Land of the Ascending Dragon: Rediscovering Vietnam
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- Paul Martin
- pmartin [80]
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Many Vietnamese buy plum blossom sprigs and take them home to decorate for the country's biggest holiday, which falls in late January or early February. |
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The intercom in the Hong Kong airport kept blaring messages in English and Chinese as the minutes ticket away toward my 4:55 p.m. flight to Hanoi. It was still hard for me to believe I was returning to Vietnam, where I'd served as a Navy journalist in 1970-1971. Once, I'd vowed to never again set foot in that green apostrophe of land so few Americans had ever heard of before the 1960s. I'd been a reluctant participant in the war, serving more out of a Sunday-school-and Boy-Scout-bred sense of obligation than from any heartfelt belief in our cause. And I'd nearly been killed by a Viet Cong rocket. So why did I want to go back, after two dozen years?
Quite simply, I wanted to see the Vietnam that I'd missed the first time. Over the years, I'd become embarrassed by how little I knew about this place that had been such a central experience in my life. Now I wanted to see it all: a thousand-mile-long country that is slightly larger than Italy, a nation of vibrant cities and myriad cultural treasures, a land as beautiful as any in the world, with mist-wreathed mountains rolling down to the indigo South China Sea and mysterious temples enshrouded in vines and centuries. I wanted to survey the rumpled Trong Son Range, which runs nearly the length of Vietnam; the pristine beaches and quiet coastal lagoons; and those lush-beyond-imagining rice fields that stretch from the Red River Delta in the north to the Mekong Delta in the south. And yes, I wanted to revisit the places where I'd served long ago; to gauge what power they still held over me.
What I would discover on my journey from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City was a 2,000 year-old country reinventing itself at a furious pace, leaping from the early 20th century infrastructure imposed by decades of war and economic isolation directly into the 21st-century world of computers and cellular phones. I would find a remarkably youthful country -- nearly half the 75 million Vietnamese now living were born since 1975. What I would not encounter was a single citizen who showed the slightest animosity toward me on learning I was an American.
Published on 3/1/98
