Good Morning Vietnam

(The Zen River)
In the theme of “going with the flow”, if you have to have a layover at your choice of airports, try and make it Bangkok. Landing at 4:30 a.m. with a four hour layover is normally a dreaded delay, but throughout the airport the weary traveler can find foot and head massage stores offering the best hour you’ve ever spent waiting in an airport. Not getting much sleep on the flight from Bombay, I was not feeling well and in need of recovery before my next flight leg. I canvassed the terminal to locate my departure gate and then found the nearest massage store.

Walking right up to the cashier, I asked “how much?,” almost reflexively as I would have paid far more than the $28 charge for the heavenly massage in the leather recliner. I was not in a position of bargaining strength. She spoke Thai into a microphone that echoed into the next room behind glass doors, my bags were taken from me in exchange for a numbered tag and in I went, melting into the chair like an anchor finally resting on the ocean floor. For the next hour, my feet were resoled and my head was put to ease. One hour of no worries in the world.

Post celestial massage, I strolled through the airport like a kid visiting a toy store for the first time. The cleanliness, order, variety and food in the terminal tantalized my senses. Despite my fondness for India, it was nice to experience some of the familiar comforts.

Boarding my early morning flight to Hanoi, I was excited to venture into a new land and meet Jason, my good friend from the US. Fighting hot flashes from being awake most of the night, I began to think more deeply about Vietnam, the war and how I as an American would be received by the Vietnamese people. A political science major in college, I was assigned many books and articles on the Vietnam War offering perspectives from the hawks, doves and the Vietnamese. The consensus was that it was a huge foreign policy blunder for which many US and Vietnamese soldiers and Vietnamese citizens lost their lives.

Even though the war was nearing conclusion when I was born, I wondered if I would be held in contempt for being American. Could I blame them? We’ve all seen stories on Sixty Minutes and films like Apocalypse Now and Born on the Fourth of July that exposed the devastation and death in Vietnam during the war. It was as recent as the 1990s when a story was run on active landmines still causing dismemberment and missing American POWs. The Vietnam War (known as the “American War” in Vietnam) is a psychic scare in the history of US government foreign policy.

My flight landed in a pleasantly surprising newer airport just outside of Hanoi. Exiting the plane, military officers dressed in uniforms I had only seen in movies waited on the jetway. Fortunately, they were not waiting for me, they seemed to be there just to observe the disembarkation. At the end of the jetway, there was a female military officer observing and directing passengers to the passport control. It dawned on my that I was now in a country ruled by the Communist Party. Growing up, I had always heard of government spying on its own citizens and visitors. Did this still take place? While I don’t know for sure, I doubt it, I think the military plays an active dual police/military role in Vietnam.

Jason and I had planned to meet before exiting customs, but his flight had been directed to another passport control section and baggage claim which meant that we would need a little luck to find each other. As Lady Luck would have it, we found each other within less than a minute of exiting from separate locations into the main terminal. Meeting a familiar friend in a sea of strangers gave me a burst of energy from some unknown reserves.

On the taxi ride into Hanoi, we caught up on affairs from home and some of my travels. As we neared town, the Lonely Planet was cracked open as we searched for a place to hang our hats for the next few days. Pulling up to the Sunshine Hotel in the Old Quarter of Hanoi, we inspected the $25/night room and moved in. Running on a credit from the sleep bank, we hit the sidewalks to explore our surrounds. Neither of us had done much research on Vietnam prior to our arrival, leaving the trip wide open for a day-to-day schedule.

On the ride into Hanoi from the airport we saw people working in bright green rice fields with the stereotypical pointed straw hot I had seen mostly in the movies. A country of approximately 83 million, already Vietnam was looking like the Outback compared to the one billion plus in India. As in Munnar, India, the sight of green vegetation was a delight to my eyes. The air seemed cleaner, the weather a tad bit cooler (although still humid) and the roads less crowded and chaotic.

And my questions regarding how I would be received as an American were answered early on as we strolled through shops in the Old Quarter of Hanoi. Shopkeepers were warm, welcoming and always smiling. There were no dirty looks thrown our way that one might expect if there were harboring war torn feelings from the past. Vietnam was moving forward, detached, but mindful of its past. As I would learn, Vietnam had experienced millennia of conflict whether it was with the Chinese, French, Cambodians or the US. With a tattered history of conquerors, wars and occupiers, the Vietnamese I encountered thus far have been surprisingly warm.
(Jason goes to work on his first day in Hanoi.)

I remembered seeing a film in college called Hearts and Minds examining the Vietnam War, specifically how a world superpower lost to a small third world nation. The theory behind the film was that while the US had a powerful military, it was not as powerful as the hearts and minds of the people, in this case the Vietnamese people. 15 million tons of bombs would be dropped on the small Southeast Asian country, but the citizens would not succumb.

Looking back at the film today, I see that the heart, like the pen, is mightier than the sword (or bomb). What the US did not understand at the time was that the Vietnamese were used to centuries of attacks from would be rulers and even occupiers. Vietnam is the tenacious little dog that doesn’t realize it’s small because it carries the heart of a big dog.