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The theme for today was the Vietnam War. When they instituted the lottery for choosing people to be drafted during the Vietnam era, they put a ball for each of the 366 days of the year and mixed them in a hopper. If the first ball that was picked was your birthday, you would be chosen first for the draft. My birthday came up as number 341 out of 366 in the 1969 lottery so I felt comfortable that I would not be chosen. However, it turns out that I was not eligible for that lottery. I was a year younger than most of my friends so I had to wait until the next year’s lottery.

My number for the 1970 lottery was 214. In 1969, they went up to 195 so I was worried that I could be called into the military. I had already decided that I would not go into the military if drafted. I was a student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada and would have applied for Canadian immigrant status. If I had been drafted, I probably would not have been able to visit the US until amnesty was declared by President Ford several years later. It turns out they only drafted the first 125 birthdates that year. By the way, the first lottery was flawed in that people with later birthdays (Dec., Nov., Oct., etc.) were more likely to be higher on the list and called early. This is well known by statisticians and I ran statistical tests myself. Please contact me if you would like to know more. I did apply for Canadian immigrant status anyway in 1973 but it was not because I was trying to avoid the draft.

Back to Vietnam today. The first stop was very intense emotionally. We stopped at a school that was a site of an important battle. They have rebuilt almost everything but they left this school how it was, along with a handful of other structures. You can still see the bullet holes.

What made this stop amazing was this man, who appeared with an entourage at the same time as me. He was a North Vietnamese soldier who had fought in this battle. His good friend died here and he is slightly injured from the battle.

This is the man who came to pay his respects to his fallen comrade who died here.

They asked me to join them in their ceremony to respect the dead and I did so. It might be hard to see in the photos but the man who had fought in the battle had impaled a cigarette on one of the sticks of incense. I asked my guide about this and he explained that ancestor worship includes a belief that you can pass worldly items on to the dead through ceremonies like this. He was giving a cigarette to his dead comrade.

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More than once, guides mentioned how the Buddhist faith encourages forgiveness and looking forward not backwards. They do not hold hatred for soldiers who fought against them. I mentioned to this man that I had protested against the Vietnam War. My guide said that it was not important to say that. It didn’t matter to this man whether I had been a soldier fighting against him or a protester against the war. All that matters is that we live in peace today and respect each other. I really liked this point of view and it makes me respect Buddhism even more. I told this guide later that a sister of my grandfather had been killed along with her husband at Auschwitz. He asked me if I can forgive the German people and of course, I can.

The area of Vietnam we were in is just below the former De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) that used to separate North Vietnam from South Vietnam. As such, there were many important military sites. One of the main ones was called the “Rockpile.” The only way to access it was by helicopter. The guide mentioned stories of wild parties including hookers imported from Thailand held up there. I remember a movie that showed crazy scenes from here. The hill in the background is the Rockpile.

When I left for this trip, I promised to be super careful about what I ate. I would only eat at the tourist hotels so that I could avoid spending my time in bathrooms. It had now been about two weeks and I felt fine so the ban on local food was long gone. We were at  the city of Khe Sanh, almost at the former US base when we had lunch. The guide, and the driver and I ate at a roadside restaurant that had probably never or almost never had an American eat there. What I loved about it was that the cooking was done outside by the street so I could watch what was going on.

If you’re not into cooking, please skip below to what was a very intense visit to the Khe Sanh airbase. First she threw a pile of noodles in the Wok.

Then she added some sauce.

Then she added the green onions.

Next came the sprouts and the cabbage that had been boiled separately.

She put it all together with some of the broth on top.

Next she threw all of it into the Wok again. I’m not sure she meant to have this much of a flame.

She stirred it all together and put it on the plates for the three of us.

Here is the view from the street of the restaurant.

On our way up to the Khe Sanh base, we passed a monument to all the dead from the village.

There’s a brief article about Khe Sanh at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khe_Sanh_Combat_Base but it was a defining moment of the Vietnam War. My guide considered it to be America’s Dien Bien Phu. Den Bien Phu was the critical battle that the French thought of in 1954 as their ultimate stand against the Ho Chi Minh forces. It was a major disaster for the French and led to them retreating from Vietnam.

Khe Sanh was an important base because it was close to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was the main supply route for materials from North Vietnam to support the troops fighting the US in the South. It was at high elevation and near both Laos and North Vietnam. The main battle here took place in 1968 following the Tet Offensive, the most important military action of the Vietnam War. US B-52 bombers dropped “more than 75,000 tons on the People’s Army of Liberation”. The living conditions for the US troops was terrible during this siege. The US forces abandoned the base on July 5, 1968.

Here is a crashed US aircraft at Khe Sanh.

These are tanks sitting on the abandoned air strip.

Here are some other abandoned US military items displayed on the site of the former US base at Khe Sanh.

This is a worried President Johnson looking over a map of Khe Sanh.

These are personal items from soldiers.

These US bombs were designed to bore into the ground and to look like trees. They were actually listening devices.The stem at the top is a radio transmitter.

This was the point I got very disturbed.  Two Vietnamese came up me to with competing trays of souvenirs from the war. I took a picture of a dog tag from a US soldier. It has his name and  on it. There are two reasons I’m not posting it. One is that his social security number is on it. The other is that it’s disturbing that these people were trying to sell the very personal effects of people who went through such a tragedy. I googled him and found his name at this site along with hundreds of others so I’m not divulging anything by giving you the link — www.atroop412cav.com/A%20Troop%204-12%20Cavalry%20Vietnam%201968-1971%20Roster.html

The person on the dog tag is one of the many who is listed as LOC or “Trooper Located”, which I think means he survived. I have no idea if the dog tag is authentic or not but it really brought home the fact that 50,000 plus US soldiers died along with many more Vietnamese in this war. I still feel emotionally disturbed several days later by having seeing this.

The next stop was to cross the bridge from the former South Vietnam to the North. The bridge is painted yellow on the South side and blue on the North side.

Both sides used megaphones like this one to yell propaganda at the other side.

The guide is pointing to where we were on a map. The red lines are the boundries of the two sides of the DMZ. Instead of the DMZ being fixed at the 17^th parallel as originally planned, it followed the river. We were very close to the Pacific Ocean on the right of the map.

The area just north and east of where he was pointing was our next stop. This area was heavily bombed by the US forces since it was a major route for supplies to sneak across the border. The residents often did not have time to retreat to bomb shelters so they built living quarters underground. The underground tunnels Keith and I saw near Saigon were used for the soldiers not primarily for families like these.

Here are some American bombs of the type that drove people to live underground.

My guide is getting ready to go into the tunnel. I’ll follow him.

I’m next to a model of a resident of the tunnels.

More pictures from underground.

When I was in Paris in 2003, Margaret, Keith, and I climbed up the narrow staircase to the top of the Sacre Coeur Church in Montmartre. About halfway up I had a panic attack. I hadn’t realized that I get panic attacks in small spaces before then. I have mostly forgotten about that incident until being in these tunnels. About halfway through I felt the world closing in on me. I asked the guide if it was quicker to go back or forward. He told me about a side exit that overlooked the ocean, which I gladly went to. The bad news was that I would have to return to the tunnels to get back. I skipped a side tunnel to the large meeting hall and didn’t really pay attention to several of the models of rooms. Somehow after the break outside I felt better and was able to get to the other side without another panic attack. Here I am celebrating the fresh air.

I stopped to use the outdoor facilities when the guide pointed out that we were around rubber trees. In the second picture, he’s snapping a piece of rubber from the tree.

The guide asked me if I wanted to join them for dinner. He said the food in the hotel is not great and he knew a good place. Usually, the guides drop me sometime between 4 and 6 and I do my own dinner. I was very tired from a very full day but I couldn’t turn down his offer. The specialty dish of this street restaurant was this “sticky rice”, crispy, pancake-like thing made with egg and pork shavings

I had wanted to get a feel for the Vietnam War sites we heard about every day on the news in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. I certainly got that today. I was harshly reminded that these are not Disney-like fun replicas but the all-too-real thing. The person whose name tag I saw and the North Vietnamese soldier giving his cigarette to his dead companion really brought that home to me.

I had four down experiences today. I almost fell when I got tired of walking on the stone walkway at the tunnels and slipped on the clay next to it. The guide said he was going to mention this to me. It wasn’t the guide’s fault. He was a wonderful companion and had so much to tell me. Another down experience was the very long day in the car with over 6 hours of driving. We went from the Pacific Ocean to just a few miles from the Laotian border. The other down experiences were the panic attack and the big one, the feeling at Khe Sanh.

In spite of these down experiences, I wouldn’t have traded this day for anything. I have wanted to see these places for myself for decades. Of course, I did not want to see these places during the war. My favorite part of the day was the idea of forgiveness and looking to the future.