Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"Phien" he said, pronouncing it fyeh.

They were both smiling quietly, sitting contentedly as the train raced along the shore past rain-swept paddies and flooded fields. Some houses were also flooded, their verandas underwater, the water filling the first floor. The coast road was a well-paved thoroughfare with a guardrail and good drainage, much more substantial and better made than, say, the Kamehameha Highway on the coast of Oahu. Apart from a few cars and some men whizzing along on motorbikes wearing plastic capes, there was no traffic. A big jolly billboard advertising a brand of rice stood where before—at the beginning of a railway bridge and a culvert—I would have seen a gun emplacement.

The news at that moment was of the Iraq War, and so (though I found that news depressing) it was heartening to see this coherence and serenity: life after war, no hard feelings, no blame, the buried past, people looking ahead.

To lighten my load of books, I was transcribing quotations from the Pol Pot biography into my notebook. Recognizing Pol Pot's face on the cover, Oanh tapped it.

"Pol Pot," I said.

"Bad man," he said.

He spoke a little in Vietnamese to Thanh. Then Thanh said, "We fight," and he tapped Pol Pot's face. He took my pen and wrote 1976

and 1978 in my notebook, and showed me two fingers, meaning two years in Cambodia. He pointed to Oanh. "Him too."

Still with the dopey stoner's grin, Thanh said with gestures and mumbled words that he and Oanh had fought in the first Vietnamese offensive to overthrow Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge government. This was the so-called proxy war of the Carter administration, when with utter cynicism we stood by, encouraging the Chinese and hoping that Vietnam would be weakened.

I said, "Did you fight here too? Vietcong?"

"Oh, yes. 'Sixty-nine and later. Him too."

Their stoicism and toughness resembled that of many of the men described in Bao Ninh's novel. They had ferried food and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, they said. Both had been bombed by American planes at a place called Con Meo (Cat Slope). Twelve years they'd been fighting, first the Americans, then the Cambodians; now they were construction workers in Hanoi, putting up new buildings.

"What your country?" Oanh asked.

"America."

The word surprised him a little and made him smile. He shook my hand. We all shook hands. As with Mr. Pham the day before, there was only friendliness in this encounter—no moralizing, no frowns, no scolding. Almost all the Vietnamese I met were like this—not backward-looking and vindictive scolds muttering, "Never forget!" but compassionate souls, getting on with their lives, hopeful and humane.

In The Sorrow of War, the main character, Kien, hears some soldiers in Hanoi talking about a victory in Cambodia. "But he knew it wasn't true that young Vietnamese loved war. Not true at all. If war came they would fight, and fight courageously. But that didn't mean they loved fighting. No. The ones who loved war were not the young men, but the others, like the politicians."

The train was pulling into Hue. The last time I'd been here, it had been overrun by angry and frightened American soldiers, and looked like hell. The hell of war—mud and ruin and flames, the whole stinking city on the wane—which is no empty metaphor but actual hell.

***

HUE I REMEMBERED AS A BLASTED, war-damaged, and mostly empty town of muddy streets and shuttered houses, one hotel called Morin Brothers, feeble lights, ARVN patrols hurrying in jeeps on pot-holed roads, and touts promising ecstasy on drug-and-whore cruises on small boats lit by hanging lanterns on the Perfume River. Prostitutes and soldiers were all that remained of a city shattered and all but destroyed in the Tet Offensive of 1968, when the Vietcong had held the citadel of Hue for twenty-four days, flying their flag over it. And it was flying over it again, but a rebuilt citadel and royal palace, the Forbidden Purple City, which had been mere hyperbole then and was reality now.

I stayed at Morin's again, the hotel by the river, but this was a reincarnated place. The city had been restored and enlarged: the French-built municipal buildings and churches and schools, the chinoiserie on the far bank, the neighborhoods of small shops, bungalows with walled gardens and courtyards, narrow lanes, bars, and small restaurants. The rickshaw drivers' trade had been revived, the so-called cyclos, and their patter too: "Massage, sir? You want girl? Nice girl! I take you!"