VIETNAM, CHANCE, AND THE TRUE VALUE OF A MOTORBIKE

I was sitting idly on my favorite Washington Island perch, the coffee house porch, on an almost spring April morning. I was cradling my first cup of the day, robust steam wafting into my nostrils. I glanced at the open copy of the New York Times someone had abandoned on the side table. Above the fold it read, Three Marines Killed in Fallujah. Below, near the bottom, Democrat Alleges Vietnam Parallel. That little bit, that was enough.
The pace of activity within my field of vision was what you'd call relaxed. Almost nothing was moving. A car piloted by an elderly woman straining to see over the steering wheel slowly approached from the direction of the thrift shop, made its way to the intersection and turned toward the heart of town. For no particular reason I decided to time the interval until the next car passed. Four and some half minutes later Constable Tyler slowly rounded the bend in the Island cruiser. He crept on by with a wave and a smile. The fact that he didn't stop suggested to me he was in high speed pursuit of that suspect gal in the afore mentioned vehicle.
The scene got me to thinking just how different human lives can be, and about the vicissitudes of chance that had put me on this porch. In recent months my idle reverie had inclined toward such sophomoric musing. I'd been sitting on this porch in early February when the pace of things had been even less frantic. Seventy two hours later a taxi had plunked me and my worn satchel down on a street corner in central Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Now, there may be places where everyday reality differs more from some winter's afternoon on Washington Island, but I doubt such places are on this planet. As is my way, I'd given little thought to what such an abrupt transition might mean. The fetid air, the heat, the smells, the noise, combined to leave me lightheaded. I pulled my satchel away from the broken concrete curb and plopped myself down. In front of me moved an almost unbroken swarm of honking motorbikes, bicycles, cyclos (rickshaws), and an occasional truck. There could not have been more than a foot separating the darting vehicles. Most proceeded on their side of the road, but a goodly number appeared to find driving against traffic more advantageous. At the intersection an intricate dance of daring somehow allowed one mass of humanity to meld into a similar mass proceeding in a cross direction. No lights, no signs, no helmets, no rules whatsoever. Utter and complete chaos. As I watched, it seemed inevitable that the intersection would fill with broken bodies. Surely all the horn blowing was a prelude to brawling, on a very large scale. Had the sidewalk not proven equally perilous I may have remained, immobilized, right where I was. When I regained my balance, I realized that my satchel and I were impeding a complex world of sidewalk commerce that extended as far as I could see in both directions. I would need to find a refuge away from this deafening din and mount a search for my missing sensibilities. Such was my introduction to Vietnam and it remained pretty much like this for the month of my meandering.
Some months earlier my wife had posed the eminently reasonable inquiry. "Why Danny, of all the places you could visit, do you want to go to Vietnam? "I'm very curious about the place," I told her, "I've always been very curious." That reply meant one thing to me, another to her. My wife's forty four, I'm fifty-four. Her experience had been different. For me the very word "Vietnam" pushes play on a private home movie, replete with a soundtrack, that I made long ago. In these snippets I'm always young, so I never mind the intrusion.

If you're in your fifties, Vietnam has likely loomed large. I'm not speaking here about the relative few who had gaping holes blown in their lives. That's a different matter altogether. I'm referring to the rest of us. That huge bulge on the population curve that came of age during the moral and physical squalor of the Vietnam War (or the American War as the Vietnamese choose to call it). We were, I suppose, all dealing with the predictable developmental issues of growing up and separating from our families of origin. The war and the adult world that had fermented it, provided the perfect foil. One could make the argument that much of the passion of the time was attributable to the unique convergence of demographics and events. One could. I wouldn't. There were an awful lot of us, so many in fact that we came to occupy a mutually supportive, parallel universe. This heady brew, and the war that gave it focus, was the most consuming reality of my young adulthood.

I managed to avoid service in Vietnam. Like most of my contemporaries I maintained circumstances that allowed me to avoid being drafted. I remained a college student and later drew a middle of the pack lottery number that allowed me to avoid making the hard choices. It's true that some took a principled stance in either volunteering for, or refusing to go to Vietnam. I admired both, but I didn't really know many of either group. Sentiment against the war prompted many I knew to become antiwar activists, and a few to become extremists. Most just wanted to stay out of the fray, the one at home and the one in Asia. A few, like the resolute Mr. Cheney, busied themselves with "other priorities." They supported the war as long as it was fought by other peoples children. I didn't personally know anyone killed in Vietnam. A boy several doors down from my parents home was killed in the Mekong Delta, but I'd only met him in passing. I was always acutely aware that going or not going to Vietnam was purely a matter of chance and had nothing to do with fairness. Whatever guilt I may have felt watching others I'd grown up with plucked from their lives was vastly overshadowed by the relief that it wasn't me. I was very long on self righteous principle in those days, but in truth my aversion to service had a much cloudier basis. I'd watched Vietnam on nightly TV since I was fifteen and the whole deal flat out scared the bejeesus out of me.

Many of those images remain clearer in my memory than events of a year ago, and they provide the temporal benchmarks of my young adulthood. I was fourteen when my civics teacher brought in the AP photo of the first Buddhist monk to set himself ablaze on a Saigon street. Fifteen when the evening news brought us footage of the first American combat troops going ashore near Danang, initiating the "casualty count" as a standard feature of the day's news wrap-up. Seventeen when General Westmoreland apparently mistook a train coming right at him for light at the end of the tunnel. Eighteen when the news cameras captured the specter of our South Vietnamese ally putting a bullet into the brain of his bound and kneeling "suspect" on a crowded Saigon street. Eighteen when Johnson threw in the towel and the Democratic Convention exploded in Chicago. I was nineteen when live footage of the Tet offensive brought us that naked and burning Vietnamese child running down a Saigon highway, and the airport tarmac covered with two thousand American bodies awaiting shipment home. Twenty when we learned that Nixon had secretly invaded Cambodia. Twenty one when the New York Times printed the Pentagon Papers, confirming what most everyone already knew. The government's ability to tell the truth had been an early casualty in the conflict.Twenty four when Nixon slunk away under the weight of so many big fat lies. Twenty five when the last American helicopter ascended from the US embassy roof, like a mamma sparrow abandoning her chirping, hungry hatchlings. Add to this the spate of horrific Vietnam era movies I felt obliged to sit through in recompense for not having shouted "FIRE" loudly enough. The reader can perhaps understand why I felt it prudent to give the Vietnamese twenty-five or thirty years to cool off before paying them a social call.
I had always wondered how such colossal misjudgements could have been made. Had nobody ever bothered going there to look around? Did nobody speak French? Twenty four hours in Vietnam only deepened my incredulity. The streets teem with purpose and the people with dogged determination. Nobody but me lazing away the morning on the coffeehouse porch. The amount of ingenuity and effort that the average person has to muster just to survive and provide for their loved ones appeared daunting. They were the hardest working, most tenacious people I'd ever seen. What's more, they appeared to endure their demanding lives with considerable grace. I wandered through dirt poor, densely congested urban neighborhoods and remote backwaters and never felt nervous about my personal safety, (the fact that the government deals quickly and harshly with street criminals likely had something to do with this). I never saw an angry exchange despite the rigors of daily life. They seemed blessed with an enviable equanimity of temperament. I found myself wondering what our legions of motoring hot heads would do if afforded a real reason for upset.


The people I became acquainted with in Vietnam were extraordinary. Take for example Tan. He operated a small Guesthouse in an alley in central Saigon. He had lost his right arm, a good part of his shoulder, and other anatomical bric-a-brac as a soldier in the South Vietnamese Army. His wife told me that despite seven operations he'd been in pain for twenty-five years. Yet, I could not dissuade this man from carrying my bag up two flights or from doting on me in a host of unnecessary ways. The loss of his painting arm had caused Tan to suspend his dream of becoming an artist. He'd stopped painting for many years and then took on the arduous challenge of training himself to paint with his left hand. He supplements his meager income as an inn keeper by painting flawless replicas of the old masters and selling them at the market. He puts asides his modest painting proceeds in the hopes of someday sending his daughter to school abroad.

Or, my young friend Quan. I hired Quan to be my guide while I was in Central Vietnam. I didn't really want a guide but Quan was so earnest and such good company that I paid him a ridiculously small sum to hang around with me for a few days. He was twenty-two, and had studied some kind of a tourism curriculum at the University in Danang. He made about $40.00 a month plus tips at this vocation. Quan told me that he sent one quarter of his wages to his widowed father in a rural village and another quarter to his younger brother studying in Saigon. A devout Buddhist, Quan taught the Temple youth group and was an avid fan of traditional Vietnamese music and theater. He was also very fond of American heavy metal music. Quan acknowledged that life in his country was hard but he was optimistic about the future. I would rent a motorbike and tell Quan to take us wherever he wished. On one such outing I asked Quan if he had a sweetheart. He hesitated before replying, then said wistfully, "you cannot get a sweetheart without a motorbike." For whatever reason, I found this admission heartbreaking. As best I could tell Quan would not be getting a motorbike any time soon, if ever. His tone suggested that he was painfully aware of this. I tipped Quan as well as I could when it was my time to move on. He showed up at my hotel that evening with presents for me and for the members of my family. He insisted that I be his guest for dinner. When we arrived at the restaurant he'd chosen, Quan produced a CD from his bag and instructed the waiter to play it on the establishments sound system. My friend Quan, who didn't speak English very well, then stood and sang me a flawless version of Hotel California.

Or consider the young boy I met on a ferry somewhere in the Mekong Delta. I've got some walking problems that get worse in the heat. My legs had pretty much given out on me and I wasn't sure I'd make it up the ramp before the boat left without me. I was hobbling along clutching the rail when a young boy of about nine or ten came out of the crowd and took my arm. He didn't say anything, just patiently walked with me and found us a seat on the deck bench. He sat with me for the crossing though I don't think he had a reason, other than helping me, to go to the other side. He smiled shyly at me and said little. He seemed intensely curious about my appearance. He stared at me until embarressment compelled him to avert his eyes, then he stared some more. He didn't want anything, wasn't selling anything, just a kind and curious little boy.

I suspect that Asia shocks most first time visitors. It did me, and for a short while the utter strangeness of the place scared me. My initial trepidation quickly turned to fascination. As is true in most third world countries, there are lots of people in desperate straits begging on the streets. This took some getting used to. On day one I responded to whoever approached me and looked needy. The result of this largesse was a run on the bank. It was akin to the announcement of a "blue light special" at K-Mart. Even after I had adjusted my threshold of response to persons with debilitating physical abnormalities and multiple missing limbs, I gave away a substantial amount of "dong" each day. I've heard sophisticated arguments for not encouraging such begging. It's been my experience that these arguments are most forcefully made by the stingy.

The government of Vietnam is still ostensibly communist, but long ago gave up the dream of creating a socialist Utopia. The economic "opening" in 1996 has made almost everyone in Vietnam an entrepreneur of one sort or another. Impromptu Mom and Pop restaurants spring up on every available meter of unoccupied sidewalk. "One folding chair no waiting" roving barbers are ever-present. Pirated, cheaply copied, books appear to be a cottage industry. They are pressed on western tourists by very young street kids, most of whom contend they are orphaned and homeless. They have a practiced ability to size up their quarry on the move and pull from their stack their one best shot. It would appear that I telegraph a fondness for Graham Greene. The military ( who appear also to be the police), lacking anything tangible to hawk, appear to interpret "economic opening" as license to extort small bribes for inconsequential infractions of petty regulations.

I spent a morning in Saigon visiting Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum. Uncle Ho died in 1969 and despite his express wishes to the contrary, he's been stuffed and placed on public display. Everyday thousands of Vietnamese journey to Saigon and line up for an opportunity to file past their beloved leader. Every two years he's sent to Russia for some kind of a general sprucing up. Despite his recent refurbishment, I must report that Uncle Ho looked pretty darned peaked.

I spent a good amount of time watching people and traffic from the vantage point of the ubiquitous sidewalk cafes. My favorite time was late afternoon when the streets filled with beautiful young Vietnamese women in their traditional white dress. They would float by, like apparitions on their motorbikes, long hair streaming in the wind. In Hanoi I became particularly fond of a sidewalk café where, for the price of $1.20 (American), I could sip a Nehi orange soda and receive a half hour head massage while watching young Vietnamese play ferocious badminton in the park across the way.

I floated for several days on an ancient boat into the Mekong Delta. The unfolding life on the river and on the bank likely looked as it had fifty or even five hundred years ago. A young woman in black pajamas, the daughter of one time North Vietnamese regulars, poled me through a labyrinth of narrow jungle waterways to the site of a former guerrilla base in the heart of South Vietnam. Remnants remained of the underground medical facility, the command hut, and barely discernible underground bunkers. I crawled around in parts of the extensive tunnel system that the VC built to connect them with the North. Later the young woman took me to meet her Aunty in the nearby village. Aunty had been born in the tunnels in 1968 and had lived the first four months of her life there. She served me coffee and was kind enough not to inquire whether I might, perchance, have been one of those lobbing bombs at her snug underground warren.

Many of the motor bikers on the roads are interested in providing transport for a fee. This seemed unnecessarily risky and I usually declined such offers. One afternoon I was particularly worn out and decided to accept the proffered ride. I attempted to communicate my destination. He nodded in comprehension, turned the bike around and accelerated into the oncoming traffic. This apparently was the quick route. Realizing the futility of objecting, I just closed my eyes.

I bought passage on a rickety old vessel for a two-day cruise of Hailong Bay near the Gulf of Tonkin. This was a surreal dream scape; huge limestone spires, shrouded in mist, pierced the dead calm waters of the bay and rose hundreds of feet straight up. The appearance of a dragon seemed not only possible, but likely. On the second morning I awoke early to watch the sun come up. The crew's cook was preparing our breakfast at the stern of the boat. I could see that he was scraping the fur off some part of animal anatomy that appeared to have a hoof on the end of it. Fortunately I had a store of Snicker bars for just such a contingency.
I spent several days wandering around the ancient Chinese trading village of Hoi An. At dusk the shops and homes are ablaze with colorful silk lanterns. The streets seem dreamy and magical, perhaps indelibly made so by the opium trade that once flourished there. Hoi An is a place renowned for it's textiles, tailors and seamstresses. A Dutch acquaintance commissioned two custom fitted, tailor made suits that were made to perfection in two days for a total of $40.00 (US). Unfortunately, I had no use for new suits. One afternoon I decided to buy a sack full of inexpensive toys at the market and pay a visit to the orphanage I'd spotted while biking on the edge of town. Two Buddhist nuns do their best to care for more than seventy children many of whom appeared to be severely developmentally disabled. I was immediately swamped by needy kids and rather quickly concluded that my decision to drop in had been naive and decidedly unhelpful.

I went twice to see the Hanoi Water Puppet Theater. The first time a large rat stole the performer's thunder by cavorting at length outside of the puppeteer's view, in full view of the audience. The following day I joined a small excursion for a tour of some outlying Buddhist antiquities. We stopped for lunch at a café on a rural highway. I had become somewhat accustomed to the unexpected but I was taken aback when an eighteen-foot python slithered out of the kitchen in the direction of my table. The proprietor found my alarm quite amusing, and after much reassurance, convinced me to pose for a photo with this big fellow hoisted onto my shoulders. This photo has done more than anything else could to convince my nine-year-old boy, Sammy, that his daddy is a very brave man.

When I got home, I would regale my family, whether they wished to be regaled or not, with my memories of Vietnam. My eighteen-year-old daughter, Janey, found Quan's romantic conundrum particularly disturbing. "Why" she wished to know," don't you stop sneakin' around smoking cigarettes and put the money you're spending ruining your health toward buying Quan a motorbike?". "Well," I told her "they aren't cheap. The coveted Japanese jobs cost a lot more than they cost here, and the cheaper Chinese knock offs don't last long." "Well," she responded, "get him one of the cheap ones. If he gets right to work, and pays her the attention a girl deserves, he can probably seal the deal before it breaks." I am intending to explore this inspired counsel.

It's May now and I have resumed my tireless vigil on the Washington Island coffeehouse porch. I'm sippin' a cappuccino that costs twice what the average Vietnamese makes in a day. Janey phoned me last night. She's finishing up her freshman year at college and frantically trying to tie up the semesters loose ends. She told me she was having difficulty focusing on her work. She said "I can't get those horrible, horrible pictures of those Iraq prisoners out of my mind. Pappa, who could do such a thing? " She wanted to know."What, in Gods name, is happening over there?" I would have liked to have comforted Janey, to have told her that such lunacy was an abberation. That reason would prevail. That those leaders acting in her name on the other side of the world were not malevolent. She would, however, recognize this as the disengenuious nonsense that it was. It didn't seem useful to tell her that more than a few of the savvy crowd that has orchestrated Iraq's "liberation" cut their policy wonking baby teeth reaking havoc in Vietnam. It makes me thankful that we humans have a finite life expectancy.

After we'd hung up, I sat wondering what Iraq must look like through her eyes and if such images would come to constitute the temporal benchmarks of her young adulthood. Having lived on the planet for fifty five years hasn't made me smart but it has allowed me to notice when the same sorry things come around again and again. Perhaps the hardest to get my mind around is our governments periodic inclination to ship our precious children off to die for nothing. I'm not a pacifest. I can envision a just war, in fact my father and my uncles fought one. But whats happened in my time is different. Those leaders who take us to war for their own murky reasons don't believe it's worth their own childrens lives. Only one, one in 600 members of the United States Congress and Executive Branch has a child serving in Iraq .Thats right, nearly 2000 and counting American kids killed in Iraq for nothing more than the oppurtunistic and transient caprice of fools. I would like as much as the next person to pretend it was otherwise, to pretend these kids died for something necessary and noble,mostly because it breaks my heart to think of their parents. They must have to desperately cling to illusion or go mad. The fool of the moment's war doesn't appear to be going well and there's some suggestion that the shortage of fodder could necessitate a resumption of the draft. Should such a thing happen it's my intention to grab up a fistfull of those high limit, unsolicited credit cards that appear so often in my mailbox and drive as many young adults as are interested to a saner country. And, should my child in his/her youthful naivate be hoodwinked by the call to be all she can be I'll lock her in the basement until the madness passes. Janey is a very sweet, compassionate child. They are always the vulnerable ones. I wondered what kind of discount I could get if I went ahead and booked her a flight to Iraq thirty years in advance.

Vietnam, as I mentioned earlier, got me to thinking about how different human lives can be. How for no reason other than the fortuitous, or not so fortuitous, circumstances of your birth you draw an easy life or a hard one. The experience has helped me place my little bucket of woes( over which I have whined, ad nauseam) in some much needed perspective. As anyone who knows me well can readily attest, I've done nothing of note to warrant my privileged perch on this porch. The truth is that if talent and grit were the determinants of good fortune, Tan would be here on the porch and I'd be trying to flag down a Saigon cyclo with my phantom limb. If virtue were the determinant, Quan would be courting a pretty Island girl and I'd be trying to convince an aging Danang Mama-san that I was only on this bike cause my Honda was in the shop. If kindness were the determinant, my anonymous little ferry helper would be excelling at the Island school and Donald Rumsfeld would be peddling chicklets on a ferryboat somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Again, I must confess that any guilt I feel regarding my random good fortune is far overshadowed by my relief. I really wonder how I would have fared if the roll of the dice had saddled me with a difficult life.