Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Getting attacked by a crazy man and other adventures in the Mekong Delta
I write this post from the cool highlands of central Vietnam. For the first time in a couple of months I am finding it necessary to swear jeans and a sweater. Yesterday, I was in a very different climate, sailing the hot waters of the Mekong Delta.
I can understand why so much American blood was spilled in the Mekong Delta. The jungle is incredibly dense. One can't really see anything on the shore from the streams that make up the delta. Our toor guide was very candid about the role that he playedin the war and has quite a macabre sense of humour about it. He talked a lot about the war. I wondered whether that was for the tourists sake or because it has left him incredibly scarred. Perhaps humour is the best way to deal with it.
His first joke was describing his job as a translator for American forces. As he said, "The Americans tortured their captives and I translated what they said." Later when our bus was attacked by a club wielding crazy man he joked that tomorrow he'd bring a gun to protect the tourists because "the Americans trained me and I am a very accurate shot." He also seemed to feel guilt about some of the stuff has happened, especially when he described dropping Viet Cong captives out of helicopters to their death. As he said, war made everybody a criminal, and the Vietnamese people have had to collectively forgive each other for what they didto each other and move on to create a more peaceful and civil society. He said that the Southern Vietnamese have accepted that they lost the war and now, Vietnam has a capitalist economy again anyway. As a South Vietnamese army officer, he told me that he had so spend three years in a reeducation camp and that reeducation consisted of hard labour.
We went to a variety of interesting places: a market, coconut candy factory, although it all felt too touristy. And then we were attacked. We were on the road back to Saigon, after having stopped to satiate our alcoholism a couple of Heines (Heineken for those uninitiated in Aussie slang.) I was reading an interesting book about the politics and culture of Iran (a country that is going to be much in the news the next few years.) Suddenly, our bus started to swerve and honk its horn. I looked up to see this middle aged man, with ruffled hair, dirty clothes and a crazed look in his eyes weilding a huge bat. He takes one swing at our bus, thump. He takes another swing, THUMP. Our bus driver floors it. A kilometer down the road we pull over to check out the damage. There is a huge hole in the bus's exterior right next to where I was sitting. We were just lucky that he missed the window, or that he didn't have a gun. He was lucky that he wasn't smoked by a bus, car or motorbike as he walked down the middle of Vietnam's busiest highway. He was also lucky that he didn't try to attack a motorbiker (this country has a love affair with the motorbike) because he'd have really seriously injured the person.
I can understand why so much American blood was spilled in the Mekong Delta. The jungle is incredibly dense. One can't really see anything on the shore from the streams that make up the delta. Our toor guide was very candid about the role that he playedin the war and has quite a macabre sense of humour about it. He talked a lot about the war. I wondered whether that was for the tourists sake or because it has left him incredibly scarred. Perhaps humour is the best way to deal with it.
His first joke was describing his job as a translator for American forces. As he said, "The Americans tortured their captives and I translated what they said." Later when our bus was attacked by a club wielding crazy man he joked that tomorrow he'd bring a gun to protect the tourists because "the Americans trained me and I am a very accurate shot." He also seemed to feel guilt about some of the stuff has happened, especially when he described dropping Viet Cong captives out of helicopters to their death. As he said, war made everybody a criminal, and the Vietnamese people have had to collectively forgive each other for what they didto each other and move on to create a more peaceful and civil society. He said that the Southern Vietnamese have accepted that they lost the war and now, Vietnam has a capitalist economy again anyway. As a South Vietnamese army officer, he told me that he had so spend three years in a reeducation camp and that reeducation consisted of hard labour.
We went to a variety of interesting places: a market, coconut candy factory, although it all felt too touristy. And then we were attacked. We were on the road back to Saigon, after having stopped to satiate our alcoholism a couple of Heines (Heineken for those uninitiated in Aussie slang.) I was reading an interesting book about the politics and culture of Iran (a country that is going to be much in the news the next few years.) Suddenly, our bus started to swerve and honk its horn. I looked up to see this middle aged man, with ruffled hair, dirty clothes and a crazed look in his eyes weilding a huge bat. He takes one swing at our bus, thump. He takes another swing, THUMP. Our bus driver floors it. A kilometer down the road we pull over to check out the damage. There is a huge hole in the bus's exterior right next to where I was sitting. We were just lucky that he missed the window, or that he didn't have a gun. He was lucky that he wasn't smoked by a bus, car or motorbike as he walked down the middle of Vietnam's busiest highway. He was also lucky that he didn't try to attack a motorbiker (this country has a love affair with the motorbike) because he'd have really seriously injured the person.
