Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
cause we hadn't a prayer of completing the mileage to our scheduled stopping place be-
fore dark.
Still, in many ways this was the most rewarding stretch of our three-week journey
from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City; this was the landscape we had come all this way to
see, the deep green jungles, the lush riverbank villages, the Vietnam terrain that still
looks like a war zone, familiar from newsreels and movies. Hanoi, once the battered
enemy capital, is, amazingly, a friendly city. At Khe Sanh, the American garrison that
was the object of the miserable siege in 1968 is gone. But beyond Giang, in the seemingly
impenetrable wilderness between the village of Phuoc Son and the city of Dak To, the
war's terrors lingered.
There, on a thick-misted morning, Morris Erickson, now a 48-year-old real estate
lawyer in Bloomington, Ind., dismounted his bicycle on a small cement bridge over a
creek and remembered patrolling as an infantry platoon leader in 1970.
His men would go out in similarly forbidding terrain for two weeks at a time, Mr.
Erickson said; they'd move through the jungle a few hundred yards a day, eating dry ra-
tions, sleeping in their ponchos, ever alert for trip-wires that might set off a mine or a
booby trap, or for guerrilla machine-gun nests camouflaged in the hills.
“It's not bothering me at all to be back,” Mr. Erickson had said in Hanoi. But stand-
ing on that bridge, reliving that time, he looked like a younger, less confident version of
himself. He hugged his shoulders, and as he continued the story his grip tightened notice-
ably.
“I'll tell you one thing,” he said. “You'd never, ever stand out in the open on a bridge
like this.”
Our trip had begun with a brisk ride out of Hanoi, passing through the bleakly beau-
tiful landscapes of the north—the humped mountains looming in the mist beyond vast
rice paddies—and the energetic but uninspiring cities: Ninh Binh, Thanh Hoa and Ky
Anh. Still, by the time we reached the former demilitarized zone, it had already been
eye-opening, exhilarating even, with a reception from the Vietnamese that we could not
have anticipated. Entire villages came to the roadside to greet us as we passed through.
And from people so far away we could barely see them, hundreds of yards away knee-
deep in the rice fields, calls of “Hello!” echoed at our backs.
There were some discomforting incidents—Vietnamese threw stones at our group a
few times and one young woman made a threatening gesture at me with a machete—but
even those of us most unsettled by the occasional shows of hostility admit that the over-
whelming reaction of the Vietnamese in the North was one of unqualified welcome.
