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From Griffith REVIEW Edition 18: In the Neighbourhood
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Larry Buttrose
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Larry Buttrose's biography and other articles by this writer
George W Bush Snr berates Iran for newk-ya-lah ambitions. George Bush enunciated the Saddam in Hussein like he'd just lipped too much salt with his margarita. Richard Nixon pronounced Viet-Nahm like a tropical wasting disease, rhymed with harm.
Three decades after the fall of Saigon, for some the background chatter of helicopters and a Phantom jet's jungle wake of spidery tendrils of white phosphorus, and napalm plumes in day-glo orange remains. Martin Sheen's murmured, ‘Saigon, Saigon, I was still in Saigon ...' may haunt the odd scabby hotel room, but it's Ho Chi Minh City now, and the only boom is an economic one. Having won the war, the Vietnamese are winning the peace: Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi are growling free-market tiger cubs, a business thriving on every corner.
Vietnam has moved on, while the United States remains in the thrall of a recidivism born of old victory and revenge movies: news reports indicate many Americans even believe they won. The Vietnamese have seen the movies too, but they know the difference between box office and history. As the Americans are discovering all over again in Iraq, history isn't bunk.
‘They say that whatever you're looking for, you will find here. They say you come to Vietnam and you understand a lot in a few minutes, but the rest has got to be lived,' Michael Caine's character Thomas Fowler declares in The Quiet American. The first hours in any new country are precious, before your senses acquire the familiarity of a third glass of wine. On the taxi ride into Ho Chi Minh City we pass designer infant clothing boutiques and a profusion of billiard rooms. Electric cables trail down main streets like thick black vines, branching off into shops and homes. The streets throng with young people on motorcycles, teenage girls text on their Vespas, all so young, products of the baby boom that followed what the Vietnamese call the ‘American War'.
The women make an immediate impression. Not just because they are beautiful. It's their apparent ease and confidence, their freedom on the streets, dressed in their pyjamas or high heels, jeans or mini-skirts. The only veil is a mask against air pollution, embroidered with a flower. Subsequent inquiries confirm an emancipation stemming from the ancient matrilineal tradition and the frontline role women played in the American War. Who would dare to tell the guerrillas of the Mekong that their place was at home cooking rice?
The initial impression is of a vigorous, increasingly prosperous nation, an economic hybrid of big state-owned enterprises and a flourishing private sector. The dollar and the dong are interchangeable. The image of the revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh is on Vietnamese banknotes, Washington and other American revolutionaries on the US dollar. The last Aussie dollar in my pocket bears an English queen and a kangaroo.
In his 1955 novel The Quiet American Graham Greene foreshadows the arguments which were to come. In Pyle, the American who wasn't ‘one of those noisy bastards at the Continental', Greene embodies the ingenuousness of American foreign policy. ‘You and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren't interested.'
‘They don't want Communism.'
‘They want rice ... They don't want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don't want our white skins around telling them what to do'.
Greene anticipates the final debacle. The origins of the intervention are not the old imperialism of pillaged riches and subject peoples but a policy cooked up by think-tanks in the McCarthy era: ‘Containment of Red China' to prevent the ‘domino effect' of Asian nations falling one by one to communism, challenging America's post-World War II Asian-Pacific imperium and menacing Australia.
The US assumed the colonial mantle of the beaten French and contrived a ‘third force' – the government of South Vietnam – always more a strategic notion than a viable entity. By the end of the whole dreadful mess, millions had fallen, but the dominoes remained upright. A century of colonialism ended, Vietnam was reunified with a social and economic carpe diem. Who killed those millions? Alden Pyle, the frighteningly quiet American who Greene's narrator, the newspaperman Fowler, cannot bring himself to hate. Pyle is wrong, not for the wrong reasons but for genuinely held ones – which makes him all the more dangerous.
WE LEAVE THE AIRCON OF THE rosy-hued Miss Loi Guest House bound for the first place on Belle's holiday ‘to see' list. Summer days in Ho Chi Minh City are hot, up to 40 degrees, and after a half hour walk we're grateful for the cool French colonial Museum of Fine Art. Instantly, we're impressed by the quality and diversity of work: paintings of streetscapes, bar scenes, portraits, nudes, women with children, workers in ricefields and fisherfolk dragging nets. Other canvases are war images, painted on hessian rice-bags, of women soldiers in the jungle, eating under canvas, combing each other's hair, feeding infants with a rifle slung over their shoulder. The influence of Picasso and Matisse is clear, but also traditional Chinese, in paintings of striking beauty and originality.
Although this is a major state-run museum, there are price-tags on the works we discover are all painted by one of Vietnam's modern masters, Fam Luc. We talk it over, and later buy a small canvas of brilliantly coloured flowers. The assistant asks whether we would like to meet the artist, and phones Fam Luc at his hotel. We meet and converse in hopelessly broken French. Over the next couple of days he graciously entertains us and we ask more about his work. He never points out the bullet holes in the paintings of women at war.
Outside the War Remnants Museum there are US tanks and helicopters and fighter planes, still menacing three decades on. There are bombs and rockets, cluster bombs and napalm canisters: a nation's identity expressed in legions of military might, and all to no avail. Inside is far worse: galleries of photographs of napalmed children, farmers being led away and shot, dead families with throats cut by US soldiers. There are testaments to the spraying of the defoliant Agent Orange, jars of deformed foetuses in formaldehyde which demand you to look even though so much in you begs you not to, and photographs of people with ‘Elephant Man' faces, gnarled and twisted bodies. A US serviceman smiles for the lens as he pumps Agent Orange from a drum daubed ‘The Purple People Eater' into the tanks of a plane. It seems too monstrous, inhuman, a heinous felony. How could one nation do this to another: deform its children for generations? ‘Come home America. Come home from your dark country of racism, from your tragic, reckless adventure in Vietnam,' Dr Martin Luther King had pleaded not long before he was shot in 1968.
There are other galleries featuring photographs of US forces under fire, mired in mud, wounded and dying, a horizon of Huey Valkyries across the sky, crimson flashes of shell-blasts, and American grunts in the field, young faces mingling fear, pain, fatigue, anger, contempt and bewilderment.
Despite the horrors, there is scant abiding bitterness from the Vietnamese who created the exhibition, or in those streaming by outside the museum gates. There is profound sorrow, but also the hope of reconciliation, typified by one of the final exhibits, the military decorations of an American serviceman and his letter of apology.
The former presidential residence, now called Reunification Palace, is a '60s modernist block-pile, but inside it is cool, calm and spacious. The guidebooks jibe about lavish kitsch, but the cabinet rooms and meeting halls are beyond kitsch, captivating to the last outrageous chandelier. There's a map room, with colour-coded phones; a gambling room with wine barrel bar; a movie room with red plush swivel chairs; and, in the basement, banks of ancient telex machines and single presidential ‘combat bed' for nights when it got too hot upstairs. There's a closed security section with rows of dungeons, and a shooting gallery where President Thieu peppered targets with his favourite handgun.
We emerge to the gates two North Vietnamese tanks crashed through on April 30, 1975, the final act of decades of war. I ask whether the tank driver is famous. ‘Well-known yes, but famous, no. He lives like an ordinary man, with not much money. We are all proud of him and what he did, but he is one of us, nothing more.'