back from Vietnam

My Dad was there in 1967. He left January 1968, a week before the Tet Offensive. He was with the 25th Infantry Division in Cu Chi in a mechanized unit that rode M113 armored personnel carriers. For the past few years he had been talking about wanting to go back to visit Vietnam, see how the place has changed since he was there and just say hello. I had asked him if I could tag along, and so off we went.

The old American Cu Chi base is now used by the Vietnamese army for basic training, but we had a guide take us up to the gate and near a stream where they had bunkers that guarded one of the entrances. Our guide turned out to be an old Viet Cong fighter who lived in the Cu Chi area. He didn't tell us that, but when he said he was a year older than my Dad and was born in Cu Chi I had a hunch. We asked the lady who organized the tour and she told us he was VC. He was an amazing guy. At 61 years old he's got a 4 month-old son with his second wife who's half his age. We asked him if the Vietnamese people are angry with Americans, and he said that they let bygones be bygones and want to be friends.

I put a few photos on photobucket so far. Here's a few from our trip to the Cu Chi base and the Cu Chi tunnels.


My Dad and our tour guide standing on the bridge over the stream that my Dad used to guard. One side was the American base and the other side was Commie country.


Me trying to fit down a spider hole. It was widened for Western tourists so I can't imagine how anyone fit down those things.


A guide leading me down one of the tunnels. This was had lights in it. Another one I went down didn't, and it was claustrophobic. I don't know how anyone could have spent any length of time there.


My Dad and I planning for battle in the tunnels. This room was supposedly where the Tet Offensive was coordinated.


Exiting the tunnels hot and sweaty.

This is the Reunification Palace in Ho Chi Minh City. It was the Presidential Palace when the South Vietnamese government was in control, but renamed after 1975 when the Communists came into power. We took a tour of it one morning, and the place is huge. It's 3 floors tall, and has a helicopter pad and a dance floor on the roof. The basement has a huge bunker system where the war was run.

The place was bombed by a Communist who infiltrated the South Vietnamese army. I guess they have a shrine for that pilot in Hanoi along with his airplane, and on the roof of the Reunification Palace they have two red circles marking where the two bombs landed.

Another semi-interesting thing of note. At the entrance of the Palace where the tours organize there are photos of the wars with the American and French, and some of the captions revise history a tiny bit. One photo was of a bunch of Viet Cong celebrating, and it said they were celebrating their victory after Tet when in reality they got their asses beat. Another had a photo of a Marine at Khe Sanh running down a road. The caption read something like "The frightened Marine made a hasty retreat from Khe Sanh". Again... never happened.



Thorp might appreciate this photo.

He didn't seem to be phased by the trip in an emotional sense. He said that other Vets will get weepy or cry when they re-visit places they were stationed or where there was a battle, but that he wasn't that type. He was right. He told some heartbreaking stories over the course of the trip, but I guess he's come to terms with it all. Our guide for one of our day trips asked him why he wanted to come back to Vietnam, and he said he just wanted to say "Xin Chao" (Hello) and see how everyone was doing. My Dad even said that he'd like to go back again to see more of the country. We really only saw parts of the country near Ho Chi Minh City.

Speaking of which, here's a few more random photos from around the city.



Everyone drives a motorbike to get around, and the traffic is legendary. There are traffic lights and I assume traffic laws, but I don't think anyone follows them. It's almost a free-for-all. I think something like an average of 9 people get killed each day on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City alone. I took a ride on a motorbike taxi towards the end of our trip just to say I'd done it.



People have street stalls everywhere selling food and snacks and anything else you can imagine. I didn't eat at one of these places. Too afraid of catching a bug.



The city has KFC and Pizza Hut, but no McDonald's.... yet. Im sure it's coming.



HIV/AIDS awareness posters around the city. I took this photo for the people at work. Figures aren't really known for how many people have the virus, and apparently this is all the government really cares to do about it and I read that they only started putting these posters up because of outside pressure.



The latest in wiring technology.

A few more photos and I'm off to work.

On one of our day trips we drove through Trang Bang, the town where the little girl was hit by napalm from South Vietnamese bombs that went off course. If you don't know what Im talking about here's the famous photo.




Our guide said that usually he just points the place out as he drives through the town, but for some reason we stopped in the town for a minute. As my Dad and I were taking some pictures our guide was talking with some locals who pointed out a tiny store just up the road. So we walked over there and it turns out it's a relative of the girl, Kim Phuc. She had married Kim's brother, who has since died, and runs a noodle shop just off the road. I had happened to be reading a book about Kim Phuc, and when the communists took over her family, and the rest of the country, suffered through severe poverty. I don't know if that noodle shop is the same one that Kim's mother had run, and I didn't think to ask, but I feel lucky that we had even stopped and I had a chance to meet her.





Kim defected to Canada in the 90s, and the book didn't really talk about how her family fared as a consequence of the defection. Again, I didn't think to ask.

a few more photos if anyone's still interested.


In Cu Chi there's a memorial for everyone from Cu Chi who died in Cu Chi during the wars with the French and the Americans.


Here's the leftovers of M113, the vehicle my Dad drove in/on in Vietnam. Theyre trying to figure out what could have caused the damage to the side of it.



A few other photos. This place was pretty neat.






Later that day we went to a temple in Cu Chi that had the names of everyone from Cu Chi who died anywhere in the country or in Cambodia. I had no idea we were going here, but it was pretty neat. The place was huge, and has something like 40,000 names on the walls on the inside of it. The names go something like 3 stories up. I wasn't supposed to take pictures, but I wasn't told that until after I took one of the shrine in the back of the temple.






Not very intesting pics, but I had them in my photobucket. Figured I'd post em.

Well, our guide didn't say anything about not taking photos. Also, you're supposed to take your shoes off before you go into a temple or a pagoda, but our guide just walked right into this temple. The dude working there said something to him in Vietnamese so our guide rushed us out and said "take off your shoes". When I took my photo, again, the guy working there said something to our guide and he told me "no photo". After that, anywhere we went I was asking our guide if it was ok to take photos. Like you said, the last thing I want is to offend someone or break some law and get thrown in jail or kicked out of the country. I was just surprised that our guide didn't know the rules!

Ive got some other interesting photos I still need to upload. We went to a few places where most tourists don't go.

One place we did go that's a tourist trap is Vung Tao. It's a town on a penninsula southeast of Saigon. It used to be the in-country R&R location for American troops during the war, but for some reason my Dad decided not to go when he had the chance. So we hopped on a hydrofoil and took the 90 minute ride over there so my Dad can say he's been there. It looked really nice from the boat as we were docking, but since it was a weekday and the place was dead, all of the locals who were selling stuff or made money by driving tourists around on their motor scooters were SUPER aggressive and pretty much spoiled the day for us. We didn't see much of the place and eventually got so fed up with the harassment and went back to the dock to wait for the boat to come back.

Supposedly the town is hopping on the weekends, and it's infamous for it's sex trade as it also caters to the off shore oil riggers. So, here's a few photos of that place. It looked nice, was clean and probably would have been fun on a weekend, but we pretty much hated it.









The water and the "beach" were pretty dirty. Apparently there's a nice beach on the other side of the penninsula, but again... we didn't bother checking it out.