Home Again

Written by Amy Lyon

I am still suffering from jet lag when I visit the Saigon Market in Wilmington, just days after our return. I am Vietnam-sick and need to smell rice and dried fish and see indecipherable Vietnamese letters. I breathe in deeply the salty starchy aromas as I meander the aisles, lingering in front of a display of clay pots that remind me of the cooking school in Hoi An, where we learned to cook eggplant. I walk past large bags of rice and wonder on what street in what village these kernels dried out and how many dogs, motor bikes and cyclists ran over them. I fill my basket with guava juice, lemon grass, Vietnamese chili sauce, greens and dried rice paper, resolving to work on a recipe that makes fresh rice wraps.

The owner, Lan, came to America soon after the war and settled in Wilmington with her American husband whom she met during the war. They have two children, a daughter who is soon to marry and a son who works in the store and remembers me, the crazy woman who planned to cycle Vietnam in the heat of the summer.

Lan smiles when I tell her I’ve just returned. She pulls photo album after photo album out from under the cash register and shows me pictures of her visits to Vietnam.
I admire the photos. They are taken by photographers that follow tourists around, snap dozens of shots, develop and deliver the finished photos to their hotels at night. Lan uses this method of picture taking on all her visits. It is cheap she says. I think she is also glad to employ them and share her American wealth.

There are pictures from Hue, the ancient capital, where a brother lives, along with nieces and nephews, their spouses and children, dozens of them dressed in their best clothes at weddings and restaurants. There are pictures taken in the old Forbidden City on the same steps where we took pictures just weeks ago. She shows me one picture of her mother dressed in a royal costume made of a rich red robe and stiff ornate hat, taken in a tourist restaurant; perhaps the same one in which we ate.

She always starts her Vietnam visits in her hometown; south of Saigon, where her mother lives in a house Lan built with money she earned in her store here in Wilmington. We saw numerous homes all across Vietnam financed by money sent home by Vietnamese living elsewhere. There is a special word for Vietnamese ex pats, who left under duress and like many refugees, on the one hand long to return to their homeland and on the other are happy living the American dream, possible in America. In a culture that honors ancestors and whose social structure is built on a backbone of family millions of dollars annually are sent back to Vietnam.

Her relatives tease her about her soft American ways. Lan installed air conditioning in one room in her Vietnamese home, finding the heat intolerable. Yet all her relatives fully appreciate the indoor plumbing she installed one year. On each trip home, Lan invites family members to vacation with her in Dalat, in the highlands north-west of Saigon, so they too can enjoy the cool mountain air and great green pine forests. She shows me pictures of her daughter dressed in multicolored indigenous tribal garments, her arms draped around her Vietnamese cousins. Both her children have visited Vietnam.

Lan’s trips are expensive since she is expected to host her extended family and spends upwards of $20,000 between meals, gifts, trips and home improvements. Her mother died last year and she has not felt well since her most recent visit. She doesn’t know when she’ll return next. I wonder if she has Malaria or some other foreign bug our American bodies are not accustomed to. I urge her to see an infectious disease doctor. She says others also have suggested that and maybe she will. Meanwhile, she is always cold and is on this hot day wrapped in a wool sweater.

I leave the shop promising to visit again soon. I’ll bring my photographs, digital images on a laptop, so she can see the similarities. I’ll also show her my pictures of Hanoi, a city she has never visited, but says she will on her next visit. I will too.

Bad Dog! Bad Dog!

Written by Amy Lyon



Preparing for this trip took time and thought, not to mention shots and shopping. The shots numbered over ten, depending on what one might have previously had and the shopping was to outfit us in bright bike clothes, special wash and wear underwear and a big first aid kit.

We put in as many miles on the bike as our schedules allowed. Carving peddling hours out of already crammed days was not easy. Jonathan and I had a goal to ride 100 miles a week, 50 during the week and at least one long ride on the weekends. We were more or less successful, although we found no hills in eastern North Carolina, so our training was bereft of an important ingredient. This proved to be a challenge when we got to Vietnam.

We had many lovely and some tired early morning rides around Greenfield Lake and longer rides at Lake Waccamaw, rides out to Wrightsville Beach and one delightful ride on July fourth along the country roads of Columbus Country just west of Lake Waccamaw during which Jonathan and I were able to put into practice some valuable advice learned from our neighbor and avid cyclist, Norm.

Norm, a retired heart surgeon and teacher is the mildest mannered of men. His natural tendency is to smile and assuage any feelings of discomfort. A formidable Scrabble player, I had never heard him raise his voice, even in delight, as he lays down a seven letter word on the triple word tile and accumulates 135 points.

So it came as a complete shock when on one ride around Lake Waccamaw as a dog lunges towards us, barking, teeth bared, Norm belts out in a loud and mean voice Bad Dog! Bad Dog! Startled, the dog stops for a moment and we speed off. Norm explains: This is exactly what owners do when their dog misbehave so in that confused moment when the dog is registering this command, you are given a fraction of time to take off and save your ankle.

That is what Jonathan and I practice riding the back roads of Columbus County. Evidently in this part of the country, every home comes equipped not only with a gun and a pickup truck but with multiple dogs. On otherwise quiet and bucolic curvy roads through cornfields and past barns, we peddle towards and away from barking dogs, strengthening our calves and thighs and vocal chords. Bad Dog! Bad Dog!

This may be good training for America, but I knew it would be impossible to learn Bad Dog! Bad Dog! in Vietnamese with the right intonation. I was going to have to wing it and rely on the three preventative rabies shots we received in case of a bite from dog or monkey.

In Vietnam, we saw monkeys, but none on the loose and passed hundreds of dogs. Sweet, docile dogs, large and small, they meandered along the roads we cycled, slept and lounged around. At first I thought I was seeing dead dogs, expired from the heat or lack of food. But these were Zen dogs. They hardly looked at us. They just didn’t care about the passing traffic, not the Vietnamese on motorbikes, water buffalo, or Westerners on bicycles wearing bright clothes and helmets, looking like they came from outer space. Who can blame them for their lethargy for every day in Vietnam was dog day hot.

Only once did I encounter a barking dog. I was cycling behind Mike and this medium size scraggly looking dog really did act like his American cousins. He seemed so happy chasing Mike. Wagging his tail, it was as if this dog finally realized that this is what dogs did, chase cyclists! I did wonder if the dog planned to take a nip at Mike’s foot but there was something in the initial moments of the fray, when it looked like the dog was just having fun, trying something new. Mike, understandably, took off, yelling in English, Bad Dog! Bad Dog! I coasted past the now panting and exhausted dog who turned back into a Vietnamese dog and lay down and played dead.

What we had most to fear was not a dog bite, but rather running over the toe of a Vietnamese child who, all over the country, seemed to play the same game. How many Hellos and High Fives can you get from a Westerner riding through the Village? At first it was charming and endearing, but as the trip went on, I began to fear the shrieks and cries wondering if it was going to be in this village that I was going to run over a little foot.

Some rides, like the day we rode miles of levees, past rice fields and fish farms just south of Hanoi, they could see us coming from a long way off. Along with the heat waves rising off flat parched land, rose their many voices followed by small bands of charging children. They’d stop abruptly, line up, arms raised; hands open and wait for us to pass. . Depending on how tired I was, I’d either come in close and hi five them, or swerve away, needing all of my energy to keep upright after a long hot hard day of cycling.

Jonathan loved the game right back and came up with one of his own-- stop and take their picture and show it to them. They loved this almost as much as hand slapping. Entire villages loved this. The teenagers, in teenager fashion, would hold back, but they too, came forward and laughed to see their image and ask for more. The girls would giggle, the boys swagger and the younger ones jump up and down. To Jonathan’s dismay, one father put his baby on the back of his bike.

Overnight Train Trip

Written by Jonathan Smylie

Between Hue, the French colonial capital and even older Nguyen Dynasty capital and Ninh Binh, 56 miles southeast of Hanoi, we took an overnight train. The 600-kilometer ride through this north central part of Vietnam lasted twelve hours from 4 pm to 4 am, during which we crossed the DMZ.

We settled into our cabins and dined on Vietnamese style guacamole that Amy and Tanh had cobbled together with ingredients bought at an outdoor market. Tanh was correct in his assumption that we would not like the boxed food included in the cost of the ticket. After dinner while the last of the sunlight waned, I stepped into the aisle and began taking pictures of the passing countryside. On the train’s west side were tall distant mountains, jagged silhouettes in the dimming light. On the train’s east side stretched flat, rice-paddy-covered green fields as far as you could see.

Since taking pictures had become a bit of an obsession with me by this point in the trip, I clicked away, hoping to capture something interesting, but explicitly wanting an image of the train’s long line of cars. After tightening the camera’s nylon handle securely around my wrist, I would stick my left arm as far as I could out the open window and click away. Then with my hand still stiff-armed, I turned the camera and pointed it on a few of us looking out the window. When we flipped the camera over and examined the digital image of smiling faces and wind blown hair we went wild with laughter. The fun was contagious and everyone wanted in. Again and again two or three or five of us would crowd around the window and stick our faces into the wind while I clicked away. Then we’d jumped into position, heads close together to view the results and invariably break out in laughter.

It was one of the most joyous moments of our trip, filling us all with youthful energy. Here we were, all children again in a cabin hurling northward through the night, half way through our trip, acting just like the children who surrounded us in village after village, who wanted us to take their pictures and then once seeing the images, would exploded into laughter.

Later that night, after the women had headed to their cabin for sleep, Mike asked Tanh if he wanted to watch any of the war documentaries he had brought along. Tanh was very interested and for the next hour Mike played different parts of two or three CDs on his laptop. Here we were, four men watching a war documentary, sharing a train compartment, sipping a little Scotch. If Tanh and I or Mike or Andrew were 18 or 20 or 25 in 1968 and in this country we could have been fighting each other. Andrew had a draft number, but was never called up. Tanh was born just north of Hanoi in 1976. His uncle was killed fighting for North Vietnam. On a metaphorical plain, we killed his uncle and Tanh beat our entire army into retreat, giving America the first lost war in its history.

I couldn’t imagine fighting this kind man after having cycled together for a week, eaten dozens of meals together, having received his help with everything from staying hydrated through the hottest part of the day to making sure I didn’t take the wrong turn, to showing me, the only one who wanted to go, the old Cham towers at the end of one of our longest cycling days. This was his country yet he was speaking my language.

In this moment and there were many like it, I was grateful to be here, grateful to experience it with Amy and the others so we could be witnesses to each others lives, grateful that I had not had to come here as a soldier.

My Lai -- 504

Written by Jonathan Smylie

It is hard to understand this massacre. I try to make sense of it by reading the old newspaper clippings at My Lai. There are many in the museum display case including one from the Springfield Union from Amy's hometown.

William Calley was the only member of his platoon convicted. Five others were tried but acquitted, but they had all lifted their guns toward a face, a torso, a bent form, a child, an old woman and they had not stopped. During four hours in the early morning of March 16, 1968, Calley and his men, helicoptered into this small hamlet since no roads lead to it, burned down 19 thatched homes, raped, and killed hundreds villagers. A black granite wall inside the large windowless mausoleum like museum records this mass murder in sharp details: 504 killed, including 182 women, 17 pregnant at the time, 173 children, and 60 men over the age of sixty. Their names, ages and genders are listed. William Calley served less than five months of a life sentence before being paroled and allowed to return to his home in Columbus, Georgia to run a family jewelry store.

The frustration among the GIs was high. The Tet offensives had just happened six weeks earlier. The My Lai area was believed to be a stronghold of the Viet Cong. There was intelligence that the VC was in the hamlet. The U.S. solders were on a search-and-destroy mission in a free-fire zone which meant all the rules were left back at camp.

The killing was initially covered up by high-ranking army officers, but in November of that year, the story hit the newspapers. In 1970 Life magazine printed 51 colored photos taken by an army photographer who was on the ground with the troops. These photos are on displayed on the walls of the museum and show the gruesome facts: a huddled group of 15 women and children just before being executed, two boys cowering in the road moments before being shot, soldiers gunning down farmers forced into an irrigation ditch. 170 died in the ditch. Its walls are now cased in concrete to preserve it. Was this whole thing a revenge killing for Tet? Who came up with this evil plan and how high a rank was he? Why’d they bring along a photographer?

The hamlet of My Lai now looks like a well manicured garden, with neatly pruned bushes, orderly plantings, walkways, leafy trees and just beyond the grounds, acres of bright green rice paddies. Although a tall palm in the middle of the village still shows the scars of bullet holes. The air is clean and still and quiet, the smell of gun powder and cries of the dying have long been brushed away by the wind. Carried, I fear, to Iraq.

One US helicopter pilot, Hugh Thompson, tried to save some of the Vietnamese once he realized this infraction had turned into a slaughter of the innocent. He set his chopper down in a field and beckoned villagers to run to him. When member of Calley’s platoon saw his actions, they took aim at these running civilians, but the helicopter pilot aimed his craft’s machine right back at them and warned them not to shoot. The pilot managed to fly about a dozen villagers safely out of the area.

The museum guide, a young woman, dropped into an emotional trance when she began her talk while we stood outside next to where one of the village huts once stood. Her voice turned distant and weepy, even though I could tell she had recited these words verbatim many times. The last thing she told us, as we stood in front of the wall of names, was that her grandfather, two uncles and one aunt were killed that day.

Cu Chi Tunnels

Written by Jonathan Smylie

They raked the dirt into rice paddies, poured it into streams, and dumped it into bomb craters so the Americans couldn’t tell they were digging under them. They started these tunnels in the late 1940’s when they were fighting the French. By the mid 60’s their underground world included kitchens, theaters, dormitories, printing ships, weapon cashes as well as 125 miles of tunnels.

When they were not excavating, they were extracting gunpowder from unexploded bombs or artillery shells fired by the US or they were setting booby traps made of bamboo spikes or waiting out the constant shelling the Americans threw at this province just north of Saigon.
Using only short handled hoes and small reed baskets for carrying out this hard clay, the VC created a three-tiered network of tunnels that dropped to depths from 10 to 30 feet.

As I crawled through them, they zigzagged every few yards. They were designed never to run straight for long, it helped limit damage if there was a fire fight. The tunnels were almost pitch dark because the few navigational lights that the museum strung along the walls were far apart and gave off little light. I crouched on my toes, curled up into a tight ball and used my hands as a second set of feet, swinging forward like a monkey. This way I was able to move quickly and not have to crawl on my knees.

At one point the tunnel dropped down a small square hatch and I found myself on a deeper level. The place felt like the inside of a maze and I could have easily taken a turn or two and not known from which direction I had come or which way was out.

I passed a small opening on my left side, an off shoot; probably a body’s length long and I imagined it was where someone would have slept. I imagined them feeling the ground shake as the bombs fell around them, fearing their exit would be caved in by the next explosion. The US bombed the area so extensively it damaged 70% of the tunnels. I imagined the man or woman, they worked and fought side by side, whose niche this was waiting and listening to hear whether the US would, after the bombs stopped falling, next try to fill the tunnel with water or flames or chemicals or send in a tunnel rat, a volunteer with a rope tied to him, who would start shooting at the dark. I imagined lots of things and was grateful when the exit appeared and I climbed the ladder to sunshine.

Second World

Written by Jonathan Smylie

In the afternoon of our eighth day, we cycled for hours through a long series of country villages that were surrounded by cemeteries, an area just north of Cau Hai Lagoon. There was no apparent order or pattern to the area, no separation between homes, hay stacks and graves. We’d pass a house or small shop that stood by the road and next to it laid a grave or behind it stretched acres of graves, large and small, facing one direction or the other, some in the starkness of the sun, others dappled in the shadows of long leaf pines.

The people here live in humble dwellings, wooden shacks or brick, one-room structures, yet they spend significant amounts of money to build a grave to honor their ancestors. The graves are made of brick, finished over with plaster, covered with ceramic tile or painted with bright reds, blues and yellows. From a distance these elaborate structures looked like enlarged pieces of ceramic art that you’d find in an antique store. Some of the graves were in the shape of lotus flowers, some stood two stories high, some used beautiful, dark red marble or stone for their sarcophaguses, some employed arches, high walls, and had great detail in their roofs.

Tanh, our guide, explained that at first when someone dies they are buried in a coffin and put in the ground with a simple marker or nothing at all. I saw many mounds of sand that looked like unmarked graves. After three years the casket is dug up, the bones removed, placed in a jar and put in a permanent grave, the location carefully selected, often with the help of a geomancer. Tanh explains that this is all a part of the Taoist beliefs. He says there is a second world where the dead live and from where they watch the living. The more the living honor them, in part by giving them a handsome grave that some actually planned for themselves, the more the dead will help in this life.

The guide books say Taoism is the least visible and most mystical element of Vietnam’s mix of beliefs. It’s a philosophy that dwells on nothingness, on the yin and yang symbol that emphasizes the harmony between contradictions. It’s a belief system that focuses on the absence of personal ambition, desire and sensual pleasure. It values simplicity.

Tanh told me that after his father retires in a year or two, he will start looking for his brother (Tanh’s uncle) who was killed during the American War and whose body was never found. He will use a gifted psychic to help him locate the body. The Vietnamese army employs five such psychics who have help relatives of the dead find the remains of 10,000 soldiers.

Tanh’s story left me wondering what kind of grave has his father, in his daydreams, envisioned for his brother.

Chicken Village -- a love story

Written by Jonathan Smylie

Outside of Dalat, in the south central highlands, after we cycled our first downhill, an 11 kilometer ride down a steep mountain road with cars and buses whizzing by at close quarters, we turned off the highway onto a dirt road heavily rutted by rain and entered a small village. The residences were members of the L’Ha one of the many hill tribes that the government is moving off the mountains in an attempt to stop their slash and burn approach to farming and integrate them into modern ways.

This was Chicken Village, and in this tribe, it is a custom for the women to pick their husbands. Among the cluster of wooden buildings there stood a 20-foot high concrete statue of a chicken. The concrete bird is a replacement of the previous wooden one, which after long standing eventually deteriorated.

The story behind the chicken goes like this: A beautiful but poor farm girl fell in love with the son of a very rich family and asked him to marry. The family did not want the marriage, but custom dictated that they could not outright deny it. Instead they set up an impossible requirement. She would first have to bring them a chicken with long, perfectly formed claws, an impossible request. She accepted this request, set out to find this perfect bird and was never seen again.

The story ends there, at least the facts and I’m left with only my imagination to pluck this bird, cook it and discover what it tastes like.

Symbolically, the young girl in love has nothing. She is poor, but her heart is strong. Inside she is filled with the great treasure--the ability to love. Sadly her wealth is invisible to most others. She wants the young, rich boy. She wants the golden ring, perfection, the external picture of having-it-all. Our story teller did not say how the boy felt about the girl. It’s not really his story. He’s just a symbol of the temporal mountain top. We don’t know anything about his capacity to love. Was he a spoiled brat? A momma’s boy? Full of bravado? Or was he a strong, handsome, cowboy? Was he kind or selfish, smart or slow? All we know was that his family was rich. He symbolizes perfection, a member of the highest caste.

She has a very courageous character, revealed by two acts. One: she asks the boy to marry her. She goes against the norm, what’s the expected, reaches above her status. She wants more. She wants it all and she asks for it.

The family’s request is also symbolic. It’s a demand for perfection, for the impossible. You want the moon; you must first bring us the moon we want. She asked for perfection, the boy’s family asked for perfection back. They, the family, by throwing out their impossible requirement, are keeping themselves safely locked away from the poor, the imperfect, from other humans, from the power of the heart.

Her second great act of courage or stupidity or surrender, depending on how romantic you are, is that she actually goes in search of the perfect chicken and of course is never heard from again.
And here’s where you can choose how to garnish your now cooked chicken.
What happened to her?

(1) She walked over the hill and threw herself off the nearest cliff understanding she would never be able to do the impossible. Sounds like a Shakespearean ending. (2) She walked over the hill and searched and searched and eventually found the perfect chicken but by then she had come to realize she didn’t need a man who couldn’t go against his family and love her back. She’d outgrown the need for a whip. (3) She walked over the hill, found the chicken, realized its worth, took it to Saigon, sold it, which made her rich and she found that she had to beat away the men. (4) She walked over the hill, never found the chicken, fell in love with wandering the road and became a guide for Spice Roads. (5) She walked over the hill, traveled to America, realized she didn’t need a man and ran for president.