Excerpt
Now, as I crossed Quang Tri Province in the first days of the Year of the Snake, along a washed-out mountain road near Khe Sanh, a remarkable transformation was under way. The long-silent jungle stirred again with voices and movement and, at last, the dividends of peace. In the largest state-financed public works program since the war, the trail was being reborn and rebuilt, this time as a national highway that would link Hanoi with the city once known as Saigon, 1,050 miles south. Three hundred bridges needed to be built. Hills had to be razed, tunnels burrowed. Narrow dirt roads would be widened, raised for flood control, and paved. Unexploded mines and bombs had to be located and defused. The conversion of the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the Ho Chi Minh National Highway was, I thought, the perfect metaphor for Vietnam's own journey from wartime deprivation to peacetime development.
It was lunchtime. The thirty members of the Eleventh Engineer Brigade showed no surprise at finding an American poking around the Ho Chi Minh Trail. One of them poured me a bowl of chicken and rice broth from a charcoal-warmed caldron. Freshly washed fatigues were laid to dry across the bushes. No one carried a weapon. I lit a Marlboro and passed around the rest of the pack, which was received enthusiastically. We went inside a bamboo barracks to get out of the sun. There was a poster of Ho Chi Minh on one wall but no amenities such as toilets, electricity, or running water. I asked how many of the soldiers had been on the trail during the war. Three hands went up. I asked how many of their fathers had been on the trail and almost every one raised his hand.
The Ho Chi Minh Trail was born on May 19, 1955, Ho Chi Minh's sixty-fifth birthday, when, with the French colonial army defeated and gone for a year, Hanoi began laying plans to bring South Vietnam under its control. Major Vo Bam, a logistics specialist who had fought the French in the central highlands, was put in charge of forging a supply route to the South. The mission was so secret no written records were kept. Hacking through triple-canopy jungle, avoiding villages, enduring biting cold and suffocating heat, hunger, exhaustion and disease, Bam and five hundred volunteers from the 559th Engineer Brigade--the unit's motto was, "Blood May Flow but the Road Will Not Stop"--skirted the Truong Son mountains, crossing Route 9 just east of Khe Sanh, and plodded south. The rudimentary track they carved out would fuel the American War.
Trong Thang was one of North Vietnam's most celebrated wartime photographers and I went to see him when I returned to Hanoi. He had spent four years documenting daily life on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Back then, he had developed his film in glazed pots by candlelight and helped bury the dead by day. His images were haunting, focused more on the emotions of war than the chaos of war: a rare moment of tenderness between a teenage soldier and a girl volunteer; a North Vietnamese soldier named Dien sharing his water canteen with a wounded South Vietnamese infantryman; three adolescent privates with uncertain smiles and arms over one another's shoulders headed off for a commando mission from which they knew they would not return. "After taking their picture," Thang said, "I had to turn away and weepThey were all so young."
Thang went on, "Our happiest times on Truong Son were when we got mail from home. We'd read the letters aloud to each other. Pretty soon one soldier would laugh over something in a letter, then everyone would laugh until the forest shook with laughter. Then you'd feel so guilty for being happy, you'd cry, and the whole forest would cry.
"We hungered for love. I remember watching, from behind a bush, three girls take off their clothes and bathe in a stream. When they emerged, they looked like fairy princesses. They were so young, so beautiful. I wanted to shoot their picture, but I didn't because they were nude, and it wouldn't have been appropriate. An hour later, they were killed in a B-52 strike. I still ask myself, 'Why didn't I take their picture nude to keep their memory alive for history?'"