[NYTr] From Ho Chi Minh City, a Tribute to My Vietnam Vet Father

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Counterpunch - Nov 12, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/brown11122007.html


Letter from Ho Chi Minh City

A Tribute to My Vietnam Vet Father

By BEN BROWN
Ho Chi Minh City.

I can't say that I was exactly nervous in the days before I met my
father in Vietnam. He has come a long way since my childhood, when his
world suddenly darkened, and he would lose days on end to haunted
memories of his war. I remember him from those times, sitting all night
in his sadness and a flickering light, drinking the green-label Sierra
Nevadas and wearing out our VHS copy of Platoon. But his family and
friends know that he has aged well, mellowing with the passing of time.

So, then, not nervous; but I was curious how he would find himself in
this country, what it would mean to him to return for the first time
after nearly forty years. Our home is the Mattole Valley on northern
California's Lost Coast, where my father runs a modest cattle
operation. My mom works in the schools there and also co-founded the
Lost Coast Camp with her friend Ellen, which runs every summer in
Petrolia.

I arrived in Vietnam a few days before my parents, after a year of
living in steaming, teeming Bangkok. I've been teaching English in a
public school there, as well as studying Thai. The first night that I
arrived here in what is officially called Ho Chi Minh City but to
locals is still Saigon, I sat in a bar in the backpacker area known as
Pham Ngu Lao. As I looked around at the staff-a bunch of smiling,
friendly Vietnamese kids in their twenties-I experienced something that
might be called a vicarious flashback. I felt myself as my father, and
saw these young men as theirs before them: its '68 and we kill each
other. But it lasted only for a moment; a slight, pretty waitress broke
through my somber reverie, clinking the scotch in my hand with her
Tiger, and shouted what has to be one of the best words for 'cheers' in
any language: "Yo!"

For most of his time in 'Nam, my father served in the Iron Triangle, an
area to the north of Saigon that buffered the capital from the
Cambodian border and a terminus of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. He also saw
time in the Mekong Delta. He fought in an infantry recon platoon
through the Tet Offensive, and survived countless firefights, mortar
attacks and ambushes. Many of his brothers were not so lucky. In the
twelve months of 1968, his infantry company of ninety young men took
100% casualties, including more than a dozen flag-draped coffins. His
war ended when he was shot in the arm after his platoon was ambushed
west of the village of Rach Kien, on the eastern edge of the Plain of
Reeds, on November 22, 1968.

My folks hired a Vietnamese guide through a friend in the US. Mr. Khanh
is maybe five foot eight and strong, with a round face and copper skin.
He packs a few extra pounds around his waist, the dividends of a man
who enjoys an occasional rich meal and a cold beer. On first
impression, he was quiet and polite, with a bright gleam in his eyes.
Over the next ten days, we would come to appreciate both the scope of
his historical knowledge and his easy friendship. He is the son of a
Catholic family originally from the northern city of Hue that fled
south after the communist takeover of the North, where Catholics were
quite violently persecuted. After 1975 and the fall of Saigon, several
of his family members were sent to 're-education' prisons, and he
himself fled to a Hong Kong refugee camp as a 'boat-person.' He finally
returned in 1996, just in time for the economic collapse of the
following year. Despite all of this, he remains remarkably upbeat about
the future of his country and refuses to dwell on the past. I believe
that his presence and this perspective did much to welcome my father
and put him at ease.

Mr. Khanh took us on a trip up Highway 13, leading north out of the
capital through what was the Iron Triangle. In the war, this was known
as "Thunder Road" for the constant rocket attacks on American truck
convoys. My father remembered scattered, thatch-roof villages
surrounded by rice paddy. Now we saw attractive three story houses,
sprawling industrial parks and growing prosperity. Indeed, many of the
places he fought in seem to have been swallowed up by the Saigon
sprawl. As we drove on, he whistled low or muttered incredulously at
all the change swirling around him. He tried over and over to impress
upon my mother and I what it used to look like. It wasn't until close
to Lai Khe that the city thinned, and something of what he remembered
returned.

Lai Khe was a major air base supporting the First Infantry Division. He
told me of a massive camp centered on a paved airstrip and surrounded
by concertina wire. During the war, it would have been a flurry of
activity. Bombers, attack helicopters, tanks and APC's, artillery
batteries and bunkers; thousands of fighting men, and thousands more of
the ever-clean officers pejoratively called REMF's by the front-line
GI's. Poor southern white boys, urban blacks, Native Americans,
Hispanics and Hawaian islanders, thrown together into units that became
closer than family. There were mess halls and a hospital, and the men
and women to run them. There were USO shows and banks of diesel
generators and nightly mortar attacks. And there was the inevitable
Vietnamese town that sprung up on its edge, full of the laundries,
bars, whorehouses, hawkers and peddlers of all kinds that such camps
draw.

And now: virtually nothing remains. The government planted a vast
rubber-tree plantation atop its ruins. Under the deep shadows those
trees cast, we found a brief section of crumbling pavement that Mr.
Khanh told us once was part of the airstrip. There were a few large
permanent bunkers still standing, like the legs of Ozymandias, though
hard-up locals had broken up the concrete in places to sell the re-bar.
Beyond that: red earth, rice, mango trees, peppercorn vines and
barefooted country kids.

My father volunteered. His motivations were mixed: a tradition of
military service in my family extends back to the earliest years of our
Republic, and he honored this as well as his blue-collar patriotism.
Together with wanderlust, the GI bill, and undoubtedly some 20-year-old
machismo, he went willingly while millions of his peers sought student
deferrments, burned their draft cards or emigrated to Canada. But by
the time he returned home his outlook had changed. He carried a Purple
Heart, the gear and identity papers of a dead NVA officer he'd killed,
and a lifetime's worth of internal conflict wrought by a growing
recognition that he and his brothers had been used and then abandoned.

At the start, my father was not unlike so many of my generation who
have volunteered to fight this new war in Muslim lands. They mostly
believe in what America is doing over there, and believe what our
leaders tell them. But very few of these leaders ever saw war
themselves. When my parents go to protests to stop this war, he wears
his military decorations with both sadness and pride.

Together with Mr. Khanh, we visited the war museum in Saigon. Its walls
are covered now with a photographic dedication to the many journalists
who died during the conflict. The pictures tell tragic stories; their
truths are impervious to the propaganda that at times composed their
captions. They showed boys from both sides blown to pieces. They showed
the mud and blood and terror that is war. War reveals humanity's
fundamental bipolarity-in the face of such unspeakable carnage and
barbarism our greatest qualities surface: a picture of a blown out
crater and two men down in the mud, one with most of his torso gone and
dying, and the other holding his hand in comforting love. At some point
on the tour, somewhere between these pictures and the display case of
Soviet-made 82mm mortar tubes, my father disappeared. I found him
later, sitting in the shade outside, his head down in one hand and his
other holding his straw hat. All around him, tourists from a dozen
countries swarmed about the tanks and artillery pieces, chattering and
snapping photos, as the Vietnamese peddled over-priced bottles of
water, postcards and chewing gum.

I've heard many people speak of a veteran's return leading to something
called 'closure'. If there even is such a thing, I doubt that my father
will ever find it. He will never forget the faces of the men around him
who died, or that he killed other men. But that day in Saigon, he
brought the identity papers with him. They were of a young man he
always told us was a hero, though an enemy. He was an NVA officer,
perhaps twenty-five like me. His unit was overrun and my dad and
several other Americans pinned him down on a day in March of '68. They
shouted at him in pidgin Vietnamese to give himself up. Instead he
stood and fired and killed and then died himself. He was buried along
with the rest of the enemy in an unmarked grave.

At first, I think my father carried his things like trophies; I know
that over time they came to hang from his neck like a karmic weight. So
we sat in an air-conditioned room with the director of the museum, who
works with a Vietnamese project that identifies missing soldiers. My
father spoke to him gravely, through our friend Khanh, and told him his
story. He spoke of the man's courage under fire and the feeling of
respect that fighting men develop for their enemies. He gave him the
identity papers, including a picture of a dark strong face with a
military haircut. This director said that, by the insignia on his
uniform, he could tell what NVA unit he'd fought in, and thus where he
came from in Vietnam. Perhaps an anonymous family in the far north will
finally learn of their fallen son's resting place, and perform the
rites and rituals he was denied. We all shook hands.

We walked out again, slowly, into the Saigon inferno. My folks held
each other, and I walked just behind. There was no profound change in
the world, or in his face: only that he now has fresh, warmer memories
of this place so long synonymous with hell to seed atop the scars in
his mind. I walked feeling blessed to be a part of this journey of
return, and with the sense that I've never been closer to understanding
my father.

[Ben Brown teaches in Ho Chi Minh City. He can be reached at
aminbrown at gmail.com ]