Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

MOST OF THE DAYLIGHT WAS gone by the time the train got to Hanoi, yet the glaring lamps and illuminated boulevards gave the city a greater dignity, the mystery of night shadows, in which glorious lakes and a huge opera house dominated, and that was when I realized what a wondrous place it was, a kind of Asiatic Paris.

I had no idea. But how was I to know? The noble city had always been represented to Americans as the enemy capital, a rat's nest of villains, and belittled by our propaganda, better off bombed and wiped off the map. That was another lesson in the twisted justification of war: demonized people are more deserving of death, rubbishy cities more deserving of destruction. Talk about them as inferior or taunted or pathologically hostile, and they're no great loss when they're gone.

The Parisian glamour had another dimension. I found a hotel on a back street in Frenchtown, near the well-known but much too expensive Metropole. I went for a late-night walk and realized that among the cafés and restaurants and elegant villas, all this Frenchness, there were also noodle shops and street vendors and hawkers huddled near the joints selling fresh beer and smoked fish. The vast, simple-looking, Europeanized city held another city that was more crowded and complex and Asian, and quite a bit cheaper.

Walking back to my hotel, feeling happy, I paused under a tree to watch the bikes and scooters go past when a motorbike bumped up the curb some feet away and came straight at me. Her arms apart on the handlebars, a young leering cat-faced woman with long hair and white gloves and thigh-high boots revved the engine and made kissing noises at me.

"Get on! You come me!" She hitched forward to make room for me on the seat.

"I come with you?"

"Me madam. Come my hotel. Get on!"

There is a stereotypical women's fantasy of being swept up by a handsome knight on a horse. This was related to it, a male fantasy you never dare think about: being confronted on a dark street and swept up by a long-haired woman astride a motorbike. Even so, I hesitated.

"You want boom-boom?"

"Yes I do," I said and laughed in admiration at the suddenness and ingenuity of it. "But I can't tonight."

"Forty dollar," she said. Fotty dolla, a kind of Boston accent.

I had to decline, not because I didn't want to, but because I was an older man and happily married and more interested in finding an Internet café to send my wife an e-mail than in hopping on the bike and being driven through the portals of love. This happened two more times as, unbidden, beauties on bikes mounted the sidewalk and, eagerly smiling, revving their engines, offered to speed me away. Each time they promised the same thing.

"Get on! You want boom-boom?"

***

HANOI WAS A FORMAL CITY of wide avenues, extravagant topiary and pretentious colonial mansions, picturesque villas with cupolas and mansard roofs, imposing ministerial buildings—every sort of pompous Gallic façade, including the nineteenth-century opera house—and many good restaurants; at the same time it was an improvised city of malodorous neighborhoods, labyrinthine streets, noodle shops, and open-air markets of screeching traders and squashed and stepped-on fruit. It was also a city of stately parks and lakes surrounded by landscaped perimeters. The French capital had been transformed into a Vietnamese capital without any sign that America had been involved. And of course we hadn't been: we had bombed Hanoi and mined Haiphong harbor, and so our history in Hanoi was one of infamy and evil-intentioned outrages directed from the air.

I was continually struck by how most Vietnamese were willing to forgive, or move on, when the subject of the war came up. One exception to this was the memory, by those who had endured it, of what became known as the Christmas bombing of Hanoi. This unambiguously geno-cidal act of pure wickedness took place in December 1972, just weeks before the signing of the cease-fire, like a final spiteful slap, except that it was not a slap but rather a blitz of firebombs intended to incinerate and cow the Vietnamese.

Nixon had ordered this air strike in mid-December, and for eleven days the sky over the capital was black with B-52 bombers. In their circuit, they dropped forty thousand tons of bombs and aerial mines from Hanoi to Haiphong harbor, killing an estimated sixteen hundred Vietnamese. Twenty-three American planes were shot down, and we were outraged when the surviving pilots were imprisoned. "Military targets" was the justification we were given at the time by Nixon and Kissinger, but this lie was transparent propaganda. In one instance, in an old neighborhood of Hanoi, every house on Kham Thien Street was destroyed, with a great loss of civilian life—nearly all women and children, because their husbands and fathers were away fighting.

On my second day in Hanoi a man mentioned this to me. He was in his mid-fifties, and he recalled it, but all he said was "Very bad."