A lifetime in two weeks

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Happy New Year

It's Friday night, Tet has unofficially begun and Saigon is hot, sweaty, and pulsing. Beer halls and discos have sprouted out of nowhere and overflow with people and music. Exotic women with long hair and slit dresses are cruising the boulevards on their motor cycles. Cay and I are returning from a pre-Tet party at his university. I stare out the window of the taxi as it inches through the Bacchanal. I want to freeze everything so I can take it all in. I want to be 20 again.

Return to Ho

Barry and I returned from the North earlier this week, but we returned to a home in crisis. One of Chi's cats has been in labor for days. One kitten is already born, but two more won't come out. Meanwhile, the mother refuses to feed the one that is born. Days have passed. Chi is very worried. She stays up all night massaging the mother cat's belly and trying to get it to feed her baby. I am awed by the empathetic connection between mothers that apparently transcends differences in species.

I try to help out by accompanying the twins on their cross-town drive to their school. It's a fancy private school; instruction is in German. As the van pulls into the school's driveway a guard swings open a heavy metal gate topped with spikes. Everyone in the van holds out their hands while he squirts them with disinfectant.

Inside the walls I find a tight knit group of ex-pats that brings back memories of the different times in my life when I was an ex-pat. It's a lifestyle that comes equipped with interesting friends, social functions, and a heady sense that one is a citizen of the world first and of some particular nation second.

Just wanna ride on my motor cy...

Last Tuesday Barry and I hatched a plan to visit the mangrove swamps in Can Gio district. We hired motorcycles and a guide. I rode on the back of the guide's motorcycle, but Barry, an experienced rider, drove himself.

Being on a motorcycle shifted my perspective. Instead of being a bemused observer on the sidewalk, I was a corpuscle in the Asian bloodstream of motorcycles, busses, and conveyances that defy labels. Right of way is determined in the blink of an eye. Yet there are no curses or obscene gestures. Where is the road rage? At home I can't drive a block without at least once thinking that the guy in front of me is a cretin. I couldn't believe Barry managed this chaos on his own, but every time I turned around he was right on our tail, still alive.

We made it to a boat launch an hour too early and had to wait for the tide to come in and lift our boat out of the mud. Our guide explained that the NVA had secret bases in this swamp where they would hide during the day and launch attacks against Saigon at night. The locals called it the Forest of Kill. Later in the day we discovered odd tree-bare patches in the swamp, which is elsewhere a hopeless tangle of roots. Our guide claimed these spots were where the US army used defoliant to clear the brush. Forty years later and still nothing grows there.

Our boat came ashore at some corny tourist attraction. The place was run down and looked like it hadn't seen a customer since the Diem administration. The main attraction was crocodile fishing. They put Barry and me on a metal raft floating in a pond filled with crocodiles and let us dangle pieces of fish over the side. We practically had these things in our laps!

The next day Barry was sick with a cold that I probably gave to him last week. He wanted to stay home, so I called my motorcycle driver and the two of us spent punishing hours driving all the way to the Mekong Delta. To avoid another dilapidated theme park, I hired a boat to take me to a random island in the river and spent the day on my own wandering through a fishing village. I must have arrived during the broadcast of an important soap opera. In every house people were lying on hammocks watching TV. (It's easy to see into the houses because most don't have walls on the side facing the street so that they can double as shops.)

Final Thoughts

I'm spending my last afternoon in Vietnam at the bar on the roof of the Rex hotel. This used to be the hangout for American officers during the war. Now it has grown into a modern four-star hotel that probably retains little of its original ambiance.

Every American soldier knew the exact number of days he had until he could go home. I always assumed that leaving Vietnam, removing one's self from the line of fire, was a 100% good thing, but sitting at the Rex I wonder if some of my bar stool's former occupants had some tiny grain of regret about leaving a place in which they felt so alive and useful, only to resume soulless jobs working in factories and offices back home. This has been an especially full trip for me. I feel like I've lived a lifetime in a few short weeks. I feel so alive here. It makes me anxious to think that in a few days I will return to my empty house back in the World.

P.S.

I want to end by saying a few words about the war. When I arrived here I saw a thriving country with communist ideology reduced to a few hammer-and-sickle banners flapping impotently in front of a Calvin Klein outlet. What happened to all of the dire forecasts of falling dominoes? What exactly were the members of my generation sacrificing their lives to prevent? I need an apology from someone.

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