"105 Degrees and Rising"

You know that famous picture of an American helicopter evacuating troops from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon at the end of the war? Did you know that was not the embassy in that photo? Or U.S. troops? Yeah, me neither. Funny how what actually happens in history is not nearly as important as what is reported to have happened. History is only lived once with no one around, but its written over and over again to an audience of millions. I love history, especially those historic moments that have some direct connection to me. (that just sounded like the intro paragraph to a seventh grade essay)

Whether good or bad, I realized that I was so interested in learning about the Vietnam War that I will definitely be excluding some amazing things to see and do in these countries. I am Ok with that, and the way I am looking at it is I can always come back and really see these countries more closely some other time. My dad just told me that he'd like to see these areas--so there you go...I'll be back. Luckily for me, Zaz was interested in getting the inside scoop also. ...

Didn't surprise me that Pol Pot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot ) organized often on the western border where we entered Cambodia. Like Zaz said, it was one of the lowest points of our trips culminating in tears running down Zaza's face. I wasn't pissed until I saw those tears. I was trying to remind myself that she just cries when she gets angry-it wasn't that she was upset, she just felt helpless. The guy who abandoned us without a bus to get to Siem Reap in Cambodia literally had black eyes without a hint of color or brightness in them. He really looked evil. I thought maybe he was a direct descendant of Pol Pot, who I found out later had lived and organized in that area. Or maybe he had met some of my descendants in the last 50 years. But once again a bad situation turned good and we got a taxi (way way faster and more comfortable) all for the same price everyone else paid for the entire trip from Bangkok to Siem Reap, Cambodia. Travelers now ask us for advice on how to overcome the "Bangkok to Siem Reap bus scam" (yes it has a name). When the taxi pulled up, a toyota camry covered in red mud from a road we would soon meet, some tourists with us gasped. I saw the extra suspension that was added jacking it up like a truck, and I noticed the tires were like small truck tires---I thought this thing would get us anywhere we needed to go, I was psyched. I wonder if I would have had that same reaction before experiencing India. Doubt it.

People ask us what's the best part of Cambodia (I hate that question--but I like our answer) its the people. They are so warm and friendly its like no where else I've ever been. How do borders align generosity levels? I don't know- let me get back to you on that one. Siem Reap and Phnom Phen, their two major cities. They're beautiful cities with tree-lined streets, french architecture, surrounded and dissected by rivers with walkways along them. In Siem Reap we toasted with green beer for St. Patricks Day and in Phom Phen we hung out with a local bartender named Lee who took off work for the rest of the night and took us out to the hottest club in the city: "The Heart of Darkness." Phnom Phen is stained with rich corrupt politician's kids who ride around in brand new Hummers, Mercedes, and Cadillacs with chrome wheels reflecting starving limbless kids on the street--victims of the countless landmines that are left over from the previous wars. It's a real concern here actually. Even our guide book advises us not to take a piss on the side of the road--you never know who's weapons lie underneath the dirt. It could have a Russian, Vietnamese, or American patent on it. Farmers, and kids looking for firewood get blown up all the time. We found out most of them are not designed to kill but to maim, because a maimed soldier costs more to repair and take care of for many years. How much of my taxes go to pay the economist who crunched those numbers?

The Killing Fields. It brings tears to my eyes as I write this ---10 days later. There are still human bones and clothes around the ditches that were dug to slaughter 2 million Cambodians. Check out the link above on Pol Pot. Even though he grew up wealthy, he tortured and killed almost 1/4 of the population of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 because he wanted Cambodia to return to an agrarian society. The cities were emptied and people were forced to farm. He killed people who did not have rough hands, even though this guy never lifted a farming or "working class" tool of any kind. Uhh... its one thing to read about, but to see our taxi driver tear up just because he had to wait outside while we went in is another. We didnt even ask if one of his family members were taken....we just knew. Everyone over the age of 30! has a story of a loved one that was last seen being questioned then put into a truck. People say they were afraid to talk to anyone, even their neighbors, because people ratted each other out to protect their own families.

We crossed the border into Vietnam on a bus. We passed right over the Ho Chi Minh Trail...the direct road/ trail/ rivers that was the avenue for supplies from the Northern Vietnamese (Vietcong) to their Southern rebels. We entered Saigon on the same road that the North Vietnamese did at the end of April in 1975, after the Americans had left. The next day we took a bus to Chu Chi tunnels. This was an extensive underground tunnel network built by the vietcong completely surrounding an old American military base (their largest in Vietnam). Part of the base was even built on the tunnels allowing them access to the inside! You should see this...you drive pass the base 5 minutes and you're inside the Vietcong's tunnels. The two fronts couldnt have been more than a mile apart. At one point we were guided through the tunnels by an ex Vietcong soldier who was very friendly even when I told him that I was American. Is this unreal? It's just a different digit on a calendar year that stands between this guy killing me on the spot. There was a left over blown up American tank there that stayed where time left it. Or a bomb left it I should say, time didn't help those Americans out at all.

Then we heard gunfire. From a machine gun. I never heard a machine gun before but to those that haven't, don't worry you'll know when you hear a machine gun. Our guide was leading us to a sort of snack place where we could take a lunch-break slash firing-range where you could shoot an M-16, AK-47, or any number of assault rifles. Did I say that right Josh? Assault rifles? Aren't they all assaulting? We had this option in Cambodia but we were so heartbroken by the stories of Pol Pot's violence, we couldn't even think about it. In Cambodia they give you a bigger selection too. You can fire an AK for $30, a rocket launcher for $200, and even take the old tank out...I'm not playing. If you want, for an extra few bucks they'll let you kill a cow or a chicken. So let's just say, none of this put us in the mood, especially the "kill something alive" deal in the backyard of the Killing Fields. But, I don't know, this set-up in Vietnam didn't have such a dark cloud over it. I mean the cloud was dark from an American perspective, and an overall human kind war is a horrible thing perspective, but we were on Vietcong turf, and these guys are pretty damn proud of winning the war. You can get any number of killing machines, sodas, sandwiches, you know your every day snack bar. Ihe guy behind the counter asked me what I'd like. He said the money goes to the museum and there's too many bullets in Vietnam, so its a good way to make money. Good enough for me--conscience cleared, i'll take a coke and that AK-47 right there!

And wait....look who's tagging along right behind me wondering if we can split the clip.....that's right...the AK Zazzadoo. It was fun actually, I like guns if you just shoot stuff in the woods. There were these targets really far away (Im bad with long distances--would guess almost a football field) and we both nailed them a couple of times. Sometimes its hard to tell because an AK makes a mess when it hits so there was a lot of dust where it would land--but wow these things are not for kids man. If you held the trigger too long it would just rip automatic LATATATATATATA, or you just hit it once BBBAAAOOOM. Its SOOO loud, like lighting an M-80 in your ear. Crazy. The whole thing just kind of left me shaky. Just made me more conscious of the violence that happened in those woods.

There were huge B-52 bomb craters in the next area that we saw. After my stint with the machine gun, I was trying to imagine what the plan would be for any given battle....I mean its thick jungle (the forest is very young now due to the napalm dropped everywhere(another tragic story hopefully zaz will elaborate) but you could imagine--plus you see the thick jungle everywhere else) What would the strategy be? Go straight, and kill any Vietcong you see? Or hide and kill when people move? Go left? Who goes first? Who ever goes first is definitely dead, how do you go? What if everyone in your group gets killed and your face down in the mud in South East Asia wondering how did I get here? This is not a good place to be....for what reason? I could be at a Grateful Dead show right now with my girlfriend and I am face down in the mud preparing to die. For what? They say we're fighting commies so our kids can go to a Grateful Dead show with their girlfriends in the future.....can't we just make up with the commies? The commies won and the Grateful Dead still went on...

The commies did win. Although the American military out-fought the Vietcong(meaning they killed 2 million Vietcong -while 55,000 Americans died) and won many more strategic battles, the North Vietnamese Vietcong soldiers took Saigon on April 30, 1975 and Vietnam is still communist. The Vietnam War (or as they call it here "the American War") had two fronts and the U.S. Military "lost" the front at home with public support. The Vietcong have since said that they wouldn't have been able to hold on much longer. Ho Chi Minh has said that the American anti-war movement was crucial to victory for the North Vietnamese. Who won and what we won all depends on whos writing it. The American War museum here in Saigon reminds you how both sides are just people---so similar--but we find ways to make some the bad guys and some the good guys.

Zaz and I printed a copy of that famous photo during the fall of Saigon of the American chopper lifting people off the roof of the embassy. Just a few clicks of the mouse and you find out that the photographer's message "down the street from the embassy" got lost in translation and history was re-written, or written I should say. It was in fact an apartment building right in downtown Saigon- not the embassy. I got the address and stuffed the printed photo into my pocket and off we went in search of this famous building.

I'm really sorry for the length--you wouldn't believe how much is being left out...plus this is for me too.

Ok, we leave with the address and a photo. I felt like a journalist with some leads. We find out that the street was renamed--- at least we got that far we thought. We half-heartedly kept looking hoping with little confidence that the number was the same even though the street name changed. We found number 22 Gia Long St. This was supposedly the real CIA headquarters which was disguised as an apartment building called Pittman Apartments across the street from the fake official CIA headquarters which is no longer there. The people boarding that helicopter were CIA, some other press and South Vietnamese--not American military 'running away', as some news outlets printed. We saw 4 men in their 50-60's(when I see men this age here I always wonder: where were they during the war? Who's side were they on?) sitting in black leather chairs laughing at a joke one of them had told. They look like they work there, a few of them have badges. I write down "Pittman Apartments 22 Gia Long St" next to the photo and show it to the men because I knew that they wouldn't speak English, not many people do above the age of 30 here. I accidentally hand them this one : (which we never found the location of)http://www.elpais.com/elpaismedia/domingo/media/200310/12/reportajes/20031012elpdmgrep_10_I_LBW.jpgand eliza realizes and snatches it away and replaces it with the correct one, this one: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a8/Vietnamescape.jpg where I had scribbled the address and name. I thought they looked puzzled until one of them nodded and wrote "C I A" on the piece of paper. Zaz and I said, YES YES. At the same time, they all agreed in Vietnamese I think.

We asked, very politely, in sign language if we could go to the roof and take a picture. Confused, and not too sincerely, one of them left with the photo and it seemed we should wait. A woman came back who spoke english and she asked if we wanted to go to the roof. We told her yes if it was OK, and she politely said it was not possible. I learned in India just by asking the same question twice, many times you get the answer you are looking for. You sort of get a coupla free bees because of the language barrier, it's great I wish I could use it at home. So I said again, "Is it Ok if we go to the roof to take a picture", like she never even responded the first time. Eliza kept saying, "history, history" it was hilarious. She said wait she'll check. (See?) She came back and said she would have to get clearance from the Director of the Building(dont know what that is --Communist Bureaucrats we thought) so its not possible. I said again so politely, "Can we get clearance from Director to take picture on roof?" "It's OK?" Eliza: "history, history?" She said to wait again and came back with the first guy who we originally spoke to and she said that he was going to escort us to the roof.

We were doing pretty well considering it was our first guerrilla journalism experience. We thought he was taking us to the roof but led us into an office titled 'Director of Operations'. These are common titles in Communist countries. I think I know this from my limited study of Chinese politics at CSU. Business and politics sort of blends sometimes. We enter a room straight out of 1970 with lime green rug and brown paneled walls all included. We even got a 1960s-70s dark brown blown glass ash tray on top of those plain gray metal desks with a dirty orange desk cover, you know the kind that have the cheesy carved wooden weights on each side--they prolly mass produce these in plastic for Office Depot now. The whole thing was topped with an old roledex like a cherry on a sundae. It even smelled like the seventies- cafeteria food and old cigarettes. There was a simple non-exotic plant thrown on some metal file cabinet that had a shade of green that matched every color in the room. How DID plants survive in those places back then?

The man behind the desk seemed to be only interested in business which led me to believe that this was a our dead end. He had a young, 20-something woman in a suit standing next to his desk. He asked us to sit. We sat in the two chairs in front of his desk and I sat on the edge of my seat, sort of leaning on to his desk--I was trying to make this less important than it looked. It wasn't THAT important, I was thinking, its just a photo. Zaz sat back a little, looks like she helped me with the photo downstairs and her reassuring "history, history" back-up, but she looked more over and out now. I had to curtail this charlie 9er 9er and take us home. (sorry for that).

But when he spoke he had a huge inviting grin on his face that made me really comfortable and had Zaz inching up a bit in her chair. He asked very matter-of-factly if we spoke Vietnamese--like there was a really good chance that we did. This was when we found out that the young woman standing to our right was the translator because we didn't.

We said that we knew hello, good-bye, delicious, and thank you.....and we were IN. His smile turned into a chuckle and I knew we had this guy--or he had us with his charm. Let's just say we were all charmers. We had a great exchange of personal questions ...well not really exchange but we answered really well with funny answers that really got him rolling. Then he got somewhat serious and said (through the interpreter) that this was CIA headquarters during the war. We both thought he said it was CIA headquarters now and an image of us getting assasinated flashed my mind. Luckily it was the former, and he said if we go and look or take pictures of the roof(he didnt care what we did on the roof), afterward, when we go back to New York we should tell our friends and family about the nice people of Vietnam and forget that War forever. He said this cuz previously we had said how nice people are in Vietnam and we were surprised being Americans and all....we agreed and thanked him and we were on our way up to the roof.

That was really cool, standing on that actual spot just after the code words "The Temperature in Saigon is 105 Degrees and Rising" was said repeatedly on the radio after "White Christmas". This was the signal to the CIA and to the rest of American Saigon that this was the end and it was time to go to your designated point where helicopters or buses would be waiting. the South Vietnamese soldiers were shedding there uniforms in the streets because the Vietcong tanks would round the corner any minute. I looked at the city streets. I read about a Dutch reporter that stayed....he said moments after the last American had left Saigon the Vietcong were at the city center. he said that they were really nice and welcomed him with open arms. He described how bizarre it was to be hanging out with the "enemy" and how they were all right guys.

Even this exhibit at the Gerald Ford Museum in Grand Rapids Michigan is flawed in more ways than one. Even the ex-Pres discussed the staircase atop the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon when this exhibit opened. As far as this staircase, who knows where its from, maybe somebody is missing a fire escape in Queens: http://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/museum/exhibits/permanent/Shuttle-Diplomacy.asp

What a nice guy, I thought about the Director. Man I hope the War didnt effect his family. How could it have not? This is a Wikipedia site again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War ...It goes through the history of our involvment and why...Is it the best site for info? I don't know, but is it enough? Yes. I asked a south Vietnamese guy that was in his thirties if anyone was happy that the Americans came to help them fight the North Vietnamese. He said that there were some that were happy, they liked the new money-the capitalism, the change of pace and new culture, but most people knew that the South Vietnamese government was funded and followed the Americans interests. And when that leader(Ngo Dinh Diem) was accused of possibly making peace with the north and simply not getting control, he was killed(by his own coup supported by U.S.) and Kennedy put someone else in his place that would listen to the Americans. Eventually Nguyen Van Thieu was president in 1967 and he was abandoned because the U.S. public lost interest. Would they have fought without us? It really doesn't look like it. It was the U.S. fighting the Russians with the Vietnamese filling the roster. All the weaponry we see over here is 100% Russian made. And they like to show it off, so we see a lot of it.

I have to say, its really weird visiting places in the world ; India, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, that have all had a lot of problems because of Western interests in their politcs and economies--then sitting in all these cafes with travelers from those Western countries. Like we are the only ones that can afford to travel because we've taken advantage of their countries in the past. I know that is not the whole story but its a chunk of it. A couple of weeks ago, we were sitting at one of these hotel/ pool room/ restaurant/ lounge TV room guesthouses filled with white people that they have everywhere and we were looking across a lake in Phnom Phen. To our left were a few french, to our right were some Brits, behind us were some australians. If you looked past the beautiful red reflecting off the lake during the sunset, you could see a massive neighborhood where Cambodians lived. It was tacked together with rusted metal scraps and old rotten wood. The dirt streets were filled with garbage and sewage and it went on for miles. I couldn't help but feel guilty. There weren't any Cambodians in that bar, the local people cannot afford these places---maybe because they got f--ed by every country represented here.

Any American who is embarrassed to say where they are from because of the actions of our government, I'll let you know that we are not alone- although sometimes people want us to be. The french are not angels to the Algerians, the Aussies are in Iraq too, Britain has had its share of empires, and germans hardly bring the subject up--wonder why? And the crazy thing about it is that the people in this region know that there is a difference between the American government and the American people and the past and present. Lucky for us.

Hoi An---french food, french architecture, and tailor shops lining the streets. I have lots of ideas for hats I want to make....don't ask. The heat is kinda getting to us so its going to be nice to go north a little. "The temperature IS 105 degrees and rising!", and thats no code--it was 110 today....

over and out

p.s. if I said something that wasn't true, please inform me.....I'm interested in what happened not what was written....

gg