place as well as a historical site that is important to the whole country. This could not have happened. We are closed at night. No one could come in.”
Mark would later rate the prison story one of the best exposes he had done during his four years in Hanoi. And what a great story: sex and corruption in the Hanoi Hilton. When I passed by the prison late at night a few months ago, it looked like business as usual, with johns, hookers, and Party guys on the take.
One evening shortly after moving to Hanoi, I met Everett Alvarez briefly at the upscale Hanoi Towers, adjacent to Hoa Lo and built on the grounds where the bulk of the prison once sprawled. Alvarez had been the first American POW to check into the Hanoi Hilton, and stayed there the longest. He had ejected from his A4 Skyhawk after taking a hit on August 5, 1964. His bombing sortie was a response to the alleged North Vietnamese naval attacks on American ships that would become the pretext for going to war in Vietnam, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.
I addressed him as “Lieutenant Alvarez,” the rank he had when shot down. Soft-spoken, handsome, ageing with grace, he corrected me, “Lieutenant Commander, please.”
He was in Hanoi as a consultant with the Department of Defense. I asked him what it’s like to stay in the plush residential tower at the same address where he’d spent eight and a half years in prison.
“It feels creepy, very creepy.” As he walked away, he jokingly said, “I’m getting out of this place once and for all.”
No doubt it did feel creepy. Yet depending on how you look at it, Hanoi’s myriad ironies can’t help but evoke varying degrees of tragedy and comedy. The site of its notorious war prison now hosts a plush residential property renting to ex-POWs, with a golf store selling Callaways and Pings, while the remainder of the prison complex has become a museum with a sideline trade in pleasures of the night. Over his eight and a half years as a POW, Alvarez probably dreamed a thousand times of clean sheets and someone to cuddle up with, and now all is available plus more at Hoa Lo.
The Ly Thuong Kiet bia hoi gang gradually dissolved however. The UNICEF offices relocated, and several members moved abroad. Hans was transferred to a new posting in Burma, where he is skulking his way through fresh government brothels. In a four-month period in 2002, three of our tippling assembly died.
Phil Mulvey was only in his mid-40s, and was last seen on a Sunday afternoon by his friend John Peat. That evening his neighbors heard a blood-curdling scream coming from his apartment. He was found dead the next morning. Some said his heart blew out from too much Ecstasy, others said it was pure methamphetamine. John seemed to think he had a degenerative heart condition. The police kept it all hushed. He apparently had a digital camera full of girly pictures. Not necessarily related to the pictures, two hookers stood vigil waiting to scavenge what they could from their old friend Phil.
After five days, with no notice of a funeral, John Peat went to check on Phil at the hospital morgue. Phil was sprawled on a slab in a hot, deserted room. Starting to putrefy, he was still dressed in the pair of black pants he was wearing when he died. John raised enough hell that hospital officials moved the body into an air-conditioned room. A couple of days later, a few close friends and no family honored Phil at a cremation ceremony. His ashes and beloved kilt—but no digital camera—were sent to Scotland to his ageing mother.
Approaching the precipice of 60 years, Richard Petit apparently fell down a flight of stairs and broke his neck. As with Phil the details were sketchy—drunk, on heroin, no one seemed to know. Many people were familiar with the after-hours persona of Richard Petit, but few knew much about him. The American embassy couldn’t find Richard’s next of kin. They authorized, however, a cremation ceremony and agreed to hold his ashes for six months. I attended a wake of 20 or 30 people at a bia hoi on Hai Ba Trung. Not one person there seemed to know Richard’s last name.
Paul Copeland was rowdy and reckless but too young to die. He wasn’t much older than 30, and had only recently returned to the States. Paul’s Aussie friends at the Spotted Cow said he’d careened off an icy road into a tree. It was late at night and his blood-alcohol level was in the stratosphere. At the Spotted Cow, his pithy graffiti lives on: “If you have tried and failed everywhere else, try Hanoi.” The Buddha Bellies remembered him with a succession of wakes.
About the time the bia hoi scene on Ly Thuong Kiet was breaking up, my house started to become a scene for Friday evening happy hours. Thanks partly to my central location John and others would come by. It felt like the beginning of a new season in Hanoi.
John gets around Hanoi by holding onto the back of a cyclo, pedaled by his full time driver Mr. Lai. “Cyclo drivers are the last of the real working stiffs,” John says. He trusts Mr. Lai as an uncle would a favorite nephew. Mr. Lai was only three months old when his father, fighting for the NVA, was shot and killed by American marines near Danang.
Always before dark on those guys’ nights out, I hop into Mr. Lai’s cyclo with John, while others grab their own for a trip back in time up to the Old Quarter. Over the course of an evening, we do a barhopping loop around Hoan Kiem Lake, our Friday night Stations of the Cross.
One Friday evening, we carried road drinks and followed the designated cyclo route, swinging out onto Trang Tien Street, where we were greeted by the raucous gallery of familiar xe om drivers (motorcycle taxis), shouting, waving to let us know they were available. Stopping at the light briefly, we rounded the corner onto Ngo Quyen.
Stoplights are becoming more than just a suggestion. In 1998, when I moved to Hanoi, I was told there were only 17 stoplights in the whole city of 3 million people. Better than the year before when there were only five.
On Ngo Quyen Street stands the tropical white Metropole Hotel. Returning to the habits of the colons, every few months on a Sunday we would splurge at the Metropole’s Le Beaulieu Restaurant. At a long table with a streetside window, we indulged in a lingering brunch of France’s finest—an open flow of Champagne, caviar, pates, oysters from Brittany, entrecote of beef, clams in white wine, beef tartare, cheeses, pastries, and Cuban cigars. A Vietnamese string quartet leavened the mood. As much as the Vietnamese wanted the French out, they do like the many “Bs” of French colonialism—Burgundy, baguettes, berets, brothels, bars, boulevards and buildings in the Romantic Franco-Viet style.
Across from the Metropole, an ornate former French palace is now Government House, used for visiting VIPs. Simon and a wide-eyed Ms. Quy once spent an evening on the street there, watching the klieg lights wash over Michael Caine during the filming of the second version of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, the first major Hollywood movie filmed in Vietnam.
Well-kept parks, forested in mature banyans and tamarinds, border the road on either side. The arrestingly ugly State Bank and the Hanoi People’s Committee buildings engulf the stylish low-rises in a spate of Soviet realism. Into the maelstrom of traffic, John rolled—chatting, having a gin and tonic and hanging on to Mr. Lai’s cyclo. Heads turned—foreigners and locals alike—agog at the sight.
We turned towards the lake at Lo Su Street, before whipping back onto Hang Dau, an extension of Shoe Street, with nothing but polished leather shoes arrayed along the sidewalks and in storefronts beneath a low-hanging trestle of leafy branches.
Coming to a stop on the edge of the traffic circle at the north end of Hoan Kiem, Mr. Lai and Simon assisted John up a small stairway to the elevator in a post-Soviet mid-rise, the Turtle Building. Outside of a few upscale tourist hotels, there are only a couple of restaurants and bars in Hanoi that are completely wheelchair accessible. Even UNICEF, where John has consulted on children’s disability issues, is not accessible.
Leaving the elevator, we made our way through Legends, a beer hall owned by a German brewmeister. The place was packed with a crowd of middleclass Vietnamese pressed around a chain of long wooden tables. We claimed a table out on the balcony, and ordered quart-sized tankards of dark, porterlike lagers.
The day had been braising hot. The fading sun enveloped the Old Quarter, tinging the moist sky in peach and violet. Soon, the air began to move, the Lao winds of late spring blew across Hoan Kiem Lake. Below, the traffic circle dinned as the Konica and Fuji electronic billboards flashed ads like screen-savers. Cops in green and brown uniforms abandoned their traffic stations—some would say personal toll gates—for the evening. Young girls stood in the eddy of traffic, hoisting trees of balloons and pinwheels in a rainbow of colors. Postcard boys latched onto tourists one last time before vanishing for the night. An old couple in their skivvies inched through the traffic like sleepwalkers. The traffic heaved and swirled into a white blur of light, like the slow-shutter exposure of a comet.
“Action” Jackson, a gold-mining geologist joined us. Jason Rush and Simon were laughing about a new ordinance outlawing tank tops, short shorts, and pajamas in public; foreigners were generally exempt.
I eased into the fun with my “anti-Pajama Law” two cents, “The Chinese outlawed pajamas in public two years ago. They were targeting the rural folks, out in the provinces. They called the behavior ‘uncivilized’.”
John followed, “The problem is China is not in the tropics. It’s hot and crowded in Hanoi, and people need to spread out and be comfortable.”
Action chimed in, “This is one of the things I love about Vietnam. How old do you have to be to wear pajamas in public? Fifty? Sixty? I want to wear pajamas in public but I’m only forty-five.”
“Don’t forget it’s the decade of the navel. These up and coming pop culture girls around here aren’t going for the ao dais on Friday night,” Simon added with a raffish smile.
“The cops have already quit trying to enforce it. They gave up after a week. It’s still a law but it doesn’t mean a damn thing,” John concluded.
“Cheers, cheers,” as we clanked glasses to the failure of the “Pajama Laws.”
Not long after, we were in our cyclos on Le Thai To Street, heading towards Restaurant Bobby Chinn. Singles and young lovers cruised by, circling the lake in a Friday night ritual. The breeze kept up, and as street lights flickered on, the sacred Hoan Kiem’s waters became an elliptical black sapphire, glinting in a thousand directions. Dark stencils of willow trees hung on the lake’s verges, luring junkies and hookers and boy hustlers to come out and play. The beeping, the honking, the shrill voices, the whining of sirens, all banged in the air with ghosts of ascending dragons, of sacred turtles, of bygone days and nights of devilry.
Most Friday nights we stop by the Polite Pub or the nearby New Zealand-owned Puku. There, a band of younger expatriates, mostly Australians, wear berets and carry shoulder-slung monk bags, pining for the next poetry reading. As fresh members of this avant-garde tribe arrive, they all bounce up and down like jack-in-the-boxes in a competitive game of cheek kissing. The old hands—here before the Roxy Theatre was torched in 1998—get misty-eyed as they mention their former Old Quarter hangout. Those were the good old days.
Skipping the Polite Pub and Puku, we arrived at Restaurant Bobby Chinn’s in a flourish. The bar was crowded with young hip Vietnamese. Sandra, a sexy blonde career diplomat at the Czech embassy who drives a “Willy” (a wartime American Army jeep), was perched at the bar with her cocker spaniel strapped to the metallic bar stool. Across the room, Marci Friedman, director of the International Red Cross in Hanoi, sat at a two-person table with her friend, Larry Holzman, a social marketer of condoms.
Lolling on the cushions, out of sight, was a thirtysomething Mizbah Sheikh, nuzzled up against her twenty-year old beau, Smurf. This unlikely union transcended all cultural cliches: she a Yale graduate of Muslim faith from Kashmir, working for UNICEF, and he a marine guard at the American embassy, hailing from southern Louisiana. Smurf’s stated ambition in life was to return to his hometown in Cajun country and become a deputy sheriff; meanwhile this metaphorical summit played out in the live-and-let-live Western enclaves of Hanoi.
Rick of Rick’s Café, Bobby, was working the hip in-crowd. Old Minh was playing his sax, as he had at the conservatory 40 years ago, riffing like a poltergeist. Jazzbos—artists, students, a movie director, the new Beats of Hanoi—flopped around on floor cushions near Smurf and Mizbah like fresh-hatched moths around a bright light.
Streamers of white roses and long swatches of silk hung from the ceiling. Simon, John and I joined some other friends on the low couches in back. We ordered up a communal hookah of sweet apple tobacco, a slice of Bobby’s Egyptian heritage. Not even during the SARS epidemic—when many were wearing masks around Hanoi—did we give up the group hookah. We clung to it like a talisman against the more insidious ill of freedom threatened.
Food begins with grapes covered in goat cheese, embedded with chunks of pistachios. I pick up the pace with a Karber’s Fizzy, which I invented using medication my doctor gave me for my back problem. It’s Bombay Sapphire premium gin, tonic, two tabs of “seltzerized” codeine (sold at the corner drug store) and lime. “When you are feeling a little too much, it’s for the sensitive man,” Bobby’s drink menu reads.
Bobby was finessing the crowd like a magician, aided by Jeff behind the bar who kept three or four conversations whizzing in the air at once, while landing exotic potions upright on the bar. A coterie of expats and local gays made a grand entrance, filling Bobby’s place with drama. Party officials have only recently (and reluctantly) admitted that local homosexuality exists. Thus acknowledged, this group of gays are like caged birds finally singing.
Bobby’s lakefront retreat is a revolving door of tourists who have studied the food columns, Party boys, foreign journalists, ambassadors, international school teachers, embassy functionaries, UN and World Bank folks, and the unending flow of NGO, humanitarian aid workers. Or as Bobby says, “It’s a bunch of poor people from rich countries giving rich people in poor countries money.”
He has some serious art on his yellow-silked walls, thanks to a consignment arrangement with a Hanoi art dealer. Not only do the life-size paintings add ambiance and bring in the art crowd, they frequently offer social and political commentary. Writers do not enjoy freedom of expression in Vietnam, but painters and musicians work in the abstract and thus can push the envelope—caricaturing communism the way the performers in the musical “Cabaret” spoof the unwitting Brown Shirts.
One painting that hung in Bobby’s place nearly a year was an earthen-silver, lacquer image of Ho Chi Minh presiding over a gallery of what appeared to be wine bottles. On closer inspection, the bottles wore the faces of people. A representative from the Ministry of Culture and Information picked up on the imagery and asked that the lacquer masterpiece be removed. Bobby, who had paid a hefty price for the painting, reluctantly followed their wishes and removed it to his home. Four months later, the culture police visited the famous artist responsible for the work, told him to retrieve it from Bobby and turn it over to them. The artist gave Bobby his choice of a replacement painting, and for the sake of self-preservation, complied with the government’s wishes.
Over the years, Joellen and I have entertained many visitors at Bobby’s, usually from a window table looking out onto Hoan Kiem Lake. Always seductive, lady-lake changes her complexion by day, by night, and by season—trembling in the rains, glowing in spring’s bath of color, or somber in winter austerity.
One early winter evening at Bobby’s, sitting by the window looking out on the lake, we met Bill Schaap and Ellen Ray from New York. A civil and ideological marriage of four decades, they are a couple of leftist legends. Bill is a New York attorney, author, and publisher of Covert Action, a CIA watchdog magazine. Ellen is a documentary filmmaker, a political journalist and self-styled communist. Her aunt, Willa Cather, is the groundbreaking author of the early-to-mid 20th century who wrote about heroic women, and the spiritual decay of modern America caused by materialism.
Bill and Ellen spent two years working a “GI coffee house” in Okinawa as anti-Vietnam war activists. A couple of decades later, they were both consultants to Oliver Stone in the movie, JFK. They published the book on which the screenplay was based, and Ellen played a cameo role in a restaurant scene. Recently, Ellen co-authored the book, Guantanamo, about prisoner abuse at the American base in Cuba.
Bill and Ellen had been involved with Vietnam Communist Party members since their anti-war days in the 1960s, but this was their first visit to Vietnam. Ellen had been in Paris during the Peace Talks in 1972, when one of the negotiators, Madame Binh, gave her footage of the human and environmental ravages caused by Agent Orange. She smuggled the black and white film into the States, and made the first documentary on the subject. (Madame Binh recently retired as Vice President of Vietnam.)
At the same time in Paris they met Xuan Oanh, the official spokesman for the Vietnamese delegation at the Peace Talks. With the prospect of peace just over the horizon, Xuan Oanh waxed philosophical, quoting a song written by Kris Kristofferson, performed by Janis Joplin, “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.”
When the lunar new year holiday of Tet rolls around each January and February, and I mention the festive season to contemporaries back in the States, they usually think I mean “the Offensive” of 1968. Tet and “offensive” are two words fused in their minds like New and York. But for Vietnamese, Tet is a deeply spiritual 24 hours that ends the old year and brings in the new. It is time to wipe the slate clean, to renew hopes, welcome the spring. But most of all it is a time of gift-bearing and pilgrimages to hereditary homes and villages, to be with family, and to seek the protection of ancestors at the family altar. The same goes for Vietnamese living abroad—some 250,000 make the journey home each year, leaving tens of millions of dollars behind in Vietnam each time.
Expatriates, on the other hand, find the week of Tet a time of almost unbearable hardship: housekeepers, cooks, waiters, bartenders, secretaries and co-workers abandon us. Rather than endure this suffering, many of us flee to Thailand or Burma for a week. Those of us left behind find the streets eerily quiet—stores, restaurants and bars disappear behind steel accordion grates. The streets are empty.
Already a month before Tet, the holiday atmosphere begins gathering steam. Streets and shops are hung with sparkling red banners screaming Chuc Mung Nam Moi, New Year’s Greetings. Storefronts from the Old Quarter and throughout Hanoi pour merchandise onto the pavement: boxed sweets, vivid decorations, calendars, votive offerings, fat Buddhas with gaping smiles to place at the family altar. Flower markets appear on the streets and along the main roads leading in from the country, which are forested in peach trees, their branches mostly spare and leafless but for pink blossoms. Mandarin orange trees, pyramidal like Christmas trees, hang with the seasonal ornament of saffron fruit. There is an ancient art to coaxing these trees into bloom precisely during the Tet season. A modern embellishment is the pragmatic custom of bungee-cording the orange trees upright on backs of motorcycles and bicycles, to deliver throughout Hanoi’s streets and neighborhoods.
Joellen and I decided to stay for the full Tet festivities during our last year in Hanoi. We steeled ourselves for the rigors of washing our own dishes, taking out trash, making sandwiches, and changing the sheets.
The Tet of 2003—passing from the Year of the Horse to the Year of the Goat—began with some of the coldest temperatures ever recorded in Hanoi. It even snowed in the Tonkin Alps near Sapa. Many Hanoians boarded the train to go see snow for the first time in their lives.
Tet begins on the 23rd day of the 12th lunar month, as houses are primped and painted, old debts are settled and new clothes are purchased. Traditionalists commune with the Kitchen God, or Ong Tao. Journeying on the back of a carp, the Kitchen God travels that day to the Heavenly King to give an annual report on each household. Families go to lakes like Hoan Kiem and release carp, imprinted of course with the spirit of the Kitchen God, destined for heaven.
Nguyen Cong Tru, the artist of great renown, and close friend of Simon, stopped by on Kitchen God day bearing a gift of French wine. Wearing a scarf and looking dapper, he had been cleaning his house since dawn and was thirsty and hungry. He was headed for a bar in the Old Quarter on Hang Voi Street, so I jumped on the back of his motorbike. Simon and Ms. Quy followed. Ms. Quy doesn’t trust her Merry Old beau out at night with Nguyen Cong Tru.
Parking the bikes curbside, we tunneled through a narrow corridor of concrete before deadending at the bar’s doorway. It had the smoky ambience of a speakeasy set in the bowels of some Arab medina. Artsy patrons were squeezed snugly on cushions around low-set tables, their conversation generating a steady hum.
Someone pitched up a plastic table and four stools for us in the tiny alley. We were almost in darkness but for a fluorescent light on a balcony glowing somberly, and the alluring glare of fairy lights framing the bar’s red door. Ten feet away, beneath a bird’s nest of electrical wires draped in drying laundry, smoke billowed from the charcoal fires of two stoop-bodied crones. All around were sour seeps of water, reeking of ammonia. Tru began pouring bumble-bee flavored rice whiskey, mellifluous to the taste as honey but with a fiery sting going down. Tru complained about the decline of the true Tet: “In the old days when no one had money, the women prepared food all day. Now they just go to the market and buy.”
He and Quy ordered a carnivore’s smorgasbord of dried beef, grilled chicken, roast goat, and dog—dog sausages, dog McNuggets and dog-on-the-bone. “Dog is very good to eat at the end of the lunar year. It cleans out last year’s problems and sins,” Tru chirped by way of a toast. Draining our thimbles of whiskey, Simon and I timidly dipped the dog-on-a-bone in the purple, fermented shrimp paste.
Tru was wolfing down dog sausage like peanuts, and asking for the thuoc lao, the bamboo water pipe. In keeping with local maxim—by the virtue of the desire it must be legitimate—we filled the pipe with a pleasant mix of hashish and tobacco. Soon we got on the motorbikes to Hoan Kiem Lake and a new disco, a submarine-capsule of a place. Glistening with exposed pipes and silver railing, the club felt like the sub’s engine room, half-shrouded in real and artificial smoke. Young girls in split-pea colored sailor outfits competed for our drink orders. Divas and dancing men performed on the revolving, translucent stage, circling in and out of an electrical storm of flashing lights and fake fog. It all seemed to be in slow motion, like being underwater. The deafening sound became muted and the tutu-ed dancers a faceless blur of pink coral.
On the following day, after the departure of the Kitchen Gods, Joellen and I took a Tet basket—Australian wine, chocolate-coated macadamia nuts, Lipton tea and gourmet cookies—to the house of Mr. Vu Xuan Hong, chairman of the Vietnam Union of Friendship Organizations and member of the National Assembly. After introducing us to his son Kanh, who goes to university in Australia, Mr. Hong served us candied fruits and rice whiskey out of a half-gallon Smirnoff bottle. The fiery concoction was the pride of his father’s province of Nam Dinh, where he would travel in a few days to his ancestral home and cemetery. Mr. Hong toasted our visit as a good omen, the first foreigners to have entered his home during the Tet season. We again raised our porcelain thimbles to World Peace, as he pointed out that Vietnam had had 89 years of episodic war and civil strife in the last century.
Next evening we went to the seven-story townhouse of Dr Tran Nhon, former Vice Minister of Water Resources, and his wife, Le Ngoc Hue, a Senior Program Officer in Joellen’s office.
After the defeat of the French in 1954, hundreds of thousands of families, most of them Catholic, went south. Dr Nhon’s family was among the much smaller counter-migration that moved north, to embrace the prevailing winds of Ho Chi Minh. Although Dr. Nhon never fought in the war, he was trained in Moscow and Hanoi to return to the South upon victory and assist with the takeover. Working as a functionary in the South for 15 years, he returned to Hanoi, where he climbed to success in water management, a vitally important field in a country like Vietnam.
Having recently retired as Vice Minister of Water Resources, Dr. Nhon is also a composer. He rushed to show us his sheets of his latest works, including some in English. Then he sang a playful ditty he’d composed for the 1998 World Cup, aired on Vietnam Radio during every match.
Over the course of the evening, we ate, drank, talked politics and listened to Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake on a phonograph. At some point, Dr Nhon raised his glass to World Peace and to the New Year, Chuc Mung Nam Moi. Not so interested in the upcoming Year of the Goat, he pointed out that the year the French had taken over Hanoi was in 1885, the Year of the Golden Rooster. Sixty years later in 1945, the zodiacal cycle spun around to the next Year of the Golden Rooster. Propitiously, that was the year Ho Chi Minh declared the North’s independence from France. And now, his country rid of colonialism and Cold War aggression, Dr Nhon anxiously awaits the next Year of the Golden Rooster, 2005, crossing his fingers that Vietnam will join the World Trade Organization that year.
On the evening before the lunar New Year, in a drizzling rain, Joellen and I went to dinner at the home of friends Le Ngoc Bao and his wife Ha. Bao was educated in Singapore and is a policy analyst in the Deputy Prime Minister’s office. Ha, a modern career woman, received a master’s degree in the States and is now employed by the National Committee on Population, Families and Children.
In the heart of the Old Quarter, hidden from the street and tucked behind layers of concrete walls, Bao’s family home was built in 1924 in the French-Vietnamese, chock-a-block style. Without elaborating on the reasons, which probably involved accusations of landlordism, Bao told us the house was expropriated from his family during the land reform debacle in 1956. For the equivalent of $3,000 in gold, they bought it back in 1974.
He gave us a brief tour, showing us a crawlspace beneath the stairway where his family hid from French soldiers, and then in 1972 when he and his family took shelter from American bombings at Christmas.
After the tour, we convened in a family room dominated by a large Chinese mandarin tree and a smaller peach tree. Adorning the dinner table was a branch of sweet smelling forsythia, surrounded by sugared apricots, marinated cherries, tangelos, sweet grapefruit, pumpkin seeds and a bottle of white wine.
“Like snow at Christmas in America, during Tet in Hanoi we prefer the weather to be cold and misty. It brings out the smells and tastes,” Bao said, beckoning us toward the vittles.
Bao’s mother, tiny like a child, crept in to greet us. When she smiled her face crinkled in kindly folds. Her hair was tied in a bun and framed in a holiday scarf. She spoke no English, but greeted us in warm bows with the quiet self-possession of her age.
Bao’s father is deceased, leaving Bao in the Confucian role of being the oldest male in the ancestral house. Neil Jamieson in his book, Understanding Vietnam, described each Vietnamese family as a nation, “The husband is nominal head of state and in charge of foreign relations; the wife is minister of the interior and controls the treasury.” Bao would preside over Tet festivities at the house the next day, with the extended family on hand. Bao’s mother and other female relatives were busy preparing traditional foods for the family altar and holiday feast. As a traditional Vietnamese woman, Bao’s mother is now at the end of her three submissions: first to her father, then to her husband and finally, to her son Bao.
Bao and Ha’s niece and two children joined us briefly. They confessed that their favorite part of Tet would come on the second day when they would visit their maternal grandmother and receive red envelopes of money. Fourteen years old, the niece spoke perfect English and had a thing for the music of the Backstreet Boys. She also likes to “chat” with fellow Vietnamese on the Internet.
Ha stepped in to mention the temptations facing too many Hanoi teenagers: drugs, drinking and motorcycles. Their oldest daughter was 13, and was worried about her weight. She was small and thin like most young Vietnamese. Bao shook his head, “When I was young we worried about having enough to eat, now they have plenty and won’t eat enough.”
Dinner was served: many vegetables, pressed chicken and goat. Bao told us the upcoming Year of the Goat was a good year for boys to be born. “Many strong, intelligent, compassionate-for-the-less-fortunate leaders were born in the Year of the Goat,” Bao explained. We discussed the Year of the Golden Dragon, also considered good for boys, which came three years before. Almost every woman of childbearing age in Vietnam was pregnant that year.
Still gathered around in awe at the sight of foreigners in their house, when the girls saw me penning my email address with my left hand, they lowered their heads in a tandem fit of tittering. Almost in chorus, Bao and Ha shed some light, “No child in Vietnam can pass the first grade of school unless they write with their right hand.”
Such conformism! Back in America, in 1957 when I began the first grade, I was put in the back of the classroom with the other left-handers and made to write with the other hand. In the school lunchroom left-handers were made to sit at the end of the cafeteria-sized tables to avoid dueling arms. In an American age that championed uniformity, we were treated as if we had learning disabilities. Out of the classroom, coaches made me bat right-handed, play tennis right-handed, golf right-handed. Today I write and throw with my left hand, eat with my right hand, fire a shotgun from the left and fly-fish with my right. I am not ambidextrous. I am confused, yet still trying not to conform.
The next evening, after our visit with Bao’s family, I met up with a few fellow nonconformists at John Lancaster’s seventh floor apartment on Bui Thi Xuan Street, overlooking the three lakes where fireworks would erupt at midnight. Simon, Ms. Quy and others joined us there, on an evening when most Vietnamese are at home or somewhere celebrating with their families.
Among us was David Holdridge—a former second-lieutenant in the Americal Division who lost several feet of his intestines when gut-shot in Quang Ngai Province the summer of 1969. He was today in a buoyant mood and the subject of several toasts. David ran the Vietnam office of an NGO that owned a share of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for their work in banning and clearing anti-personnel landmines. On behalf of the NGO, he had just signed the first bilateral agreement with the Ministry of Defense to do a comprehensive survey of the remaining unexploded ordnance in Vietnam.
Among other appetizers and drinks, John served the traditional Tet staple, banh chung, cold fatty pork and bean paste tucked in the middle of lime-green layers of glutinous rice. In the old days before the relative prosperity of the 1990s, Hanoi women and children used to work slavishly for 12 hours and more, over charcoal fires preparing the traditional chung cakes. The cakes would be placed on the family altar on Tet Eve and eaten on the days following.
Most expatriate men living in Hanoi who are married to Vietnamese women loathe the day they have to visit their in-laws during the Tet season and eat banh chung. This is understandable. When unwrapped and served from its banana-leaf-like packaging, the chung cake resembles a radioactive blob of green and tastes like cold blubber. John and I made futile attempts at slicing the chung with a knife, like trying to scoop up a ball of Jell-O with chopsticks. Ms. Quy calmly brought the situation under control, grabbing the bamboo twine the banh chung had been bound in, and garroting the green glob into perfectly cut squares.
We washed down the cakes with gin and went gaga at midnight as we gathered on the balcony watching skies illuminated by fireworks in three directions—over West Lake, to the south at Lenin Park and to the north on Hoan Kiem. The glass facades of Hanoi’s few high rises glittered with mirror images of the display. Candles and lanterns flickered below at a pagoda as devotees streamed in for Tet prayers.
With the fireworks over, we departed John’s en masse and weaved through festive streets lit up by small bonfires of paper offerings to the dead—tiny inflammable models of televisions, bicycles, motorbikes, money and more. The money is used to bribe the Kings of Hell to lighten the suffering of their ancestors. Defying local ordnances, firecrackers crackled around us anarchically. Like a human dam breaking in all directions, waves of people flowed by, rushing from the fireworks event toward their ancestral homes.
Out of sight, on the upper floors of every home, families gathered in front of their ancestral altars to burn joss sticks, to offer food and drink and to invite their antecedents to confer happiness on the family. At the precise moment of the New Year, upon the arrival of the new Ong Cong—the god who oversees the family land—heaven and earth become one, and yin and yang shift into perfect balance. Each home is then ready for the first visitor of the New Year, whose presence and zodiacal harmony with the coming year will bestow good tidings.
The first morning of the lunar New Year, Joellen and I took a taxi with Simon to Ms. Quy’s home on Le Ngoc Han Street. The roads were mostly empty, with red flags drooping in the misty tranquility; all businesses were grated shut. A few men in fedoras and suits, and a similar number of well-dressed women wearing trilby hats, motored between homes.
Ms. Quy, as well as being an entertainer and military officer, runs a coffee shop on the ground floor of her family home. With the accordion doors open to the street and the misty weather, we gathered around one of the tables there and presented her family with a Tet basket.
Ms. Quy’s mother was dressed in all her finery: golden ear studs and a glinting chain around her neck weighted with a jade amulet; her hair was chignoned on top with a yellow silk scarf, and she wore a black velvet coat. She was spry as a bird, her owl-like eyes panning to and fro, full of intelligence. Ms. Quy’s daughter, Phu Ang, and niece Minh, wore blue jeans and platform shoes. Red envelopes littered the table, packages of Tet gift money for friends and family. Ms. Quy and her mother served us Heineken, rice whiskey and more chung cake. Fortunately, Ms. Quy’s mother also served a plate of pickled scallions, which helped cut the taste and fatty smell and gave a crunch to the texture.
That afternoon, our expatriate friends came over for ham-and-turkey sandwiches. With almost all Vietnamese staying at their homes, Ms. Quy was our only local visitor that day.
The next day, a time for getting out and visiting maternal relatives and friends, Joellen went to see a friend and colleague, Tu Ha, whose father had died only a few days before. Tu Ha could not leave her house to visit other family or friends for another month. That would bring bad luck to anyone her presence touched.
On the third night of Tet, the Opera House square around the corner from our residence featured singers and dancers waltzing in and out of a MTV mise-en-scene of stage smoke and lights.
The fourth day of Tet, a Tuesday and an even-numbered day, was selected by Thuy, our cook and new house girl, as an auspicious time to return to work. The long anticipated morning arrived with relief. Although my marriage to Joellen had not yet collapsed, our nerves were sorely tattered. Neither of us knew where to take the garbage, so it had piled up in the kitchen. I had been in charge of making the bed, now a cyclone of twisted sheets. Clothes littered the bedroom. Joellen was to act as lead dishwasher, but in the end was upstaged by Ms. Quy. Simon was charged with filling the ice trays, now filled only with cold air. With the arrival of Thuy, our home’s expatriate life could revert from the offenses of Tet to a peacetime footing.
One fall day beneath the jackfruit trees of the Au Lac Café, I sat waiting at a streetside table, enjoying an unrivalled view of the backdoor of the colonial Metropole Hotel. The beggar lady Thuy, who has cerebral palsy and works the popular beat, came by and sold me the gum she hawks daily. As usual, she tried to walk off without giving me change. “Stop, stop,” I shouted, as she turned around laughing and handed me my change. “No more this week,” I told her. A few months later, she turned up pregnant with twins by one of the hard-bitten motorcycle taxi drivers around the corner. Her fundraising drive had only just begun.
The Au Lac and the restaurant next door, the Diva, both spill out of two old villas that are owned by a friend, Tran Tien Duc, and his family. He is the son of the former mayor of Hanoi, who held that position for 20 years beginning in the mid-1950s. Duc and his wife, Ngoc, were married next to the fireplace in the Diva villa in February 1968. Their wedding was interrupted when American bombs began pummeling the city. In their formal wedding attire, they fled to the bomb shelter in the basement.
Duc stopped by and chatted with me a bit, then went inside to see his mother, now a widow in her 80s. Simon arrived along with a mutual friend, Marie, proprietor of the only foreign-owned bookstore in Hanoi. Marie was excited about the arrival of a new shipment of books.
I asked how the Ministry of Culture and Information censored her wares.
She laughed. “I am not supposed to encourage the patronage of Vietnamese customers. There can be no foreign-published books imported or sold with ‘Vietnam’ as part of the title. Any book with ‘Atlas’ in the title is forbidden. It’s hopeless trying to convince them that Ayn Rand’s magnum opus on capitalism, Atlas Shrugged, does not contain sensitive maps of Vietnam.”
In the shipment just received were two copies of a fascinating book, Lenin’s Embalmers, written by Ilya Zbarsky, a scientist charged with preserving Lenin’s corpse, who was preceded by his father before him as one of the original embalmers. The books made it through customs on the strength of Lenin’s name. It’s the story of how Lenin, and eventually Ho Chi Minh and others, were embalmed.
Few secrets in communist Vietnam are better protected than the mysterious periodic maintenance of the corpse of Ho Chi Minh. It all started back in wintry Moscow on January 20, 1924, the day Vladimir Ilich Lenin died.
Racing against the clock, as his body decomposed, Lenin’s disciples—Trotsky, Stalin, Kamenev, Dzerzhinsky and other politburo members—began the debate on whether to bury, cremate or preserve the corpse for posterity.
While the corpse lay at the Trade Union House, drawing pilgrims such as Nguyen Ai Quoc (young Ho Chi Minh), Stalin foresaw a struggle for political succession. He thought the corpse could serve as a tool for “harnessing the religious sentiment of the ignorant masses in order to ensure the survival of the regime,” as Zbarsky wrote.
After the pomp and circumstance of the funeral, Petrograd (née St. Petersburg) was renamed Leningrad, and Stalin won a vote of the politburo to preserve Lenin. Over a month after Lenin’s death, Professor Vorobiov, a bio-chemist and expert in preserving anatomical specimens—organs, arms and legs so far—was summoned to Moscow.
At the end of March, Vorobiov, the elder Zbarsky and several assistants, all of whom had been under relentless pressure, agreed to preserve the corpse of the leader of the world’s proletariat. Their task was formidable, to recreate the semblance of recent death, or better yet the illusion of napping. There was one small factor in favor of their unlikely success: just the hands and head would be exposed for viewing.
After weeks of work, the scientists came up with a successful process, and gave Lenin’s family a viewing. Lenin’s brother delivered the verdict: “He looks as he did when we saw him a few hours after he died, perhaps even better.” Patented like a cryogenic tonic, Professor Vorobiov’s formula, with only minor refinements, has been used on Lenin’s body every 18 months since. Stalin got the same treatment when he died in 1953. As a favor to the Soviets and for political legitimacy—harnessing the masses—the “balsamic baths” became de riguer among satellite communist regimes—Dimitrov in Bulgaria, Gottwald in Czechoslavakia, Neto in Angola, Burham in Guyana, Kim IL Sung in North Korea and of course, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam.
In his last will and testament, Ho Chi Minh requested that he be cremated. He also proposed that building schools would be a more productive use of the state’s money than erecting a monument or museum in his honor. He died on September 2, 1969, Independence Day, yet the Party inner-sanctum decided not to spoil the holiday, announcing his death date as September 3.
Russian embalmers flew to Hanoi to help. By the end of November 1969, North Vietnam’s Politboro had voted to build a mausoleum, and to subject the Great Patriot to “balsamic baths” every 18 months for eternity, or the unforeseeable future, anyway.
Because of the American bombing taking place then, HCM’s corpse was removed from Hanoi to a field laboratory near Son Tay, 30 miles to the west on the Red River. There, in the bowels of a karst mountain, Russian scientists assisted with the deification of HCM.
In 1972, a flock of American helicopters swooped down along the Red River on a rescue mission in search of a POW camp. While having tea, the NVA officer in charge of the laboratory redoubt where HCM’s corpse was being kept, looked up in astonishment at the choppers. The aircraft alighted briefly on the opposite riverbank, but took wing after they determined the camp had been abandoned only days before. The NVA strengthened security after that incident. According to an NVA general, “If the Yankees ever did get hold of it [Ho’s corpse], we’d be prepared to hand over all our American prisoners in exchange for it!”
On August 29, 1975, only months after reunification, the Vietnamese government opened a permanent mausoleum on the holy ground of Ba Dinh Square. It had been there in front of a throng of thousands that the Great Patriot delivered the Declaration of Independence on September 2, 1945, beginning with the familiar words: “All people are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Since the mausoleum’s opening, 15,000 Vietnamese a week have paid homage.
In the five years I have lived in Hanoi, I have been to HCM’s mausoleum nine times, possible grounds for suspicion of necrophilia. Since September 11, the mausoleum caretakers have installed a metal detector through which foreigners must pass. I recently escorted friends from Arkansas there who were visiting Hanoi. Simon refused to come along, “If Ho didn’t want to be there, neither do I.”
After surrendering our cameras, we solemnly fell into in a long line behind a group of older peasant women, diminutive in size and each dressed the same in her best velvet jacket, matching black trousers, with hair in a knot and wrapped in a cloth disk. We followed a single guard in dress whites and billed cap along the grassy common of Ba Dinh Square. A platoon of similarly dressed soldiers followed us with rifles resting on their shoulders in marching position. Traffic circled one end of the square in a distant cacophony. In the same direction, clusters of women clipped the grassy common by hand, moving crabwise on their haunches in the foreground of the stately and colonial Prime Minister’s offices.
The squat marble walls fronting the mausoleum are as cold and gray as the Hanoi crachin skies. With bayonets drawn, two guards flanked the doors, their eyes scanning our body language, zero tolerance for anything but military rigidity and mortuary reverence. Twisting up a marble tunnel of three flights of stairs, the visitors’ line slackened to a bottleneck, trickling ponderously through the holy of holies.
In the vaulted chamber, a black catafalque with a glass sarcophagus was set in a sunken space near the middle of the room. A guard nudged me forward as I stalled, fixated on the aquarium-like bedchamber just as I had been on previous visits. An old familiar face, the Great Patriot lay somnolently in a black tunic, his fleshy mug illuminated by recessed lighting. Accented by his wispy beard, his skin tone was immortally pink—the good results of his last “balsamic bath” six months prior.
The grave silence of the devotees was deafening. The air was icy, prompting a whisper from an English-speaking local, “Best air conditioning in Hanoi.” Another guard nudged me and pointed to the exit. More guards were positioned below with bayonets fixed at the cardinal points of the sunken shrine. A third guard prodded me out the door. Herded downstairs through a tunnel of oppressive shadows and out into a garden, the mood of the peasants we had arrived with remained hushed, somber but composed.
Once outside everyone’s spirits rose, along with the temperature. We talked, strolling beneath tall trees in the shadow of the Presidential Palace, the former French Governor General’s residence constructed in 1906. Next to an elliptical pond, rattling with the percussive beat of golden carp breaking the water for food, was a polished wooden home on stilts where HCM lived, simple and spare in the Japanese way. He exercised around the pond in the morning, planted much of the lush garden that surrounds the house, and often in the twilight of day, enjoyed feeding the carp.
The fad for preserving the remains of communist leaders did not take long to fade. The infighting of Cold War politics, the breakup of the Soviet Union and a lack of cultural acceptance prompted its demise.
In 1961, only eight years after being preserved for posterity, Stalin was denounced by Khrushchev for genocidal crimes. Khrushchev had his corpse removed from the mausoleum and buried under the walls of the Kremlin. In July 1990, having laid in state for 40 years, Dimitrov of Bulgaria was removed from his mausoleum and buried alongside his parents. Gottwald, head of the Czech Communist Party, was displayed for three years before his body was cremated. “Embalming is not part of our national tradition,” stated Czech party members. Nito in Angola spent 13 years in his mausoleum, before in 1992, the government, heeding his wife’s wishes, allowed him to be buried.
Leningrad has returned to its original name, St. Petersburg. The corpse of Lenin still occupies the Moscow mausoleum, but not without considerable debate about removing him for burial. Nowadays the Russian scientists at the mausoleum no longer embalm comrades, but instead make money fixing up the bullet-riddled bodies of the nouveau riche—the Russian mafia—many of whom are former members of the nomenklatura, the ruling communist elite. About four per month are placed on the same marble slab used to prepare Lenin for embalming in 1924, and are restored at fees ranging from $1,500 to $10,000.
“It seems, therefore, that no matter what the political regime, embalming and the building of mausoleums is ... both a homage paid to the dead and a demonstration of power addressed to the living,” concluded the 90-year-old author and Lenin embalmer, Ilya Zbarsky.
As Stalin had done with Lenin’s remains, the revolutionary disciples of HCM were “harnessing the masses,” molding a martyr to evoke patriotic emotions from a peasant population. And it’s never an easy task to transform a diehard atheist into a demigod.
But today in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh’s repute has decayed no more than his body, still the icon of immense national pride. Across the Pacific, the debate will never be resolved as to whether HCM was pushed into communism because the West supported colonialism. And long after HCM’s corpse is finally laid to rest—or cremated according to his wishes—he will be remembered as the Great Patriot who led Vietnam’s liberation from foreign control.
I am not a club member of any sort. I belong to no guilds, unions, leagues, associations or any other alliance of like-minded people, having even been dropped from the dues-paying rolls of the Arkansas and American societies of Certified Public Accountants. As for the Army and other military groups, I had almost nothing to do with them after I left the service in August 1971, other than keeping in touch with a handful of friends who were veterans. I was a veteran against the war, but never joined the organization of the same name.
In the early 1970s, following my return to the States and discharge from the army, my father and I would on occasion go to Fort Chaffee, where he played golf and liked to have a drink at the Officer’s Club. During one of those Sunday afternoon sojourns, a brouhaha erupted from across the bar room. My beard and ponytail had offended a drunk colonel, who recruited several of his fellow red-faced warhorses to get the sergeant-at-arms to ask me to leave. These men had dedicated their lives to serving their country. Their bitterness was just as strong as the outrage emerging from the antiwar movement at the time.
My father came to my defense, pointing out that I had served the better part of two years overseas in the army. At the time I carried a copy of my discharge papers for student loan and GI Bill purposes. Rather than attempting to clear the bar, which did cross my mind, I reluctantly produced the papers as Exhibit A, revealing that I had received the perfunctory Vietnam Campaign and Service Medals. They deliberated as a jury in private, and then one at a time bought me a drink. I was acquitted of wearing an unpatriotic hairstyle, I guess. After draining the free whiskey, we left and I never returned to the exclusivity of their drinking club.
I never much thought about veterans or veterans’ organizations until I moved from Nairobi to Hanoi. Through random circumstances—a few of those chance encounters worth a thousand appointments—I met John Lancaster, whose office was across the street from my house; Chuck Searcy, who was part of the NGO network; Eric Herter, who hung out at the R&R Tavern which I also frequented; and Suel Jones, who I met at the R&R on his first trip back to Vietnam since the war. All had been in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive of 1968.
In April 2002, Chuck shared the bones of a groundbreaking conversation he had a few months before with a representative of the VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) headquarters in Kansas City, “They have several million dollars in their foundation they would like to funnel into humanitarian work in Vietnam—landmines, unexploded ordnance, wheelchairs and maybe Agent Orange. All we have to do is open a VFW Post in Hanoi.”
The VFW has a heavily conservative membership of 2.6 million men and women. They began over a century ago as independent, local patriotic organizations to help wounded and sick veterans returning from the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection. A few years later, the disparate organizations were consolidated under a federal charter as the Veterans of Foreign Wars of America. They boast an impressive roster of past and present members: Audie Murphy, Carl Sandburg and eight U.S. Presidents—Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, big George Bush and so on. They finance war memorials, lobby for veterans’ benefits such as health care and education, and in the case of Agent Orange, were instrumental in getting remediation for American veterans. On the other hand, they also support all wars on the premise that if Americans are fighting, the cause is just—blind patriotism you could say. My only encounter with the VFW had been to pass their beer halls throughout Arkansas.
The idea of opening a VFW in Hanoi seemed as counterintuitive as doing the same thing in Baghdad in a couple of decades. John, Chuck and I were intrigued, however, and became convinced that it was worth pursuing. Eric, skittish from the start, attended a few preliminary meetings, but once he saw the application—a patriotic oath to God, Country and War—he opted out.
All of us were not only drinking buddies, we were birds of a feather in our dovish politics, and sensitized to how the U.S. is perceived internationally. As for biting our cheeks to deal with the VFW, we reasoned that the worthy causes we were pursuing justified our hypocrisy.
Late in the same year, Mike Meyer, Administrator of Corporate and Foundation Development for the VFW, visited Hanoi with a group of veterans. John, Chuck and I met them in the Hilton lobby for drinks and a testing of the waters.
John, as the Post Commander-elect, gave a measured speech making clear that he favored a simple humanitarian aid agenda, and that partisan politics had no place in a Hanoi VFW Post. Nobody disagreed, and Mike Meyer said, “We welcome all political persuasions.”
Soon, all the wheels were in motion for an official visit from the VFW brass. Our organizing committee came with impeccable credentials: John and Chuck are both former presidential appointees. Eric is an accomplished documentary film maker and former magazine editor, with a first-rate Eastern education. His grandfather, Secretary of State Christian Herter, sat next to Eisenhower when he shocked Kennedy the day before his inauguration by telling him Laos was the wobbly domino keeping Southeast Asia from going communist. Suel Jones has made his life mission raising money for the Friendship Village, which houses disabled Vietnamese veterans and children with disabilities. He relishes veteran-to-veteran work—hugging fat 60-year-old men who return to Vietnam to make their peace. And every serious organization needs a deskbound paper pusher. After a stint with Ernst and Ernst, I spent 16 years as chief financial officer of an independent oil and gas company, a profession and industry unsurpassed in conservatism. So, all in all, we thought we were a Dream Team for a VFW Post, with qualifications in no need of patriotic embellishments.
Only weeks before the boys back in Kansas City at VFW headquarters were to arrive, they began floating the suggestion that Pete Peterson, the former American ambassador to Vietnam, might be a candidate for our Post Commander. I doubt that Peterson would have been interested, but we roundly objected. Aside from the fact that Peterson wasn’t living in Vietnam, we felt John was more qualified, and free from the baggage of embassy politics.
The day before the Kansas City delegation was to leave for Vietnam, VFW headquarters issued a press release stating that the Hanoi Post’s primary goals would be veteran-to-veteran work, community outreach, widening humanitarian support, and “expanding the presence of American patriotism ...” They hadn’t bothered to consult, however, with us, their “comrades” in Hanoi.
It was starting to seem all too familiar. During the war, I had seen the dismal results of military brass failing to heed the views of soldiers on the ground. And more recently, I had had my fill of patriotism. My wife and I had just attended the 990th anniversary of the founding of Hanoi. At Hanoi Stadium, in a jazzed-up crowd of 40,000 Vietnamese, we were among the fewer than ten foreigners in attendance. The military pageantry there presented a reenactment of Vietnam and Hanoi’s resistance against China, France, Japan and America. A meticulous choreography of patriotic songs, chants, and foot stomping reached fever pitch.
In the main event, air raid sirens screamed and the sky filled with smoke, as mock B-52s were launched on guy wires from each corner of the stadium. With the stadium plunged into darkness, we heard Ho Chi Minh’s recorded voice calling for the nation to stand up and fight against American air raids. The B-52s burst in the sky, as toy Russian surface-to-air missiles plucked them down one by one. The roar of the crowd grew louder and the foot stomping literally shook the concrete stadium for 10 minutes. I leaned over to Joellen: “If anyone ask, we’re Canadian. This is scary stuff!”
The VFW folks seemed naive about diplomacy, perhaps symptomatic of a wider problem in America, where less than half the members of the US Congress hold valid passports. Vietnam’s relationship with the United States thrives on mutual self-advantage, and not on admiration for American patriotism. Any program for “expanding” U.S. patriotism in Vietnam, whatever that might be, seemed absurd to those of us on the ground there.
On a Sunday afternoon in late February, Chuck arranged for an informal meeting at the R&R Tavern with the prospective membership in Hanoi—several of whom I had never met—and with the Kansas City boys: Ron Browning, Assistant Adjutant General for Development, Bob Frank, a fellow bean counter with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, and Alan Greilsamer, the public relations person for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund.
Inconveniently, the R&R Tavern’s owner, Jay Ellis, was a hard-core 60s throwback and happened to have told a local rock band they could practice their covers of Grateful Dead songs there the same afternoon we were meeting the VFW brass. “I’m sorry man. I know I said today was okay, but I made a mistake. I told the band they could use the place,” Jay shrugged, clearly more eager to host the Dead than us.
So we piled into several cars, jumped on motorcycles and rode in cyclos around the lake to Restaurant Bobby Chinn’s. Once there, we barely got through opening pleasantries when someone brought up the looming war with Iraq, a lightning rod for lively discussion. Colonel Steve Ball, the military attaché at the American Embassy, soft spoken, yet towing the military line, was sitting next to John and me. In the way you might brief Martians fresh off a flying saucer about planet Earth, he patiently explained how the United States had to move beyond the inertia of the U.N. Needless to say, “Saddam is training Al Qaeda terrorists and he possesses and is producing weapons of mass destruction.” Ball was clear: “We have to get there sooner rather than later.”
John cautioned, “We are in too big a hurry to get to the future. We are going so fast that if we hit a bump we are liable to spin out of control.”
Colonel Ball seemed indifferent to our concerns: Was this another quagmire? Had terrorism replaced communism as an excuse to suspend civil liberties, to question patriotism, to build a massive military and to wage war using fear to garner support? To him, the answers were plain and simple: My country, right or wrong.
Soon, Ron Browning, the go-to-guy in the VFW delegation, brought the meeting to order and gave a Chamber of Commerce overview of the VFW’s mission in Vietnam. He apologized for the snafu in the press release and promised to collaborate better in the future. Ron then repeated some of the optimistic wisdom he had shared in a recent letter to Chuck and John,
“You have helped me realize a personal dream [a VFW Post in Hanoi] ... All of us who served in Vietnam are entering a life-stage where the legacy and the lessons we leave to the generations that follow are becoming more and more important. The nature of that legacy is in our hands. It may be that only our generation, the men and women who served in Vietnam, can make sense of this message. Perhaps it is our obligation ... it [a VFW Post] has the potential to be a sounding board for a new generational message ...”
Ron then opened the floor for questions, when a marine colonel of 39 years in service and temporarily attached to the embassy, dropped a grenade, “We should all support our commander-in-chief in times of war.”
Post Commander-elect Lancaster responded first, laughing and banging a Heineken bottle on his wheelchair for emphasis. “I support the troops on the ground but I am also the son of Leon Lancaster, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, and that makes me a Democrat. Besides, I don’t wear the uniform anymore. I don’t have a commander-in-chief.” John thus gave the conservative membership, about half of the group of 20 on hand, a piece of his mind.
In the ensuing stillness, Suel overheard the colonel harrumph, “He’s not going to be my Post Commander.”
Before the first Hanoi VFW meeting broke up in disarray, Suel and I got the floor a time or two to rail about the embassy position on Agent Orange. We Hanoi VFWs were divided in too many ways, with no faction to lead. And Eric Herter was missing all the fun; he was in New York City helping organize the anti-war march.
Chuck, a Georgia politician at heart, anxious to pull us all together, was so frustrated at the hostile byplay, he bolted to the nearest thuoc lao stand for a corrective dose of waterpipe nicotine.
Saying farewell, Colonel Ball assured me that embassy staff like himself could say what they thought, even against the official position. I assume he was being defensive, as I had mocked him earlier about being a diplomat and having to wear that State Department muzzle. On the way out, I shook hands with Bob Frank and Ron Browning, reminding them that I would see them in the morning.
The next day struck early for me. I had to find my musty, black pin-stripe wedding suit of seven years before, then organize the accessories for an important meeting with Vu Xuan Hong, chairman of the Vietnam Union of Friendship Organizations, and a National Assembly member. Mr. Hong can make things happen with new NGOs wanting to do business in Vietnam. I had met Mr. Hong a few weeks before, when Joellen and I had delivered a Tet basket—wine and food for the holidays—to his home. The three-man VFW delegation was slated to attend the meeting, along with me, Chuck and John.
Just as I was working through the third attempt to get my tie over my middle-age paunch, John rang and said we were to “stand down.” It was 8:15 a.m., and our meeting was to start at 8:30. The VFW delegation wanted an exclusive meeting between officials, contending John and I weren’t on the list. I later found out that the Americans judged John and I to be risky partners based on our comments at the meeting.
I called Mr. Hong’s office number, pressing the numbers expressively as if I were punching Ron Browning’s chest. Mr. Hong’s secretary answered, and read me the official meeting list, “John Lancaster, Chuck Searcy, Phil Karber and some veteran from America.”
I had him read it again, and then he asked, “Is there a problem? You will be here?”
“No, please tell everyone when they arrive that I called and that John and I won’t be there. Thanks. Goodbye.” Our countryman’s dissembling had been confirmed.
John and I were all dressed up with nowhere to go. More than anger, disappointment set in. We saw our vision of a Hanoi VFW Post being dried up by a fly-by-night, fancy-suit crowd.
By pleasant surprise, in the early afternoon, Bob Frank called and invited me and my wife to dinner at the Press Club, an upscale favorite of ours located just around the corner from our house. Chuck and John were also invited. Bob sounded as though they would backpedal, and try to be collaborative. He laughed about the meeting glitch, as close as he or the others would come to a mea culpa.
At dinner Bob, a connoisseur of the grapes and the man with the Visa card, studiously worked over the wine list. John and I drained gin-and-tonics, while I called on my wife to enlighten us all on doing business in Vietnam. They hadn’t asked but it seemed relevant. We talked about organizational structures, bank accounts, NGO licensing issues, and all the tools necessary to run a high-profile NGO in Vietnam.
Ron, however, changed the subject—to himself. For the third time in two nights, with whispered digressions on North Korea, he recounted having been a policeman for 10 years, how his dad had worked the loading docks for 42 years, and how his star had risen from those humble beginnings. He never asked one member of the organizing committee about themselves or Hanoi.
Chuck, who had vast political and media experience, was talking to Alan, the press relations guy who had come up with the “expanding American patriotism” blurb. Chuck struggled in vain to pass on a few nuggets of his experience, finally barking at Alan, “If you would slow down and listen for a minute, you might learn something.” Alan got up in a boil and disappeared like hot vapors. The heat had been turned up.
Ron went back to his clandestine guise, telling us that in addition to the stated VFW mission objectives, the powers had formulated “a proprietary agenda.”
“Well since we are helping to organize the Post can you tell us anything about it?” John inquired.
“It’s proprietary, sorry,” Ron snapped.
“You mean as a membership organization even the dues-paying members don’t get to know about the proprietary agenda,” John pressed him.
“That’s right.”
“Well I can’t be a part of something so mysterious.”
“Come on, are you guys planning a lollipop airlift for the benefit of the poor folks in Vietnam?” I mocked.
Ron ignored me and turned to John, “And you may not be the right guy to be the Post Commander,” casting doubt on our best-laid plans.
“I may not be, that’s right,” John agreed.
It was then that we knew failure of the VFW Post was a fait accompli. Yet in the interest of closure, we agreed to attend one more meeting the next night at the American Club.
Located on Hai Ba Trung Street, one of the main arteries and most historical streets in Hanoi, the American Club occupies two acres that the United States owned when ties were severed with Communist North Vietnam in 1954. As part of Hanoi’s efforts to normalize relations with Washington, the prime real estate was returned to the U.S. in 1995. It is now used by expatriates of all stripes for various functions, including a big blowout every Fourth of July. A few blocks to the west is the old Hanoi Hilton.
Colonel Steve Ball had organized the informal food-and-beer affair to welcome Ed Banas, Commander-in-Chief-elect of the American VFW, and a small contingent of veterans who accompanied him. Other attendees included Ambassador Ray Burghardt, who officed next door to Ollie North at the NSC in the 1980s. The scent of grilling hamburgers and the rabble of American veterans filled the Hanoi night air.
Making a surprise appearance was Andre Sauvageot, in a mismatched suit ensemble, complimented by his signature red baseball cap with the five-pointed yellow star, the flag insignia of Vietnam. Of French descent transplanted to Ohio, Andre speaks Vietnamese as well as any non-Vietnamese possibly can. He has been the manager of General Electric Vietnam for five years. A former colonel in the army, Andre was in Vietnam continuously from 1964 until the Peace Agreement in 1973.
Andre can be entertaining but is prone to manic, namedropping filibusters. He often invokes the names of famous former superiors: William Colby, once the head of the CIA and now deceased; Richard Armitage, the current Deputy Secretary of State; and a host of military luminaries. In many ways Andre is a postwar paradox: one who tears up when he talks about the carnage he witnessed during the war, and in the same breath dismisses anti-war activists as “gooey peaceniks.”
Still yet, I felt he wanted to do what was fair for Vietnam and Indochina. He had been seconded by the military to the refugee camps after the war, and spoke with compassion of the human suffering he had witnessed. I had given him the application for the VFW and encouraged him to be at the meeting. In short, Andre, like many expats I had met in Hanoi, was an enigma.
Larry Flannagan, pushing 70, arrived in cowboy boots and a relic of a brown tailored suit. Larry had retired from the army while in Vietnam, and returned three weeks later as an economic advisor. Like Andre, he, too, had spent nine years in Vietnam during the war and married a Vietnamese woman.
When Larry found out I was from Fort Smith, he told the story of opening the Oklahoma City paper one Sunday morning back in 1975, to find his sister-in-law featured on the front page as a newly arrived refugee at Fort Chaffee. He and his wife drove there that day and picked her up.
Larry huddled around where John, Suel Jones and I were holding court. When Andre walked up, Larry greeted him as “Jean.” We all laughed and I asked, “Why are you calling him Jean?”
“That was the name he went by back then. Everyone knew Jean. He spoke fluent Vietnamese. He wore black pajamas and trained the irregulars.”
Pumping Larry’s arm as an old friend would do, Andre nodded that it was true, saying only, “Jean is my first name, but my family always called me Andre. When I joined the army they started calling me Jean.”
Ambassador Burghardt, an even-handed career diplomat, walked over to say hello to John and introduced himself to me. John was in the throes of a career transition, exiting his job as manager of an NGO to become a full-time consultant. The ambassador was interested in how it was coming along.
Soon, Ed Banas and his entourage of veterans just in from the States arrived. Ambassador Burghardt, Andre and Larry moved to a nearby table where they could talk old times. The group of freshly-arrived veterans had lost their luggage and were wearing the same clothes they had left the States in. Even still, with all the protective coloration of patriotic lapel pins, hats and T-shirts, they looked like the fresh-faced greeting committee at a Fourth of July picnic. They bantered about the latest MIA finds in excited voices. Not a single veteran out of Banas’ entourage spoke to our organizing group.
Banas, Commander-in-Chief-elect of the whole enchilada, did, however, stumble up to our table. John saw his tall, healthy frame hulking towards us and greeted him, “Hey, Commander, just in time. We were talking about Iraq.”
Banas’s eyes were bloodshot, and without measuring the crowd, he spoke in the voice of a historian, “You know the Ottoman Empire ended in the 16th century, and a lot of Muslims migrated to Europe then. And now they can vote.”
We weren’t sure what he meant, and by the way the Ottomans lasted to the 20th century. But before he could say more, Chuck engaged him in an extended game of pool. Staggering with experience, neither one of them sank a ball, and finally gave up. (I was later told that Ed Banas had a severe allergy condition, and was not drunk.)
Ron Browning had no doubt brought everyone with a need-to-know within the VFW up to speed on our lively meetings. Thus, at the American Club there was no discussion, no question-and-answer session, and no speech by Ed Banas. Only after Chuck goaded him, did Banas blurt out, “We have a lot of work to do to make this thing happen.”
Ambassador Burghardt took the floor to make a few welcoming remarks and then attempted to shame Andre into taking off his communist flag hat, “If Andre would only remove his cap so we can see his face.” Andre chuckled and left his hat in place. I am sure he said under his breath, “You’re in Hanoi boss, the rules are different.”
By the time we reached the last bites of our hamburgers, Colonel Ball thanked all for coming and dismissed the gathering. Andre rushed up to me, and in front of Ron Browning and several others, recounted how I had persuaded him into the fold of Vets. Then he leaned over and imparted conspiratorially, “What do you think the ambassador would have thought had I had time to go home and put on my normal evening attire—a red sleeveless T-shirt with a yellow star in the middle, matching red boxer shorts and red pith helmet with another star in the middle?”
I had seen him in the outfit many times, and almost fell out of my chair laughing. John joined in, “Some things never change, Andre’s been wearing the sleeping garments from the North for 40 years now.”
John was Post Commander-elect as far as I was concerned, so I handed him the $20 and application Andre had given me. Seizing the moment, John hollered out to a humorless Ron Browning, “Ron wait, don’t leave, here is your newest Hanoi Post member. Andre, you know Ron.” Shaking hands stoically with Andre, Ron took the money and application, spun around and departed without saying a word or offering so much as a last handshake to John and me. Donald Duck steam poured from his ears. That was the last we saw of the VFW boys.
So much for harnessing these masses; we resembled more a Hatfield and McCoy reunion, held on disputed property. As for making history—drawing constructive lessons from the war and closing the circle of quarrelsome veterans—we had all failed. Old comrades, who once might have shared a foxhole in Vietnam, today, could hardly stand to be in the same room.