Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
We stayed three days in Hanoi. One morning, I rode with Wilson Hubbell to see the
Bach Mai Hospital, rebuilt by then but nearly destroyed during a Christmas week bomb-
ing in 1972; a bas-relief memorial to the dead filled a courtyard wall. We stood there
astride our bikes looking at the engraved words we didn't understand, both of us think-
ing that the people who died there died by American hands, and after a few minutes
we looked up and we were surrounded. It was a little intimidating. A couple of dozen
people milled around us, looking at us quizzically, uncertainly. It seemed possible we'd
committed an offense, that being Americans at this memorial—maybe a hallowed spot,
we didn't know—was an affront to the local people, many of whom likely had friends
and relatives among the casualties. It turned out, though, that wasn't it. No one spoke
English, but one man gestured at our city map. They thought we might be lost. Did we
need directions? They were curious about the strangers. They wanted to help.
From there we rode to the site of Hoa Lo Prison, the so-called Hanoi Hilton, which for
decades housed revolutionaries and political enemies of the state and during the 1960s
and '70s American pilots, including, famously, Senator John McCain, and Pete Peterson,
the first postwar U.S. ambassador to Vietnam.
Part of the prison was then being torn down to make room for an apartment and office
complex. I picked up a brick from the rubble to bring home as a souvenir and was imme-
diately surrounded again, this time by several men who fixed me with severe expressions
of reprimand. It was a few seconds before one of them spoke.
“One dollar,” he said.
This was actually Wilson Hubbell's second return to Vietnam. Normally an amiable and
loquacious man, he had come to the country a year earlier, on the first trip sponsored
by our tour group, but when he landed in Hanoi, he said, a crippling anxiety overtook
him at the airport, and he returned home to Southern California, where he worked as a
transportation official.
“I had put the war behind me years and years ago, I thought,” he told me in Hanoi.
“But the very first thing that happens when you get off the plane and you go through
customs, you see the guy there in the uniform. A North Vietnamese Army soldier. If I
had seen a guy dressed like that twenty-five years ago, I'd have shot him on sight and
he'd have shot me on sight. So suddenly here I am standing face-to-face with this guy,
and I can feel the hair on the back of my neck starting to crawl up.
“Where I had been in Vietnam, especially in the Central Highlands, you couldn't trust
little kids. You couldn't trust mama-sans. There were a lot of different ways you could
