Red Right Blog |
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Rants, Rates, Slags, Slates. Manic-depressive posts from Red Wright-Hand. Because there are thousands of worthless blogs out there and who am I not to add to their number?
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Saturday, March 12, 2005
CU CHI: It would be wrong to call it a pleasure, but there is a peculiar satisfaction in re-reading some of the Viet Nam journalism I had studied before my trip, and seeing street and place names now leaping recognizably off the page. An eyewitness account of the fall of Saigon in 1975, for example, is lots more immediate when the author (Keyes Beech) begins "...I had breakfast on the ninth floor of the Caravelle Hotel...and watched a column of ugly black smoke framed by the tall, twin spires of the Catholic cathedral...just up the street"and now I know precisely what he's talking about because I walked past that area every day I spent in Sai...I mean, Ho Chi Minh City. Likewise, this little passage from Dispatches: "We were walking out on a sweep north of Tay Ninh City, toward the Cambodian border, and a morter round came in about thirty yards away."Holy smoke, I was in Tay Ninh City. It is near the Cambodian border. Puts a chill down my spine, let me tell you. Which brings me to our guided tour of the Cu Chi tunnel complex. This is an extensive area northwest of HCMC, where the Viet Cong, living in elaborate tunnel systems first begun after WW2, managed to sustain themselves, seriously harassing first the French and then the Americans; in other words, a major operations base literally under the noses (and feet) of the enemy. If you wanted to fight the Cong there, you had to get down in the tunnels yourself, which a) was often a physical impossibility and b) not really something you wanted to do anyway. American forces came to know this area as The Iron Triangle; they bombed it, napalmed it, burned and defoliated and bulldozed it, and they still had...Cong around the collar. As you might expect, the Viets are rather proud of this history, and a portion of the tunnels (widened and cleaned up) are now available for tourist visits; in fact, it's got to be one of the most popular war-related sites in the country. After a brief lecture in the visitor's center about the place's history, we were shown a propaganda film lauding the Cong fighters and their heroic struggle, etc. The film was b&w and appeared to be of 1960s vintage...but was it filmed on the fly and then edited together after the War? Come on, don't tell me they had film studios in those tunnels too. Maybe the footage was smuggled up north to Hanoi and put together there...I just dunno. The movie had English-language narration (that didn't sound recently recorded) so I am at a loss as to the intended audience...pinko-lefty anti-war types in the States? Once that show was over, we got a look at some recreated booby traps. Here's a guide posing happily in front of a mural depicting the effect of those on GIs. A barrel of laughs! They let us crawl around in the tunnels too...five minutes of that and I was ready to surrender. More pics to come of the firing range on-site. Then it was on to Tay Ninh, center of the remarkable Cao Dai sect, headquartered there in a cathedral whose interior is really worth taking the trouble to see. We'd missed the noontime service but we got an eyeful of the place anyway. I'm at a loss to explain this religion; I refer you to Chapter 2 of The Quiet American, in which Greene (what, you think I'm going to try and compete with him?) or his narrator, if you prefer, has this to say of the cathedral: "A Pope and female cardinals. Prophecy by planchette. Saint Victor Hugo. Christ and Buddha looking down from the roof of the Cathedral on a Walt Disney fantasia of the East, dragons and snakes in technicolour." And what do you know, a few paragraphs later he writes: "It always seemed hotter in [Tay Ninh] than anywhere else in the Southern Delta...you couldn't believe it would ever be seven o'clock and cocktail-time on the roof of the Majestic, with a wind from the Saigon river." I had cocktails on the roof of the Majestic. It is right by the Saigon river. Puts a chill down my spine, let me tell you. |
