Memories, Distortions, Old Times, New Realities
By Korski

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It was a time when people were standing on college benches shouting in protest and wearing beads around their necks and flowers around their ankles and smoking dope and talking about resisting and not going and you're in graduate school and then you're divorced and you're hardly thinking about the war.  Then one day you're on your way to Colombia and you will get lost because what you went there to do can't be done because of all the smuggling, and you're not quite sure what to do so you begin wandering, like you're doing right now.  Every day a new discovery that will be distorted by memory and time and more wandering, the mind on klick time.

   

You're sitting in a cafe in the present in Hanoi and he tells you he's been to Vietnam fourteen times and the Vietnamese are the most racist people he's ever met, like all Asians but worse, worse than the Japanese, he goes on.  You've already got a suitcase full of perceptions and images and things you've concluded about this country of endless wars, but this is not one of them.  You ponder this one, think of how racist the Jews of Israel are, and the Arabs too, and most people around the world, come to think of it.

It was a month unremembered when he told you that he was going to enlist and it was already done when he told you and the only way you could react was to go half mad and tell him what a horrible mistake he'd made.  You were beside yourself for months, even when you wrote to him.  But he came out okay because he wasn't a grunt in the rice paddies and he didn't take any bullets or shrapnel and yet for years and longer you wondered how it had affected his mind, what the war had really done to him.  You were sure it had done something bad, you just didn't know how bad and maybe he couldn't tell you even if you asked him.  Can anyone tell anyone anything about these kinds of things that shock the mind and erode it over time, meltdown in slow time?

It's your first night in Hoi An and you wander into a restaurant set back from the street and off to one side are two large pool tables and a couple of young people playing and there's no one else around except for a Vietnamese woman approaching middle age, who's behind the bar, and a large fat and bald European seated by himself not far from the bar but distant from the pool players.  You decide to stay and have a beer and soon you're talking to the large fat Belgian who is the owner and he's telling you that he's married to this Vietnamese woman who is tending bar and they've been married for only a short time but had lived together for three years, him having to register with the police every time he goes abroad and then returns and he has to tell them why he's going to his own house; and him telling you how they had to have two rooms in a hotel whenever they were together prior to being married, all of this some sort of perverted perception issue with the communists still in control. It wasn't so long ago that he opened the bar and restaurant and thought he was doing everything right. But he hadn't paid any protection money up front so one night the police came by and there were seven of them and they told him he had been open one night too late and then they walked around and sniffed as only people on the take know how to sniff and they found several small infractions of local codes or laws and so they fined him a thousand dollars and shut him down for six weeks.  He says the next time they come to him for money he will close the restaurant and bar and move on to something different, he just won't pay protection money like everyone pays, never again he says.  Everything has to be paid for in Vietnam, he tells you.  Everyone is corrupt, he also tells you and you think this claim is now nothing new or building on your learning curve about Nam because you've heard this same refrain repeatedly.

  

You did not have the easy and clear sense that others around you had about what the U.S. was doing in the war that would be lost. You heard too many facts by the shouters and protesters that gave you pause and made you argue with them, and what did you know about communism and the imperialistic ways of reds and whether or not there was anything to this thing called the domino theory?  Maybe you didn't like what was going on there but you liked commies even less, and this way of thinking has never changed in your always changing mind.

You're sitting in the middle of the sidewalk on one of those ankle-high blue plastic stools on a busy street corner in the Old Quarter of Hanoi and you're talking to Peter and you're both having a beer and he's having a smoke, and you ask if he could get you some heroin.  He says that it won't take him more than ten minutes, it's that easy. How much do you want? You had asked him because you've curious about anything that comes to mind in the flow of the moment, and because you have already learned how easy it is to get marijuana after sundown in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City and just about everywhere else. All you have to do is get on a bike going anywhere and you'll be asked how much you want and if you want a girl or two too, and why not?

  

You remember most of all the times with Ann and Nancy and your friends in philosophy and arguing about all those esoteric word puzzles that do not matter and never will, and the war issue among these people that you knew and cared about did not come up because these were people who didn't know what to think about the war or didn't care that much or had these things called ideas on their mind that were more immediate and in the present, and they were like you in not quite knowing what to say about the TV images of a platoon under fire in heavy brush or the body bags on the runaway or the speeches talking about the need for more troop buildups and more Congressional appropriations.

You seek out expats and you have little problem finding what you look for and engaging whomever catches your eye and they tell you stories and they are all pretty much the same about this unfolding commie-turned-not-quite-so-commie country on the run, only minor details differing.  They tell you that foreigners can only live in certain areas in the cities and they have to get permission but that you can easily enough find a Vietnamese woman who has three or four rooms and lives in one and pays eighty U.S. a month and she will rent you one of the other four if you give her forty a month and are willing to give the police another twenty or thirty a month to do what is illegal.  Everything is illegal in Nam, but everything can be made to seem legal by paying the cops.  Ideology is one thing and practice is quite another, a thought you are tired of thinking and want to find a new way of seeing a mess like this.

   

You’re wandering the Colombian countryside and you hardly speak the language and you never think about the C.I.A. and the U.S. abroad and what its foreign policy might mean to you personally in another country.  Then one day you are walking down a dirt road toward a small village with a towering Catholic church in the distance and this man in a black ruana and black rubber boots is coming at you swinging a machete and you think nothing at all about it.  But you think differently about it when he asks you questions about being with the C.I.A, and you understand enough to know that you have to find a determined way to tell him no you are not with the C.I.A. or any other government agency because you can see he is very angry at the prospect of who you might be.  And he has a machete and you have nothing by way of a weapon and only want to get away from him before he begins swinging that brutal tool at you.

   

Early on you realize that what makes this country called Vietnam so different to the eye are the cone hats on all these people in the city and in the countryside, and it makes them appear so Asian and so traditional and so photogenic, and whether walking or sitting or riding on a bicycle or carrying a bundle of grass full of rice heads they are begging to be caught in your camera's eye, the subject of a dozen photo essays, shots that will be memorable no matter where they lie in a heap among the inconsequential piles of your life. You remember, though not so clearly now, TV pictures of these people in their cone hats that were dressed in black and sometimes not in black and they were Vietcong and on their haunches in circles with their hands tied behind their backs and their heads bent over and there were women and children who might be carrying explosives and wanted to kill Americans walking down dirt roads.  No one could tell a friendly by looking at that thing on their head so it was always in doubt that they were friendlies and you shot them and worried about the consequences later of shooting them because you wanted to live and watch your short stick run all the way down to time zero and the flight home to the World where you could have a hotdog for lunch with mom.

You were in college and a big African-American was standing on a park bench on the edge of a street in the middle of campus and he was holding forth on the war and all that was wrong with it and someone in the gathering of some one-hundred or so students asked him a question and he responded to the question by claiming that his facts came from the front page of The New York Times of such and such date and that they could be found in the second column of the issue.  No one questioned him further and there were silence everywhere because the truth was now known, and after that you were certain that the details he had given made his facts as solid as facts can ever be, and it would take you time to realize that truths are to be found in detailed wrappings of just this kind and not in the nature of what in fact happened.  And so it is today that you always tell this story to students, and you always tell them that god lives among the details even when it is god you are never looking for in your personal life.

  

In Hue a Vietnamese woman tells you that when her brother comes north from the Mekong Delta to visit he must get permission from the police and give them information about why he travels and where he will be staying and the purpose for this particular trip.  When you hear this you think of how it is just like this in Cuba, and you think just how much Vietnam is like Cuba when it comes to snooping police and police on the take and the freedom to move and the freedom to live where you want to live in your own country, freedoms that are not possible because communists above all else love control.

You remember that when you were seventeen you told your mother and father that you wanted to go into the Marines and maybe they would not have taken you because of your punctured eardrums and your bad hearing, but you wanted to go anyway.  Then your mother who didn't know what college was all about since she didn't go to one and neither did your father said that you could live at home and get free room and board and all you would have to pay for would be your car and your girlfriends, and the deal was that in exchange you would go to college.  You took the deal and never went near a recruiting office and never once gave any thought to whether you might have been killed in Vietnam if the Marines had taken you. And even today you do not know whether to call this luck or just say that it the way things happen, because even now when something happens you do not know whether it was all about luck or a future foretold.

This Aussie expat is telling you that when he came to Vietnam four years ago his sister who was living in Ho Chi Minh City told him that it was okay to look at Vietnamese women but to never get involved with them because it would be trouble of a sort that he would regret. She said that when a Vietnamese woman gets married she moves into the house of her husband’s parents and she is subject to all the rules of the mother and will be treated like the dirt that is daily swept up with the large straw brooms that flare like flamingo skirts.  And that when you get married to a woman even as an expat you will be subject to all the norms and whims of elders, because elders know everything in traditional Vietnamese society. He tells you that he has never gotten involved with a single Vietnamese woman even though he has had numerous opportunities, and even though some of them are beautiful beyond words, a truth not evident to you. He tells you that he has many expat friends who are married to Vietnamese women and that ninety percent or more of their relationships are an utter failure and not one of them will get out of the relationship.  You don't know what will happen to you if you do get out, he says.  This is Vietnam and there could be the police at your door or the immigration people at your door, or you could get whacked.  The Vietnamese are racist, and once a Vietnamese woman gets married to a foreigner she cannot go back to Vietnamese men because then the Vietnamese are racist in a new key.

You remember way back then reading about American soldiers going with Vietnamese prostitutes and now and again they would stick their penis into a woman who had inserted a razor blade in her vagina and they would suffer more than pain. You heard this identical story days ago and it came out of nowhere and you believed every word of it now in a way you did not way back then. War is something or other by other means, you remember hearing many times and now you cannot remember what is really meant by war by other means.

You spend a day north and east of Hue taking more than 150 photos of farmers cutting and taking in the rice and separating the rice from the thick grass stalks and you think this is one of the great two hours of your life, and you write a little something about this and just how other worldly it was because you want to share this moment with people who cannot have what you just had.  But what you fail to include in what you write because you don't want to pollute the high you had and the sense of how unique the experience was is that at one stop you had jumped off the bike and taken a photo of a farmer at a ditch and the photo was a full head shot that you wanted a second shot of because the farmer had a cigarette dangling from his mouth in a mouth full of these incredibly large yellow teeth with large gaps between them, and his deeply burned face was memorably framed by a cone hat.  After you had taken the second shot the guy you were with by the name of Tu exchanged some words with this farmer from another century, and what he said to Tu you would soon find out was that he wanted five American dollars for the two shots you had just taken.  You looked for the delete button in your mind on hearing this, and then the trash icon, and then you emptied the trash too.

  

One year for Christmas you receive this very big book about Vietnam, called The Great Shining Lie, and you read it almost non-stop which is something you have rarely done with any book, maybe only once or twice in your life.  And as you sit here writing these words you remember how the central character, John Paul Vann, a character as real as you are and more so because so much was revealed about his life, told of how he had learned how to beat lie detector tests. Now why would you remember this most of all when the book was all about a war that went wrong and then was lost?

It's not clear how much heroin you can have in your possession and be able to buy your way out of trouble in the most important heroin trafficking country in the world, a secret that's not a secret but one that no one talks about because... Maybe you could get away with several kilos in your possession and not have to pay much at all to get out of trouble, maybe no more than 50,000 dong or some three dollars; and this is amazing beyond words when you think about it.  But if you are trafficking big time as a Canadian citizen with a Vietnamese surname was doing a couple of years ago you might be in real trouble. The police held him for four days and questioned him about things that were not later revealed and then they put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger and that was the end of the matter and it didn't matter at all what the Canadians thought about any of this.

You were in a village in southern Colombia and it was a fairly remote place because no one spoke a word of English and some people were talking about men landing on the moon and the consensus was that it did not take place, the whole thing.  All the TV images that were being shown around the world was a fabrication, an American invention, the kind for which America was famous. This was your introduction to postmodernism and you didn't tell anyone about it ever in this way because it made no sense and you did not know that word then and these were only people too ignorant to even know how to sign their names. They hired people to do this and they still do.

You hear repeatedly that the Chinese detest the Vietnamese, and the Vietnamese detest the Chinese in equal measure, and the Chinese are controlling the rate of economic development in Vietnam by controlling the supply of raw materials. They are in control because they are obviously bigger. Controlling the supply of raw materials to Laos and Cambodia is what Vietnam is doing to slow the economic development of these two countries.  You don't know if any of this is true, but you believe that it is and not just in some minor way.

  

An Australian married to a Vietnamese woman and doing business in Vietnam is telling you about the country and the topic turns to all of the plain clothes cops and you do not know if one is sitting right beside you or nearby, and the conversation does not get too far along because the Australian puts his fingers to his lips and whispers that he cannot talk more about the issue with you because the person over there and not far away might be an undercover cop.  You nod and you take note of where the conversation broke off and tell yourself that you'll see him later in the hotel and at a place in the hotel where it is safe to talk without being overhead.  It is all just like Cuba, you think, remembering the score of times you walked down the middle of the street in Havana or played a game of musical chairs in a plaza in Santa Clara or Santiago to avoid being overhead talking about the repressive ways of Castro and the Cuban state.  And now you think of all these Americans you know now talking about repression in America and you laugh out loud and inside and wonder what they would say about how they feel when talking what should not be talked about in Cuba and Vietnam today if they went to these countries and wandered about.

At home and before coming you came upon a file with letters from your brother when he was in Vietnam during the war.  They are all written in his neat and beautiful script, and before leaving and yet knowing that you would be going to Nam you started to read them.  But you read only a couple and then stopped and then and now don't know why, but you know that when you return you will read them for his thoughts, knowing that he knew no more about Vietnam and the people of Vietnam in those war years than did any other American there and fighting a war. You know there will not be a single clue in those letters about what you are seeing and hearing and feeling today and yet you will read them looking for a clue you just might find, and who really knows?

  

You're now a good two weeks on in Vietnam and the patterns are beginning to come together, some of them anyway. More than mere hearsay or prejudices or what you want to believe or not believe. You're hearing the stories too often, from tourists and travelers and expats who have been living here for two, three, five years and more.  These you tell yourself are anthropological notes of a sort to build on and fill in the details in the future, but more than mere first-approximation notes at this point. What beats street knowledge?

It is commonplace to be overcharged on hotel bills, on restaurant bills, on almost any bill in Vietnam. A couple of thousand dong here, 30,000 or 50,000 or more on a bigger bill.  Sometimes an apology, most of the time not. The Vietnamese are bulldogs on crystal meth and they probably were during the war and this is how they beat the then strongest army in history. Scamming is the norm and not the exception, you see so clearly as the days lose their special identity and turn into yet another and another day that will be lost to time.  Everybody wants his or her small take, and everyone is a prey, this is the Vietnamese way you discover in your small wandering time here.

  

You wonder why you remember that the number of Americans killed in Vietnam was about the same yearly figure for the number of Americans killed on American highways in one year.  You don't wonder why you don't know or don't remember how many Vietnamese were killed in the war.  What you do know is that it is a very large number and maybe you don't want to know the real number because it is too uncomfortable to think about.

The demands are often anything but soft or subtle.  They are blunt and insistent and shameless. You again think of Cuba and that there is an attitude there that everything is owed, by the state, and if not by the state then by anyone else who crosses your path. It's the give-me attitude prompted by all socialisms, the ideal that becomes a sickness before it even knows where to look for reality and that thing called human nature.

The scam repeats endlessly, for you and others.  You agree on a price and when the job is over and it’s parting time there is invariably the demand for more--10,000, 20,000, or an amount you don't want to have to discuss if you're on a dark street and you made the mistake of hiring someone on a motorbike who was probably high on the very marijuana he tried so hard to get you to buy.

You were once asked why you were not in the war and you said because of your ears, and then you said because you were married then, and then you said it was because you were in college, and you never did know what the real reason was because there was never a point at which the truth had to be known.

  

The Vietnamese prey on tourists and on travelers who are here for a week or two and then gone forever and if you think about it this is behavior more rational than it seems.  They hit on one another too, and incessantly, and they hit on expats who live in their neighborhood and who would like to do business with the same people again and again but do not because the scam is always on. The scam that is always on is like the streets where the bikes without motors and the motorbikes run and roll because there are no stop signs and the few that there are can be ignored and no one cares.

Corruption is widespread, as close to a human universal as one might imagine, you hear again and again from those who live in Nam. You want to do business, you pay extra.  You want to stay in business, you pay protection money. You want to do anything, anything at all, you pay.  And at one point on hearing this point yet one more time you wonder about your Vietnamese students of which there are many and how often they are trying to scam you because you are beginning to think that there is something in the Vietnamese blood that cannot be flushed or diluted by moving to another country and speaking another language and living a different culture.

Across the Red River is a large area devoted to prostitution for Vietnamese. The policeman who is second in charge of the area was recently paid $100,000 U.S. just to be second in charge because the word on the street is that he will recover his investment in one year.  The girl who is doing what is officially illegal is getting forty or fifty thousand dong to spread her legs or open her mouth.  You know without having the facts before you that she is going to get half this amount or perhaps much less, so that the investment by the number two man can be quickly recovered and then it is it all profit, Vietnamese style or Vietnamese Communist style or a style that comes out of too many wars, you can take your pick and argue all day long and no one will know for sure why.

There's a woman who works on the street in Hanoi. She sells gum and other small items for two or three or four thousand dong which is peanuts in anyone's language, and there is her cost to be calculated in these numbers too.  She has got MS and it is pretty advanced and not too long ago she got pregnant by a Vietnamese man cheating on his wife as most Vietnamese men do which is the reason that there are so many prostitutes on the other side of the Red River and a man second in charge can think nothing at all of paying $100,000 U.S. for a post to be second in charge.  She had twins and one on the twins died shortly after birth and now she needs money just to live. Aussies and Americans and other expats who live here and know her put together money to help her and unwittingly only make things so much worse because before the pregnancy and the twins the young woman was paying 50,000 dong a month to live in a tiny hole between two cement walls. But now for the same tiny hole between two cement walls the landlord is demanding that the woman with a child and MS pay 500,000 dong a month in rent.

Pity and compassion are words written in invisible ink in a contemporary Vietnamese dictionary.

Two kids on motorbikes are driving like they're nuts and they crash into the back of one of the few cars on the road in this country on the march to the West and they die. There's blood all over the road and on the car and the driver and his friend get out and go back and walk over the bodies and through the blood and they see nothing at all at their feet.  Their only concern is whether or not there are any scratches on the car, because this is the Vietnamese way.

The cops in uniform and the cops that are not in uniform make about $100 a month. But they make ten times this amount in shakedowns and graft and protection money and this is ten or twenty or thirty times their salaries. You don't know what the actual multiplier is and you never will but it will never matter for the principle is the same whether the multiplier is five or five hundred.

The kids on the street who sell books and shine shoes and the prostitutes and those who sell drugs are all under mafia and police control, and maybe the mafia and the police are one and the same, you don't know and it doesn't matter because it does not change the nature of what is going on. The kids on the street who sell books and shine shoes are heroin addicts and they smoke it and they shoot it up and they get the HIV and they numbered almost 200 strong on the streets of Hanoi until there was the matter of perception from afar because there were some people from afar coming to play games and it would not look good to see these heroin addict kids and now most of these young heroin addicts are in prison.  But you do not wonder how long they will be there, do you, when everything in Vietnam is for sale and everything can be bought? 

Your mind is running dry thinking these thoughts that many who read what you have just written will not want to believe and will believe that it only you once against in the darkness of your dark mind in a world where others have lights to illuminate the worlds they must see to be able to get by.

    

Your mind is running dry and other things you have learned about Nam will not change your story so you think it time to move on and wander more and get a ticket to a country where they use ledger books where others use computers and where there is only one foreign currency that is acceptable and this is the most valuable commodity in the world because it is produced by the greatest cultural and economic and military force in the history of the world.

 

Stickman's thoughts:

You CAN quit your day job.  You can be a travel writer.  Oooops, I think you can safely say that you already are.

The bar is being taken to a whole new level.  Another fantastic piece.

I still want to visit Vietnam....and I think I know what to expect.

The author can be reached at korski1@cox.net.
 The author of this website, NOT this article, can be contacted at: stickmanbangkok@gmail.com.