I didn't get much sleep last night. Some of it was the sugar rush from the giant banana split I had last evening. And I'm sure I'm not fooling anyone, even myself--most of it was in anticipation of setting foot for the first time in a county whose name runs like a thread in my memory; a thread that is often very dark and twisted.

Viet Nam is a part of my life. It is a part of the lives of virtually all of my generation. Some of my earliest recollections of it begin in 1964 when my fourth grade classmates and I were discussing current events, struggling with the pronunciation of such strange sounding words as "Saigon", "Da Nang", "Hanoi". I remember clearly as if it were last week when one of them reported to us the prediction that the United States had now become so mired in Indochina that children who were now 10 would eventually go to fight the war in Viet Nam. We happened to be 10 at the time, and yes, some of my schoolmates did go to Viet Nam. Thankfully, all of them came back alive.

Memories and associations with Viet Nam permeate my school years, no more so than the time I had to register with Selective Service (a.k.a. 'the draft'); through my early college years when draftees were chosen by their birthday via the lottery. I still have a button from a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania for George McGovern that says "Remember October 9th", a reference to a statement made by Richard Nixon, that anyone who couldn't end the war in 4 years didn't deserve a second chance. Democrats hoped would come back and haunt him. It didn't.

As a sophomore in high school, I went to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy; one of my hospital roommates had a brother who fought in Viet Nam. He had been critically injured in a bomb blast. While being airlifted to Japan, he went into cardiac arrest several times. If I remember correctly, they weren't sure if his brother would be paralyzed for the rest of his life or not.

I remember an anecdote about a distant cousin who returned from combat; he was talking to his sister at the kitchen table over breakfast. When someone upstairs accidentally dropped something on the floor, the man reflexively dived for cover beneath the breakfast table.

Viet Nam was a constant presence throughout my school years, no more so than in the newscasts, stories and pictures from the Mekong Delta, from Saigon; no more so than the weekly report from station KDKA in Pittsburgh of how many Americans were killed and injured during that week in the fighting in Viet Nam.

And then one day, the newscaster's son was among the injured. The newscaster's voice was so thick from either loss of sleep or tranquilizers that he could barely be understood.

I remember my brother telling me of one of his former students coming up to him and bursting into tears because he was leaving for Viet Nam as a helicopter gunner; a position where the average life expectancy was measured in months.

I saw death and destruction on the nightly news. I thought about the thousands of soldiers who would be forced into a world where they were unable to tell friend from enemy; where they might have been forced to kill women and children; where many of them came home in a body bag.

Many times I lay awake at night wondering if someday soon I would be one of them.

When I teach about the music of Beethoven and his passion for human rights and freedom, I remind my students that he was 19 when the French revolution began; about how events we experience at that stage color and affect how we look at things for the rest of our lives. I deeply admire composer Dmitri Shostakovich--who was also about the same age when he lived through the Bolshevik revolution, trading one kind of tyranny for another far more brutal one under Stalin.

I know the power of that time of life all too well, at beginning to see things for the first time from an adult perspective while experiencing a feeling of helplessness to control it. At age 17, I was seeing two generations torn asunder by events that rushed in from half a world away. One generation had grown seeing its wars defined by Omaha Beach and D-Day; by songs such as "Over There" and "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition"; it was a time when there was a clean and clear division between the good guys and the bad guys.

The other saw its paradigm of war defined by Mai Lai, by the shootings at Kent State; by songs such as "Blowing in the Wind", and "The Fixing to Die Rag"; by "Ohio"; by a war that seemed to many of us to have a cost far dearer than what the asking price was worth. Sometimes it seemed like there were no good guys or bad guys. This was not a war that seemed to be in black and white--instead it all seemed to be in shades of gray.

I felt caught in the middle of it all. I felt confused and angry. And certainly, no one could have felt more confused and angry than the soldiers sent to fight a difficult and complex war while hearing about the vicious ideological battles back home instead of the support they deserved.

It is a time future sociologists will sink their teeth into with vigor; two sides, each operating out of conscience, seeing different things with different meanings through their paradigm. Two opposing sides, each convinced of its own righteousness; two sides on the opposite banks of a giant chasm; two sides that sometimes acted very badly, who each have things not to be proud of.

Pavlov would have loved to have me as a subject. After 30 years, these images and memories are what come racing to my mind whenever I hear the mere mention of the words "Viet Nam".

Bill Mohan's stories of chaperoning GP's first trip to Viet Nam helped plant the idea in my mind that I should go. However, one factor began to outweigh all of the others--best summed up in a line from Hamlet's soliloquy: I wanted to "take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them".

When I step off the plane in Ho Chi Minh City, there will be ghosts waiting for me. Like so many in my generation, I still need to confront them face to face. Looks like I now have an opportunity to do it in a rather unique way.

Most of the rest of this group will be going on an international field trip to see new sights and visit new places. I will be making a pilgrimage--a pilgrimage to a very dark shrine with an alter where a lot of very dear sacrifices were made.

Time to shut down the laptop and head for Dulles Airport.

Time to finish this essay on the other side.

March 29, 2001
6am
Ho Chi Minh City

And now, here I am at the other end of this trip, tackling the absurd task of trying to make sense of a kaleidoscope of thoughts and feelings about the last two weeks that kept me awake one more night.

My body's circadian clock caught up with Viet Nam time quite a few days ago. It's just my mind that is still reeling.

I had a very spooky sense of deja vu almost two weeks ago when we landed at the airport at Ho Chi Minh City. I had seen this all before on newscasts indelibly planted in my memory. There was a series of hangers that looked like they should be in the dictionary beside the term "war scarred". Stern customs officials wearing the distinctive green of the Communist party checked us through, their demeanor, their body language, their facial expressions conveying there would be no nonsense to take place. We were in a foreign country with a government whose declared ideology was the direct polar opposite of mine.

As we stepped outside the airport, the best analogy I use to describe what I saw is to compare it to the shock audiences must have had at the first showing of "The Wizard of Oz". It was as if my dank, gray impressions of Viet Nam had suddenly burst into Technicolor. We stepped into a mass of people happily chattering in a tongue completely foreign to my ears, into a hot humid afternoon with exotic sounds, sights, and smells.

The first day of my stay here was absolutely fascinating. By the second day here, it had become overwhelming. I'm still trying to find a thread to put them all together-that task will take some time. The best I can do is write about a few and let them be like the dots on an Impressionist painting that suggest a greater whole. Like the traffic here, I still haven't managed to piece all the rules together, but I know they're there.

One of the first things that one notices is that Viet Nam is a country with mind-boggling poverty. There are beggars everywhere. Children beg, they try to sell postcards, gum, anything. Many of the streets are like one giant flea market--everything is for sale. Food, animals, gasoline; stores filled with old fans, old motorcycle parts, bootleg CDs, anything they can get their hands on to try to survive.

People who have official jobs collecting money regularly skim off the top just to survive. I'm told the average income here is $50 a month.

We drove by many huts made of wooden frames with walls consisting of panels made from woven rice straw; other houses with roofs and walls made of old sheet metal. One of our guides told us several times, "we are a very poor country--we waste nothing, we reuse everything."

A number of people I spoke with very softly and poignantly pointed out that the quality of life began to show quick improvement when the trade embargo was lifted in the 1990s.

As Vinh Dang pointed out, "Look around you--you will see no overweight people in Saigon." Vietnamese people are tiny compared to Americans due in part to malnutrition during the critical stages of development. On one of our boat trips, a very small girl was guiding the boat, helping us moor it. She looked like she was 6--I was stunned to learn she was 13. At Cho Lai, a boy began following this group of Americans. He stood next to the youngest in our group who towered over him and began conversing in what little English he knew. Both found out that each other was 14 years old.

However, this is not all of the Viet Nam I got to know--I saw much more.

Drive into Ho Chi Minh City, and the first major assault to the sensibilities is the flood of motorscooters buzzing about madly, creating a crazy quilt of a traffic pattern. Millions of them are in the city--and it feels like they're all within a three block radius. The rules I've been able to come up with so far: you merge into traffic, you blow your horn. You want to pass someone, you blow your horn. You want to turn left across a torrent of traffic, you blow your horn. You want to pass someone by weaving over into the oncoming lane of traffic, you blow your horn.

By the sheer magnitude of the fact that it works almost without accidents means there is a de facto order that holds it all together. After almost two weeks here I still haven't figured it all out, but at least I'm getting reasonably good at getting across the streets.

I began to see Viet Nam as a happy torrent of life, every street a gushing tributary of humanity ripping around with a purpose.

Viet Nam became breathtaking sunrises and sunsets; gorgeous beaches, craggy mountains; rice paddies of the greenest green you can imagine; it is the beautiful night skies out in the rural areas where the constallations jump out at you; it is the bustling cities where life is raw and unfiltered; it is the teams of water buffalos pulling a cart to market, the houses with the concrete patios for drying the rice that they grow to live on.

Viet Nam became the man on the street corner who gave me the double thumbs up when he found I was an American. He was an advisor to the US forces during the war and I had the opportunity to speak with him for half an hour, about the complexities of the war here on this end, about Communist infiltrators in the South. He told us of elections where you go to vote knowing who will win the election before you even get your ballot. In his opinion, about 70% of the country was pro US.

I began to know Viet Nam as a mix of the new and the old, an eclectic blend of so many traditions; Buddhist and Catholic; French and American culture recently added to a blend that goes back thousands of years; it is a mix of snake wine and the Internet; it is a mix of Eastern traditions and Western culture; of development and poverty; it is a mixture of colonialization and conquerors and its ongoing quest for autonomy.

I got to experience Viet Nam as the smile on the face of thousands of children; Viet Nam is the "hello!" shouted to us hundreds of times. Some of them came up to us and playfully touched us as if they were trying to see if we were real. It is the faces of hundreds of children in huts on the banks of the water in the Mekong Delta, happily waving to the boats, to the strange visitors.

Viet Nam is the face of one of the little girls I photographed on the Mekong Delta who was smiling all the time she was around us, but for some reason turned serious when I photographed her. Only several days later when I was touching up the color on the photo did I notice that her dress had the word "Love" embroidered on it.

Before I had realized or even understood what was going on, Viet Nam had taken on a face and a personality. I got to see a Viet Nam in the flesh; raw and unfiltered.

We've all probably heard the wry comment that while the US defeated Japan in World War II, step out into the streets of a US city and it might be hard to tell that fact. Observe all of the Hondas, the Toyotas. Step into the houses and see all of the Sony, Toshiba, Mitsubishi, etc. electronics and you'll begin wondering just who really did win the war.

If I had awakened from a 20 year coma in downtown Ho Chi Minh City, I might be wondering the same thing.

Viet Nam is slowly but surely expanding its transportation and information infrastructure. Western hotels are springing up all over. People speak English. I read anti-American propaganda at the War Museum, saw a blistering propaganda video near the tunnels used by the North Vietnamese-and had my American dollars enthusiastically accepted for souvenirs. I drank Pepsi and Coca-Cola all over the country. Every computer I've seen runs Microsoft products. People are selling everything, anything they can get their hands on. You can watch HBO, CNN, and MTV in downtown Saigon. Yes, you can even watch "The Simpsons".

You can go into a club and hear the Beatles, pop, techno, American jazz; I spent a number of evenings in a hotel overlooking the Saigon River listening to a classical piano trio playing some of Elvis' greatest hits, and on occasion, Mozart.

The internet is becoming more readily available by the day (and frankly, if I were a totalitarian ideologue, I would be shaking in my shoes at that fact).

One morning I opened an English language Viet Nam newspaper to find a picture of Mike Mussina (editorial comment--unfortunately wearing a Yankees uniform).

All of the signs I saw pointed toward freedom of worship.

Viet Nam is well into transition into becoming a free-market economy. It's not there yet, but like the beggars, like the people who are willing to sell anything, like the artist on the street who was painting with his foot, I think this country realizes what is necessary for survival and growth.

There are still lots of cues that people can't freely speak their minds yet.

But, I see hope. And maybe--just maybe--when the dust settles, things aren't going to turn out as badly as we thought they did twenty-five years ago.

And so, here I am at the end point of my pilgrimage. In a few hours, I will be returning home, having reached the fountain at the center of a very dark shrine, one shrouded in pain and anger. I sipped from the waters. While I didn't experience any moments of thunder, blinding lights, or miracles, what I walked away with may have been all that I needed. As one of the baby boomers that has begun to see more sand in the bottom half of the hourglass, what I will be taking home with me is a sense of closure on one of the major issues in my past. In the whole perspective of things, I guess that's not a trivial matter.

A few years back when I was writing a lot of science fiction, I managed to avoid the rather trite plot device of time travel where the protagonist goes back in time and changes something in the past, or perhaps the hero rights a wrong.

Ironically, I may have come as close as humanly possible to that in real life.

I say this because the next time I'm at a crowded party immersed in a swirl of conversations, or the next time the television is on and I'm only half listening and the words "Viet Nam" catch my attention, Pavlov would still love me for all of the associations that will come back to me.

What will jump into my mind, however, are the streets filled with crazy, honking motorscooters; thousands of beautiful faces; gorgeous sunrises.

I will remember the poverty, the hardships of a people living close to the earth and trying their best to scrape out a meager existence-and somehow succeeding.

I will remember the smiles and waves of the children and the hundreds of times I heard a happy "hello!" shouted in my direction.

I will remember people living an existence at full throttle; people who are living life with the volume control turned to the max, doing their best to make do with what little they have, and succeeding by their persistence and their resourcefulness.

I will think of a country with so many people begging, doing ANYTHING just to survive, but also very willing to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps when they get half the chance.

I will think a very, very beautiful land that has been through hell--and manages to still clutch onto a bit of heaven.

And I will probably remember what became the defining moment of this trip for me. Very early on while we were waiting to go on the tour of the Mekong Delta, I sat down at the piano in the hotel lobby, overtaken with an urge too strong to let pass. I played a song written just about 30 years ago in the midst of a world in turmoil.

The name of the song was "Imagine."

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised to find that that it struck a chord in the hearts of visitors from many parts of the world. I was surprised, however, that the local people knew it. One of the Vietnamese workers at the hotel said something to me several days later--even she knew the song and knew what dreams its composer dared to articulate.

I was fully aware of the irony of sitting in a lobby of a hotel in a country whose government has chosen an ideological viewpoint as far removed from mine as possible; in a city with such poverty, such a war-torn history. As I played it, I went blank on the lyrics a couple times and my hands were a little shaky from the blast of strong morning coffee. I know John Lennon performed it far, far better many times, but I can guarantee that in the last verse where the song's composer dared to dream about a world without war or poverty, he never sang it with more sincerity than I did.

So far in my life, I've been a lucky traveler--not once have I parted company with any of my luggage.

This time will be different. When a particular ANA flight lifts off the runway later tonight, I will have lost some baggage this time.

About thirty-five years worth of it, to be exact.

One of the souvenirs I'll be taking home with me will be in the form of a little salve that has already started to heal some very old scars.

I just wish it could be this easy for so many other members of my generation. . .

Gary Daum
Ho Chi Minh City
Viet Nam
gldaum@gprep.org