DMZ
(writing from Vientiane, Laos; posted from Luang Prabang, Laos)

Bella and I booked a DMZ tour from our hotel in Hue so we could see some of the memorials dedicated to the "American War" in Vietnam. The tour itself taught us more about Vietnamese aggressive capitalism than of the horrors of war. The owner of our hotel showed us numerous testimonials from prior guests lamenting that the DMZ bus tour was boring, and how they wished they had taken a motorbike tour instead. I.e. better to spend $25 for motorbikes and drivers than $10 on a bus. But as we learned, "boring" speaks more to the sites themselves than to the transportation. The photos here show a few of the interesting stops, but most of the DMZ sites of historical interest now provide nothing more than a plaque -- the Macnamara line, Khe San, Camp Carrol. A bus travels fast enough, at least, to see all these places in a day -- which we did not. We did learn the benefits of motorbike travel, however: overpriced lunch ("no menu, sorry"), sore butt, and sunburnt thighs.

Complaints complaints complaints! No more!

On the plus side, driving on motorbike does give you a taste for the landscape. The Vietnamese have transformed every arable inch of land into a rice patty. The roadside en route to the DMZ is a notable exception -- napalm and agent orange rendered most of the soil too poisonous for farming, and vegetation is only now starting to take root in the sandy earth.

The photos below looked fine on my mac, but appear very dark on this PC. Let me know if you can make out details.

First, we stopped at the Ben Hai River, which served as the true border between North and South Vietnam -- it runs right along the 17th parallel. The memorial features a Vietnamese woman with her arms on her child's shoulders flanked by coconut palm fronds. An unfinished bas relief decorating the base on the memorial pits Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army soldiers against American GIs. We shot the second photo from the north side -- during the war, the Vietnamese painted the bridge half red half yellow as a reminder of the division of the country.

So many Vietnamese remains were unidentifiable that military cemeteries celebrate more unknown soldiers than known.

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Bella and I thought this bas relief at the Vinh Moc tunnels just north of the DMZ crystallizes the Vietnamese memory of the American war. Vietnamese citizens and solders persevere, digging tunnels into the earth and resisting the best they can, while American planes bomb relentlessly from above. This perserverance most impressed us -- civilians dug the the Vinh Moc tunnels and lived underground for six years, and every bomb we dropped hardened their support for the communists. After reading up on the history, it seems to me the middle road we took (don't invade the north, don't leave the south) made it impossible to ever "win". If the domino theory was right, we should have marched into Hanoi -- except that might have provoked a nuclear confrontation with the Soviets or Chinese. If we weren't prepared to invade, we should have left earlier -- except our retreat might have emboldened the Soviets to expand their sphere of influence and aggressively support leftist revolutions elsewhere. Instead we laid siege to the South -- we burnt down the villages we were supposed to protect which only fed support for the Viet Cong. While we piddled around with search and destroy missions, the NVA and Viet Cong built the Ho Chi Minh Trail into a supply superhighway and citizens dug in and waited for us to wear out and leave. I'm left with a more visceral understanding of the Powel doctrine -- go in with overwhelming force or don't go in at all.