|
Trail of Tears
Vietnam's
trail of tears is being reborn
by David Lamb
8/20/00
Los Angeles Times
DAKRONG, Vietnam - The Ho Chi
Minh Trail, which carried 1 million North Vietnamese soldiers south and
confounded the United States' top military strategists for 10 years,
belongs to history now, its network of hidden dirt roads reclaimed by
jungle, leeches and ghosts of a war long past.
But though abandoned, there is
hardly anything or anyone, save Ho Chi Minh himself, that the Vietnamese
of the north hold more dear than the supply route that was once the
world's deadliest road. Without it, Hanoi's dream of a reunified Vietnam
might well have remained a dream.
Many of the Vietnam War's most
famous battles - Khe Sanh, Hamburger Hill, Ia Drang - were fought, at
least indirectly, for control of this meandering track that started in a
gorge Hanoi's troops called "Heaven's Gate." And some of the
war's most valuable lessons were learned here, among them that air power
alone doesn't guarantee victory.
"I drove this stretch of
the road many, many times during the war, hauling ammunition, supplies,
taking the wounded north," said Sgt. Trong Minh Long, 48, who
carries a shovel instead of a gun these days. "There was no more
dangerous duty."
Today, Long and 30 army
colleagues are back on this ribbon of track now known as Highway 14,
near the former U.S. encampment at Khe Sanh. Chinese- and Russian-made
trucks, relics of the early war years, rumble by loaded with gravel and
rock.
Soldiers cluster around bamboo
huts where rice and chicken broth simmer in caldrons and freshly washed
fatigues are laid across bushes to dry in the breathless summer heat.
The long-silent jungle stirs at last with voices and movement and
peace's dividends.
In the largest state-financed
public-works program since the Vietnam War ended in 1975, the trail is
being reborn and rebuilt, this time as the Ho Chi Minh Highway. The new
road will link Hanoi with Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, 1,050 miles
south, and open vast expanses of previously inaccessible terrain.
The four-year project is
monumental. It will cost $400 million, a staggering sum for one of
Southeast Asia's poorest countries. More than 300 bridges will be built.
Hills will be razed, tunnels burrowed. Narrow dirt roads will be
widened, raised for flood control and paved. Unexploded mines and bombs
will be defused.
Only the vanguard
Long's 11th Engineer Brigade is
but the vanguard of a work force that eventually will number 50,000
soldiers and youth volunteers.
"We think the highway will
have a big economic impact," Ha Dinh Can, the project's general
director, said in Hanoi, the capital. "There will be a huge boost
to employment. Timber and coffee producers will have easier access to
their markets. Tourists will be able to get to remote areas that were
unreachable before. Driving times will be shortened."
Hanoi long maintained the war
against the Saigon government was fought by indigenous Viet Cong
guerrillas, not North Vietnamese soldiers, and that Hanoi's direct
support of the Viet Cong was in response to the landing of the first
U.S. combat troops, in Danang on March 8, 1965. But the history of the
trail - which is the history of the war itself - indicates Hanoi's
battle plans were drawn 10 years before the arrival of the first two
Marine battalions.
On May 19, 1955, Ho Chi Minh's
65th birthday, Maj. Vo Bam, a defense-supply specialist, was instructed
to find a supply route south. Traveling with 500 troops, Bam put
together a patchwork of paths through the triple-canopy jungle.
By the winter of 1962-63, North
Vietnam had 5,000 troops and an engineering regiment assigned to the
trail. In the next few years, the route was upgraded into a network of
roads that covered 10,000 miles.
`24 different ways you could
die'
"We got our orders to move
south in January 1966," recalled Nguyen Duc Bao, 70, a retired
colonel who lives in Ho Chi Minh City. "The trail was very secret
then. We'd lay a canvas sheet over dirt roads, and the last man across
would roll it up so there'd be no footprints. We carried our own weight
in weapons, supplies, medicine. We set up storehouses for rice. Usually,
it was a 20-day walk from one storehouse to the next. In between, we ate
roots.
"At first, the American
bombing wasn't so bad. But malaria, snakes, starvation, drowning,
accidents were just as deadly. In the four months it took us to reach
the south, 100 men in my regiment died. I counted 24 different ways you
could die on the road."
Hanoi claimed to have shot down
2,500 U.S. planes over the trail; the Pentagon said it lost 500 planes.
Whatever the truth, Operations Steel Tiger and Tiger Hound set the
forests ablaze, littered the trail with charred corpses and scorched
vehicles, triggered landslides and, by CIA estimates, probably killed
only one soldier for every 300 bombs dropped.
Using elephants, horses,
specially designed bikes - which could carry 500 pounds of supplies -
and, later, trucks, Hanoi's volunteer Shock Youth Brigades Against U.S.
Aggression for National Salvation - many of them women - turned Bam's
old footpath into what would become the road to victory.
"We're in the middle of
nowhere here," said Dam Trong Nam, 26, one of the soldiers building
the new highway. "But when you think what the people went through
during the war on the road, you don't complain. We're building our
country just like they did, helping develop the economy. I really hope
the Americans understand how important the highway is and help us more
and more to develop our economy."
Tricks stump U.S. technology
The United States dropped 1.7
million tons of bombs on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in an unsuccessful effort
to cut off supplies. It used rain-inducing techniques to flood the trail
and Agent Orange to strip the jungle awning. It gave anti-personnel
cluster bombs their first significant test. It dropped
"invisible" parachutes - sensors that burrowed into the ground
like bamboo sprouts and relayed data back to Nakhon Phanom in Thailand
for evaluation by U.S. intelligence experts. It built the McNamara Line,
an electronic cordon with 20,000 sensors reaching from the South China
Sea to the Laotian border.
But month by month, year after
year, the soldiers and supplies reaching the south increased.
Infiltrators set buckets of urine near chemical sensors or drove water
buffalo past motion-detecting sensors so information transmitted was
often meaningless.
The trail itself became an
intertwined web of bypasses and parallel tracks and access roads onto
which traffic could be rerouted, much like a railroad switching yard. By
1968, an estimated 150,000 North Vietnamese soldiers had safely made the
journey south. By 1975, trucks were making the journey to the southern
front - a trek that had taken foot soldiers six months - in 23 days.
"My unit shot down 32 U.S.
planes," said Nguyen Thanh Son, 50, a former anti-aircraft gunner.
"I used to think of the pilots as savages when they were in the
planes. Then I saw three or four who'd been shot down, and they were
like little children. They cried. They were afraid of the U.S. bombs
like we were.
"Our trenches were only
large enough for Vietnamese, not the Americans, who were very big. So we
gave them shovels and said, `Dig your own trench.' They dug very
quickly. They were frightened. In short, they were human beings like
us."
***************
PublicAffairs Books is Proud to
Announce the Publication of
VIETNAM, NOW: A Reporter Returns
By David Lamb
Thirty years after he reported on the war as a young combat
correspondent,
David Lamb returned to Vietnam to cover the peace for the Los
Angeles Times.
He moved into an apartment in downtown Hanoi, the city he once
viewed as the “enemy” capital, and began exploring the new
Vietnam, a country emerging from years of political and economic
isolation. Lamb was surprised by what he discovered during his
four-year journey. His readers will be, too.
“This is a truly a magnificent book,” comments Pete Peterson,
former POW and the first U.S. Ambassador to peacetime Vietnam,
“and the first ever to accurately capture Vietnam as it is
today.”
Stanley Karnow, author of VIETNAM: A History: “Americans
discovered Vietnam during the tragic war there more than a
generation ago. Now David Lamb rediscovers the country in a
vivid, perceptive, elucidating narrative that is bound to rank
among the major books on the subject.”
David Lamb is the only newspaper correspondent from the
Vietnam War to later live in peacetime Hanoi. A distinguished Los
Angeles Times journalist, he is the author of five previous books.
He has been a Nieman Fellow, an Alicia Patterson Fellow, a Pew Fellow
and a writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California's
School of Journalism.
Available now at bookstores everywhere and at Internet
booksellers. $26. 274 pages.
Visit Public Affairs at www.publicaffairsbooks.com,
212-397-6666.
******************
Vietnam,Now A Reporter Returns
by David Lamb
People's Magazine:
Reviewed by Julie K.L. Dam
When Vietnam War correspondent David
Lamb returned to the country in 1997, he thought the U.S. involvement in
the conflict would remain a sore subject among the Vietnamese. Despite
the horror of the war and the hardship that followed, though, people who
were once considered the enemy "treated me as an honored
guest," writes Lamb.
Part
political history, part memoir, Vietnam, Now has a simple thesis:
It's time for the U.S. to reach a similar sense of closure. At times
Lamb seems too eager to embrace the optimist's viewpoint and makes
generalizations about the Vietnamese based on limited information. But
the eloquently told stories of the vets (both Vietnamese and American)
expats and widows he meets (others are profiled in Vietnam
Passage: Journeys from War to Peace, a documentary narrated by Lamb
that airs on May 23) have an emotional resonance that drives home
his point. As one elderly Vietnamese villager tells Lamb before giving
him a farewell hug, "The war's past now. It belonged to my
generation, not my sons'." (Public Affairs, $26) Bottom Line: Eye-opening
look at the other side
*If you know others who would like VIETNAM,
NOW please forward .
Home
|