Rubber Plantations, Soviet Rockets and an old Aussie.

Hotel Ten Xian
Hoi Ann
Central Vietnam

I am writing these notes on the first real desk that I have come across on our travel. Our room is large, cool airy and has french windows that are thrown wide open. Hence the airiness. It overlooks a deep green paddy field,; this being Vietnam, I can not tell whether it is a faux paddy field or a working one. The test, one suspects is to note whether a water buffalo comes along at some stage, chewing things, or pulling a plough. We are in the middle of Vietnam, halfway through the country in fact, in a small town of ancient buildings by a putrid river. Indeed most rivers in Vietnam are putrid until they get closer to the sea. There they graduate to merely being polluted. Twenty miles off shore, deep into international waters, one wonders if the sea is clean.

There are about 4000 words here and only 8 photos, but if you can struggle through the words, you might be amused, or perhaps surprised. Vietnam is truly fascinating, and rather complex.

I hope you enjoy.... and now we must hop on the Hanoi Express,
Until the next Missive.
Raf

SAIGON- SOUTH VIETNAM
But to explain Vietnam I must go back a few days.. to Saigon (I refuse to call it Ho Chi Minh City, because if the great man took one look at it, he would disown it- That and the fact that no other Vietnamese calls it that.)

The utterly refreshing thing about Saigon is that travellers or tourists as you might think of them, are a side show. This huge port city gets on with the business of doing business, manufacturing stuff, shipping stuff, importing stuff, stealing stuff, copying stuff, ripping people off and every other kind of stuff, both legal and illegal that ine could imagine. An American commando once told me that Saigon was a 24hour city, a city that was vibrant, all throughout the Vietnam war and always doing business. Perhaps the city changed in the 1970’s but I would say that the description was still apt.

It is a concrete city, with many modern and quite unstable looking flats, but the new concrete often shares space with old stucco and French type architecture. Motorcycles constantly zoom down the streets, on the cylcle lanes, in the gutter, and on the pavement. The drivers drive reasonably slowly and with a degree of fairness. They expect pedestrians to simply walk in front of them, (there is no other way to cross the road.) and therefore they politely avoid them. It is a bit like walking across a beach with a strong tide going out around your legs.

With the exception of the back packer street of Buu Dien, foreigners, are an unimportant amusement for the locals. After our ignominious retreat from Chau Doc we arrived in Saigon by bus. Air-bus A320 to be exact. Our plan was to see if we could get into Vietnam and, if not return to Holland to get a new passport, or fly straight to China. The Vietnamese Air border police were not fazed by Cisca’s slightly damadged passport and we were in. We stayed at the Viet Ngi Hotel, a strange tall building with clean rooms, helful staff and no space wasted on a restaurant, bar or breakfast area. We had five days to kill until the Dutch Consulate General opened. Cisca wanted to get a new passport so that the border guards at our next underused land crossing would not turn her back again.

To kill time, we decided to fly somewhere pleasant. The island paradise of Phu Quoc seemed an excellent choice to rest and relax. Vietnam airlines may have excellent modern airbuses and e-ticketing, but it is not possible to buy a ticket online. So we dropped into one off the plethora of travel agents on Buu Dien street to buy tickets.


“Return plane full on Monday” said the computer tapping agent.
“Tuesday?” We asked.
“Full” (The helpful Vietnamese lady pronounced this: phooooo)
“Wednesday?- let me guess Phoooo?” I asked.
“Yes” She smiled as if to say “now you get it-Book in Advance!”
“Ok so how about the plane to Dalat” we asked about the French hill station.
“Aha” she tapped away on her computer “phoooo!”


So we walked out of the travel agent and just carried on walking. We did not have the energy to take a taxi for 4 hours and did not really want to join a Saigon tour full of pissed danes who only wanted to get their photo taken in a tunnel and fire an M60 Belt fed machine gun. We simply went for a stroll in Saigon. We came across a market and a palace and looked around. Sleeping came easily even in the noisy city. We extended our stay as each morning came upon us, and found that strangely, the city had enormous charm and history mixed in with its complete madness. The Saigonese also had a sense of kindness, friendliness and sense of humour that we never anticipated. And so it was, that three days after I should have been lying on a beach, I found myself on the roof of the presidential palace. When I say presidential, I mean presidential for the ancien regime. Presidents Thieu and Diem had inhabited this building, not Comrade Ho. Indeed His Excellency Mr Ho, never got to see Saigon under his control, he died before the war was over. Rather fittingly, the elegant four story building is now called the re-unification palace. The Socialist Northern Government still use it for functions, but in the meantime, it is open to the general public. Cisca and I climbed up through the multiple stairwells and looked into cabinet meeting rooms, map rooms, planning rooms and bedrooms. All of the rooms were spartan, well laid out and carpeted with lush red Chinese dragon carpet. This was not a versailles of the east, or the palais D’Imelda Marcos. (The Phillipine 1st lady with 1000 pairs of shoes). This was a simple and functional seat of government. The only give away to the importance of building were the bank of at telephones in every room. Some rooms had five or seven, including the bedrooms.

I climbed up out of the offices, past the souvenir shop and onto the four “sided tower”. This was effectively a large hotel lobby on the roof surrounded by glass against the rain. Visitors were afforded a view of the main boulevard of Saigon and the gorgeous gardens of the palace, The only difference to a hotel was that behind the tower, on a lower level was parked a camouflages American “Huey” helicopter with the explanation that the president would tour in this.

“Tour or run away” I wondered.
Throughout my childhood and teens I had read about Vietnam, and its aftermath for America. The disastrous and brutal war, the Northern take over, the vietnamese boat people, the humiliation of America, the post Vietnam Psyche, and Ronald Reagan. I once asked my father what on earth Ronald Reagan had done? He replied that he had given the Americans their pride back, raised their morale as it were… after Vietnam.
“That was very important for America” My father had said. I had seen the films, read the newspaper articles, and now here I was, standing on the roof of the boss with a bunch of gawping asian tourists.

I started thinking- Was this the country that had taken America’s pride? How did it loose its pride? Was it the 2 million dead Vietnamese Civilians (+1m NVA) , or the 58,000 dead American Servicemen? Or was it the cold hard fact that one of the strongest nations in the world at that time had come to some shitty rice paddyland and failed to hold half of it? The paralle of Vietnam and Iraq is rather unpleasantly stark. 1 million Iraqi civilians (approx) are dead, and the indisputably most powerful nation in the world is visibly incapable of subduing the small shenzy arab nation. I feel slightly sorry for the Americans, while they are good nice people, they stumble like clutz’s from one disaster to another. I feel more sorry for the Iraqi shopkeeper who’s family have been murdered.

My thoughts brought me back to the present. “What a wonderful way to put your enemies down- to show the people that you have won..” I said to myself, “Just turn the most important building into a tourist attraction.” I stayed on the roof for a while. I never thought I would ever be here, and now that I was here I could not take it all in.

There is of course much more to Vietnam than the war, and so we went to the old French Post Office. Here we looked at the huge mural maps on the walls, and the décor. Even the floor had the most beautiful tiles. Outside sat the red brick version of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. It looked so French and yet so perfectly placed here in Saigon. I was fast learning, that even in a concrete city, history is everywhere and the history defines so much of what is new. Even the central market building, an undeniably Vietnamese place, is 93 years old and built by our Gallic cousins.

Having seen so much and yet nothing, of Saigon, we decided that we should go to the sea to breathe clean air and take a day off sightseeing before Cisca had to face the Consulate.


VUNG TAU- AND THE BATTLE OF LONG TAN

“Can you sell us a hydrofoil ticket to Vung Tau” We asked another travel agent.
“Yes, $10 each way” He replied positively.
We booked a return and headed off to the Saigon River. The river is in effect a large brown port. The banks are one big wharf, with permanently full berths, constantly working cranes and ships from as far apart as Holland, Malta and North Korea. Israeli and Chinese Containers were unloaded alongside with bags of something from somewhere. Being an avid activity watcher, I could have watched the port action all day, but our hydrofoil waited for no one. The Soviet built rocket was impeccably maintained with paint, clean carpet and airline seats. The lines of rivets seemed to be all there.
“Hang on” I thought! “Rivets.. who still uses rivets?”
The only concession to westernisation were the four domestic air conditioning units that were bolted to the roof. Their pipes disappeared into the cabins.

We took our seats and waited. The Japanese air con thumped out bitterly cost air and even more unpleasant cold water. The windows, partially hidden by horrid green curtains, had been strengthened with fibre glass resin and were therefore opaque. Shapes without definition were visible through most of them. At exactly 0855 the soviet engines started up and grumbled for five minutes. At 0900, we slipped our lines and turned in the middle of the river. The turbines growled more loudly. They reminded me of a pride of lions calling to each other, and then without warning, we were up on our hydrofoils and doing 20 knots. We skimmed past the docks and down the Saigon river for the next hour and half. At times we came perilously close to the edge, and I could see farmers in their conical hats, but soon enough, we burst out onto the open sea at the same 20 knots. Now we stopped skimming and started punching and bouncing. The rocket never wavered and within 10 minutes we were again tying up at the new wharf at Vung Tau. Disembarking was done from one swaying hydrofoil to another and then another and finally onto the modern concrete wharf.

Initially Vung Tau was a disappointment. The concrete cap de st Jacques hotel was nice enough in the rooms, but the hotel would not honour the prices on the internet and would not let us in until late and would not let us keep our passports. The beaches were crammed with umbrellas and Vietnamese weekenders. All they seemed to want to do was eat , smoke and drink. That was the Vietnamese way of escaping the week. Get some grub down you, smoke until you feel relaxed and sink as many cans of Heineken as Brit on a stag night in Amsterdam. After all the travelling and wandering through Saigon, I had had enough. I ate a huge plate of noodles with beef, and fell sleep on the bed. I suppose I wasted the rest of the afternoon, but my excuse was that it was culturally appropriate. Cisca woke me at 4 pm saying that we should do something cultural. This did not mean buy a packet of 555state express and a 6 pack of Dutch beer, but a walk up a small hill is sheeting tropical rain to see a statue of Jesus Christ. Try to imagine Rio de Janiero but on a smaller hill and in a rainstorm. At the summit, we looked at the black rain clouds that were either pissing on or getting closer. By mutual consent we decided that this was not a kodak moment and headed down to the base. Keen to explore more of Vung Tau, we slid in our flipflops, along the marble pavement and down the hill towards the ferry port. This was a slightly less commercial part of town.

“Look a café” said Cisca. “We can have tea. And get out of the rain”.
“Ok” I thought and looked over. A bunch of obviously inebriated Australians were sitting in wicker chairs shouting “ZZZ beautiful heah maite- ZZZ great tuckah!”
With some trepidation we joined them and ordered tea. This was Belly’s bar and restaurant. Belly was an absent New Zealander with an Australian accent. He had spent many years offshore, and had retired with a bar to Vung Tau. And he was not fat. We started talking with the polite but semi sozzled middle aged Australian men. I thought they might be oil workers looking for prostitutes, but they turned out to be cultural tourists who had come to see a friend. They were as amusing and well behaved as could be expected.

Before leaving Saigon, I had seen a photo of a centurion tank on a wall of a travel agency. It was captioned. “1 Autralian repair group-Vung Tau” Now how you repair something with a centurion tank beats me, so I rang my old Australian friend GXXX. Having had a colourful past, he was midly interested in Australian Military History and currently lived in Nairobi- the line was very bad.
“Hey I’m off to Vung Tau tomorrow” I shouted “Have you been there?”
“Yes, but only at the airstrip- you need to go north to Nui Dat and then get some ex-VC bloke to take you to the battle of Long Tan”
“Ok” I shouted back having barely comprehended what he had said.”Where the hell is Nui Dat?”
“About half an hour’s flying time north of Vung Tau airfield in Huey”
“Right- “I said dismissing the idea immediately. This was a typical GXXX- Go and find something that was there 40 years ago and the only direction is a name of a small village, a point on the compass and inaccurate flying time. However at Belly’s bar, it occurred to me that one of these Aussies might know where Long Tan was.

“Does anyone know where the Long Tan Cross is?” I asked the group.
“Oh yeaaaaaa. “ Said one “Talk to Peter mate, he’s the one that knows. He does the tours” said one.
“Oiii PeeTeeeee,” he shouted “Some bloke here wants to see Long Tan”

Peter came over, he had shaven grey hair, a singlet and shorts. He was reasonably sober and utterly charming.
“If you like I can organise a taxi to take you” He said. “$60 just pay the cabbie”
Cisca and I agreed that this would be a nice way to spend our last day in Vung Tau and agreed, at the last minute, he said - “I’ll come with you- no one knows Nui Dat like me- and I won’t take money ”
“You were there?” I asked.
“I was there” he replied- “But long after Long Tan. Just be here at eight and we’ll go”

Peter insited on being called PT. Pronounced Peeeeteeeee in “strine” the language of the Australian. As good as his word, he was there before us at 0800 and had a Toyota ersatz 4x4 waiting. We piled in and drove off. PT pointed out the edge of the airstrip the blatcoe club for rnr and and we drove off north.
“I was a national serviceman you see, in 5th battalion Royal Australian Regiment.” (This is abbreviated in strine to “5raaar”) “we came over as reinforcements on Qantas. All quite funny really, when the plane stopped in Singapore we had to wear civilian shirts to get off the plane while they re-fuelled. Jungle boots, greens and silly shirts. Then we came here in caribous from Saigon and get started.”

At this point we were driving through a small village with some concrete huts, this was the local village where we pulled all the locals to. We levelled their villages and made them live here so that we could keep an eye on them.
“So was this village VC?”
“Mate every village was VC” he replied “these guys had no choice, the VC ruled the night and forced people to at least be sympathetic if not join. At night time we had a curfew and knew that anyone out was VC. We could hear them a mile off, they would spit and smoke and talk and walk on the paths”
“What would you do?”
“ambush them- again and again and again. We never used paths. We would always walk through the bush. We would bend branches and move silently. They wouldn’t bother. We’d have a contact roughly every four days. I wanted to come here, I believed we were doing the right thing, but then we were pretty well brainwashed.” He rambled on under questioning . I asked him how he felt when he left.
“We all got choppered down to Vungers (Vung Tau in “Strine”) and then sent out on boats to an aircraft carried and sailed down to Perth and Sydney. HMAS Melbourne it was. I sat on the back deck and watched Vietnam disappear and said “I’m never want to see the place again.” I just thought the people were so horrible.” He paused at this point and then said with a smile: “Also its not much fun being on a two way firing range”.

We arrived at a stump of concrete gates. And stopped in a rubber plantation. “this was the main gates, over there” He pointed to the south “were the artillery,” we walked through the rubber trees and passed stones with the Australian Artillery battery’s insignia painted on them. “That’s all that’s left now, gates, foxholes, roofless bunkers and painted stones” PT continued. We toured the helipads called KANGAPAD, SAS hill and ANZAC lines. “I was up here on the side of this hill for three months” he chuckled, “until the boss came up here and saw how we were living- that was the end of that, back down to battalionlines near the airfield for us. Back to doing pickets and saluting.. The guns were going off all the time, 24 hours a day. I never realised till I got hold of one of those tapes that we used to send home. We used to speak into the recorder saying how things were and how we were. In the background all you can hear is artillery. We just got totally used to it.”

“I’ve been here for three years now, got married again, had a son, now I am waiting to get my wife her papers, but they take months, and to be honest, I like it here. The people are so nice. We had it all wrong about them then. Look out to see, what do you see from Vungers? Oil tankers. Vietnam has loads of it. They say the French told the Americans what there was here when they left, and the Yanks kept fighting for it. Most wars are about oil aren’t they?- Sort of all makes sense now. We were just wasting our time. This whole war was a complete waste of time”

“Well the American Oil companies are here now, I suppose it would have been cheaper to buy Ho Chi Minh”

“Yeah and a hell of lot less trouble” Replied PT.

By now, we had moved to the rubber plantation of Long Tan. After being given my instructions by Greg- I had mugged up on this episode. Long Tan was the scene of the greatest loss of Australian military life since WW2. The battle was very simple to explain. At 3;15 in the afternoon, in pissing rain, No 11 rifle platoon of A company, 3 rar was on patrol. Most of them, including their commander were national servicemen. They came across some Viet Cong. They fired on them, killing one, and the VC ran away. Then more VC appeared and a bigger firefight ensued. There were two other platoons on patrol that afternoon and they were drawn into the fight. There were so many VC and NVA, that artillery was called upon to assist the diggers. Apparently this was the first time since WW2 that the Australians had an entire regiment of artillery firing at the same time. The diggers came under ferocious attack and asked for air support. None could be given because of the rain. For four hours the diggers fired their rifled through the rubber trees. The VC and NVA fired back and attacked in waves. Two cargo helicopters dropped desperately needed ammunition onto the three platoons. At 6pm reinforcements from D company arrived in Armoured Personnel carriers and joined the fight. Some accounts say that their appearance turned the tide. Either way, soon after dusk, the Vietnamese disengaged and ran away.. The VC carried many of their bodies away, but in the morning, when the 3 rifle platoons and D company were ordered to bury the Vietnamese dead. 245 bodies were found and buried with respect. The Australians had lost 24 dead. When all was said and done, it became apparent that 80 men and lots of artillery had stopped 2000 possibly 3000 men from over running their base at Nui Dat

“The actual battle was over there by one kilometre.” Said PT by the cross of Long Tan, “It must have been horrific, bullets bouncing off the trees, NVA coming out of the rain, and then having to stay there all night with the VC all around when the battle was over” he paused thoughtfully “So many guys say they were in Long Tan, that they did this or that. They’re talking shit. I had the privilege of showing this place to two of the scouts when they came back. And all I can say is thank God I wasn’t here”

PT then took us to nicer places, the hills behind the base, dotted with huge grey boulders, and full of screaming birds. “This was a VC hospital complex and all sorts, the yanks napalmed this place to hell, but they never got them- I just think it’s beautiful now. “ PT talked a little of the Vietnam today. How the North runs the show, and how the Southerners get a raw deal. “if you were NVA you get a pension, if you were VC, you get nothing. The Southern resistance is not overly acknowledged. The northerners run the country, own the big businesses and make the money. All the ARVN guys were re-educated in camps or just kicked out. They were not allowed to own businesses. That’s why the cyclo drivers are all old guys- mostly ex ARVN. Its all they can do.”

I asked someone else about how Vietnam now works and he replied: “If you want something done in Vietnam, you need to pay, the government are corrupt at the lowest level. They are also corrupt at the highest level. The rumour is that they just made a southerner prime minister to get into the WTO. Personally I don’t want to pay anything, so things take longer. Sure the old southern regime was corrupt but the new guys from the north are just as bad. I don’t think Ho Chi Minh would approve”.

We were sad to say goodbye to Belly, PT and his Aussie mates. We had never expected to see any battlefields in Vietnam, but the combination of Greg’s instructions, and the good fortune of finding PT was too tempting to refuse. I am glad that we went and glad that we got the Australian Perspective on the war. For in the same way that the Killing fields, define Cambodia, Vietnam’s independence struggle (or war) from 1949-1975 defines Vietnam. The aftermath is felt everywhere. Everything comes from the war. Idealists may argue that the war only exists if you look for it, but they are wrong. Superficially perhaps they have moved on from the war, but it is still there. The Mao suit generation needs to die, the North needs to deal with the fact that commerce is in every vietnamese’ blood. China may well be the model for the Vietnamese to follow, but long term fiscal socialism would be political or physical suicide for any Vietnamese administration. PT still refused money, so we put it into the charity box for the local orphanage, and took the rocket back to Saigon.

THE DUTCH AFFAIR

When the Dutch Consular staff had stopped laughing at Cisca, they had to decide what to do with her. A totally new passport would take many days. Perhaps two and half weeks. Carrying on with her existing passport was a risk. Eventually, after much consultation, they offered her and unadvertised emergency passport issuable in a day. She accepted this kind offer and paid up. An hour later she was issued with a 5 page Dutch passport that was valid for a year. The only snag was that the passport was pink. They were very sensible and did not cancel her old passport. For some reason she was Jah in one passport and Zwiers in the other. So for the sake of pragmatism she was left with both, and instructions to hand both in, in Holland and apply for one new one. Just before she left the building, Cisca invited the entire Dutch Consulate in Saigon, to decamp and take over the Her Glorious Dutch Majesty’s Embassy in Tanzania. The Staff were politely amused, and perhaps rather bemused.

When I had finished laughing at Cisca’s pink passport, (this was clearly a day for mirth) we went to the post office and sent all my films to Beijing for processing. (at least we could now get there). We had dinner at our usual Saigon Haunt- a cheap place where the staff had become acclimatised to my shouting in bad Vietnamese, and some rather hefty tips. Then we hopped in a Taxi to GA SAIGON. (Gare Du Saigon for the francophones amongst you). Here we finally caught a glimpse of our first train of the journey. (and hopefully not our last).

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