War traces remain, but capitalism alive and well in streets of Saigon
IT had been bitterly cold, so when The Duchess spied the sevenday package to Saigon, it seemed a meteorologically sound proposition.
Saigon would be hot, the hotel claimed it owned a decent swimming pool, and the word is the restaurants dish up astonishing food at greasy spoon prices. Besides, I’ve never been to Vietnam, and the deal was crazy cheap. It would be churlish to cavil.
Much of the South was in broad agreement. There were token northerners at the airline checkin for the group, but the biggest chunk were southern farmers. It meant missing a Lions’ test, but it was time to give the gumboots and thermals a break.
The Vietnamese offer a civilised airport welcome to the Kiwi arriving in Saigon. (Ho Chi Min City, if we must). You count out $US25 ($NZ34) in hard cash, and after some token Communist red tape, they give you a visa. Were it this easy to be let through the gates guarding the Land of the Free.
So here I am a few days later, opening the bar fridge in the Grand Hotel — and ready to type out deep thoughts from abroad.
Let’s see. Well yes, we’re having fun. The Duchess is up on the roof drinking gin slings with the farmers. The Vietnamese cuisine is superb. We got done while bargaining in the market, but it was so cheap, who quibbles? There is a near miss a minute, but nobody has been run down by a motor scooter.
The group gets off the bus, it sees things, and it gets back on. And tonight, after the 6pm thunderstorm, we’ll get stuck into local culture, by eating Italian with 10 other Southerners.
But don’t turn your nose up. This is precisely what your short package holiday should be. It’s not your big, questing OE. You dip your toe, create some memories, and jet back home.
But for all that seeming shallowness, never — I repeat never — underestimate a new place’s power to make you think.
With Vietnam, you don’t leave without confronting The War, and there’s a big chunk of Vietnamese warsite tourism which won’t let you. When you read the information boards detailing the dastardliness of ‘‘the enemy’’, a reluctant part of you knows this doesn’t just mean the Americans.
It’s us too. The people on the bus. New Zealand sent a military force of 500 because our government thought it wise we pay our dues to the US military alliance. Some on the bus had been against the war — myself included — so a lunatic part of me wanted museum visitor books where you could sign a page set aside for: ‘‘Not me, honestly I was against all this.’’
At Cu Chi we peered down the entrances into a 120km network of narrow tunnels, where villagers hid by day, and come out at night to fight. Several New Zealand soldiers who qualified as small enough, were among ‘‘The Tunnel Rat’’ volunteers sent underground with a knife, torch, and a ball of string, to seek the Vietcong.
Tourism workers, dressed in their militaries, enthusiastically displayed sharptoothed jungle snares set for we invaders. The traps had practical names like ‘‘the armpit’’, ‘‘the fish trap’’, and ‘‘the folding chair’’. Consider all this, and then for two bucks a round, you can fire off a burst with an AK47.
Today, Vietnam’s Government is trying to accommodate America and Western business. We discover that ‘‘The Exhibition House for US and Puppet (that would be us?) Crimes’’ has been tactfully renamed the ‘‘War Remnants Museum’’. But the captured American tanks, guns and helicopters are still there, along with the Agent Orange exhibits. The message remains.
The war ended in 1975 when the North Vietnamese tanks crashed into Saigon’s Presidential Palace, as the departing regime fled via the rooftop helipad. This palace is another tour, with war rooms that could be from Churchill’s days, interrogation cells, and old bunkers stuffed with old communications technology.
Today, officialdom does very nicely in a country that is still Communist in name. But out on the streets of Saigon, capitalism reigns — it’s every man for himself. I suspect we New Zealanders are more socialist at heart than the Vietnamese.
The Americans saw themselves also fighting Communism for ‘‘the hearts and minds’’ of the populace. But the Vietnam you see now shows this ‘‘hearts and minds’’ battle was about as logical as invading Ireland to make it Catholic.
❛ Never underestimate a new place’s power to make you think❜