Hanoi and Uncle Ho
- Warning: this gets political!
We got off from Phu Bai Airport (formerly "Airbase Phu Bai") on time in a beautiful new Folker 70. It was almost completely silent on take-off. One hour later, we were in the capital of the former enemy, and were met by Nga, a tiny 24 year old woman of about 32 kilos. Driving into the city, we were treated to a wonderful surprise. This city is still a beautiful French Provincial town. Thousands of yellow stucco buildings remain, including the Governors' Palace and government buildings. The boulevards are wide and lined with large, beautiful trees. The streets are clean and the place even smells good. I like this town.
One of the first visits in this town was a temple which was all too familiar by this time. Chinese Temples are repositories of the history of the people and for ancestor worship. This one was very pretty and I got a photo of a bronze item which is of interest it is a common figure all over the country and consists of a Stork standing on a Turtle. The fable is that the Stork didn't want to get its feet wet and the turtle couldn't reach the food it needed in the trees. The arrangement satisfied the needs of both and is an important teaching for this people about banding together to meet the problems of the world. Our leaders should have checked out such fables before doing war in this country.
In the very middle of the city is the citadel, still an army base. It was here and in the many parks around the center of the city that the North parked and marshaled their stores of surface to air missiles and military hardware in complete safety for years, since we were not allowed to hit military targets in the city until 1972. After that date, the area got pounded. (By the way, it is a violation of the Geneva Convention to shield military hardware and supplies by parking them in civilian areas.)
We checked in at the Hoang Minh Hotel on Hang Bun Street, in walking distance of most sites of interest in the 1,000 year old city. We don't have to walk. Our very friendly driver holds our doors, carries our stuff, takes us anywhere and is waiting outside at the curb when we come out of the theater, or wherever. The hotel is, naturally, French Colonial, and is very small. Our room has a glass chandelier and a decorative plaster ceiling. It is air conditioned, but we didn't really need it. The weather is very pleasant, with none of the heavy heat of the South. There is a nice breeze most of the time.
Walking the streets in the old city is interesting. There are endless streams of shops gathered in areas or streets according to the products sold. This area was a network of canals 1,000 years ago, and each street was then a boat landing on which goods were received and sold. Dikes were built over the centuries to reduce flooding. One now, as then, can buy silver on Hang (shop) Bac (silver) Street, cotton on Hang Bong(cotton) Street, coffins on Hang Hom, hats on Hang Non, bamboo on Hang Trong, etc. Cyclos are everywhere, but less meddlesome and of better humor that in the south. Again, there are few cars, but swarms of two wheeled vehicles. John and I walked for hours and hours, most every day.
We left Hang Bun early and visited the dead guy. School children and army recruits were lined up 4 abreast for half a mile by that early hour. Lines were very orderly and people waited patiently, that is except us. The children waved at us as an Army Colonel saw me and lead us to the front of the line.
The guards were very serious. There was a middle aged woman nearby with a string bag over her shoulder. A guard grabbed her roughly and threw her out of the line and to the ground. Bags are not allowed. We were warned in the book not to make comments in the presence of the many guards such as, "Sure looks dead to me," or "They should bury the stiff."
Afterward, we visited the lovely garden where Ho Chi Minh, his 50th or so alias, lived as president for his last 10 years. He chose not to live in the French Governor's mansion, and had a simple stilt house built in the garden nearby. It is simple and lovely, patterned after the houses in the simple village, Vinh, where Ho was born and named Nguyen Sinh Cung.
Ho Chi Minh is just the last of many noms de guerres he adopted. At least this is the party line. I think Ho was too smart to stay there where we could target him. Actually, we did not know it at the time, but Ho was replaced on the Politburo of the North in 1963 by LeDuan, a dedicated Stalinist, educated in Moscow. Ho was kept as the North's mascot, and actually exiled for a time for not being willing to escalate the war. He and General Giap were recalled after the miserable failure of the Tet '68 Offensive.
Nga kept up her generally-good commentary in fairly good English. Here we get more party line than in the South, and I didn't say much at first, at least until she referred to the war's cause as America's attempt to form a colony in the South. "Stop," I said. "The US had no such intention." She seemed completely baffled. "Then why did you come?" she asked. I explained about Kruchev's pounding his shoe on the desk at the UN and promising to bury us all. I told her of Stalin's murder of 20 million of his own people. We took that seriously, I told her, and felt compelled to draw the line on the expansion of communism, which we perceived by its fruit to be a great evil. This was completely new to her and I think that her mind was in overload. I explained further that VietNam was the shooting part of the Cold War between Russia and the US, but as it turned out, Russia collapsed completely and probably wasn't much of a threat anyhow, and that all the communist countries in the world had succeeded only in keeping their people in poverty and hopelessness.
This caused her to stop in her tracks. She had no idea about the dissolution of the USSR or the economic and political failure of the state. As long as I had her on the hook, I told her that the west had sent billions in aid to bail Russia out, but it has done no good because of rampant corruption and the scale of the collapse. She stopped me and said, "I am sorry, but I have to keep telling the American Colony story."
We visited an excellent museum which tells the story of Uncle Ho's life. He is truly revered here. There is real passion in his legacy. He came along as the poor of the world were beginning to struggle against foreign and class domination. It is easy now to see how people can follow such men.