Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

He became cautious, overly confidential, the way drunks sometimes do, but always in a conspicuous way, talking in pompous stage whispers and making foolish faces when they think they're being discreet.

"Let's move. I've got to be careful." He swiveled his head at the waiter, who was emptying ashtrays. "People listen."

He was now drunker, and like many drunks he became mildly abusive in a matey way, pestering me to have another beer, to drive with him to Cholon to pick up girls. He was also ranting about George W. Bush, who had recently visited Vietnam with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "She's his girlfriend! I know it! I can tell. I know women!" Meanwhile, the bar had become noisy and crowded, and to complete this picture of disorder, the TV was showing footage of a typhoon that had just killed a thousand people in the Philippines and was bearing down on Vietnam.

Omar was better natured the next day, but still self-dramatizing, and occasionally he alluded, with exaggerated facial expressions, to the sinister ways of the current Vietnamese government. He was somewhat unusual in this. Most people shrugged off political philosophy as humbug and simply got on with their jobs.

We were standing outside a little antique shop and I asked a woman who was showing me a carving what she thought of the government.

"Politics!" Omar said. "Say nothing! People are listening!" He said it loudly enough to be heard on the next block.

On the way to the War Remnants Museum (my suggestion—he'd said "It's just propaganda"), he told me that he'd been born in Hanoi and brought south as a child, because his father was a soldier in the French army. We swung past the American consulate, where a great crowd of Vietnamese were lined up, waiting for visas to enter the United States. Near them was a monument dedicated to the memory of 168 Vietcong soldiers who were killed on this spot in a skirmish in January 1968.

"Now everyone must respect them for being heroes," Omar said. "That's what it says."

"I'd like the exact wording."

"We can't stop. There are cops all over the place. They'll ask for my papers if they see you writing things down."

That was another thing. The Vietnamese who were Omar's age were paranoid and skittish. Younger people didn't know dates or names, didn't care, weren't interested.

The War Remnants Museum was a visual history of Vietnam's road to independence—a bloody road of corpses and land mines that occupied most of the twentieth century and began with the war against the French. "Vietnam has the right to enjoy its freedom and independence," Ho Chi Minh had written, and he shouted this to cheering crowds in Ba Dinh Square in 1945. This defiance had the French oiling up their guillotine (also on display), but less than ten years later the French army was humiliated and destroyed at Dien Bien Phu. And then it was our turn.

This ghastly pictorial of torture, massacre, carpet bombing, herbicide, defoliant, terror, dioxin sprayed from planes, Vietcong soldiers pushed out of helicopters or dragged to their deaths, civilian killings, and tanker trucks of napalm driven by grinning American soldiers and lettered The Purple People Eater—this gallery of horrific condemning photographs, in ten rooms, was all the more shocking for being the work of mostly American or foreign photographers. These men, among them Larry Burrows, Robert Ellison, Sean Flynn, Oliver Noonan, Kyoishi Sawada, and Henri Huet, produced much grimmer pictures than the official Vietnamese photographers. In their pictures the American soldier was an isolated, tormented, or injured man fighting a rear-guard action, while the Vietcong photographs showed groups of spirited Vietnamese soldiers, maneuvers, teams of men, few individuals.

Several rooms in the museum were devoted to protests against the Vietnam War, not just in the United States (the Kent State shootings were featured), but also in Britain, Holland, West Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere.

Omar said, "I'm telling you. Propaganda."

I pointed to a photograph and said, "That's me."

It wasn't me, but it could have been: the same wild hair and hornrimmed glasses, the same winter-pale face, as I picketed the White House in the rain with a few hundred others. And in my memory there arose a vivid, frustrating scene.

You're wasting your time, my embarrassed older brother was saying. You should have stayed in Amherst.

Did you hear what Paul just said? his hawkish, mocking wife cried, and she screamed with laughter after hearing me quote a line from one of Ho Chi Minh's Prison Diary poems: "The poet also should know how to lead an attack."