Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Saigon, revitalized, hectic, not beautiful but energetic, was a city driven by work and money and young people, a place of opportunities, big and bright and loud, yet strangely orderly and tidy. I had seen it before, under a bad moon; I could say it had been reborn. One of the greatest aspects of the new Vietnam was its compassion, its absence of ill will or recrimination. Blaming and complaining and looking for pity are regarded as weak traits in Vietnamese culture; revenge is wasteful. They won the war against us because they were tenacious, united, and resourceful, and that was also how they were building their economy.

It was possible to see the effects of positive thinking in their work ethic and their view of the future. Nominally Buddhist, the Vietnamese seemed no more spiritual than any other people I met, but they were practical and efficient and worked well together. In traveling the entire length of the country, introducing myself as an American (because it was usual for Vietnamese to ask), no one ever said, "Look what you did to us." Yet war damage was visible all over the place: land mines littering the jungle, bomb craters, many amputees hobbling in the cities, and—quietly dying in villages and hospitals—thousands of cancer victims who had been poisoned by the millions of gallons of Agent Orange we had sprayed on their trees and on them.

The older Vietnamese remembered everything. I was hoping to meet one, and I did. Walking in the city one day, looking conspicuous—a strolling American among hurrying Vietnamese—I bumped into a gray-haired man who volunteered a hello.

"Where ya going?" he asked. He was Vietnamese, but his accent was American. Stocky, bluff, coarse in an offhand way, he said he had a motorbike—did I want a ride anywhere?

I said I wanted to find the bar where they sold "fresh beer."

"You don't want to see the war museum and the other stuff?"

"Some other time."

I didn't say so, but because he looked about my age I wanted to hear his story. He took me to Trung Tam Bia Tuoi, a saloon in a barracks-like building in a fenced-in compound, where we drank beer and ate spring rolls until I could barely stand.

He wouldn't tell me his Vietnamese name. He said everyone knew him as Omar, a name he had bestowed on himself, "because in Doctor Zhivago, Omar Sharif has a wife and a girlfriend—and I do too. Three girlfriends—forty-four, thirty-one, and twenty-one. How do I do it?"

But I hadn't asked.

"Blue diamond, you know? Viagra!"

"Did you fight in the war?" I asked.

"Yeah. For the Americans. I was a Marine. Ninth Infantry, in the Delta. Then they shipped me to Danang."

"I was in Danang after the pullout," I said. "Spooky place."

"Like I don't know that?" Omar said. "After Saigon fell I was arrested and put in prison. My daughter had cancer from Agent Orange. I wanted to go to the U.S., but the embassy said I hadn't been in prison long enough, only four months. My brother-in-law was in prison from 1975 to '84"

"What happened to him?"

"The U.S. looks after people like him. They keep their word. They said 'Okay.' And gave him a visa. He's in Houston. Another cousin's in Portland. One's in LA. I got forty-seven members of my family in the U.S., but not me. And now I'm too old to go."

"Why were you put in prison?"

"They grabbed me because I'd been a soldier with the U.S. They put me in a camp near the Cambodian border. It was shit. We worked all day and studied all night." Then he chanted, "Lenin-Marx-Ho-Chi-Minh, Lenin-Marx-Ho-Chi-Minh."

He nodded his head as he chanted, holding up a big glass of fresh beer in one hand, a spring roll in the other.

"They said, 'Your brain is fucked, boy. Come back inside. We gotta make it better.'"

"So you were reeducated?"

"If you want to call it that." He was laughing tipsily. "You think you're there for a few days, then it's weeks. Then months. Years for some people. My brother-in-law worked for the CIA. That's why he got nine years."

All this was after the fall of Saigon, he said, when the embassy was abandoned and the last of the Americans fled in helicopters, with people clinging to the landing slats.

"They found out who I was," he said of the Vietcong who had occupied the city. "They said, 'Prison for you, boy.' It was like River of No Return. You know that movie? Good one—Gary Cooper, or John Wayne."

Neither of them, actually. I checked later and found it starred Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe. Odd that Omar, a professed womanizer, had forgotten Marilyn.

There were still some people in prison, he said. He had begun to glance around the big beer hall, where loud music was playing, a TV was showing music videos, and men were guzzling beer and smoking.

"But it's not like Cambodia. In Cambodia they kill you in prison. Here they make you work and read politics. They don't kill you."