The DMZ, part II

The DMZ, part I.

     One of the things that I was most looking forward to while planning this trip was getting to tour the DMZ, which stretches for five kilometers on either side of the 17th parallel. However, the more I looked into going, the lower my expectations got. I was still excited about seeing everything, but I had heard almost uniformly from review sites such as tripadvisor that unless you get really, really lucky, and have a fantastic guide, the DMZ is almost universally disappointing. As it turns out, I'm really lucky.      The day started bright and early, with the minibus picking me up at my hotel at 7 a.m. WIth most people having been picked up an hour earlier to eat the breakfast that was included with the tour, I was the next-to-last one on. Since breakfast was also included with my hostel, and I couldn't get both (unfortunately - not being one to turn down free food, I did try), I opted to sleep in an extra half hour and eat breakfast at my hostel. When I had asked the booking agent what came with breakfast on the tour, I got the standard Vietnamese answer of "bread." Now granted, I have been told this several times now, and never has the meal solely consisted of bread. Usually there's a baguette on the side of some other, more filling, meal. I'm fairly sure that "bread" just happens to be the only English food word they know, so that's what they say. However, I knew that I had multiple options for breakfast at my hostel, all of which were good, so I figured I'd play it safe. I later heard the breakfast through the tour also consisted of numerous options and was quite good, but at least I didn't have to get up at 5 a.m. like everyone else.      After one more stop at a quite fancy hotel, the bus was completely full, and we headed north. Air-conditioning was virtually non-existent, and the body heat didn't help matters any. The windows did not open, and by the time we got to Quang Tri a few hours later, we were all drenched in sweat. It was here that our guide hopped on, and I was pleasantly surprised when she was perhaps the first person I have met in this country that I could qualify as being completely fluent in English. Her accent wasn't even difficult to understand, a rare delight. As we drove along, she pointed out a few things along the way, including several cartoonish signs along the road depicting land mines. She explained that unexploded mines were still quite a problem here, and children their most common victims, due to their ignorance of what mines look like. The cartoons were aimed at helping children identify mines and provided them with a phone number to call should they stumble across any.      After another quite long ride, we stopped at the river which formed the post-1972 border between North and South. This is further south than the 17th parallel, and became the new border after  U.S. troops pulled out and the north made a successful push towards Saigon. This is also the site of a point on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, where numerous troops and supplies were moved from north to south and back again. The original bridge was destroyed in bombing raids, but a new one has since been built. We then made a quick stop on the side of the freeway to take some pictures of "The Rockpile" - a small but important observation post for Americans during the war, reachable only by helicopter - which is now basically just a big pile of rocks. However, some war-era photos provided by the tour guide made the stop a bit more interesting, as we could see not only the American flag on the base (which has now been replaced with a barely visible Vietnamese flag), but also the defoliation caused by use of Agent Orange in the area. She then pointed out the clearly visible lines in the forest - different colors of green - and explained that the dark green areas, for instance, were new primary forest, planted since the war. There were still a few bare areas which had not been replanted, where the effects of Agent Orange were still visible.      Our next stop was Khe Sanh Combat Base, a site that is perhaps most well known for its role in the 1968 Tet Offensive. *begin history lesson* In late 1967, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the commander of the People's Army of Vietnam, had put together a plan to gain quick control of the South and end the war. It was a two phase plan that involved tricking the U.S. into thinking that there was a major attack planned on Khe Sanh by moving NVA troops north towards the Cambodian and Laotian borders (phase one), and then having VC units in place in all major southern population centers attack on Tet, after the American soldiers had left (phase two). Phase one was overwhelmingly successful. Giap fooled General Westmoreland into moving a vast number of U.S. troops into Khe Sanh, playing on Westmoreland and President Johnson's fears that this would be the American Dien Bien Phu. Phase two failed. The VC attacked, but the southern Vietnamese people did not rise up against the American backed South Vietnamese government as expected, and ARVN (the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, pronounced Arvin), fought better than they ever had before or would again. Only in Hue did the fighting rage on for a few weeks, destroying much of the Imperial Citadel (see previous post). *end history lesson*      Khe Sanh, part of which is now a coffee plantation, was actually really cool. A small museum inside detailed certain parts of the war, with some wonderfully anti-American captioning on photos of the base as it appeared during the conflict. There were the requisite captured American war planes on display outside, as well as some examples of the types of bombs used during the war. There were also original bomb shelters and trenches that could be wandered through, sandbags and all (okay, so the sandbags were probably new).      Finally, it was on to the Vinh Moc tunnels, in which a town full of people lived during the war. Tunnel systems like these were part of the reason that American bombing proved so ineffective. When the planes would come, the entire town would simply move underground. They lived like this on and off for six years, with seventeen babies even being born inside the tunnels in the "maternity ward," which was barely big enough for one person to lay in (or so it seemed). The family rooms, in which two parents and two children lived, hardly looked big enough for two of us smaller girls to squeeze into (although granted, as westerners, we are still a bit bigger than even most Vietnamese men).      After the tunnels, it was a two hour ride back into town, where we ate lunch at a surprisingly good restaurant, and then headed back out for one final stop. It was Doc Mieu Firebase, and the sole remnant of an American presence here is an overgrown U.S. tank sitting across the street. What I'm presuming was once the main part of the base has been turned into a cemetery for Vietnamese soldiers who died during the war. With the tall memorial in the middle, and small, uniform white gravestones all around (many of them sadly anonymous), this place put me in mind of Arlington, albeit a significantly smaller version.      We got back into the now boiling hot van for one last long drive - half an hour into town again to drop off our guide, and another hour and a half after that back to Hue - but having now spent nearly twelve hours in each other's company, and being much less sleepy than in the morning, there was at least good conversation instead of awkward silence. An English girl sitting next to me, whom I immediately took a liking to after I saw her taking notes on the tour guide's lectures, found out that I had taken a class all about the war the previous semester, and immediately began grilling me. Happy to oblige her curiosity, I gave her a rundown of everything I could readily recall involving America's original entry into Vietnam, the anti-war movement, the Tet Offensive, Agent Orange, and of course the battles fought in the area around the DMZ. By 7:00 p.m. I was back in Hue, exhausted but delighted at my particularly good choice of tour (booked through the DMZ Bar, should anyone be interested), and after grabbing a quick dinner, promptly passed out in my dorm. Tomorrow would be another early day, and I wanted to be semi-sort of-ish rested up for it.