when General Giap launched the brilliant Tet Offensive, breaking U.S. resolve. And it’s well to remember that these Vietnamese who fought the French and Americans for a combined hundred years were the direct descendants of those who forcibly resisted the Chinese invaders for a thousand years — from our eighth century to the eighteenth. (And as we’re constantly being told, a millennium is a long time in politics.)
The Vietnamese, northerners and southerners alike, know how to pull through, get by, and prosper. When I saw my friend Christopher Moore in Bangkok, he recalled:
When I first went to Hanoi in 1990, everything was still pretty basic and grim. There were many bicycles on the streets, but very few private cars. The cars you did see weren’t like the 1950s ones you found all over Havana, which the Cubans have kept in immaculate condition because there aren’t any others to be had. The Vietnamese weren’t restoring or rebuilding cars that way, they were reinventing them. When some vital piece of the engine broke down or actually fell off, they’d replace it with something from an old tractor, plough, lawn mower, or air conditioner: anything they could find to rig up. This made for some strangely unique vehicles. They looked like the crazy inventions in Rube Goldberg cartoons of the 1920s and 30s. No, that’s not right. What they often looked like were the vehicles in the Mad Max movies.
I think this leads to an important point. At the end of the American War, large areas of the country were littered with military detritus. Pieces of tanks, lorries, helicopters, and winged aircraft, not to mention weapons, communications equipment, and all the untold tonnes of other stuff necessary to maintain in the field an army of, at its peak, half a million people, seemed to be everywhere. One sees virtually no such evidence today, apart from what’s displayed as memorials — for example, the partially submerged aircraft in Hanoi that protrudes above the surface of what’s called, in English, B-52 Lake (though it’s actually a pond). The amount of American war surplus that survives being almost infinitesimal, I’m always a little surprised to discover, for example, metal boxes that formerly held belts of .50-calibre machine-gun ammunition being used by sidewalk shoeshine boys to carry their polishes, rags, and brushes. For the Vietnamese turned nearly all abandoned war junk into scrap metal for export. Theirs is not a melancholy or sentimental society, but rather a culture that is always pulling itself up by what in this case could be called their sandal-straps. Practical people, sometimes aggressively so. Practical enough to also do a brisk trade in war nostalgia.
Not long after the war’s conclusion, former U.S. servicemen began returning on nostalgic visits, if nostalgic is the correct word. They were generally well received by a forgiving population. Two million Vietnamese had died in the war. The survivors included one entire generation, possibly two, that had come of age without much knowledge of how a market economy operates. The government saw the great potential in tourism, but worried that not enough U.S. dollars were being spent on admission to such places as Saigon’s Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes. I’ve never been able to confirm this, but my understanding is that the relevant government ministry hired consultants from the West. “Oh, now I see,” I can hear top officials saying as they read the commissioned report. “If we desire their hard currency, we should not insult them to their faces — at least until they’ve bought a ticket.” As a result, the institution is now called the War Remnants Museum. The transition involved no change to the exhibits, and it took place virtually overnight.
M was still doggedly pursuing her job of seeing how much French culture still lingered in Indochina. She was meeting with the director of the Maison de la Francophonie and even found someone who was visiting from France as a representative of the Association d’Amitié Franco-Vietnamienne. She charmed her way into the cozy flat of a welcoming, somewhat French-speaking, Vietnamese family. They lived in the artists’ quarter around Notre-Dame Cathedral, whose priests, in a nod to Western travellers, have special permission to give short sermons in French and English after the regular service in Vietnamese. Our most interesting research discovery was that, unlikely as this sounds, the Rex had begun life as a storage garage for Renault motorcars.
We decided to visit the War Remnants Museum, supposing that even though only China and the U.S. had been mentioned in the original name, there just might be some displays on French war crimes, as well. Well, the museum does possess a guillotine that was used to dispatch captured Viet Minh insurgents in the 1940s. (There is another such instrument on display in Hanoi, at the old prison the French called Maison Centrale and the Americans knew as the Hanoi Hilton — thus confusing Saigon taxi drivers today who hear the phrase and try to drop off their American passengers at the new Hanoi Hilton Hotel, next to the Opera House.) Execution by guillotine ended in Indochina with the French withdrawal in 1954, but continued in France itself until 1977. Another exhibit referred to France at one remove. It was a representation of the so-called tiger cages, which people in the West may remember from the film The Deer Hunter. These little bamboo cages were used by both the Viet Cong and their enemies, though the model at the museum refers specifically to Viet Cong held on Côn Son Island, which the French, in one of their first acts after capturing Saigon, turned into a notorious prison for anti-colonial agitators. (It is now a resort, with a spa.)
Outside the War Remnants Museum sit restored American aircraft (how tiny the jet fighters of the 1960s seem), tanks, and other weapons. What’s striking on the inside, horrifyingly so, are the photographs and other evidence of systemic American brutality in many forms. The museum is housed in what used to be the Saigon headquarters of the United States Information Agency, the same organization that ran the rooftop bar at the Rex as part of its propaganda effort. What the visitor sees on first entering is a glass case containing the medals and decorations donated by former Sergeant William Brown, late of the 173rd Airborne Brigade of the 503rd Infantry: a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, his wings and his marksman’s decoration, a Purple Heart, and various others I couldn’t identify. Brown has added a text: TO THE PEOPLE OF A UNITED VIETNAM. I WAS WRONG. I AM SORRY. His donation was a touching gesture. It has done so much to heal the maimed and restore the dead to life.
— TIDAL ACTIONS —
M and I weren’t having any breakthroughs in terms of French culture in Vietnam. At one point I said, “Even Louisiana takes more pride in its French heritage!” If we were interested in just snapping pictures of more French-style buildings, we could have gone up Highway 20 to Dalat in the Central Highlands. This is a hill station (the very term puts the Indo in Indochina) to which the French would retreat at certain times of the year to escape the crippling heat down below. When most French nationals finally fled the city and the country, they left behind an estimated two thousand villas. Unfortunately, Dalat then reinvented itself as the honeymoon capital of Vietnam, coating itself in all the tacky charm of, say, Niagara Falls, Ontario, and Niagara Falls, New York. Suffice it to say that Dalat boasts a replica of the Tour Eiffel. Such is its reputation for the finer things in life that Dalat is also the name of perhaps the most popular brand of Vietnamese-made wine. The stuff tastes like poor quality grape juice, and its alcoholic content is so low as to be barely measurable; but it’s cheap. So rather than explore the wine country, M and I followed the gorgeous coast of the South China Sea northward toward places whose names have a different resonance.
We came to Nha Trang (Apocalypse Now: “The generals back in Nha Trang would never believe this!”), and there we caught a break, or so we thought. We got invited to relax for a couple of days on a little island, two hours offshore by small boat, run by a French beachcomber-type. It is here, we were told, that Jacques-Yves Cousteau in the 1930s came up with the idea for the aqualung, which he and an engineer, who was his partner in the venture, developed shortly after the Second World War. The island is now being operated as a diving resort. In conversations at the six-stool bar, the proprietor would reveal little about his background in France beyond admitting that he had been in the military. The bar was made of thatch, like the scattering of huts and the open-sided dining area (the chef was French, as well). There was a pleasant little beach, complete with impossibly slim French women,
