Our early morning flight to Ho Chi Minh City was the last of our business class flights until our return to Britain in two months. The Singapore airport is renowned for its ‘Jewel’ domestic terminal featuring a multistory waterfall. We didn’t get to see that this time, but even the international terminal was gorgeous with amazing orchid displays everywhere.
Our flight was on Singapore Airlines, and I was SO excited when they brought my gf breakfast and it was pancakes!!
A few hours later, we had exchanged the orderly, pristine, quiet streets of Singapore for the chaotic, noisy, messy streets of Ho Chi Minh City,
Entering Vietnam was a slightly surreal experience for both of us.
For a critical period of my teenage years and Tom’s early adulthood, the Vietnam War dominated the news. It was the Boomer’s war, the defining war of our generation, as WWII had been for our parents and WWI for our grandparents.
Although my direct peers would ultimately avoid the draft when the war wound down in the early 1970s, the threat of the war hung over all young men when I was in high school. I knew guys who went to Vietnam and guys who managed to avoid going.
I remember seeing the graphic and disturbing photographs of the war in Life and Look magazines, the shock of the Tet Offensive of 1968, the pictures showing the haunted faces of wounded and terrified GIs in the midst of battle.
Place names: Saigon, Hue, Da Nang, Khe Sanh, Hanoi, Mekong, are etched in my mind from those years.
I remember the protest marches, Kent State, the turmoil the war caused in the USA throughout the 60s and early 70s.
Even moving to Australia did not make the war any more remote to me. On our flight from SFO to Anchorage Alaska in July 1970, the first leg of our journey to Australia, my sister and I sat next to a uniformed young GI who was returning home from Vietnam. We were both crying hysterically as the full reality of leaving our boyfriends and moving 10,000 miles away sunk in and I can remember this soldier looking at us in disbelief (disgust?) when we told him why we were crying.
Not long after we arrived in Australia, early in 1971, a young man, Bruce McKinley, whom my sisters and I had known from summer camp stayed with us for a couple of nights while he was on R&R from Vietnam. I don’t remember asking him anything about the war, but I do recall him saying how wonderful it was to be spending time with a normal family and with girls he’d known from the States. [I also remember his surprise that my sister and I had to wear uniforms to school and thought they were hilariously awful}.
Unlike England, which stayed out of the Vietnam War, Australia joined the USA and instituted a draft lottery much like the one in the States, sending thousands of young men to fight and die alongside Americans in the jungles of SE Asia.
There were anti-war protests in Australia just like in America, and the war was present in the news there on a daily basis as well. I remember watching in horror at the fall of Saigon on a TV in Canberra during my last year at university and the feeling of almost disbelief that the war was finally over.
In later years, I followed the progress of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C with intent interest and watched a spate of disturbing and harrowing Vietnam war movies–until I just couldn’t bear to watch any more.
All of these memories were surfaced when we landed in Ho Chi Minh City on a hot afternoon, and drove from the airport through the 1st District, where we were staying near the Saigon River.
Both of us immediately felt how unreal it was to be in the city that was in the news every day throughout the 1960s and 70s, and was virtually off limits until the early 2000s.
We gazed out the windows of our cab wondering what scenes took place in these streets fifty years before; how it would have looked with American soldiers and their tanks, jeeps and other military equipment everywhere.
We passed several of the colonial buildings where first the French and then the Americans had their headquarters and where some of the most iconic images of the war were photographed. Several of these buildings, now museums, were surrounded by the hulking remains of old war materiel.
We also saw that HCMC has moved on: with scores of modern new high rises and many more being built, it is a bustling hive of capitalistic activity, firmly fixed on the future, not the past.
Yet it was impossible for us not to feel haunted by the past. It may have changed its name to Ho Chi Minh City, but it still felt like Saigon to us.
Our hotel was an odd one: a sizeable room with large windows, a small balcony and a kitchenette three narrow flights of stairs above a beautifully appointed lounge bar that looked like something out of a tropical movie set in colonial times and which never seemed to have any patrons even though the bar around the corner was busy all the time.
It also had what we came to expect in SE Asia—a rock hard bed that was like sleeping on the ground. We’d slept in a LOT of hotel beds up to that point and nearly all of them had been springy and at least moderately comfortable, but we ran into a string of hard, hard beds when we hit Vietnam.
We had planned a lot of our Vietnam itinerary based on conversations with my son Mitchell and his partner Carly, who had been here a few years ago, and who had advised against spending too much of our limited time in HCMC. Consequently, we spent only 2 nights and 1 full day there.
On our first night, we decided to walk into the center along the river, which entailed crossing four ‘lanes’ of traffic between us and the water. There was a pedestrian crosswalk, but no light, and we stood on the curb, watching agape as a hundreds of motor scooters passed in front of us without pause– a flowing river of traffic, constantly moving at a steady pace with no gaps or halts.
After a few minutes, two Vietnamese girls came up and without hesitation, stepped off the curb into the traffic. A little taken aback but seizing our chance, we followed them and watched in amazement as the river of traffic just flowed around us, as if we were rocks in a stream.
From that moment on, we casually sauntered across hundreds of SE Asian streets, never once encountering even the slightest danger or close calls.
As long as pedestrians also keep a steady pace, the scooter riders (who are never going super fast) can calculate how to avoid them. It is a system that relies on everyone understanding the ‘rules’ but it seems to work very well.
Our destination was the pedestrianized Nguyen Hue street, at one end of which is the French colonial City Hall.
It was pulsing with activity, music, and the remnants of Tet, which had been celebrated about a month earlier. There were scores of restaurants and bars, shops and sidewalk cafes—it was busier and more chaotic than Taiwan, and also hotter.
HCMC was also where we first encountered the sorry state of Vietnamese sidewalks, which tripped me up numerous times, and though I never actually took a tumble, it was close on a number of occasions.
We had been shocked by the heat and humidity in Singapore, but on that night we still had no idea what Vietnam had in store for us.
As I was concerned about soy sauce, it was difficult to choose a restaurant, but we landed on a teeny little café that served a lot of vegetarian and vegan noodle and mushroom dishes, run by some very earnest young Vietnamese who spoke enough English to cater to my gf needs.
On our way back to the hotel, we noticed scores of Vietnamese people sitting in small chairs in front of cafes that served only drinks—fruit drinks, bubble tea, smoothies etc.—just sitting, socialising, and watching the traffic going by. We saw that everywhere in HCMC, though nowhere else in Vietnam.
The following day, we managed to do one thing: we went to the War Remnants Museum, housed in the building that was formerly the US Information Agency.
First known as the “Exhibition House for US and Puppet Crimes”, its name was changed to “Exhibition House for Crimes of War and Aggression” before adopting the more neutral title it now has, after diplomatic relations with the US were reestablished in the mid-1990s.
We spent some time in the outdoor area which is full of abandoned US military equipment.
Wandering from tank to helicopter to plane, we wondered who had piloted and driven them, been transported in them, lay injured in them, died in them. It seemed almost impossible not to engage in that kind of reverie.
One display featured a bell made from an Americn 500 lb bomb that had been made for a Buddhist pagoda in the war zone. After a new bell was made in the 1990s, this bell was donated to the musuem in the name of peace.
When the heat drove inside, we were a bit dismayed to realize the building was not air conditioned. There were large standing fans scattered about, and we had plenty of water, but it was incredibly hot and humid and before long I was drenched in sweat and feeling weak and faint.
Possibly some of that feeling came from the contents of the museum, which was largely photographs documenting the Vietnamese fighting first the French then the Americans.
There were several rooms devoted to the horrifying and generational effects of Agent Orange (dioxin) and napalm on the populace which were devastating to contemplate.
One temporary display showcased artifacts donated by the families of North Vietnamese soldiers who had fought (and died) including letters to their loved ones, which was incredibly moving. It was not propagandistic, but simply emphasised the universally tragic outcomes of war on individuals and families, irrespective of ideology or politics.
By far the most moving for me, though, was the large room devoted to the international photojournalists who had brought the war into American and European living rooms and newsstands.
Here were the photographs I had seen as a teenager in Life magazine, many taken by Larry Burrows, who died in 1972 in a helicopter crash in Laos along with two other international photojournalists, one from Japan and one from France.
[I wished I had taken more pictures of this room, but the photographs themselves were almost impossible to photograph because of the lighting and glare.]
Here were the gruesome and shocking photos from the Mai Lai massacre, and the terrified faces I remembered from the photos of the Tet Offensive.
Here too, were the last photographs of Robert Capa, a Hungarian Jew who fled to the US to escape Nazi persecution, and became the most acclaimed war photographer of the 20th century. Capa, who had survived the Spanish Civil War as its most famous photographer and the Second World War as the only civilian to land on Omaha Beach on D-Day, was blown up by a land mine near Haiphong in North Vietnam in 1954 while covering the eight year insurgent war known as the first Indochinese war between the North Vietnamese and the French.
Because it focused on the work of international journalists this display was among the least laden with propaganda—either overt or by omission– in the entire museum.
The museum’s over-arching narrative: Americans (and French) = evil aggressors who murdered, tortured, pillaged and sowed utter destruction; North Vietnamese = heroic, patriotic, courageous, selfless underdogs who sacrificed their lives for their homeland.
Entirely left out was the equally vicious treatment of American POWS by the North Vietnamese or any mention of the post war retributive actions of the victorious Communists against the South Vietnamese who had fought with and for the Americans, including outright slaughter, imprisonment and long-term ‘re-education’ camps.
However, even mindful of the heavy-handed pro-Communist narrative, the museum was a wrenching, sobering, difficult reckoning with a war that most Americans still feel conflicted about.
After spending several hours there, and completely wrung out physically and mentally, we went back to the hotel for the afternoon. We ventured out again in the early evening, walking to the night market food stalls, where the choices were vast, cheap and tasty (but note how wrung out I look in the photo below…]
Walking back to the hotel, we stopped for ice cream at a Haagen Daz (!) and then it was an early night for us as we had a very early flight to Hue the next morning.
We didn’t see that much of HCMC, but we weren’t sad to be leaving. While it was still possible to discern the outlines of the once graceful colonial city of Saigon, HCMC is charting a new path as a modern Asian metropolis.
Emblematic of this was the new high rise going up across from our hotel. Work went on at the site around the clock, even on Sunday.
It’s a city that doesn’t stop, sleep or slow down as this video, taken on the way to the airport at 6 am on a Sunday morning attests.
Still, especially in the historic district where we stayed, there were enough old buildings and old war machines to keep our minds on the past.
It may have changed its name fifty years ago, but to us it is still–and will always be—Saigon.
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