The Peace Correspondent (23 page)

We cycle past the former U.S. Embassy, a big, ugly square block now overrun with jungle and rubble, so familiar from photographs of helicopters lifting off, evacuating the last of the Americans. Across the street, grizzled ladies in cone hats and black pyjamas squat by the road, selling cigarettes and raffle tickets.

Passing the red brick, twin-spired Notre Dame Basilica, we cross a broad street -- and there it is, the Presidential Palace. Communist tanks rolled up this street on the morning of April 30, 1975, smashed down those front gates, and ended decades of war.

The driver drops me off at the gate, we tussle over the price, and he peddles off happily with a few dollars. Entry to what is now called the Reunification Palace is 1,000 dong for Vietnamese 5,000 dong for foreigners. This is the officially sanctioned economic apartheid that is practiced throughout Vietnam for everything from train tickets to coconuts.

Hundreds of dragonflies hover like Huey helicopters in the hot summer morning, Western classical music plays from unseen speakers as I walk up to the front steps. Looking back, I vividly recall the news footage of the tanks crashing through the gates, taken from here by Australian cameraman Neil Davis. In the last years of the war, President Thieu and his wife lived in this tawdry palace with its austere reception room and gaudy conference hall.

On the fourth floor is the famous pole where the victorious soldiers unfurled the Viet Cong flag. A floor below is the pathetic family play room, with a small, pleated pink Naugahyde bar
with four bar stools, a card table, a small dance floor and a games room with billiards, ping-pong and chess. Billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives were wasted to keep the president secure in this 1950s-style rec room.

Well, good evening, Vietnam. Once the liveliest city in Southeast Asia, irrepressible Saigon is regaining its glitter and sizzle. My evening foray into the city streets takes me down busy Dong Khoi, once Ru Catinate, then Tu Do (Freedom), to Maxim. The old-style supper club is a holdover from the earlier days, with a dated song-and-dance floor show on the circular stage in the grand, Moulin Rouge-style room.

The nine-piece band playing corny big band music, to a backdrop of scenic photos of Chinese gardens and city skylines by night, switches to Japanese songs with the arrival of a group of visiting businessmen. A slightly suggestive fake Thai temple dance follows, with the lady dancer in a very brief, glittering gold costume and tall temple hat. They say that time stopped in Saigon in 1975. In Maxim, it never got beyond the 50s.

Tu Do, the street of the tarts, is reviving, though. You can't keep good hustlers down. Bars such as the Senorita Dolce Vita, Hard Rock Cafe, Yellow Umbrella and Good Morning Vietnam operate in the area where once hundreds of GIs roamed. In a small “cafe,” I let two bar girls hustle me for a “Saigon tea” for 8,000 dong, fulfilling that aspect of the war experience at least. The girls have mellowed, though, with not so much of the old, aggressive “You number 10 cheap shit Joe.”

In the late evening, young girls in ao dai or blue jeans cruise the streets riding motorcycles or as cyclo passengers, presented like tasty morsels in Saigon's version of the bicycle ice cream vendor. Greene wrote lovingly of these delicate girls, who “twitter and sing on your pillow.”

Vietnam, hot damn.

On adjacent Dong Du Street, I find what I've been looking for, the Apocalypse Now bar, named for the classic Vietnam movie. The basic, storefront place represents so well the Vietnamese
penchant for exploiting the war without holding a grudge. “Lift the Embargo” and “Apocalypse Now” T-shirts for sale hang on the minimalist black walls, and a wild-eyed Marlon Brando glares down from a giant movie poster. Sixties rock music and the low prices attract expatriates and budget travelers from the nearby Saigon Hotel.

I find Yana here, a friend of some of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondent Club's old-timers. Yana was part of the Vietnam media pack that included correspondent John Steinbeck Junior, son of the novelist, and photographer Dana Stone. She lived a while with Sean Flynn, son of Errol, a glamorous war photographer who disappeared on a motorcycle into Cambodia one day in 1970.

Yana now works for foreign correspondents who have begun returning to Vietnam, arranging cars, guiding, translating. She looks like a latter-day, elderly flower child with her hippie bag full of memories. But she remembers the conflict, and the old correspondents, well. Would I like to see her old war pictures?

IN Vietnam, it seems, heaven and hell are never far apart. A day's journey out of Saigon (officially Ho Chi Minh City, but only bureaucrats and politicians call it that) provides visions of an odd, but endearing temple to enlightenment, as well as a man-made netherworld.

The journey itself is an experience somewhere between heaven and hell. Vietnam's better hotels and travel agents provide cars, drivers and guides for day trips, but rough-looking taxi drivers, many former Army of the Republic of Vietnam soldiers, loiter across from the Rex, cajoling passing tourists. Unfortunately, a fast-talking street tout talked me into hiring his freelance vehicle. Standing on the burning sidewalk, I haggle with one, deftly beating him down from US$50 to $35 for a day's jaunt into the countryside.

His car, an ancient, clapped-out little Renault, is painted the flat, thick, Easter-egg blue of a Saigon tart's eye make-up. With its broken seat and bad shocks, it is painfully uncomfortable as the driver erratically weaves with blaring horn through the chaotic traffic of bicycles, bicyclettes, motorcycles, pedestrians and children everywhere.

Just a few kilometers out on Route 22, and I know I have made a mistake. The battered Renault with a hole in its bare metal floor and no side windows is cramped and sweltering as we weave along the crowded, potholed roads.

In mangled French, my volatile driver insists his vintage vehicle is superior to the comfortable, air-conditioned Japanese
models cruising past us. Still, the excursion to two of the Mekong Delta's more unusual attractions, one a haven of peace, the other a memorial of war, is worth the ordeal.

In rural Vietnam, women in black pyjamas and classic woven cone hats squat at the side of the road selling long, golden baguettes, packs of cigarettes, car and bicycle parts, fruit and vegetables or fresh young coconuts for drinking. Water buffalo work the rice paddies, and ancient, wood-hulled supply barges drift slowly down placid rivers.

Even away from the city, traffic never lets up in this crowded country. Although prosperity has brought new Japanese vehicles to the highways, immense, battered museum-piece American trucks, remnants from the war years, haul huge logs, families of four or five wobble along on small motorbikes and plodding oxen pull creaking two-wheeled wooden wagons. And everywhere, countless bicycles.

Several hours in this rolling oven, 100 kilometers northwest of Saigon, near the Cambodian border, we reach the town of Tay Ninh, site of the Cao Dai religion's major house of worship. The elaborate Great Cathedral, the most prominent structure in a complex of pastel yellow buildings in Sino-Vietnamese style with European elements, looks like a holy place designed by a 1960s acid head.

I've never seen anything quite like it. More garish and ornate than even a Taoist/Confucian temple, it is like a religious theme park, with gaudy adornments, splashes of bright color and multicolored dragons entwined around pink pillars. A busy mural depicts French author Victor Hugo, Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen and Vietnamese poet and prophet Nguyen Binh Khiem, while statuary of Jesus Christ, Lao Tse, Confucius and Buddha completes the ensemble. A great, luminous sphere, the Divine Eye, hangs over the altar overlooking worshippers.

Through good fortune rather than planning, I arrive on time to witness midday prayers. At the great door (women and men must use different entrances), a member of the congregation summons
me upstairs where a dozen foreigners observe the service. The atmosphere is vaguely medieval with the priests' outlandish costumes and murmured prayers.

Seen from the balcony, it is like a scene from some fantasy adventure movie as hundreds of squatting supplicants in white, and priests clad in brilliant red, yellow and blue ceremonial robes form a geometric pattern on the stone floor below us. In the cool of the huge temple, voices chant while an orchestra all in white plays eerie, sacred music with skrawky er-hu (Chinese-style) stringed instruments.

As I observe this mysterious scene, a sweet, tiny old nun with a doll-like face approaches and attempts to explain the basics of this strange creed in hesitant English. Then she hands me a piece of paper, hand-written in English, outlining the founding of this strange theology, which amalgamates ideas from many different religions and beliefs, East and West.

Founded in the 1920s by Vietnamese government official Ngo Van Chieu, Cao Daisim is a bizarre synthesis of all existing religions, including elements of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Vietnamese spiritualism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, even animism spiritual seances and occult rites. Its eclectic ecclesiastics have communicated with, and sanctify, such a mixed group of improbable spirits as Joan of Arc, William Shakespeare, Louis Pasteur, Victor Hugo, Sun Yat-sen, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

Despite the bizarre setting in what may be Asia's strangest holy place, the chanting and music imbue the ceremony with a mysterious sense of serenity. It is as moving as any cathedral or temple I have seen.

Outside in the hot sun, as I sip a soft drink bought from a bicycle hawker wearing a cone hat and pyjamas, my pestiferous driver urges me to move on, even though I have paid him for the whole day.

Returning home along the same crowded highway, about 36 kilometers outside Saigon the driver, with a predetermined
itinerary for Western tourists, detours to Cu Chi district. As we bump along in the flat delta country, he points to the rice paddies, exclaiming “VC, VC, VC” (Viet Cong). “Boom-boom. B52 bombers,” he shouts with elaborate gestures, taking his hand off the horn for the first time today.

The Cu Chi tunnels are the most accessible part of the infamous, elaborate tunnel network the Viet Cong built over decades of war. Communist guerrillas started digging the tunnels in 1948. Later, they became a refuge from the constant bombing and operations of American troops in the Iron Triangle and War Zone C. The ornate tunnel system was a logistic center as well as a Viet Cong hideout and, in 1968, the staging area for the deadly Tet Offensive against Saigon.

As my irksome driver parks and squats in the shade of a tree, lighting up a cigarette, a small man who resembles a VC guerrilla in his camouflage uniform bicycles up to meet me. Like it or not, he is my guide.

The ex-soldier leads me down an embankment to a big, empty building, like a classroom inside, and escorts me around a series of photographs and diagrams showing the intricate underground systems. He explains, in halting English, the self evident pictures along the wall showing soldiers living in the caves and a diagram of the intricate system.

The 250-kilometer complex eventually spread like a spider's web under an area from the Cambodian border to within 32 kilometers of Saigon. The underground passageways joined villages and linked dormitories, kitchens, conference rooms and classrooms, hospitals and schools, ammunition dumps, escape hatches and propaganda lecture halls where cadres from the north passed on the word of Comrade Ho. But despite the facilities, life in these dark tunnels must have been a form of hell.

Outside the building, the guide leads me to a clearing in the jungle to show me a bombed-out tank lying in the undergrowth, a vicious bamboo trap with stakes at the bottom of a pit, and a nail trap sprouting wicked, sole-destroying hooked spikes. Then,
kicking a few leaves aside, he reveals a small gap in the ground about the size of a coffee-table book, he pauses for dramatic effect as I determine that I can barely get one foot into it. Then, lifting the cover, my tiny guide (a full-grown Vietnamese perhaps half my body weight) sits on the edge of the tiny hole in the ground, holds his arms over his head, and slithers into it, disappearing like a snake.