Good Morning, Vietnam
The Vietnam war was one of the formative events of my life. Even in the isolation of my Catholic boarding school in Ipswich, with only The Times and the Daily Telegraph upon which to rely for information about the outside world, I managed to work out that there was something wrong with the official version of events. What had begun as a brutal colonial war, as the French fought to cling on to their empire in the Far East, had become an even more brutal attempt by the Americans to resist the advance of communism, which in those far-off days was thought by some to be a monolithic conspiracy bent on world domination (the fact that the Russian and Chinese communists hated each other was not yet apparent). In the long run, of course, the Vietnamese turned out to be natural capitalists who embraced market forces with an enthusiasm that not even Margaret Thatcher would recognise. Arguably the overall impact of ten years of slaughter and the squandering of billions of dollars (to say nothing of America’s loss of moral high ground around the world) was to delay the advance of the free market by the best part of two decades. The very opposite of what the Americans thought they were doing.
In my boarding school in Ipswich, all I knew of Vietnam was what I read in the newspapers and occasionally glimpsed on television news. Most apparent was the massive disparity in firepower between the two sides. There was something particularly obscene about the richest and most technically sophisticated country on earth pounding a civilisation of rice farmers back into the Stone Age.1 Night after night television news showed US warplanes carpeting Vietnam with napalm, defoliant and high explosive. Before long they were said to have dropped more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped by both sides in the Second World War. However just the cause, and it was far from clear that this was a just cause, how could this be justified? This was the first televised war and it wasn’t possible to hide the consequences. The streams of refugees, the burned-out villages, the horrendous injuries and, in due course, the atrocities. One of the first images to make a lasting impression on me was a picture on the back page of the Daily Telegraph, of a little girl wearing only pyjama trousers, her arm bandaged, crying her eyes out. The image haunted me. I see her still. By the time I became conscious of the war, American bombers were already pounding North Vietnam. The suggestion that they were only targeting military objectives was obvious nonsense. How could they drop bombs from seven miles up on targets they couldn’t see and claim to be hitting only military objectives? The North was a closed country and at first little was known of the impact, but in due course it became apparent that in the southern provinces of North Vietnam virtually no town or village remained intact. Farmers and their families were living underground, emerging only at night to plough their fields. Later the bombing extended to the larger cities in the North, Hanoi and Haiphong. Here foreigners lived and the Americans were more careful to target infrastructure. Nevertheless, thousands died, including the French consul general who was not, presumably, a military target.
As the scale of the horror became apparent, so the politics began to change. By the late 1960s US President Lyndon B. Johnson had sent half a million young men to fight in South Vietnam and still it was not enough. At home the Labour government came under pressure to dissociate itself from its American allies. The US embassy in London was besieged by crowds chanting ‘Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’ In Washington veterans began throwing away their medals on the steps of the Capitol and in Chicago demonstrators laid siege to the Democratic Party convention. And then, on the eve of the Vietnamese New Year, in February 1968, came the Tet offensive. All over South Vietnam, the Vietcong emerged from hiding, capturing towns and cities deep behind the lines, even briefly occupying several floors of the American embassy in the centre of Saigon. In purely military terms the uprising was a defeat. The Vietcong were beaten back and suffered heavy casualties, but for the Americans the political price was high. The fiction that the war was winnable could no longer be maintained. Visibly worn down, Johnson announced he would not contest the 1968 presidential election. In his place came Richard Nixon and his sinister sidekick, Henry Kissinger, and the slaughter reached a new intensity as they attempted to bomb their way to the conference table. Four years later Nixon, cynically proclaiming that peace was at hand, was re-elected by an overwhelming majority. No sooner was the presidential election out of the way, than the bombing resumed. This was the background to my political awakening.
As a young journalist, I was determined to visit North Vietnam. Early efforts were frustrated, however. Along with a couple of other participants in the 1971 tour of China, I visited the Vietnamese embassy in Beijing in pursuit of a visa. We were courteously received, but politely rebuffed. Repeated efforts to apply in London were similarly unsuccessful. Britain did not recognise the North, which was represented by a couple of diplomats posing as journalists who lived at an address in Belsize Park and were not in a position to issue visas. It was not until 1980, five years after the fall of Saigon, that I finally gained entry to the newly unified Vietnam. By now Ho Chi Minh’s dream of building a Vietnam ‘ten times more beautiful’ had foundered in the face of a litany of new disasters: floods, typhoons and new wars with China and in Cambodia. In the North each new disaster was met with dignity and stoicism by a people who had never known anything but a life of struggle. Hanoi was an exhausted city. The tiredness showed in the flaking paint and the crumbling French villas, in the ancient, rusting tram cars and in the pinched faces of the people. There were no fat people in Hanoi. None at all. But for all the poverty there were smiles and small courtesies that you would never find in any Western city. There were no cars in Hanoi except for the handful belonging to foreign embassies and government ministries; the bicycle was king. The flow was continuous. They moved at a lazy, stately pace, meandering only to avoid pedestrians. There were no traffic lights. At junctions the cyclists mingled, emerging on the other side miraculously unscathed. Today the bicycles have been replaced by motorcycles and they in turn are gradually being replaced by automobiles. Many of the old French villas have been demolished and replaced by high-rise monstrosities of concrete and steel. Before much longer Hanoi will resemble Bangkok, Manila, Taipei or any of the other polluted urban jungles that pass for capital cities in Asia. Attempts by foreigners to persuade the government to preserve at least the centre of the old city have been brushed aside in the scramble for development. Whenever I come across a Vietnamese of influence I say, ‘It is not obligatory to repeat the mistakes of your neighbours. The only advantage of having been poor for so long is that you can look around and see what works and what doesn’t.’ This tends to be greeted with a helpless shrug, ‘I am only the prime minister, what can I do?’ I don’t begrudge the Vietnamese their newfound prosperity, but I am glad to have seen Hanoi before the coming of market forces.
By 1980, in the southern cities which had once waxed fat on American aid, those unable to cope with the abrupt decline in their living standards were taking to the boats. To a large extent the disaster was self-inflicted. The old men who ran Vietnam were products of the Stalinist system. So, too, were the generations of young cadres who had been sent to the Soviet Union and eastern Europe to be trained in Stalinist economics. State ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange was all they knew. It was to prove ruinous.
It was always inevitable that the southern economy would collapse once the Americans went home and US aid ceased, as it did, overnight in April 1975 when the communists entered Saigon. What was not inevitable was the stifling bureaucracy and paranoia so intense that it resulted in the strangulation of all productive activity. And with bureaucracy came endemic corruption, as officials tried to supplement their tiny salaries by demanding bribes for even the simplest services. The goodwill that greeted the arrival of the North Vietnamese army and their southern allies in the immediate aftermath of victory swiftly evaporated. Tens of thousands of soldiers and officials connected with the old regime were ordered to report for re-education. They were told it would be for only a few days or weeks, but many were held for years in remote labour camps. Property was confiscated, corrupt and incompetent northern cadres displaced managers and technocrats who would have been content to serve the new regime as they had the old. Agriculture was collectivised, leading to sharp falls in production which in turn led to prolonged rationing. Craziest of all, trade between provinces was banned, necessitating checkpoints on all the main roads and the payment of bribes. Before long just about everyone with a skill marketable in the outside world had taken to the sea in small boats. Some died and others languished for years in refugee camps before being granted asylum in the West, where many of them prospered. ‘Our stupidity,’ was the phrase Vietnam’s foreign minister, Nguyen Co Thach, used repeatedly, when I met him some years later.
One story will suffice, told by the driver of a car that Ngoc and I once hired to take us on a visit to her relatives in the central highlands. It concerns Da Nhim, a Japanese-built hydroelectric power station in the hills between Dalat and Nha Trang. Da Nhim was managed by a competent technocrat who, come the end of the American war, wanted no more than to continue in his job doing what he knew best. But no. The new masters decreed that, as a former official of the old regime, he must be re-educated. So off he went to a reeducation camp for a year or two only to find upon his return that his job had been taken by a new, ideologically sound (but not technically qualified) manager. He hung around for a while in the hope that he might be re-employed, but when it became clear that he was surplus to requirements, he used what remained of his savings to purchase a place on a refugee boat and flee the country. As luck would have it, he and his fellow refugees were picked up by a Japanese ship and taken to Japan, where he went to work for the very company that had built that power station at Da Nhim. Meanwhile, back in Da Nhim, under the ideologically sound (but technically incompetent) manager, things were going from bad to worse. Eventually an SOS was sent to the company in Japan that had built the plant. And who did they send to put it right? Yes, the man who had managed it under the old regime. He arrived at Tan Son Nhut airport and was chauffeured back to Da Nhim, where, no doubt to the amusement of his erstwhile colleagues, he set to work to make good the damage done by years of ideologically sound (but technically incompetent) management. This time, however, he was paid in precious dollars rather than the pittance in local currency that he would have earned had he been allowed to remain at his post. Some years later, when word of the disaster that was Vietnam’s economy had finally reached the old men in the Politburo, I related this sorry tale to Foreign Minister Thach. He wasn’t in the least surprised. ‘I could tell you many such stories,’ he said.
Mr Thach was an unusual communist. He had been ambassador to India and spoke English. He did not use jargon and was at ease in the company of foreigners – and he had a sense of humour. When I first met him Vietnam was isolated. The United States, still smarting from its ignominious defeat, had organised an aid and trade embargo. Many in the US were also pretending that Vietnam was still holding American prisoners of war, a claim the US government knew to be nonsense but refused to rebut. Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia – in response to repeated attacks by the murderous Khmer Rouge – provided a further excuse for revenge. With utter cynicism, America and its allies colluded with China and Thailand to provide covert aid to the Khmer Rouge and their allies with a view to stoking the civil war in Cambodia and keeping Vietnam bogged down and bleeding. ‘Why didn’t you ask for help from the United Nations, instead of invading?’ I inquired at my first meeting with Mr Thach. His reply was devastating:
‘We have a different view of the UN than you.’
‘How so?’
‘Because during the last forty years we have been invaded by four of the five permanent members of the Security Council.’
Earlier I had asked if I could travel south by train, instead of flying, only to be told that for security reasons no foreigners were allowed in Vietnamese trains. Now I repeated my request to Mr Thach.
‘Conditions on Vietnamese trains are much too bad for foreigners,’ he replied.
‘No problem,’ said I. ‘I’ve travelled all over India by train and I’m sure that conditions on Vietnamese trains are no worse.’
On the contrary, said Mr Thach. ‘I used to be our ambassador in India. I, too, have travelled on trains in India and I can assure you that conditions on Vietnamese trains are much worse.’
I persisted and he gave in. Before my eyes he scribbled a note to the relevant authorities, Give this foolish foreigner a railway ticket, or words to that effect. A day or two later came the answer. Request refused. Mr Thach had been overruled. In what country in the world, I asked myself, was it necessary to go to the foreign minister in order to obtain a railway ticket and in which country in the world was the influence of the foreign minister insufficient? That was how it was in 1980s Vietnam.
My wife, Nguyen Thi Ngoc, was born on Christmas Day 1954 in a refugee village of mud and straw huts in the coastal province of Quang Ngai in central Vietnam. She was the third of nine children, six girls and three boys, and the fortunes of her family mirrored those of her country. Her father’s parents were subsistence farmers from the coastal province of Binh Dinh. In the 1920s they migrated to Kontum, a settlement in the central highlands, in search of a better life. In the early years they lived in a shack by the Dakla river, on which Ngoc’s grandfather earned a precarious living ferrying people across in a sampan. The family were poor, hungry and often ill. Of her grandparents’ seven children only three survived to adulthood. Because he was so often ill Ngoc’s father frequently stayed away from school and was eventually told not to return. Such was the determination of Ngoc’s grandfather to educate his children that he changed his family’s names three times in order to reregister them in school.
Kontum at that time was sparsely populated. The countryside was mainly inhabited by hill tribes who scratched a living from slash-and-burn agriculture. In order to encourage people from the coastal belt to migrate to the malarial highlands the French, who needed labourers for their tea and coffee plantations, allowed migrants to claim as much land as they could clear and cultivate. As luck would have it, the land claimed by Ngoc’s grandfather was close to the centre of what was to become Kontum city and, as the town expanded, so the value of the land increased. Grandfather eventually sold most of his land, retaining only a plot near the town centre on which he started to construct three houses, one for each of his surviving sons, with the aim of keeping the family together whatever the uncertainties that lay ahead. Sadly he died before the houses were complete, leaving Ngoc’s father, Nguyen Tang Minh, then aged sixteen, and his older brother as breadwinners for the family. Minh noticed that several local Vietnamese of Chinese origin made a good living making sweets and pastries so he loitered around their shops, learning their recipes, to which he added a few of his own, and within a couple of years he and his older brother had earned enough to complete the construction of the houses.
In 1945, following the retreat of the Japanese, Kontum was occupied by the Viet Minh and as a result soon came under attack from the French. The family had no choice but to abandon their new homes and flee. Ngoc’s father and his two surviving brothers, Uncles Three and Eight,2 together with Uncle Three’s wife and her sister set off on foot through the forest towards the Viet Minh stronghold of Ba-To in Quang Ngai province, ninety miles north of Kontum. The journey lasted fifteen terrifying days and nights. On the way they were harassed and shot at by French war planes. Many of those who fell by the wayside had to be abandoned. For a while it seemed they would be reduced to beggary, but the Viet Minh were well organised and, with help, the family managed to avoid starvation and once again survived by making pastries which they sold around the villages and refugee camps. Twice they had to relocate, once when French warships shelled their camp and once when it was napalmed by French warplanes. Conditions were basic. They lived in houses of mud and thatch, barely eking a living. Nine years passed. Grandma had a stroke and, after three days without speaking, died. Minh married Uncle Three’s wife’s sister. He possessed only the shirt he stood up in, which he wore only when he went out to sell his pastries, walking up to ten miles a day. Ngoc’s mother’s only blouse was a quiltwork of patches. They subsisted on a diet of sweet potato, manioc, salted fish and occasionally rice, supplemented with wild berries. Three children, including Ngoc, were born while they were refugees in Quang Ngai and, miraculously, all survived. Uncle Three and his wife were less fortunate. They had sixteen children, half of whom died in infancy.
After the defeat of the French, the family made their way back to Kontum, where they were pleasantly surprised to find their homes intact, although occupied by squatters who refused to budge. The middle house was being used as a vehicle repair workshop. A long struggle followed. It took the best part of two years to regain their homes, for part of which time they camped amid the noise and dirt of the vehicle workshop. Again they survived by making biscuits and Ngoc’s mother opened a small grocery at the front of their house. They might have remained poor for ever, but for one giant stroke of luck. A boy selling lottery tickets came to the door. Minh never usually bought lottery tickets, but the hour was late and the boy had only one ticket left so he took pity on him. That ticket changed his life. He won 100,000 piastres, the equivalent at the time of about $15,000, a huge sum in 1950s Vietnam. Minh used the money to buy land on which he cultivated a coffee plantation. Between the rows of coffee bushes he planted fruit – pineapple, banana, mango, durian, lemon, longan. By the mid-1960s the family were prosperous. Minh purchased a van to transport his produce to neighbouring towns. Once, driving home in darkness, he was ambushed by the Vietcong, who had mistaken his van for an army vehicle, despite the fact that it had XE NHA (private car) painted prominently on each side. It was a lucky escape. The van was riddled with bullet holes, some of which had missed him by millimetres. After that, he stopped driving at night.
Minh’s coffee became well known in and around Kontum. By the mid-1960s many of his customers were soldiers from the military base just out of town. He was sufficiently wealthy to be able to afford to send all his children to private schools. Ngoc’s oldest brother, Hung, was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Hue; his older sister, Hong, to a boarding school in Quy Nhon. Ngoc and her remaining siblings went to local Catholic schools. Uncle Eight also prospered, building up a successful tailoring business which at its height employed ten people. He, too, fathered nine children.
But the war was never far away. At night the distant rumble of bombing could be heard from the Ho Chi Minh trail which ran down the nearby border between Vietnam and Laos. Beyond the town most of the countryside was controlled by the Vietcong, and come the Tet offensive in February 1968 the war spilled into the town.
Tet, the Vietnamese new year, is a big event. Measured according to the lunar calendar, it might fall anywhere between the end of January and mid-February. Tet is the time by which all debts must be settled, disputes resolved and fortune tellers consulted about what lies ahead. Houses are decorated with sprigs of cherry blossom, a symbol of prosperity. Midnight on New Year’s Eve is greeted with a huge outburst of firecrackers (easily mistaken for gunfire). The first person to cross the threshold can bring either good or bad luck. Much to their frustration, Ngoc and her siblings were under strict instructions to stay indoors on New Year’s Day for fear that, were they to be the first to visit neighbours, they might be blamed for whatever misfortunes followed in the year ahead. New Year in Vietnam is also a time of presents: new shoes, a new dress and, for each child, cash in a little red paper envelope. Ancestors, too, are included in the celebration. Offerings of food are placed on the family altar. The children went with their father to visit the family graves, clearing weeds and planting incense sticks. The dead are well cared for in Vietnam. Their spirits linger long after they have departed. Ngoc’s father had created a little cemetery in his plantation where late grandparents, uncles, aunts were gradually assembled, lying together in a shady corner, each grave marked by a small headstone. In years to come, when the plantation lay derelict and earmarked for development, the ancestors would again be unearthed and moved to a more agreeable location.
Tet 1968 was different from any other new year before or since. At about 8 a.m. Ngoc, then thirteen years old, heard the sound of what she thought were firecrackers coming from the direction of the central market, a block or so away. If not firecrackers, then it must be soldiers of the southern army, still celebrating, loosing off shots into the air. Then her aunt from next door appeared, saying that the Vietcong were occupying the market. ‘At that time I was very naive,’ she says. ‘I did not know that the Vietcong were Vietnamese like us. I thought they were foreigners.’ By now there was no mistaking the sound of gunfire. Soldiers appeared in the street outside. Ngoc’s father managed to lay hands on a supply of sand and sacks. The day was spent building a makeshift bomb shelter in the store room next to the kitchen. Several layers of sandbags were placed over the corrugated iron roof and these were covered with sacks of coffee beans.
On the second and third day, relays of soldiers took turns to advance up the street, pouring gunfire and tossing hand grenades into the market. The fighting continued day and night. ‘Very loud. We hardly slept.’ And to no avail. The VC remained entrenched. On the fourth day the soldiers were ordered to flush them out by burning down the entire market. A huge conflagration ensued, lighting up the horizon. ‘We lay down at the front of the house, peeping out to see what was happening.’ For a while there was fear that the fire would spread. Residents with buckets formed a line, pouring water over the houses nearest to the market in a desperate attempt to stop the flames spreading. When it was over a handful of charred bodies were found in the ruins, one of them an elderly Chinese night watchman who had been trapped throughout the siege. Several hundred shop owners had lost their livelihoods, including Ngoc’s aunt (the wife of Uncle Three), who wept hysterically on learning that her shop was destroyed. She had no savings. There would be no compensation.
Four years later the war came again to Kontum. The government ordered that the town be evacuated, but Ngoc’s father, fearing that they would lose everything, refused to go until the last moment. By this time the town was empty and the roads were cut. The only way out was by a military plane. The family set out for the airport in their van, each child carrying a bag with his or her name on, made from a sack cut in half on to which a strap had been sewn. Ngoc and her sisters had sat up late making them. Each bag contained a birth certificate, rice, canned food and medicine. Ngoc’s father drove the three miles to the airport, dropped off his family, then drove the van home and walked back. Uncle Three and Uncle Eight and their families were also assembled. The three families, in all about thirty children and adults, waited by a trench. Shelling was intermittent. At each new outburst everyone would dive into the trench. Their great fear was being split up. Ngoc, who spoke a few words of English, was deputed to ask the American officers in charge of the evacuation to put all three families on the same plane and was reassured that they would all be going to the same place: Pleiku, about thirty miles south. Eventually, one of the massive American C130 transport planes landed, triggering a renewed bout of shelling. It stood waiting for them, ramp lowered, rear doors open, engines running. The refugees, urged on by the soldiers who feared that one of the shells would soon find its mark, ran towards the plane. In the chaos several people were blown over by the draught from the propellers. Ngoc’s mother, frail and tiny, was almost blown away altogether. They just managed to scramble aboard before the plane started moving, rear doors still open. Hong vomited and almost fell, Ngoc pulled her back. Several people were left behind.
In Pleiku they camped in a Catholic church, along with many other refugees. They had food, but no money. For years Ngoc’s father had ploughed all his profit into either the plantation or the children’s education. He had no savings. This had long been a source of friction between Ngoc’s parents. Secretly Ngoc’s mother had siphoned off income from the shop and used it to buy gold. Only when they got to Pleiku did she whisper to the children that they were not destitute after all. ‘She made us promise not to tell Dad. She wanted him to suffer a little,’ says Ngoc. ‘But Dad was so depressed at the prospect of not being able to feed his children that we felt guilty not telling him, so Hong and I broke our promise. “Oh Dad, you don’t have to worry. Mum has gold.” Mum said to him, “Now perhaps you will listen.”’
After a few days, Minh hitched a ride on a helicopter back to Kontum. His stock of recently harvested coffee was stored, unguarded, in the family house and he was afraid of losing it. The family, meanwhile, remained in the church in Pleiku. After several weeks, Ngoc’s mother chanced across a wealthy acquaintance who offered her the use of one of several homes she owned. They were now well housed, but still short of money. Younger brothers, Chau and Nga, aged twelve and fourteen, earned what they could, getting up at 3 a.m. to buy bread from a bakery in the market and resell it at a small profit.
After several months in Pleiku the war receded and it was safe to return home, but the schools in Kontum were still closed and so Ngoc, Chau and Nga remained registered in Pleiku, which meant that Ngoc had to return to Pleiku to sit her baccalaureate. The road was still unsafe. At Chu Pao bridge, a particularly dangerous spot about halfway between the towns, there were occasional ambushes. As they approached the bridge the driver would urge passengers to keep their heads down. On the day Ngoc travelled to Pleiku to sit her exams, no sooner had her bus crossed the bridge safely than she heard an explosion. A bus a hundred yards behind had suffered a direct hit with many dead and injured. ‘My family thought I was in that bus. It was several days before they discovered I was alive. Yes I was scared, but when you live in a country at war you have to accept what happens to you.’ She passed the exam.
The following year Minh made what turned out to be a wise investment. He bought a house in Saigon. It was tall and narrow, like a birdcage, on Le Van Sy, a road leading from Tan Son Nhut airport to the city centre. Oldest brother Hung, an engineering student, had been conscripted into the air force and was stationed at the airport, which was also a huge military base. Hong and Ngoc were now of university age. The house in Saigon was a place for them to live and would become a base for other members of the family when life in Kontum became impossible. It would be the family’s salvation.
The war ended in the spring of 1975. One by one the towns along the central highlands – Buon Me Thuot, Pleiku, Kontum – fell to the advancing North Vietnamese army. Resistance was minimal. By this time all Ngoc’s family had decamped to the house in Saigon, by now overflowing with cousins, aunts, uncles, friends. Only Ngoc’s father refused to leave Kontum. He was afraid that the country would be repartitioned and that, were he to flee, it would be years before he could get back, by which time the family would have lost their home and the plantation that was the source of their wealth. Besides, the prospect of living in the communist zone held no terrors for him. After all, he had lived nine years under the Viet Minh. Life had been hard, but they had treated people fairly.
After the highlands, it was the turn of the coastal cities. Hue and Da Nang fell in quick succession. By the end of March only Saigon and the Mekong Delta remained in the hands of the regime. All communication with Kontum had ceased. One day brother Hung telephoned. He was now stationed at Phan Rang, about a hundred miles north of Saigon. Since the house in Le Van Sy had no telephone he called the next-door bookshop. ‘No more studying,’ he said. ‘Everything is about to change. You have to find a way to earn money.’ That was the last time Ngoc spoke to him. Three days later he was dead, killed by shell fire.
Gradually the noose around Saigon tightened. The huge airbase at Bien Hoa, a few miles to the north-west, came under attack. The city was swollen with refugees. The house at Le Van Sy was crammed to bursting, at one point sheltering thirty-five people sharing one small bathroom and a tiny kitchen. At Saigon’s Catholic Minh Duc University, where Ngoc studied, attendance by students and teachers dropped off to the point where lectures were abandoned. Many of the students came from wealthy families who were preparing to leave. There were rumours of an impending bloodbath. Following Hung’s advice, Ngoc managed to find a clerical job with an advertising company. ‘Come back in ten days,’ they said, but she returned to find the office closed, the owners having fled.
As the end approached, neighbours began to melt away. Without a word to anyone the family from the bookshop next door shut up shop and left. Mr Minh, vice president of the lower house of the National Assembly, lived in a large house across the street. From the roof Ngoc could see into his compound. Each evening the telephone would ring and the family would pack their belongings into their car and head off in the direction of the airport, only to return a few hours later. This little ritual was repeated half a dozen times until one day the family did not return. When next heard of they were living in America.
Ngoc’s family had no intention of leaving. Having no connection to the southern regime, they had nothing to fear. ‘All we wanted was for the war to end.’ Incredibly, as life around them disintegrated, Ngoc’s mother decided to open a shop in their downstairs room in order to generate some badly needed income. They sold pastries, wine, groceries and for a while did good business. People, fearing the collapse of the currency, were stocking up.
In the last days of April the airport came under attack. People living nearby, many of them Catholics who had fled south in 1954, began to stream down Le Van Sy, seeking refuge in churches near the city centre. By now the house was occupied only by Ngoc’s family and several cousins, the friends from Kontum having found refuge elsewhere. Ngoc’s mother wisely insisted that everyone stay on the lower floors for fear a stray shell would hit the house. Her fear was justified. On the final day of the war a passing North Vietnamese tank, on the lookout for snipers, put a shell clean through the upper storey.
Ngoc and her family knew exactly when the war had ended. Lying flat on the ground floor, they could see beneath the closed metal shutters that the leather boots of the southern army had given way to the rubber sandals of the bo doi, the army of North Vietnam.
The newcomers and the citizens of Saigon eyed each other warily. First impressions were surprisingly upbeat. The city had fallen with a minimum of bloodshed. The occupying army were well organised and highly disciplined. Looting and disorder were kept to a minimum. Long-lost relatives who had ‘regrouped’ in the North reappeared, reuniting families that had been divided for thirty years. Before long, groups of idealistic young people were volunteering their services cleaning the streets and sweeping away the detritus of the old regime.
Once liberation euphoria had worn off, however, a new reality began to dawn. The new authorities brought with them a vast security apparatus which operated on the basis that all foreigners were spies and anyone who had ever had contact with foreigners, Americans especially, was a potential spy. Soldiers, police, politicians and civil servants of the old regime were ordered to report for re-education. Some never returned, dying of malaria or dysentery in remote labour camps. Mr Quang, Ngoc’s teacher of English in Kontum, a kindly man who had worked as an administrator for the local police, disappeared for six years, returning with one arm paralysed from a stroke only to find that his wife had abandoned him. He ended up sleeping on the pavement in Saigon and eventually fled the country by boat. One of her schoolteachers, a member of the ruling party of the old regime, disappeared for ten years. A neighbour in Saigon, a lieutenant in the army of the old regime, was gone five years. During this time, families who had lost their main breadwinner struggled to survive. One of Ngoc’s university classmates was a daughter of a former mayor of Hue. He was arrested within hours of the fall of Saigon and detained for ten years. Meanwhile his daughter, excluded from university on account of her background, ended up making mats. ‘I spent three years studying English,’ she said, ‘and ended up making mats.’)
Loudspeakers appeared on every street corner, blasting out from dawn to dusk patriotic music interspersed with propaganda – claims of ever-rising production, increased output per hectare and so on, claims belied by the fact that, day by day, life for most people was getting worse.
Technocrats in positions of responsibility were initially encouraged to remain in post and to provide training for less experienced northern cadres. Little did they know that they were training their replacements. An American-trained senior air-traffic controller at Tan Son Nhut airport who had been sent to Hanoi to help train his opposite numbers in the North, found himself redundant after a couple of years. He ended up running a soup stall where, ironically, his less experienced colleagues came to consult him about problems at work. Such was the state of the economy by this time that he was soon earning more making soup than he had earned as an air-traffic controller. Likewise Mr Minh, who ran a thriving soup stall opposite Ngoc’s house in Saigon. He had been one of the country’s leading meteorologists, but soon found that he could earn more selling noodle soup. In Dalat, the former French hill station north-west of Saigon, the French-trained manager of the Palace Hotel (where Ngoc and I spent our honeymoon) was dismissed and replaced by a Soviet-trained apparatchik. Unsurprisingly, the quality of the service nosedived. Everywhere the story was the same.
In Kontum, where representatives of the new order were even more narrow-minded than those in Saigon, assets were confiscated. Anyone providing employment was deemed an exploiter. Le Ngoc Thanh, a former Viet Minh soldier in the war against the French and best man at our wedding, was the owner of a thriving transport business. He was allowed to keep only one of his trucks, on condition that he drove it himself. Uncle Eight, who had been running a successful tailoring business, was ordered to hand over all but one of his sewing machines and his entire stock of textiles. Overnight he was ruined. In years to come, when word of the disaster reached the old men in the Politburo, former businessmen were invited to reclaim their assets, but the change came too late for Uncle Eight. He died, impoverished, of TB. Money he should have spent on medicine was used to keep his family afloat.
Ngoc’s father was determined to keep his plantation. It was his life’s work and he had long dreamed that it would provide security for his family after his retirement. He soon came under pressure to hand over his van and the tools he used, but he refused. Eventually he sold the van and, hoping to appear less conspicuous, bought a motorcycle to which he attached a small trailer to carry his tools. This got him into trouble with the guard stationed at the bridge over the river on the edge of town, who asserted that towing the trailer was not good for his motorbike. ‘What’s that got to do with you? It’s my bike,’ said Minh, and was duly fined. In the end he took to travelling before the guard came on duty at 6 a.m. and returning after the guard had left. His efforts were in vain, however. Like all farmers he was obliged to sell most of his produce to the state at an artificially low price. Supplies of fertiliser and spare parts for equipment dried up. The coffee bushes became less productive with age, but there was no money to replace them. The plantation had become a drain on the family’s fragile finances. Under pressure from his wife, he eventually sold it – for just $3,000 – and the family went back to making pastries, just as they had done as refugees in Quang Ngai twenty-five years earlier.
In the countryside farmers were organised into co-operatives and obliged to sell most of their produce to the state at prices well below the market rate. The result was a big fall in production and the growth of a flourishing black market. City dwellers without jobs were rounded up and removed to ‘new economic zones’, huge swathes of land reclaimed from scrub, swamp and forest. Life in most of these zones was so hard that many of those relocated there soon drifted back into the cities, preferring life on the streets.
The new authorities brought with them a plethora of new laws and regulations. Every household was provided with an internal passport, known as the family book. Only those members of a household whose names were registered in the family book were entitled to live there. Friends or relatives who migrated to Saigon from elsewhere risked arrest or removal. If the designated head of the household went abroad (legally or illegally) his remaining family were at risk of losing their home unless they could come up with the hefty bribe that might be necessary to reregister the house. The house in Le Van Sy was registered in Ngoc’s name on the grounds that, being a government employee, her name might offer her and her siblings greater security. When she and I married in 1987 and she was preparing to join me in England, she dared not leave until she had succeeded in transferring the house into the name of her sister and brother-in-law, making certain that her family would be allowed to continue living there.
Corruption became endemic. Any successful business was at risk from predatory tax collectors. Even the simplest transactions required ‘presents’ for officials. Official salaries were so low that it was virtually impossible for an honest official to survive. Transactions that had once been simple now became complex. The purchase of a bus ticket, for example, could involve having to queue all night, with no guarantee of eventual success. There were two queues: one for officials and one for the nhan dan, the people. In theory, everything was for the people, but in practice the Party always had priority. The people were the prisoners of the Party. Documents were checked at every turn. There were frequent baggage searches. Bribes had to be paid to pass security posts. A bus journey from Saigon to Kontum that once took twelve hours now took twice as long.
There seemed to be no end in sight. Runaway inflation and a series of devaluations wiped out savings. People who were once prosperous faced ruin. Seeing no prospects for themselves or their children, anyone with a skill marketable in the outside world began to look for a way out. Many left legally, sponsored by relatives in America or Europe; others took to the boats, selling whatever they possessed in order to finance the journey. Preparations had to be made in great secrecy. Friends and neighbours disappeared overnight without a word to anyone. A vast underground network of people smugglers developed. The risks were high. Detection meant imprisonment. Many of the boats were unseaworthy and disappeared in the Gulf of Thailand. Others were attacked by pirates. Unknown thousands perished, among them two of Mr Thanh’s much-loved children. Ngoc’s father, who had hitherto been adamant that, whatever happened, the family should stick together, no longer withheld his consent when younger brother Nga asked to leave. He now lives in Canada. In due course the disillusion spread to many lifelong communists. Colonel Bui Tin, famous throughout Vietnam as the officer whose tank had smashed through the gates of the presidential palace and who had accepted the surrender of the southern regime, ended up living in exile in Paris.
Ngoc was lucky. A few months after liberation she was permitted to resume her studies. Minh Duc University was closed and amalgamated with the University of Saigon. Students were divided into groups and underwent a programme of political education which proved surprisingly interesting. ‘At first we didn’t like it, but the lecturers were good. They were mainly southerners whose families had gone north in 1954 and who had now returned. We asked why, if Vietnam was now democratic, there was only one party. They replied that, since 90 per cent of the population was made up of workers and peasants, only one party was needed.’ The students were required to spend time in the countryside doing manual labour. Ngoc and her friends went twice, once to help dig a canal at Thu Duc, a few miles out of Saigon, and once to Tay Ninh, near the Cambodian border, to clear land and build houses for a new economic zone. The work was hard, although a spirit of camaraderie initially prevailed, but the mood soon soured as reality set in. More than half Ngoc’s fellow students in the English language faculty ended up living abroad.
Ngoc and I first met in the spring of 1985. By that time she was working for Saigontourist, the state travel company. I was the courier for a party of British visitors and she was our guide. I was thirty-seven years old and she was thirty. We chatted and flirted surreptitiously. Opportunities to be alone together were few and far between. Our first kiss was in the lift of Doc Lap Hotel. We managed to prolong the experience by going to the top floor and back half a dozen times without stopping. It should have been a doomed relationship. In a few days my party and I would travel north to Hanoi. A few sweet memories and that would be that, but when the time came to say goodbye I broke down in front of everyone on the bus. Our secret was out. From Hanoi I sent her a postcard with the message I love you and I will return.
I did so in the autumn, though not without difficulty. At that time unofficial contact between Vietnamese and foreigners was strictly forbidden, so a good deal of subterfuge was required. Ostensibly the purpose of my visit was to negotiate further tours on behalf of the travel company I had worked for. That could only be done in Hanoi, so I had to go there first so that my cover story would appear plausible, if challenged, before making my way south. When I finally made it to Saigon, by now rechristened Ho Chi Minh City, Ngoc had arranged for her close friend Kieu to be my guide, and Kieu conspired to bring us together as often as possible without attracting attention. One evening, in twilight, we managed a trip to a local amusement park, where we mingled inconspicuously, chaperoned at a discreet distance by her younger sister, Oanh. Visiting Ngoc at home was out of the question. The nearest I got was to sit in a car on the opposite side of the road while her brother-in-law, Vuong, came over and shook my hand. I wrote to her father, who was then in Kontum, saying that we wanted to marry and promising that I would take good care of her. It was a big step. Marriage between a Vietnamese and a foreigner was almost unheard of.
Having gained the family’s approval, we now had to convince the authorities. The first move was for Ngoc to break the news to her employer. The odds were that this would mean instant dismissal. Her manager was deeply upset at the prospect of losing one of her most experienced guides and did everything she could to talk her out of going. In the end Ngoc was not dismissed, but demoted to domestic tour guide, in which capacity she would have no contact with foreigners. This was actually to our advantage, since she was now able to travel far more widely than if she had continued guiding foreigners. It also meant that she could pursue in person the progress of our application to marry with the authorities in Hanoi.
Our petition moved at a snail’s pace through the thickets of Vietnamese bureaucracy. There was, as Ngoc used to say, a great deal of ‘procedure to proceed’. Documents had to be completed, copied, witnessed, translated; approvals sought at many levels. Ultimately the decision would be taken by the Council of Ministers, no less. The best part of two years passed with no apparent progress. Communication with Vietnam from the UK was difficult. Hardly anyone had a telephone in their home. An exchange of letters could take weeks, not least because all foreign mail was censored, at least in theory. In practice, since Vietnam’s vast, paranoid but inefficient security service lacked the resources to translate all incoming foreign mail, I suspect it simply languished in the post office for a few weeks until someone got round to authorising its delivery. (As one of our ambassadors remarked, ‘I was briefed to expect East Germany, but when I arrived I found Mexico.’) Rather than put a letter in the international post, I resorted (with the help of my friendly travel agent) to finding someone about to visit Vietnam and asking them to post the letter internally, thereby avoiding the censors. Ngoc, meanwhile, had found a reliable foreigner willing to post her replies in Bangkok. This worked well until one day I received a letter containing the sentence ‘I now ill’, the code phrase that meant she was in trouble. Worried, I scoured the world for an inbound tourist willing to relay a message, eventually locating one in a Bangkok hotel at midnight. In due course he brought out a letter saying that our correspondence had been rumbled. The head of the local street committee had hinted that he had seen a copy of a photograph I had enclosed with a previous letter, taken together on the roof of the former presidential palace.
Growing increasingly impatient, I wrote the Vietnamese prime minister a letter which I delivered via his ambassador in London. ‘Although I have been a friend of Vietnam for many years,’ I wrote, ‘I am not asking to be made a hero of the people. Only for permission to marry the woman I love.’ Whether or not that did the trick, who knows, but soon afterwards word came that permission was granted. A date for the wedding was duly arranged and my ticket booked, but there was an added complication: I had been selected to stand for Parliament at the next general election. Rumour had been rife for weeks that an election was imminent. I could not risk being out of the country once a date had been announced, but what kind of impression would it make on my fiancée and her family if I were to cancel at the last minute? It went to the wire. The prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was due to make an announcement a few hours after my flight departed. What to do? I consulted a couple of lobby correspondents, just back from the morning briefing at Number 10. ‘Go,’ they said. ‘There won’t be an election.’ Off I went and, at a stopover in Bangkok, listened carefully to the BBC World Service news. It was confirmed. There was to be no election.
Ngoc and I were married at her home in Ho Chi Minh City on 14 April 1987, she wearing a traditional Vietnamese costume, red Ao dai and white silk trousers, I in my only decent suit. A reception was held for friends and family on the top floor of the Huu Nghi Hotel, at that time Vietnam’s tallest building. We honeymooned at the Palace Hotel in Dalat, a colonial relic with high ceilings and shuttered windows, opening out onto a fine view of the lake and the hills beyond. On 11 June I was elected Member of Parliament for Sunderland South, a seat I would hold for the next twenty-three years. Two months later, on 27 August, carrying all her possessions in a modest suitcase, my new wife arrived at Heathrow airport to join me.
Footnotes
1 US Airforce General Curtis LeMay said in his memoirs that his solution would be to ‘tell the North Vietnamese communists to stop their aggression or we are going to bomb them into the Stone Age’.
2 Vietnamese households with large numbers of children often referred to their children in numerical order rather than by name.