Dong Ha and the DMZ
October 4, 2002
Stumbled off the night train from Hanoi at 6am and found a seat at the outdoor railroad station cafe to dump my bags and have a wake-up Vietnamese coffee that is very strong but with hot water added to it makes a good cup of black coffee. I hear the ubiquitous �where are you from� coming from a table of men having morning tea behind me. An older fellow invites himself to my table. I love traveling alone. I am approachable…my experience is not determined by being part of a couple with a dominant male. And I think that in Asia, because of my age, I seem to draw out a kind of protectiveness in people here. My new friend hands me a little black book in which are written enthusiastic testimonials, many in English, by people that he has escorted around the DMZ.
I end up spending two days on the back of Mr. Binh’s motorcycle exploring the old American bases in the DMZ (demilitarized zone of the Vietnam War) and the tunnels at Vinh Moc in Central Vietnam. Mr. Truong Van Binh was an officer in the South Vietnamese army during the war and knows this area like the back of his hand.
Dong Ha served as a US marine command and logistics center during 1968-69. In the spring of 1968 a division of the North Vietnamese troops crossed the DMZ and attacked the city that was later the site of a South Vietnamese army base. Mr. Binh takes me miles west down Highway 9, down dirt roads, past rubber trees growing in and around huge bomb craters, rice paddies, banana trees and through tangled jungle to a bunker that sits on what used to be Con Thien Firebase. We cross the Ben Hai River, once the demarcation line between North and South Vietnam at the 17th parallel. Eight km south of the Ben Hai River is Doc Mieu Base, once part of an elaborate electronic system called McNamara�s Wall named after the US Secretary of Defense from 1961-68 intended to prevent infiltration across the DMZ.
Incidently former defence secretary Robert McNamara wrote a book called “In Retrospect” in which he shows how and why the American intervention was a terrible mistake…and “The Fog Of War” is an excellent documentary of the man in his role in the war. Today the area is a lunar landscape of bunkers. Nearby Son National Cemetery is a memorial to tens of thousands of North Vietnamese soldiers, regarded as “martyrs” for the liberation of Vietnam who were killed along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. I thought of Arlington Cemetery in Washington D.C. The only difference is that the grave markers in this cemetery have pictures of the dead on them.
A woman in her 30’s snarls at the others in the roadside cafe…Mr. Binh says she is “confused in the head” because of the orange spray…yes, I said to him, many of our Vietnam veterans feel their cancers and other maladies are due to Agent Orange also…it has been 25 years and the damage is not done.
Tags: DMZ, Dong Ha, Reading, Viet Nam
Zoe