Peace in Our Time

April 8
This was a poignant day for me. We sailed into Cai Lan, North Vietnam and I felt overcome with emotion. It’s only about a three hour drive to Hanoi, but a million miles away from the war I grew up with. There’s a tour to Hanoi to see Ho Chi Minh’s tomb and the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” where John McCain was imprisoned and tortured for years and years during the “American War” as they call it over here, but I’m not going on it. I’m already in a kind of stunned reverie as I look around and see this beautiful place and remember what happened here. What a waste. The Vietnamese people have moved on, and although the country isn’t prosperous or especially modern (although we’ve heard Ho Chi Minh City—formerly Saigon—is much more well-to-do than these northern provinces) everyone seems to be doing okay. There are “boat people” with rickety craft that came up to the ship with their kids in tow and seemed to be either curious or begging—we’re not sure—but the overall sense of this place is “we get by.”
We took a “junk boat” ride this morning which drifted through the gorgeous monolithic rocks of Hai Long Bay (Vinh Ha Long as they call it) for three hours. The area is a UNESCO World Heritage site for the miles and miles of tranquil bay punctuated by hundreds of sheer-sided rocks with jungle vegetation on the upper sides and the tops. Supposedly there were monkeys (monos or chacos, as we call them in Southern Arizona) but the jungle area was too far away to see much except the occasional large bird. The people here are fisherman, and from the looks of things they’ve been living on their boats, rarely coming to shore, for generations. I wondered out loud how the generations meet and marry and carry on family life under such seemingly isolated conditions.
Our three-hour float in the junk boat was surreal—a nearly silent engine, the flat bay water, and the towering rocks lulled us all into a kind of waking stupor so that by the time we got back to the dock I’m sure our collective blood pressure had dropped twenty points.
But leave it to the harbor vendors to jack that blood pressure back up. Within minutes we were swarmed by four-foot high ladies draped in yards and yards of freshwater pearls. There was no getting away from these wild-eyed capitalists. Their English was incomprehensible but their sales skills were impressive. We figured we should buy something (there seems to be an unspoken agreement that the least the Americans can do to make amends for Agent Orange is to BUY SOMETHING, damn it). So, we bought some dainty little necklaces. It was like blood in the water—a dozen ladies with identical wares swooped in. No amount of “No, thanks” or “See, I already bought some things” worked. They were relentless. I gripped my purse, put my head down and speed-walked back to the dock.
Yes, peace in our time. It’s wonderful to see. What’s sad is that there are over 58,000 Americans who came over here in the 1960’s and 70’s but will never be able to return to see how life goes on after the shooting stops.