Schoolchildren in rural Danang rush to have their picture taken. Nearly 60 percent of Vietnam's 84 million peopel were born after the end of the "American War" in 1975. Some 28 alumni and friends went on a two-week "Journey Through Vietnam" tour in February.

Of cyber cafés and gracious people, GI dogtags and rice noodle soup:
Searching for the 'real' Vietnam
by Michael J. Thompson '81

My wife and I are surfing through the traffic of Hue, on the hunt for a cyber café. The war-scarred yet beautiful ancient capital of Vietnam, Hue (pronounced "Hoo-ay") was the site of fierce fighting during what the Vietnamese call the "American War." But Hue, like much of the Vietnam we saw during our Macalester alumni "Journey Through Vietnam" tour, has grown beyond the war, drowning out its echoes in a river of motorbikes and human enterprise. Just crossing the street is terrifying for Midwestern tourists like us.

Four days into the tour we're sharing with 28 Mac alumni and friends and our Vietnamese guide Dung Nguyen, we've learned that the streets of Vietnam are no place for indecision. Despite the fact that we are in a Communist country whose average annual income is $300, every thoroughfare bursts with capitalist industry. Here, visitors glimpse the fabric of contemporary Vietnamese life being woven, a tapestry as complicated as a Wall Street trading floor. We have seen, through the traffic, almost every activity imaginable: a pig roasting on the sidewalk; school kids doing their French homework; friends playing badminton; men welding iron; full-size refrigerators zooming by on Honda Dream motorbikes; families having dinner. One day we spot a man on a scooter carrying at least 40 live ducks, tucked into crates and tied around his body, quacking into the humid wind at 15 miles an hour.

There are no stoplights. To get to the cyber café across the street, we need to slide into the traffic, trusting the motorbikes, bicycles, cars and trucks to slip around us. In the café, which is packed with noisy Vietnamese teenagers exchanging instant messages, we pick up an e-mail from our 15-year-old daughter back in St. Paul. She nails the big question every American traveler here faces: "Everyone's like, 'Why are you in Vietnam?'" she writes. "I'm like, 'I don't know. For fun?'"

Why are we in Vietnam? Well, yes, it's fun. Our companions are true Macites, eager to understand another culture. Together we test out many answers to that Why? question as we explore the country from north to south.We came to Vietnam because it is astoundingly beautiful; because its people are gracious (though persistent in selling trinkets to tourists) and the spring rolls are spectacular; because we remember a war that ended in America's defeat 30 years ago; because, as one of the group points out, we can afford to.

I have an additional reason. My college adviser, Professor Robert Warde, is the faculty leader of this trip, and I was intrigued by the idea of exploring, with Robert, a country that has figured prominently in his career. This trip, in fact, is one of his last official Macalester duties. He enters Mac's phased retirement program this fall.

Warde joined the Macalester faculty in 1970, near the height of American involvement in Vietnam. He became interested in the literature of the war early in his career, helping a high school friend and Vietnam veteran edit one of the earliest American novels to emerge from the war, in 1977. He offered the first course on literature of the war at Macalester in 1978.

"I have always been interested in how experience gets written down and how historical fact and memoir interface, particularly in a wartime context," Warde tells me as we float down the Mekong River one day. His Vietnam courses at Mac focused on that intersection. Our two countries' conflicted relationship and America's continuing internal dissonance about the war have made fertile soil for journalists, filmmakers and writers like Tim O'Brien '68, whose books on Vietnam include The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato. "It's crucial for Americans to look at Vietnam in different ways," Warde says.

Micheal Thompson '81, right, and Don Hadfield '52 in Saigon. The building behind them is the one from which U.S. helicopters airlifted panicked residents as Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in April 1975. Alumni Director Gabrielle Lawrence '73 also made the "Journey Through Vietnam."

On this trip, Warde prods us to think deeply about the human panorama swirling around us. He asks us to contemplate moving from a "tourist" to a "traveler" stance, activating the critical habits of mind a liberal arts education is designed to nurture. He does this almost diffidently, with a self-effacement that makes us do the thinking. It's as if I am back in his classroom in 1979.

For Warde, who's been immersed in the literature of the war from both American and Vietnamese perspectives for nearly three decades, coming to neat conclusions isn't easy. "I saw a slogan painted on the side of a tourist bus: 'Experience the real Vietnam,'" Warde says. "Now, I'm not quite sure how to do that. How might we come to know 'the real Vietnam'?"

In Warde's view, Americans often struggle with a cognitive uneasiness, an internal awkwardness about Vietnam and the war and our stance as visitors. Our Macalester group sometimes shared this unease, which stems from the history of American involvement with the country. It persists in spite of the development of a tourism infrastructure. You can buy phony American GI dog tags from friendly museum shop clerks across the country, and you can see the effects of America's use of Agent Orange during the war in the bodies of real Vietnamese. Our guide tries to help out by correcting what he considers our foggy American view of his homeland: "Vietnam is a country; it is not a war," Dung says. But for Americans, it will always be both. At the end of our trip, the "real Vietnam" is perhaps as elusive as ever.

Gradually we learn to navigate Hue's unceasing flow of motorbikes, bicycles and people. After an hour at the cyber café, we negotiate another street to stop at one of the ubiquitous, open-to-the-street, family-run restaurants that specialize in pho, the rice noodle soup that passes for Vietnam's national dish. We savor the sharp tang of Asian chili peppers and the welcoming laughter of our host as the traffic rushes by.

Micheal Thompson '81 is assistant director of secondary education with the St. Paul Public
Schools.