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[305] AFTERWORD In Vietnam On January 17, 2012, my wife, Ann, and I arrived in Hanoi. We were traveling with our friends Jay and Ann Hill and had come overland from northern Thailand to a port on the Mekong, down the river by slow boat to Luang Prabang, and then by prop plane to Noi Bai Airport. For the Hills, the trip had been a sentimental journey back to Chiang Mai, where they had worked and taught in the late seventies and again in the early nineties, but for Ann and myself it was our first trip to Southeast Asia and, for all of us, a first look at Vietnam. “I wonder if it will be like Blade Runner,” Jay said, as we climbed into a taxi. In the hour it took us to reach our hotel, his expectation was only party fulfilled. It was a chilly, drizzly night, obscured by what looked like a dense, low-lying fog. As we eased onto the main highway leading into town, we were suddenly enveloped by motor-scooters. They moved at a steady, inexorable thirty-mile-an-hour clip, weaving gracefully past and around the road’s far fewer cars and trucks. The lights to be seen along the road were fluorescent, shining wanly down on figures gathered in makeshift restaurants . Here and there a corporate big box flared out a name in color like Canon, Samsung, Panasonic. These were factories, not outlet stores. Once in town, twinkle lights and illuminated paper lanterns began to relieve the gloom, and the driver wove skillfully through the narrowing streets and the ceaseless honking that signaled someone coming up from behind. “They [306] AFTERWORD move together, like a school of fish,” Jay remarked. By the time we reached the Cinnamon Hotel, the fog, we had realized, was air pollution. But the most striking thing about the traffic, besides its density, was that every so often a scooter went by carrying a miniature orange tree. “Oh, they’re for Tet,” our innkeeper told us, at breakfast. “It’s a traditional gift.” They were not orange trees, it turned out, but kumquats. Their bright shiny fruit, we were to learn, were meant to symbolize fertility and good luck; the more fruit, the luckier the family. Prominently on display as well were branches of peach in half-bloom, a blossom which, in North Vietnamese lore, had long been used to scare away devils. Without meaning to we had come to Vietnam on the eve of its biggest national holiday. This year the Lunar New Year’s celebration was to begin officially on January 22, the day after our scheduled departure. Judging from the lights and banners in the streets, however, the celebration had begun days before our arrival. And another anniversary had come round as well, one registered on the red and gold banners decorating many of the streets. Below the image of a hammer and sickle ran the dates 1930–2012. The meaning of the dates only became clear to me after visiting the Vietnam Military History Museum. There, in a modest glass case, was a handwritten document of seventeen lines. “Political Thesis of the Indochina Communist Party in 1930,” the caption read. This was the year, then, in which Ho Chi Minh had pulled together all the rival factions and announced the formation of the Dang Cong San Viet Nam. I thought of Michael Herr and of the difficulty of dating the doom, about when wars start and whether they ever fully end, and I realized that for all the true-blue Vietnamese Communists 1930 could be looked on as year zero. The military museum was located in the buildings and grounds of a former French army barracks. Most of the story was told through photographs , documents, and remnant objects, like General De Castrie’s captured electric fan. A do not miss, according to our guidebook, was the diorama of the battlefield at Dien Bien Phu, a huge and somewhat homey relief map reminiscent of the installations at Gettysburg. It is odd to see American aircraft displayed in the museum of a foreign country, but there they were, a U.S. Air Force helicopter and two Skyraiders captured in Saigon in 1975. On entering the compound one is first met by a Soviet MiG with fourteen stars painted on its fuselage. “This fighter has been piloted by 9 men of Regiment 921–Air Division 371,” the caption read, “who have downed...

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