I'm the first person in my whole extended family, I think, that actually shipped to Vietnam. I'm amazed how much muck from childhood this is dredging up--for me and for everyone else on the ship over 40. The shipboard prep for Vietnam has not been the usual guidebook and art routine. Our Vietnam interport lecturer, Lady Borton, a long-time Quaker activist and author here, has been a gentle and very moving witness to the painful process of postwar reconstruction. The students have been surprised by the intensity of our reactions--ranging from florid speechifying and mea culpas to outbursts of weeping. Turns out one prof lost a lung to Agent Orange. Someone else lost a brother. The Vietnamese students on board--they make sure to have a few students from each port--are just as passionate about issues of reconciliation and reconstruction as the oldsters. They repeat as a plea: "Please think of Vietnam as a country, not a war!" Our students, I think, have been genuinely impressed, and are maybe in a better position to do just that than we oldsters are. For me, it's just not that easy to put the war aside. It colors everything I'm seeing.

Saigon is a quintessentially steamy tropical port, very Joseph Conrad when one approaches by ship. We spent most of the day manoeuvering the ship up the Saigon River, a northern branch of the Mekong Delta, dodging sampans, rafted boat villages, rusty old cargo tramps with Maltese flags, and heaps of floating foliage. We were the biggest thing in the river by far, and from the top deck could see miles and miles, over the bayou foliage, dense green with occasional cuts and small thatched farms, blue mountain ridges on the horizon. I was surprised to realize how sinister Hollywood had made this landscape seem--objectively, it is very beautiful, in a low, steamy watery way; but when you starting putting names on it--Mekong Delta, Hanoi, Danang, Saigon, etc etc--one starts conjuring up the darker images we all grew up with--pungee sticks, rainy green hell and all that Oliver Stone stuff. Yuck! My biggest hope for this part of the journey is to push that crap out of my mind and replace it with something more like reality. 

Reality as it presents itself so far in Saigon: A small, pretty city that reminds me in places of Bangkok, in places of New Orleans. The traffic is heavy, but almost entirely Honda motorbikes, constantly weaving around bicycles, pedicabs ("cyclos") and pedestrians like me forging straight across the stream. Shabby but pleasant streets with a strong French look, due to the roundabouts, Mansard roofs and palm-lined boulevards. Part of the French legacy seems to be superb restaurants, which is surprising considering the apparently general level of poverty. Street crime is petty but pervasive, and numbers of our students have already been relieved of cash and portables. It feels neither like a backwater nor a boomtown, but like a place settled in for a long slow haul.. Apparently the Hanoi government still runs the place like an occupied city (starting with the hated new name). Apparently the boom of a few years ago stalled out, investors pulled out, the new skyline remains an empty promise, and here they are now just coping.

The students seem to find Saigon fun--and it is. The energy level is high, the goodies are bright-colored and clever, and everything is cheap--big change after Japan and China. People are gentle, polite and very friendly. Tourist authorities seem desperately eager to please, though they have confined us to an 11 PM curfew on ship with no exceptions, nervous about we're not just sure what--our safety? their dignity? The System's integrity? Their safety, confronted with 600 big rowdy American students? All in all, it seems a reasonable idea for all concerned.

But I'm uneasy here, and I can't put my finger on it. For me, the city is full of ghosts, too many ghosts. I admit I'm spooked by the old helicopters and tanks displayed in front of public buildings. And poverty aside, there's a sleazy feel to the city, only partly due to the ceaseless hustling and street crime. There's been so much talk about the corruption here one can almost feel it. Partly it's the garish GI-era Rex Hotel, still there, stuffed with kitsch. Partly it's the War Remains Museum we all dutifully visited, which seemed nearly as garish and uncritical. You can't argue with the American-war displays and the French-era guillotine, but something about displaying war atrocities amidst carnival water-puppet shows and dog-tags for sale seems deeply cynical. I wish the museums didn't remind me so much of the Soviet ones I 've seen. At this point in the world's evolution, I'm just not happy being preached at about human rights by an old, corrupt, Soviet-style Communist government with a desperately poor population. Not without wanting to talk back. Good grief--have I turned Reaganoid after all these years? Or are these my Oliver Stone paranoid associations coming out again? War guilt? I only know that I'm just not comfortable here, however good the restaurants and friendly the faces. Maybe I'm not ready to see the "reality" of Saigon past my own prejudices, or maybe that "reality" is still settling out. Maybe I need to practice saying "Ho Chi Minh City" without wincing.

It seems obscene to say that I'm leaving on a plane in a couple of hours for Phnom Penh to tour the Khmer Rouge killing fields and the Cambodian Atrocities Museum on the way to Angkor, but that's the way it is. This is not a port for casual R&R. Other groups are off to wriggle through old Viet Cong Cu Chi tunnels, or tour the Mekong Delta in boats. Unlikely tourism, but exciting: both students and faculty are engaged, even on edge here, as a community and to a degree that we weren't in Japan or China.

Wish me luck--------------------------------------------------larry.