Hi! I am still alive! I am now back in Ho Chi Minh City after 23 days in Quang Tri, in central Vietnam. The 17th parallel, the dividing line between North and South Vietnam during the war, actually goes right through the province. Now the only foreigners who visit are war vets, but those are few and far between. Quang Tri was also the site of an 81-day-long bombing known as the 2nd Battle of Quang Tri. During those months, every living resident of the area is estimated to have sustained many thousands of pounds worth of bombs. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam, supported by the US) used 80,000 tons of artillery. That's 1,000 tons per day for 3 months. My roommate's parents, for example, survived those days, though they were just little children at the time.
The signs of the war are present everywhere, but never overwhelming. Right on the main road of Quang Tri Town, where we stayed, there is a bombed out school. It cannot be rebuilt because it, like many other destroyed buildings in Vietnam, now belongs to the government and is considered a historic relic. We biked by this school everyday, and finally we went in it. Some of the stairs are still intact, though much of the floor, walls, and ceiling is not. We went upstairs and walked through holes in the walls from one classroom into another. You can still see the chalkboards on some of the walls, and on them, groups of students who used to attend the school have written notes. It is a sad but striking site. The school now houses a family in one of the downstairs classrooms. There also seems to be a plant shop of sorts that operates out of it. There are all kinds of beautiful bonsai trees and shrubs in pots covering the ground.
Further along on our bike ride to work, there is a bombed out concrete tower that looks like it may have been a watchtower many years ago. It is along the river, but it has been abandoned now, and nobody knows what its story was. On the other side of the river, there is a monument with drops of blood, honoring the people who lost their lives in the war.
About a block away from our guest house, in town, is a big pagoda-like structure, right along the river. It is primarily ceremonial, but inside of the temple, there is a shrine on one side to Ho Chi Minh, and on the other to the soldiers who died during the wars, both the French and American Wars, I think. Although Quang Tri is a small, unimportant province politically, there is a huge ceremony held there every year which attended by high-ranking government officials, Buddhist monks, war veterans, and other citizens. It happens on the plaza in front of the pagoda (the same place we watch the sun go down every night as we play soccer with the local boys). This year, a Buddhist temple sponsored an extra service a few days before the ceremony. Going back to the 81-day bombing, many Southern Vietnamese soldiers tried, those days, to swim across the river in front of the pagoda to protect the large citadel. Thousands of men died trying to cross this river, now referred to as the Blood River. During the ceremony, therefore, they light paper lanterns to wish for the men who died.
One night, we went to have coffee by the river and discovered that it was filled with these paper lanterns. It looked like there was a city in the river because of all the lights. There were thousands of them, filling the river for as far as we could see. They had been sending them out for 3 hours. Each lantern is a wish, and with all those lanterns, I thought there must be 10 wishes for each person who died in the river, but my Vietnamese friend Hien told me that, "No, many more people died here than the number of lanterns you see floating here."
We watched this fiery floating mass go gently down the river, gradually getting smaller as they floated downstream from their point of release at the pagoda. I wanted to know why these people were there, so Hien asked a man about the ceremony. He explained it and asked me, in Vietnamese, if I wanted to go inside the temple. He unlocked it for me and let us go inside to pray for the soldiers, in Buddhist fashion.
Hien then asked the people in one of the boats--classic, long wooden boats--if they might take us out there. Some people had released the lanterns from the middle or the far side of the river, so this "security" boat for the pagoda had been one of the ones ferrying people to the middle of the river. They let the 5 of us--Hien, Joey, Pablo, Katie, and me--get on the boat, and they used a pole to push along the bottom of the river, sending us out to the middle. They turned the engine on low and drove us into the middle of the lanterns, each one representing a dead soldier. We were in a sea of lantern wishes, sitting on bamboo mats, and as we looked back at the pagoda, we saw the moon rising orange over the palm trees on the far bank. It was one of my favorite nights in Vietnam.
One of the most interesting things I have seen, and I was confused by it at first, are these men I saw on my way to work every morning, wielding metal detectors and walking through mud and dirt where the road was being expanded. It seemed weird that this team of men could make a living off of finding shards of valuable metal in the ground. Finally I asked Phuong (my roommate) about it, and learned that they were not, as I had guessed, trying to pass time looking for stray coins, but were actually searching for unexploded land mines. Never expect to see that in the States.
When you think about what Vietnam went through in the 20th century, it's amazing they're doing as well as they are. From 1940 to 1975, they had 35 years of guerrilla warfare, a 15 year civil war, occupation by two different imperial powers (three, depending on how you classify the US-South Vietnam relationship), and a massive bombing campaign against all the major cities in the north. And then, for an encore, they overthrew the Khmer Rouge, fended off a Chinese invasion, and occupied Cambodia until 1989. It's a tough country.
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