Letter from a friend of mine in Viet Nam -- Final End

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Date Posted: 23:01:14 02/01/03 Sat
Author: Drummond
Subject: Letter from a friend of mine in Viet Nam

Good Morning Hanoi!

Horn honk hello, "I am here" sounds emitting from the street below. Yellowy-orange sunrise through half-wintry clouds over tin-spangled rooftops, crooked antennae, tiles, flower-pot rooftop balconies: all the little greeting cards of third-worldliness! The raspy crinkle of morning toilet paper, unevenness of traffic noise, timelessness of foot traffic: is *this* the soil from which the ruthlessness of the Vietcong arose? Revolutionary fervor so steely that it took big bully USA down a notch, in my childhood? I look for clues in the elders on the street as my heart-mind listens for hints and clues of "national character." Is there French-colonial tropical languor? Is there Chinese straight-faced gray-wash socialist-realism? Is there SE Asian banana-leaf sunshine smile of life?

Four busy stone masons squatted on the sidewalk carving gravestones as I passed last night; burdened women ran by with weight-laden pole-balanced baskets hanging from their shoulders; our waitress at dinner smiled ceaselessly, big toothy embarrassed in the noodle restaurant: far less hostility than Bangkok, with which we have never had a war. Is it possible that tourism is more lethal to human connection than napalm?

Last night coming in by taxi, the air was Stalinist-gray with soot, charcoal smells over the oxen fields and corn-planted bottomlands that segued into torn-up streets, sand piles, truck noises and winter-clothing people, industrious. The distressed patina of a revolutionary ambience hangs in my Hanoi thoughts: a chipped, fist-waving red-paint sign despite the Sony TV in my hotel room.

I remember 1968 black-and-white television image of a helicopter taking off--announcer announcing "12 casualties, 16 wounded." I said to myself then, four years old, that *can't* really be happening, a real *war.* It was, it did, and now I'm here, here in Hanoi, final resting place of Ho Chih Minh, strains of a revolutionary song now floating up to my ears from the street below, stilling honking and motoring, reminding me not, not at all, not one bit, of home.

Andy Couturier

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