This is the second revisal of assignment 3, nearly finished with initial formatting for web publishing
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There are two audiences for this travelogue, those interested in world travel and those interested in the Vietnam War (called the “American War” by the Vietnamese)
Circle
The Darkest Hour
The chartered buses pulled out of the Morehead Planetarium parking lot in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on an early autumn morning in 1969. The sun was at least 20 degrees below the eastern horizon. A pre-dawn departure was needed to make it to Washington in time for the massive Vietnam Moratorium demonstration. As Cass Elliot of the Mamas and Papas sang in 1967, the darkest hour is just before dawn. I certainly felt the country was in darkness. One of my vivid memories of the crush of 100,000 or more demonstrators as the Washington Monument was standing against a barricade.
The Draft
In the autumn of 2000, during his senior year in high school, my son Aaron enrolled in a class entitled “Lessons of the Vietnam War”. As the class progressed, 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 autumn 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.
Vietnam Omen
In early December 2000, Aaron told me where he wanted to go for his high school graduation trip. Vietnam. That same morning, I had received 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 I would go with him on the long postponed trip.
Eastbound to Hanoi
We left Raleigh-Durham International Airport on a mid-July morning in 2001, bound for Hanoi on an east-bound route that required two-nights aboard a Singapore Airlines jumbo jet and a plane change for the Singapore-Hanoi leg. Our business class tickets (called “Raffles Class” by Singapore Airlines) on the jumbo jet 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. Arriving in Hanoi two days before the tour departed, we had a harrowing taxi ride to the Hanoi Hilton. Much of those two days were spent touring 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 at the Mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh was worth the wait. Actually, there were separate lines for Vietnamese and foreigners to let the locals speed through. We saw the renowned water puppet theatre, and were amazed to get excellent meals for just a dollar American. I quote the price in dollars because the dollar was accepted everywhere in Vietnam we traveled. Menus in most restaurants we frequented were in Vietnamese, English, and French.
Tour Begins
Checking out of the real Hanoi Hilton on day three, we meandered across the city to meet the tour, dodging the ever-present buzz of small motorbikes that crowded the narrow streets. In Ho Chi Minh City at the end of the tour, the small motorbikes crowded wide avenues. The Intrepid Travel tour consisted of 12 travelers plus a group leader The group was all English-speaking, an Aussie, two Kiwis, two Brits, five Americans, and two Canadians. Our tour included transport on 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, had a boat ride up the Perfume River towards Laos, and saw the Imperial Capital ruins at Hue.
Khe Sanh Haggling
Aaron and I separated from the official itinerary only once, for a battlefield tour. We went to the former demilitiarized zone (DMZ) between the then two Vietnams, then slightly south to Khe Sanh, a marine base that was held under siege by the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong during the 1968 Tet Offensive. As we walked to the abandoned airstrip, a gaggle of boys approached us selling trinkets. This sales technique was common everywhere we went in Vietnam. One boy spoke to us in near-perfect English, offering to sell us American pennies he said the Marines had left behind when the base was abandoned in 1968. His price was two-for-a-dollar. Aaron asked to look at the pennies and remarked, “These are 1981 pennies, the base was abandoned in 1968.” Without a pause the boy said, “OK, three-for-a-dollar.”
The Picture
Our last stop on the tour was Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, where we visited the Museum of War Remnants. That museum had been known as the War Crimes Museum prior to Vietnam opening up to American tourists just two years earlier. One museum wing had a theme “Protests of the American War Around the World”. The left wall was full of pictures of Vietnam War protests in the United States, and one picture that caught our eyes was a scene of several young Americans at the Washington Monument, pressed against a barricade. I was in the photograph, a picture that had previously been only in my memory.
Closure
That end to the trip was a closure of sorts for me. My mind looped back more than 30 years, when young idealists joined together in Washington. Traveling to Vietnam was not one of the things we wanted to do.
