There are two audiences for this travelogue, those interested in world travel and those interested in the Vietnam War (called by the Vietnamese the “American War”)
Circle
The charter buses pulled out of the Morehead Planetarium parking lot in Chapel Hill on an early autumn morning in 1969. The sun was still 20 degrees or so below the eastern horizon, the pre-dawn time was needed to make it to Washington in time for the massive Vietnam Moratorium demonstration. As Cass Elliott said, the darkest hours are just before dawn. One of my vivid memories of the crush of 100,000 or more demonstrators at the Washington Monument was standing against a barricade.
In autumn of 2000, my son Aaron was a senior at Wake County’s Needham Broughton High School, enrolled in a semester-long class “Lessons of the Vietnam War”. He’d come running to me with news like “Did you know you were #37 in the draft lottery?” Painfully, I told him I already knew. In the fall of 1971, I had gotten one of the famous “Greetings from the President” letters, ordering me to report for a pre-induction physical in Raleigh. Lifelong asthma resulted in my failing the induction physical, so my trip to Vietnam was postponed.
In early December 2000, Aaron told me where he wanted to go for his high school graduation trip. Vietnam. That same morning, I had gotten an email from Intrepid Travel selling spots on a group tour to Vietnam. I immediately decided these two events were an omen, and told Aaron that I would go with him on the long postponed trip.
We left RDU on a mid-July morning in 2001, bound for Hanoi on an east bound route that required two nights onboard a Singapore Airlines jumbo jet. Our business class tickets put us almost in the lap of luxury, we were below the opulence of first class but had two days of gourmet meals and plenty of leg room. We arrived in Hanoi two days before the tour departed, and toured the city via Ciclo, pedal powered transit with a hired driver. A visit to the North Vietnamese POW prison, nicknamed “Hanoi Hilton”, where John McCain spent several years in isolation was a shock. The long line (there were separate lines for Vietnamese and foreigners to let the locals speed through) to see the Mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh was worth the wait. We saw the renowned puppet theatre, and were amazed to get excellent meals for just a dollar American. I can quote the price in dollars because the dollar was accepted everywhere in Hanoi (as in the rest of Vietnam) and menus in most restaurants we frequented were in Vietnamese, English, and French.
Checking out of the real Hanoi Hilton on day 3, we meandered across the city to meet the tour, dodging the ever present buzz of small motorbikes that clogged the narrow streets (In Ho Chi Minh City, the motorbikes clogged wide avenues). There were 12 travelers plus the leader. The group was all English speaking, an Aussie, two Kiwis, two Brits, five Americans, and two Canadians. Our trip included an overnight train, small buses, and one plane flight. We had suits tailored in Hoi An, swam in the warm waters of Ha Long Bay in the South China Sea, traveled on a boat up the Perfume River towards Laos, and saw the ruins of the Imperial Capital at Hue.
Aaron and I separated from the official itinerary only once, for a battlefield tour. We went to the former DMV between the twoVietnams, then up to Khe Sanh, a marine base that was held under siege by the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive in 1968. As we walked to the abandoned airstrip, a gaggle of boy approached us selling trinkets (this was common everywhere we went within Vietnam). One boy spoke to us in near perfect English, offering to sell us at two for a dollar American pennies that he said the Marines had left when the base was abandoned. My son Aaron asked to look at the pennies, and said “These are 1981 pennies, the base was abandoned in 1968.” Without a pause, the boy said “OK, three for a dollar”.
Just before our departure, in Ho Chi Minh City we visited the Museum of War Remembrance, which had been known as the War Crimes Museum prior to Vietnam opening to American tourists. One wing had a theme “Protests of the American War Around the World.” The left wall was full of pictures of Vietnam War Protests, and one picture that caught our eye was a scene of several young Americans at the Washington Monument in 1969, pressed against a barricade. I was in the photograph, a picture that had previously been only in my memory.
