The Mekong Delta wetlands were grey, dotted with glinting roofs and petrified boats, rivers winding every which way like a gigantic drip painting. The city as it slowly emerged beneath the raked Sharklet wingtip revealed staggered columns of factory smoke.
If I thought I’d be landing in a place of featureless Soviet-style housing blocks, vast squares, goose-stepping soldiers, expressionless government minders, and brusque sloganeering—a place proudly asserting communist East Asia’s independence from the capitalist model of human existence—I was to be seriously disappointed. Nothing so romantic. Ho Chi Minh City turned out to be a thriving Western-style entrepot, with calculated echoes of Cochinchina—Louis Vuitton boutiques dressed to look like French colonial villas, imitation bellépoque façades, and a languid café culture with tablet menus. Souvenir shops sold weasel coffee (the one where the partially digested bean has first passed through the bowels of a palm civet). The scene was completed with decorative lanterns, prostitutes masquerading as masseurs, street cleaners in conical straw hats, tall girder-straight resin trees, and an unending riptide of those iconic scooters that feature in films of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.
Could it pass for Saigon then, still sweltering in the violence, glamour, and smut of a war from another time? Perhaps as seen by all those earlier self-regarding 1980s Hollywood movies? Albeit with a new hyperreal twist? After all, the Vietnam War is still a highly commercialised much-retrofitted war, where good-looking young men (mostly white, though Spike Lee has done his best to turn the tide) seem to die whilst agonising over their comportment. And a savvy Ministry of Tourism makes sure the visitor gets an eyeful of such mediatised magic. I spent my last night in a bar called Heart of Darkness.
Sadly, the older literary world that gave Apocalypse Now its storyline has no such appeal. Mistah Conrad—he dead. I only realised this when I checked into the Continental Hotel in District 1, and saw that I wouldn’t be shaking hands with Greene’s disgruntled shade. The place was full of China’s capitalist envoys, pushing and shoving one another at the breakfast buffet, with a smattering of shaven-headed Western baby-boomers, sitting opposite their youthful Vietnamese consorts, ashen-faced but not altogether out of place. I’d looked forward to seeing what Greene had viewed from his corner room: the Notre Dame Basilica in one direction and the street—once known as Rue Catinat, then Tu Do Street, now Dong Khoi—leading to the classically designed French colonial Majestic hotel and the Saigon river in the other. Instead, I found myself confronting a wall of blue tarpaulin, the massive new Japanese-Vietnamese Metro system and the Union Square shopping mall (a tasteful mélange of French colonial architecture and Chicago’s meat-packing district) on one side, and throngs of tourists taking selfies outside the French 3rd Republic-style Opera house—all winged victory, freshly painted arch, tympanum, frieze, and bare-breasted caryatids, and nothing else—on another. Greene’s shabbily subversive world of espionage, conflicted faith, uneven inter-racial love, and dangerous idealism had given way to the usual unequal redistribution of wealth.
I walked down Dong Khoi to the Majestic’s rooftop bar where Greene, working as a foreign correspondent, used to go in the evenings for his sundowner (and where JFK had, in the early 1950s, looked out over the gently chugging rivercraft with unsuspecting complaisance), hoping for at least a glimpse of someone as earnest and idealistic as Alden Pyle. I found only an unexceptional American family eating spring rolls and planning a trip to the Mekong Delta. I wandered back up Dong Khoi to the Caravelle hotel’s sky-bar, where journalists got drunk during the endgame of the USA’s involvement in Vietnam, and only came across more white folks, all of a certain age, who’d probably gone there for the same reason as I had. So I did what they did. I snapped the Basilica. I bought a fridge magnet in the French-built Saigon Central Post Office (once Poste Saigon de centrale)—now a giant souvenir kiosk. I took a selfie under the benign gaze of Uncle Ho. I ate a barbecued pork baguette. I got fleeced in the covered market Cho Ben Thanh (Les halles centrale). I ambled obediently and reverently around the plain concrete grill-like Ngo Viet Thu-designed Reunification Palace, admiring the tatty identikit reception rooms and undifferentiated artwork, feeling as if I was checking out the suites in a run-down hotel. Eventually, hyper-activated by the sugary drinks of the local pre-packaged culture, I struck out alone, spending days striding all over Districts 1, 3, 5 and 10, a sweaty uncomfortable business avoiding sunshine and scooters, inhaling exhaust and sewer gas. What was I looking for? Signs and symbols? The remains of my own crumbling mythopoeia?
“Where’re you going?” a woman in jeans and t shirt, selling soft drinks, eventually said as I frowned over my crumpled map. “Um,” I hedged, wondering if I was about to acquire my own youthful Vietnamese consort, “Just looking around.” “Where’re you from?” People all over the world ask these two questions, I reflected, from hunter-gatherers in the rainforests of Borneo to bouncers outside London nightclubs. They keep us level, tight, human. “I’m trying to find the Vinh Nghiem Pagoda, sorry, bad pronunciation,” I told her. She looked at my map. “Well, you’re going the wrong way, you should be going that way.” “You’re English is very good.” I was impressed. Stallholders off the tourist track aren’t normally proficient in other languages. “It has to be,” she said, and her eyes darkened, drifting off, it seemed, into some private region beyond the reach of small talk with strangers. Then she turned away, attracted by a real customer. I moved on, chastened. Globalisation smears English over the world like an easily digestible spread. You might be fooled into thinking that it feeds and nourishes well-being and brings us all to the same historically immaterial conclusion.
One morning, in District 3, I came across the War Remnants Museum, which combined art and commerce with horror and nausea. The museum exhibited captured US artillery and ordinance from the Vietnam War, photographs of massacres, such as My Lai and Thanh Phong, and other images of violent death and suffering. ‘One-sided, propagandist!’ a visitor from Boise, Idaho, had stated in angry capital letters in the visitor’s book. He was right, in a way, but this was not Boise, Idaho. This was Vietnam, where the war is known as the American War, and national identity, which is always self-engrossed and self-fulfilling, needs to find itself in its own stories. In any case, the famous picture of the naked girl fleeing from a napalm attack had been donated by the man who’d taken it, the Los Angeles-based Nick Ut, and most of the other images were the work of foreign photojournalists. One picture and its caption struck me, in particular: a grinning GI and his companions squatting in front of two decapitated farmers, the heads arranged artistically at their feet. The caption declared that war turns people into psychopaths, which, I felt, was true. War dehumanises the enemy. No one is immune. There are rituals of transition into it (such as call-up, recruitment) and transition out of it (demobilisation), of leaving from and returning to civil society. The in-between space is a threshold, a liminal zone, where conventional moral standards may no longer apply; the rules of engagement can become unwieldy and implausible under fire. That picture set out to demonstrate not just the racial difference of Vietnamese people but also their sub-humanity. It memorialised a trophy hunt.
There was worse on the next floor. Agent Orange, like its cohorts Agent White, Agent Blue, Agent Purple, Agent Pink, and Agent Green, is not a character in a Quentin Tarantino film. It was a herbicide and defoliant used to destroy forests and rice paddies. The US objective was to prevent the National Liberation Front, which the Americans called the Viet Cong or VC, from getting food supplies from rural areas or to wipe out the habitat it used as cover. This was called Operation Ranch Hand. The defoliant was seen as a kind of weedkiller and the planes and helicopters unloading the stuff over 25% of Vietnam’s land mass as crop-sprayers. The dioxins in Agent Orange turned out to be carcinogenic. Not only that, but the chemical led to physical abnormalities, affecting the genome of anyone who came into contact with it.
Examples of those who’d come into contact with it, including American handlers and children born to survivors covered the walls and tables of two rooms. The contents of bell jars arranged on tables were not for the faint of heart. In the last room, amidst children’s playthings and drawings, the living stood in for the dead, the descendants for the ancestors: a tiny limbless person was arranging picture cards on a table, using vestigial toes; a boy with no eyes and no eye-sockets was playing a xylophone, striking the keys with robotic accuracy, a girl in a wheelchair with no arms was painting something with her teeth. They seemed oblivious to us, the visitors, as we turned abruptly away and pretended to be looking at the wall-hung exhibits.
Outside, at the end of a collection of captured artillery, daisy-cutter bombs, tanks, and aircraft (a Huey gunship helicopter, a Chinook troop-carrier, a Cessna crop-sprayer—each surprisingly small and toy-like), were mock-ups of the so-called ‘tiger cages,’ where the US-backed South Vietnamese, under Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu (who ran the Can Lao secret police) kept Buddhist refuseniks and political opponents. These were horizontal coffin-sized cages made from barbed wire. A replica of the Con Son Island penal colony, which was first built by French colonisers for their opponents and then used by South Vietnamese forces for theirs, was tucked away in another corner. Deep concrete pits. Windowless. Bars for a roof. The prisoners turned white, lost their teeth and the use of their legs. Forms of punishment included boiling alive, or, less fatally, caustic lime dips and suspension from butcher’s hooks.
You can walk through Ho Chi Minh City’s neat SUV-strewn residential streets, with their sudden whirling scooters and video screens displaying models showing off their nail varnish, through arcades lined with artsy bookstores, walled villas with terracotta-tiled roofs and pretty green shutters, over-hanging leafage and the towering resin trees, glassy corporation buildings, the malls and cafés, the parks and canoodling well-fed young and find it hard to reconcile such agreeable commercial and social scenery with the 10 years of killing (150, if you factor in French colonial rule) whose smoke and cries still linger in the mind’s sensorium. Eyeballs sucked out of skulls by pressure blasts, the cooked flesh of those caught up in napalm drops (‘I took hold of his legs, and the flesh came off the bone’—quoted by Michael Herr in Dispatches, 1978), the bundled corpses hauled aloft by Chinooks for body counts, the bits and pieces of people crammed into concrete sewage sumps, the torched villages, night-time ambushes, trembling marines, some glancing back at the camera, mouths slightly open, stepping gingerly through picture-postcard jade-green rice paddies, purple mountains in the distance.
There was another set of images in the museum. A montage of 20 or so photojournalists who’d been killed or gone missing during the conflict. These included prize-winning photographers like Robert Capa and Michael Birch, Larry Burrows and Henri Huet, Kenzaburo Shimamoto and Kyoichi Sawada. But even better known than these, at least in the West’s starry-eyed imaginary, were two Americans: Sean Flynn and Dana Stone.
Flynn was a cultural icon of the 1960s and 1970s. The son of Errol, he’d pursued a career in the movies, starring in The Son of Captain Blood. Tall and good-looking like his father, he’d had many admirers of both sexes. Michael Herr, in Dispatches, says he even turned the heads of grunts in the field. But he seems to have worn his father’s life and career around his neck like an albatross. He tried acting, yachting, big-game hunting in Africa, and then, when all that palled, sought out a more seductive kind of annihilation. He chose the dangerous upcountry missions for his photographs, going with the Green Berets behind enemy lines and taking enemy fire. Once, he was wounded in the knee and commended for saving the lives of the patrol he was with. The pictures of him in the field could have been out-takes from Platoon, Hamburger Hill or The Thin Blue Line. Begrimed, unshaven, glintingly handsome, a bona fide white knight.
Dana Stone was short, bespectacled and ‘ugly’ (his word), but he was also built, daring and willing—the GIs called him ‘Mini-Grunt’—even leading patrols and organising positions (Two of the Missing, Perry Deane Young, 1975). Like Flynn, he was a ‘high-risk journalist,’ snapping the fighting at Khe Sanh and the dead and dying at Hue. The last picture of him and Flynn, taken just before they vanished forever, shows them both on motorbikes (classic red Hondas) about to approach an enemy blockade on the road ahead; they were going to let themselves be captured, get photographs of VC in the field, and then be released, with a unique story and footage. In the photo, both pose on their bikes. Stone, backgrounded by the camera angle, stares down toward the rear tyre of Flynn’s bike, as if waiting for him to move, while Flynn gazes toothily into the distance. It’s tempting to see Stone as Flynn’s Sancho Panza. But that would be a mistake. Stone was a competitor (‘That’s Flynn off to scoop me,’ he’d said, as according to Perry Deane Young in Two of the Missing), not a valet.
For these two, Vietnam was a playing field, an escape, a time out. Indeed, it was their liminal zone, where nothing mattered any more, where they could do whatever they wanted, where they could insulate themselves from the legacy of a legend in Flynn’s case, or be a contender in Stone’s. Choosing to go there, they could come and go as they pleased. The Vietnam War was a prototype for shows like Survivor, where they could test themselves and then relax on China Beach or dine out on their stories in Paris, Bali or Singapore. War was far out, a blast and, according to Tim Page, British photojournalist and model for Dennis Hopper’s spaced out character in Apocalypse Now, glamorous (Dispatches). Flynn and Stone hung out with Page and other freaks in Frankie’s House in Saigon (Frankie was the house-boy, who got them the best shit and hookers in town), listening to Jimi Hendrix and Grace Slick, planning escapades and then rolling off into the heart of darkness like Easy Riders, wearing Aviator shades.
Some of the grunts thought they must be crazy, coming to Vietnam when they had the option not to. Others thought they were pretentious bush-leaguers. Who were they, after all, alongside all the others who’d been pressed into service or had died in combat, aged 17, not knowing what the hell they were doing there? The vast majority of the dead and wounded were the young and rural poor, not professional fighters, who were forced into service through the draft (in the USA) or conscription (in Vietnam). They are invisibly clamorous in Bao Ninh’s The Sorrows of War, grotesquely visible in Saigon’s Museum of Fine Arts, engraved into black granite in Washington’s Arlington cemetery, and hanging like a special effect over the West’s more recent ventures in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan—spectral background figures in another documentary, another movie, another photograph.
A low estimate gives 1,353,000 people dead, of which 1,071,000 were Vietnamese nationals, and of these, over 600,000 were civilians, north and south. American and allied deaths (Australian, Thai, New Zealand, Filipino) amounted to 282,000. Other estimates say that over 3 million died in total. Where the North Vietnamese leaders were motivated by nationalism and ideology, the Americans entered the war because they believed that first one country then another in Asia would fall under dreaded communist rule (the domino theory), but stayed for as long as they did, even when it became obvious that they had no chance of winning, out of fear of being humiliated. Flynn and Stone offer a coda to this lunacy.
The Vietnam War was the first televised war. It was live; it was reality TV. Journalists were not embedded as they are today; they could go where they liked, hitching rides on Hueys or Medivac helicopters. And the photographs that got out were often uncensored, unmediated, unlike the ones that followed in the later US wars. Flynn took pictures of captured Vietnamese undergoing torture or imprisoned in tiger cages and Stone photographs of brutalised, wounded and dying Vietnamese civilians that caused controversy in the US and fed into the peace movement. You could argue that their work, like the work of their colleagues, broke new ground and took the righteousness out of the war effort, and contributed towards the American withdrawal, and thus that Flynn and Stone had had an important largely overlooked professional life beyond fast living and glamorous death.
But comments on YouTube videos about Flynn, at least, are not about war or mass killing and its grim legacy. They are about how ‘gorgeous’ the man was, how talented he was—why, man, he could act, sing and take pictures like no one else could, so, hey, what a waste. Some are fascinated by his disappearance, the mysterious, endlessly beguiling loss of a romantic hero. For, in the neurotic collapsed world of social media, people like Flynn belong to a tradition of white knights that goes all the way back to the iconographic Christ figure, through Gawain and Lancelot, Byron and Shelley, all the way forward to rock stars who leap off bridges—all gorgeous, all young, all male, all white. Mythical beings, endlessly, attractively vanishing. How we need them, both for their looks and their bravado. Is it because they make suffering stylish and death an enchantment? Or do they bring a hint of glorious redemption back into our own humdrum lives? A celebrity, especially a dead one, is a second life, a projection, an alter ego, an enhanced virtual identity. Flynn’s charisma is not extinguished by age and normality. It is always there, smouldering under its bush-hat, reminding us of what we might have been and still could be.
Meanwhile, new entrepreneurial Vietnam gets back on its feet, knocks down the old, clears landmines, opens a Sheraton in Hanoi and a Hilton in Da Nang, and smiles down from giant screens on Ho Chi Minh’s Pasteur Street from under its conical straw hat. “Hey, Joe, want boom-boom?” has made way for “Good afternoon, Mr Lutnick, I trust you had a pleasant flight?” The gofer swings open the door, the latest emissary of commercial reciprocity steps through, mopping his brow, grateful to be out of the heat and humidity. The table gleams, the Evian bottles are chilled, the screen flickers, the Chairperson’s smile is warm and welcoming. The battlefields are a million miles away. We’ve moved on, consciously, deliberately, one foot in front of the other, staring straight ahead.
Today’s Vietnamese rarely think of that American War. Most were born long after it ended. The past in the form of ancestor worship is still a thing, but technological and global modernity captivates. The Fine Arts Museum, which is housed in what was once a neoclassical-style villa belonging to a wealthy local family reflects this movement from the past to the future. There are three floors which ascend through silk, woodcut, and lacquer paintings, Champa relics, and Buddhist artefacts to scenes of rural life, interrupted by violence and warfare, to an upper, rarefied level of abstraction and thinness, scarcity and attenuation that you might find in London’s Tate Modern. In places, the rooms are dark and shabby, as in an abandoned warehouse, and visitors (mostly students)—young, attentive, silent—passed through like the rayographs they were viewing. “Art,” one told me excitedly, “is not for going back, it’s for going, going…” “Forwards?” “No, no. Going.” He pointed in the direction of the South China Sea. “Like that.”
Tan Son Nhat airport was packed out on the outside, taxi touts, noodles-, baguette- and soft-drinks sellers catering to a crowd of onlookers and families saying goodbye to loved ones, teary-eyed passengers clutching string-bound suitcases. It looked like an evacuation rather than a departure, almost an uncanny replay of that earlier one in 1975, but these were migrant workers bound for wealthier countries to the west. The new flyovers, shuttle buses, telecom buildings, video signs, hotels and even the rushing scooters on the other side of the road spoke confidently of an arrival. In the distance, I could see the glassy finger of the Bitexco tower, with its Heineken upgrade at the top like a pointed fingernail. It seemed to beckon.
‘The journey is the destination,’ intones Tim Page, mangling R. W. Emerson with hippyish abandon, in the 2008 YouTube video ‘Searching for Sean Flynn, Kampong Cham,’ while wandering around a burial site in Cambodia. He’s heard the body of his former friend and colleague could have been dumped there 38 years earlier. Then, as one of Southeast Asia’s rural poor, a rice-farmer, pulls aside some straw covers, revealing nothing, Page clarifies: each time he slides his feet into the thongs of Cambodian living, the journey to find Flynn’s remains or what happened to him becomes easier. Searching ameliorates anger at the loss, he sighs, adding vaguely, “somewhere in there is unresolved mystery.”
The farmer will have counted the cost, his own as well as theirs, and turned back to the toil of living, as Page and his film crew departed. That, at least, is no mystery.
