Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

I found photographs of that bombing and others at the Army Museum. Once again, the pictures taken by American photographers were much more shocking than those of the Vietnamese.

In the courtyard of the museum, like an artist's installation, stood the wreckage of American planes, one of them propped upright, as tall as a four-story building, its nose cone approximating a church steeple. The whole assemblage of fuselages and wings and tails and insignia was given a bulging form. A plaque beside it noted that forty thousand American planes had been shot down over North Vietnam between 1961 and 1973. The message was tendentious in its tone and might have exaggerated the numbers, but there was no mistaking the power of this sculpture as a shrine to downed planes and the futility of that war.

How familiar it all was to me, and would have been to any American of my generation. The helmets and shoes, the medals and paraphernalia of captured U.S. soldiers; the excerpt from President Johnson's diary expressing dismay over the progress of the war, and an accompanying photo showing his distress, his fleshy features and comical nose; the American and European faces in the photographs displayed in the Peace Movement Room—the sort of pictures that are shown in American museums that have areas devoted to the 1960s, images of sign-carrying students, speechifying, picketing, and confrontations. That it showed less of the military history of the country than the human dimension, and that it was presented without any gloating, made it all the more upsetting.

A large square of cloth printed with the Stars and Stripes contained the following message in eight languages, including Vietnamese, Chinese, Lao, and Cambodian: I am a citizen of the USA. I do not speak your language. Misfortune forces me to seek your assistance in obtaining food, shelter and protection. Please take me to someone who will provide for my safety and see that I am returned to my people. My government will reward you.

This plea was intended to help an isolated American infantryman or downed bomber pilot lost in Vietnam. Its castaway's tone and its helpless appeal were intended to soften the heart of strangers or even of the enemy. I tried to imagine the effect such a printed message would have today, anywhere in America, if it read "I am a citizen of Iran" or "a member of Al Qaeda" or "a Palestinian national," and made the same plaintive requests, with an enemy flag unfurled on it.

Most of the museumgoers were Vietnamese. They and the museum attendants, seeing me, greeted me with a smile, asking where I was from.

"America."

"Welcome."

I wanted to meet someone in Hanoi who had lived through the bombing. Hanoi was a walkable city. I strolled around for a few days, in the Old Quarter and among the huddled shops and temples and through the big market. I saw the water puppets and Ho's mausoleum and the museum dedicated to Ho's life and achievements.

Rather than eating alone in a proper restaurant—a depressing activity anywhere, sitting and staring—I roamed and browsed and grazed, snacking on noodles and bowls of soup, chatting with people in fresh-beer bars and coffee shops, looking for witnesses.

Invariably, while walking, a motorcycle with a biker babe on board would pull up beside me and demand that I get on behind her.

"You come! Boom-boom!"

This even happened in the area of cloisters and villas and temples and embassies near the National Museum of Fine Arts, where I had gone one day to look at silk paintings and bronzes.

There I found the witness I had hoped to meet, a woman who had been in her early teens at the time of the Christmas bombing. She was now the mother of two girls. Wearing a tissuey silk scarf that accented her fine-boned face and luminous eyes, she was beautiful in the Vietnamese way, slightly built, a dancer's body, svelte, almost skeletal, yet looking indestructible. The delicacy of her fragile-seeming features—and this seemed true of all Vietnamese women I met—was in great contrast to her powerful spirit and her prompt and appreciative manner. This put me in mind of how thirty years of war, successfully defending their country, had given the Vietnamese unshakable faith in themselves and made them unusually resourceful and alert.

She was Vuong Hoa Binh, the daughter of the late Vuong Nhu Chiem, who had been the curator of the museum, where she worked and where I met her, purely by chance. She smiled easily, she was articulate, and she had lived in or near Hanoi throughout the war.

"What is your country?" she had asked.

I told her. She welcomed me. I said, "Was this museum damaged in the war?"

"It was bombed," she said. "The whole city was bombed, of course."