Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

EVEN DURING THE WAR, when I had traveled here, I had thought that if Vietnam hadn't been so beautiful we would not have ravished it, nor would the French have bothered to colonize and plunder it. Its cool, steep, humped-up mountains and jungle-thick valleys and cloud forests sloped past fertile fields to the coastal heat of palmy, white sand beaches; its people were graceful and hard-working and willing; the warmth of its tropical enveloping climate made it seem a kind of Eden. Of course foreigners wanted to possess the land and its people, even if it meant bombing them to smithereens. But the Vietnamese were tenacious and self-possessed and had triumphed.

Up to this point I had not seen Hanoi, which was as stately as a precinct of Paris, as it was meant to be when it was the capital of French Indochina. The French had been humiliated in battle, had surrendered by the thousands, been taken captive, and driven out; but at least they had left long boulevards of imposing buildings behind. And we had left nothing except a multitude of scars and the trauma of the whole miserable business, ten years of terror and seven million tons of bombs.

We had occupied Hue but hadn't improved anything there. The small pink-and-white train station, sitting like a stale birthday cake on its own avenue, was a French colonial confection. It had been a wreck when I'd last seen it. It was back in business, thronged with people, efficient, with a clean waiting room and frequent trains. I got a ticket for the twelve-hour trip to Hanoi, something I had longed to do all those years ago.

Now I was in a seat on a passenger train, rattling north on tracks that ran beside the Street Without Joy, as the retreating French had called it, through sandy hills and gray swamps near the sea. What had been the demilitarized zone along the Ben Hai River, in Quang Tri Province just north of Hue, remained a litter of unexploded bombs and land mines and so many shattered tanks and shell casings that people still scavenged the area for scrap metal.

Dong Hoi was a town of new houses and bright tile roofs for a reason: having been burned to the ground, it had risen again. (Guidebook: "It was wiped off the map by U.S. bombing.") Here and there among its pink villas and bungalows, people were tending the fires at smoking kilns while others were stacking bricks, the place still being rebuilt. And the same was true of Vinh, a town that had been turned to dust by American bombs and was now rising. Most of the houses I saw beyond the 17th parallel were brand-new, the old ones having been burned or blown up.

But amid the newness the old Vietnam endured. Men up to their knees in mud in paddy fields, driving water buffaloes, a kind of harmony reflected in the geometry of their fields, and their conical hats, and the straight lines of their puddled lanes.

Later on, we passed the sudden humps of massive stone mountains with vertical sides and rounded summits. The train guard told me they were called Ouanh Binh. They extended for miles. Seeing a big domed cathedral in the distance, the conductor blessed himself with the sign of the cross to indicate to me that it was a Christian church.

Hearing us talking, another young man said hello and snatched my sunglasses. He put them on and clowned, jeering at me, for his friends.

"CIA! CIA!" he chanted.

"You think so?" I said.

"Yes. You CIA!" he said and poked his finger at me. But he was laughing. He then put the sunglasses on upside down and goofed around some more, and his friends laughed.

While his friends tried on my sunglasses and made faces, the conductor asked me where I was from, and when I told him, he said, "How do you feel being in Vietnam?"

"Happy that it's prosperous and sad that we bombed it."

"I think that too," he said. He wore a rather severe expression, and he knew that no matter where we were on this line to Hanoi there was a bomb crater. And the other visible fact of the trip was that the TV screen in this coach was showing Tom and Jerry cartoons, dubbed in Vietnamese.

The train was full of traveling Vietnamese, and though some got off at the smaller stations, most were headed to the capital. They watched the cartoons, they snoozed, they read, they chatted. Boxes of food were handed out to each passenger, containing rice, pickled cabbage, tofu, and something gray and rubbery that might have been meat but could also have been a patch for an inner tube. Outside, whenever we passed a field, people were working, bent over, hoeing or digging or plowing. Everything I saw was like the embodiment of peace and hope.

Even the young man who had fooled with my glasses made me hopeful. "CIA!" he called out when I passed his row to stretch my legs. But he was harmless—I often regard teasing as a form of confidence and affection. When we neared Hanoi, this same man helpfully told me some things I must see: the water puppets, the lakes, the Old Quarter, Ho's mausoleum.

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