Vietnam through the Lens: Part Two
Dong Ha, Vietnam, 2002 Click to See Full-Size
By Edward Palm
It was Bill who first suggested going back to Vietnam. Personally, I was never the sort of Vietnam vet who felt the need to go back in order to go forward. “Some guys never came home, you know what I mean?” an ironic friend likes to joke, whenever the topic of my Vietnam service comes up. But I don’t mind because I know he knows I’m not that way. For years after Vietnam, especially after I learned about the history of that country and of our involvement, I harbored my share of bitterness about bearing the brunt of enemy fire and friendly folly, but I always prided myself on keeping that experience in proper perspective and on getting on with my life. To make a long story short, I got out after my initial enlistment and went to college. I got married (and still am, to the same woman). I went on to graduate school. I interrupted my graduate schooling to try life as an officer in the Marine Corps. I eventually returned to graduate school and finished my Ph.D., but when I couldn’t get an academic job, I went back in the Marine Corps and stayed for 20, retiring in 1993 as a major. I’ve been a civilian academic ever since.
Bill, too, is not the sort to live his life looking back. If he had a mind to do so, he could certainly stake a greater claim on self-indulgence than I could. He came to CAP from an infantry battalion, extended his tour of duty to become a CAP Marine, and even reenlisted and did a second combat tour of duty in
Dong Ha, Vietnam, 1967 Click to see Full-Size
Vietnam. He wanted to stay in for a career but, despite all he had been through and done, he couldn’t get promoted beyond sergeant. There were just too many infantry NCOs competing for too few places as our Vietnam commitment wound down. He went home to Grand Rapids, Michigan, got married, co-owned an auto body shop for awhile, and went on to spend most of his working life as an insurance adjuster.
I can’t speak for Bill, of course, but I suspect that Dispatches author Michael Herr could have been speaking for both of us in writing that “Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.” It was where we were young and” the world was all before” us. You can’t discount that sort of nostalgic pull–even among veterans who don’t feel the need to make peace with what they did or witnessed.
In my own case, it was a little more complicated. My Combined Action experience marked an important turning point in my personal journey from innocence to experience. I could even credit it with changing the course of my life, with making me realize that I wanted an education after all. I went on to become a professor, of sorts, and to write and lecture on the war as an outgrowth of the American cultural narrative. (Note that I did not go on to become a professional Vietnam veteran, another vocation altogether.) And I had rationalized our defeat along the same lines that Graham Greene, way back in 1956, in The Quiet American, had foretold it. “. . . in 500 hundred years,” Greene’s cynical narrator tells the naïve title character, “there may be no New York or London, but they’ll be growing paddy in these fields.” Like Greene, I thought Vietnam would forever remain impervious to Western influence and that that was what the war was largely about.
Greene and I were both wrong. What Bill and I found in 2002 was a Vietnam in which the local rice-growing economy had all but died out. Agribusiness had taken over there too; the rice was being grown on large Japanese-Vietnamese collectives. Bricks and concrete blocks were fast replacing thatch and bamboo as the building materials of choice for family homes. Everyone had electricity, and television antennas sprouted from most roofs. The World Cup soccer matches just happened to be taking place when we were there. Everywhere we went, people were crowded around TV sets, watching the soccer matches as intently as Americans watch the Super Bowl. The major highways and roads were paved, or in the process of being paved. Motorbikes and trucks crowed those roads, especially in the towns and cities.
Graham Greene, I suspect, would have been especially surprised at how the countryside had emptied out; people were flocking to the cities in search of work. Our old village—the one Papa Three had been charged with pacifying, no longer existed. A few old people were still there, but there were also some newcomers—a family that had moved there recently in order to work in a nearby brick factory. Clearly, Vietnamese people are no longer rooted to the land on which their ancestors are buried. They will move to where the work is. If that’s not a Western trait, I don’t know what is.
But, to me at least, the most surprising (and personally gratifying) discovery was the one that led to the second photograph, the one of the Dong Ha kids.
Bill and I had spent our first few days back “in country” down south, seeing the obligatory sites in the former Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City. Our main objective, however, had always been the Dong Ha – Cam Lo area in what had been the former South Vietnam’s northernmost province. That’s where Bill and I had served. Hence, our itinerary took us from Ho Chi Minh City, via Vietnam Air, to the Phu Bai Airport, where we were met by the guide with whom we would spend the rest of visit, Nguyen Chanh Trieu.
Trieu, or “Tango,” as he liked to be called, was a university graduate who had studied English and French literature and who had planned to be a teacher. For reasons he never divulged, he enlisted in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (the “ARVN”) instead and was assigned to the Marines as an interpreter. He was 59 when we met him. His resume included being shot twice and spending three years in a reeducation camp. Trieu felt it was wrong for America to abandon all the Vietnamese people who had helped her during the war, but he wasn’t consumed by bitterness or self-pity. He too had gotten on with his life and was taking his opportunities where he could find them, working as a free-lance guide for returning American veterans.
After checking us in to our hotel in Dong Ha, Trieu got us back in the car, and we drove out of town on Route 9. A few hundred meters after crossing the Song Cam Lo—the Cam Lo River—on a modern steel and concrete bridge, we turned left off Highway 9 and drove up a hill into a residential area that looked remarkably like an American suburb. It wasn’t a tract development. The houses were not all alike, but they were built along western lines. Some even had two stories.
Trieu had the driver stop at the top of the hill, in the middle of this neighborhood, and asked us if we knew where we were. “Somewhere outside of Dong Ha,” was the best we could come up with before Trieu had us get out of the car and led us between two houses into someone’s backyard. There in front of us was a shrapnel -scarred small aircraft hangar that some enterprising Vietnamese had turned into a carpenter shop. Trieu went on to explain that where we were standing had been the airfield of the sprawling U.S. Marine Base in Dong Ha, and this hangar was the only remnant of our once proud presence.
That lone battle-scarred hangar made me think of “Ozmandias,” a sonnet by the nineteenth-century English Romantic poet Percey Bysshe Shelley. The poem is essentially the report of a traveler to “an antique land” who came across a large broken statue in the desert. Only the legs remained standing, and the rest of the statue lay pieces scattered all about. The inscription on the base of the statue, however, was still legible: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” “Nothing beside remains,” the traveler reports:
Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
While the site of our former base is hardly a desert, the poem “Ozymandias” still resonates with me. It recalls the boundless American hubris that took us in to Vietnam and would eventually send me and Bill and a few thousand other Americans out into the countryside to make Vietnam over into our image. And when the Vietnamese frustrated that ambition, we turned the war over to the “firepower freaks,” as Michael Herr calls them, sending in the B-52s. For all our pretensions to the contrary, we had fallen into the imperial pattern established long ago by the Roman Army. Had wiser heads not prevailed, we too would have “made a desert and called it peace.”
The irony is that the Vietnamese today do seem to be making Vietnam over into our image, but they are doing it on their own terms and according to their timeline. The Vietnamese kids I encountered in Dong Ha in 2002 were neither fearful nor apprehensive. They were exuberant. They were clearly thrilled to find Americans suddenly in their midst, and they immediately thronged around us. All of them appeared to be well-dressed and well-cared-for. But what drew me to capture this image was the realization that, unlike the kids I photographed in 1967, these kids were allowed to be kids. They were enjoying a childhood free from adult responsibility. But I was also struck by the wonderful irony of their situation. Here they were, growing up on the site of our former base, with no memory of the war that tore their country apart and cost upwards of three million Vietnamese lives and over 55,000 American ones.
After Bill and I got back home (back to “The World,” we would have said in 1967), I proudly showed my Dong Ha kids photo to some friends, all of whom liked it. One woman was especially impressed, so much so that she advised her husband to “get the same kind of camera that Ed has.”
Part One of “Vietnam: Through the Lens” appeared on Friday, July 3rd. It can be read here.
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Edward Palm is the Dean of Social Sciences and Humanities at Olympic College in Bremerton, WA. Dr. Palm is also a retired Major in the US Marine Corps and a Vietnam Veteran.
Photograph appears courtesy and copyright of the author.
This entry was posted on Sunday, July 5th, 2009 at 11:36 pm and is filed under Non-Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
