Quotes of the Day
We could tell you the truth about the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but the authorities might arrest us for spying." Ho Thi Van throws back her wrinkled face and cackles at her own joke. It remains one of the most mysterious byways on earth, but Van and her husband, Phan Huu Luc, have a unique view of the Ho Chi Minh Trail: they've lived on it for more than 30 years. Luc spent three of them in backbreaking labor, carrying ammunition and rice to North Vietnamese troops as American bombs rained down. "It was a hard job," says Luc, now 70. "But the spirit of victory inspired us."
An astounding feat of wartime engineering and defiance, the Ho Chi Minh Trail was actually a 16,000-kilometer network of roads, hacked by hand out of the jungles of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. It helped the communist North win the Vietnam War. U.S. forces never managed to destroy it, despite carpet bombing and the use of Agent Orange. Since the war ended, however, the trail has been largely reclaimed by jungle and myth; only a few, isolated fragments are accessible. Christopher Hunt's 1996 book Sparring with Charlie documented his trying, and mostly failing, to trace it. Indeed, we are among the first foreigners to travel any significant length of the trail.
Like so much else in Vietnam, the trail is changing. A few kilometers from Van and Luc's home, a construction crew is pouring fresh tar. They are building the new Ho Chi Minh Highway, a $353 million, 1,241-km project scheduled to open any day now. It traces one of the main north-south trunks of the original trail and will also open up dozens of arteries previously off-limits to tourists. We set out on rugged Minsk motorcycles, eager to explore.
One of our main problems is that we're not sure where we're going. The trail might as well be a legend, literally, as there are few reliable maps. For weeks, my kitchen floor was covered with army-issue charts as we tried to fix our route, with the help of historians and museums. In the end, we set out with only a vague idea of following the new highway and asking for directions along the way. The starting point was at Kilometer 0, in Tan Ky.
That's where we meet Mr. Truong, our guide. His card reveals he's a manager in a state-run tourism company. But we're wondering if he's a government spy. He seems strangely jittery about us talking to people on the road. And then there's his hair. In two years working as a correspondent in Vietnam, I've developed a private theory about communist officials and combovers: the lower the part, the higher the rank.
Mr. Truong's starts about five centimeters above his ear—even though, at 33, he's still got a full head of hair. Mr. Truong tells us adamantly that no one will be willing to give us directions. But after a morning of asking around we find Trinh Thi Minh Thu. Now 63, she lives just a few clicks past Kilometer 0. Thu was 24 when she came to Tan Ky, one of thousands of "vanguard women" who built the original trail by hand. She shows me a photo of herself from that time: a young girl with a sideways smile, wearing a conical hat tied with a bow. For six years, she slept on the ground, cutting trees and leveling rocks with only an axe and a sledgehammer. "Sometimes I thought I would die in that jungle," she says. At least five of her friends did: three from American bombs and two from malaria.
Dong Loc also has a shrine to a legendary platoon of vanguard women—all in their teens or early 20s—who died in one bombing in 1968. The 10 girls famously refused to let the hardship of war ruin their looks, washing their hair with paste from bo ket seeds and sharing combs and mirrors. If they were American, there would have been a TV series based on them. On each grave, there is a photo of a smiling girl wearing her battle helmet. Pilgrims have left offerings of plastic combs and compacts. Mr. Truong buys incense sticks and invites us to plant them at the graves.
I am American. I was five when the war ended. I'm not the daughter of a U.S. veteran, nor do I remember TV coverage of the war. I don't have any connection to Vietnam other than working in the country as a journalist. But I am still uncomfortable as I place the incense. I find myself smiling at the girls in the photos and silently apologizing to them.
Wartime landmarks, of course, are designed to inspire Vietnamese patriotism and American guilt. We know that not everyone sang in the jungle, that thousands were miserable and lost faith in the rain and that today's Communist Party still jails people who criticize the government. But it's hard not to be moved by the testaments to a nation's dogged determination to win at any cost.
In Phong Nha, we get stuck at a roadblock. The local People's Committee chairman—who, it must be said, has only a few strands of hair, slicked down over his head—refuses to grant us permission to travel the western fork of the highway, even though construction is nearly finished. Mr. Truong surprises us by talking the guard at the government checkpoint into letting us through. The road lies between a stream and a cliff overgrown with ferns. It offers some of the most stunning scenery we've seen, but the construction workers—who insist we join them in a noontime toast of rice wine—are less charmed by it: two of their colleagues are bedridden with malaria. There are other dangers: since the roadwork began, more than 20,000 wartime bombs have been unearthed and detonated along the route.
Traveling toward what was once the demilitarized zone, our supply jeep is stopped by police, who demand 100,000 dong (about $7) to let us continue. Mr. Truong is reflective. "Corruption is a problem in our country," he admits. Still, moving around is easier than it used to be. Mr. Truong remembers when even ordinary Vietnamese needed permission to leave their villages—before the 1986 doi moi reforms that slowly opened up the country. "Now we have a better life," he says.
And given how helpful he's being, we're slowly prepared to concede that Mr. Truong is not a spook after all. As it turns out, he's not even a Party member. He's just an anxious guy with unfortunate hair. He also doesn't know how to work a manual clutch—though he never admits to it. Our Vietnamese colleague Mai, tired after six days on the road, asks him to ride her Minsk while she takes the jeep. The going is particularly mountainous, and heading uphill Mr. Truong keeps getting stuck between gears. We pass him several times: he's frantically trying to keep from stalling, strands of hair escaping his helmet.
But then, there's plenty of tenacity in the country these days. You can see it in the smooth, blacktop highways and freshly paved mountain passes of the new Vietnam. Step off them for a short while and you might encounter the old, glimpsing rain clouds rolling over banana plantations, with miles of jungle all around. And you can always run into recent history—outside Khe Sanh, we find a remnant of the old trail, untouched for decades and made up of 10 kilometers of jagged rock that's hell to drive, even on a Minsk. But it's the new road that points the way to some unknown horizon.
On the last day of our weeklong trip, we travel this new road, going over mountains to A Luoi—where the main branch of the old trail veers off into Laos—and then take Road 49, a tortuously winding piece of the old trail, east to Hué. As we descend, I hear a mighty roar. It's Mr. Truong. He's finally figured out the gears on the Minsk and he's grinning as he passes us all. He is still wearing the helmet. But in my mind's eye, I picture his combover flying triumphantly in the wind, coasting down the road into Vietnam's uncertain future.
- Kay Johnson
- A wartime trail becomes a symbol of Vietnam's future