Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“It's weird,” said Wilson Hubbell, 49, who was a helicopter crewman in the war.
“I've gotten a better reception as an American returning to Vietnam than I did as a Vi-
etnam veteran returning to America.”
I'd been old enough to serve in Vietnam—the prospect had scared me silly from the time
I was fourteen—but I avoided being drafted because of a high lottery number, and it's
likely I didn't need even that bit of good fortune. My missing fingers might have done
the trick; so might have my eyesight, and I remember wishing I could lend out a defer-
ment or two to friends who didn't have one.
That was the way a lot of us thought back then. We were watching the war on tele-
vision every night, the country was horribly split over it, and the street protests, the
angry politics, and the bloody images in our living rooms made the war in Vietnam seem
both monstrous and close by. For a trepidatious teenager like me the idea of flying seven
thousand miles to spend two years in the middle of it was unthinkable. I didn't know
how to feel about the boys my age who went. Admire them? Sympathize with them? Dis-
approve of them? I felt all of those from time to time.
Of course, serving their country for good or ill, fifty-eight thousand of them died,
and as I grew older the tragedy of that sank in and felt more and more profound. I heard
many veterans speak about the grievous experience of having fought in Vietnam; I read
Michael Herr and Tim O'Brien, whose works struck me as especially intimate and vivid
accounts of what the war was like on the ground in the jungle and how terror-riven it is
possible for a young conscript to be. And it came to me eventually that, like having sex
for the first time or becoming a father (not that I would know), soldiering is something
to be understood only by those who have soldiered. My parents' generation knew this
without having it arrive as a revelation; during World War II the national sacrifice was
entered into willingly and diligently and it was shared. Boys like my father were drafted
and they went.
But that isn't the way it was for us. Vietnam divided my generation of men into those
who went and those who didn't, and no matter how awful it had been and how terrified
I had been of it, I went into my twenties, my thirties, my forties—I was forty-one when
I biked in Vietnam—knowing I'd missed the signature experience of young manhood in
my time. That's something I've thought about a lot, with a complicated feeling that bor-
ders on regret.
It was strange to be in Hanoi, the very seat of the evil empire of my childhood. It has
probably changed a lot since then, but it was strange and thrilling, beautiful and run-
down, a maze of wide boulevards and shack-lined alleys, mad with bicycles and mopeds,
alive with human voices and pungent with the smells from cooking fires—the most exot-
ic place I'd ever been.
