Christmas in Cambodia

“Merry Christmas, Jingle bells, Christ is born and the devil’s in hell.” —Buffy Sainte-Marie

We hadn't made special plans for Christmas. We knew we were still going to be in southeast Asia, and being so far from our families and friends, we wanted to do something we could only do here. So we decided to leave the devil behind in Phnom Penh and, as Ella Fitzgerald sang, spend Christmas on “Christmas Island.”

Koh Rong is actually one of the Southern Islands in the Gulf of Thailand. How could it be Koh Rong when it feels Koh Right? Ever since we headed north to Chiang Mai from our first stop in Thailand, we’ve been feeling more and more like backpackers. A beach in Cambodia was a heavenly place to spend a white (sand) Christmas.

Getting there, as usual, was half the fun. The bus from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville, on the coast, was as uncomfortable as most of the other buses—sitting around waiting for a toilet stop—but at least this time we didn’t spend an extra hour at lunchtime watching guys peer through an opening in the back of the bus and shouting in Khmer. I wasn’t sure when we’d get to the port or what ferry we’d take when we got there, but in the event, our transit time was ten minutes. From getting off the bus to our remork to boarding the fast ferry, including a stop to buy tickets! My previous best transit time was in the Munich airport, but I think Sihanoukville has even that beat.

So we reached the “village” on Koh Rong, the main beach, and then we had to wait for our free shuttle. Little did I know the shuttle, in the absence of roads on the island, was a longtail boat, and that we’d have to wait for the supply boat to come in and for the guys to finish loading all that stuff. And thus it was that more than an hour later we, along with the mattresses and eggs, proceeded to our “resort.” The final leg of the trip was from the boat to the beach via a raft, literally just a bunch of planks stuck together on some oil drums. I told T. I felt like we were landing at Normandy, not going on Christmas vacation.

The thing is, no one ever tells you what’s in store on these journeys. The raft was a total surprise (my balance has improved just climbing on and off so many of these rickety things). And at the Cambodian border, the bus conductor took our passports and then the bus just drove away. We had to ask the driver when and where we would actually get our passports back. But when we finally got to Long Set Beach and our bungalow, it was like a cross between our own tropical island and the Algonquin Log Cabin in Ontario. (The stars at night!)

As if to prove that backpackers keep bumping into the same people further along the route, I spotted Apostle-looking Guy walking along the beach as soon as we got to Koh Rong. We had last seen him at the boat dock in Nong Khiaw, Laos! We’d done the whole circuit of Vietnam across Cambodia and now here he was again. I speculated that he was on the island to play Joseph in a nativity play.

On the shuttle boat, we also met a guy from County Derry. He now lives in England, but has been following the scuba diving season around the world, which seems like a pretty cool gig if you’re into diving. He recommended a place down the beach that did a proper roast dinner on Sunday afternoons. So we went down there and booked Christmas dinner.

Between landing and Christmas Eve, there’s not a lot to report. Our host was stingy enough that we had to request more T.P. every day (except Christmas Day--what a great present!) But he had a moment of generosity and upgraded us to a bungalow facing the beach. The first morning at breakfast, a Scottish woman and a couple of little Cambodian girls (part of the staff family) were decorating a Christmas tree. During the first part of the week, when it was quiet, I fell asleep to only the sound of the waves. And by day, we swapped between a lounge chair by the ocean and a hammock strung up between two nearby trees. So we were together, but not too close!

Not many boats. The occasional motorbike. Even fewer hawkers. There were times, from the porch in the afternoon, that it felt like we had the beach all to ourselves.

We did have a couple of adventures. We walked back to the village, half an hour of beach and woods, one day. Not much to see there except a Western woman keeping a shop, smoking a cigarette in front of an enormous cigarette display labeled SMOKING KILLS. And then there was the partly cloudy day we decided to go for a hike. 

I emphasize that this is a marked trail.

The interior of Koh Rong is jungle and, we were told, rich in wildlife. We decided to take a walk that our host told us led from our beach to the next, through some woods and over a hill. “Not much to see,” he said.

There was something to see. T. heard a rustle in the undergrowth (which means it was a really loud rustle) and the next thing I knew, she was face to face with an enormous snake, a cobra by the look of it. It “stood” a few feet off the ground and had its hood open. She very wisely backed away, and we decided to abandon our hike. So we don’t have a picture of our snake but it was definitely a cobra. We found a picture online and the island does have them, even though everyone we talked to said they had never seen one there. Kind of made us feel lucky. In retrospect.

Indochinese spitting cobra. Photo from Wikipedia!

By comparison, the enormous "geckoes" haunting our front porch didn't seem as startling anymore. So the next night, we went snorkeling with plankton. This was thrilling in a somewhat different way. We got back on the raft and then the boat, and swam out from there. It was a little disconcerting in the dark, but the plankton weren’t just in one clump; they were everywhere. Looking down, even without a snorkel, we appeared to be walking and moving our hands through living body glitter. We went with three Brazilians and, judging by the excited chatter in Portuguese, everybody had a good time.

A single fingernail of moon just visible through the trees. Perfect shades of blue and green water.  Children playing in the sea and sand that squeaked under my feet, like Squeaky Beach. I figured I could do without wrapping paper this one Christmas, if the Grinch could manage it. (“It came without ribbons! It came without tags!”)

When Christmas Eve came, we were on the beach, where we’d been most of the week. The club that did the Sunday roast dinners was going all out for Christmas dinner, plus, there was an ever-rotating volleyball game going. Given how long it’s been since my last (casual) game of volleyball, I surprised myself by not being bad.

Two of the folks in the game were young Germans whom we ended up sitting next to at dinner. Also there was someone called Jolene, who must have ordered a vegetarian meal. When the waitress came out calling, “Jolene, Jolene!” I couldn’t help myself: “I’m begging of you!”

Please don't take my sandman.

The Germans recommended a place they’d stayed at in Siem Reap, our next destination. They were going around the opposite way; their plan was to buy motorbikes and ride all over Vietnam. I hope their luck was as good as ours. The Joker guesthouse in Siem Reap was worth getting to, even via raft, shuttle boat, speed ferry, airport taxi, prop plane, and finally a taxi driver dim even by the standards we’ve become accustomed to, who drove around and around on the wrong road asking us to identify a hotel we’d never seen before.

Siem Reap is a cool backpacker haunt, but the main draw around there is the ancient city of Angkor. The temples that remain from that time are among the few not wrecked during the Khmer Rouge era—perhaps even that regime had a moment of awe faced by the all-time greats of Khmer civilization. Many people who know little else about Cambodia have heard of Angkor Wat, the largest religious building in the entire world.

Central building of Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat is contemporary with Chartres Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. But when this temple was dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu, Angkor was a city of a million people, while London had only 50,000 residents. It’s fascinating to think of a whole other world going on, neither having any idea about the other.

Inner temple complex

The Joker booked us a lovely young driver, a young man with a shiny painted remork, like he’d just started off in business with it. "Do you want to eat rice?" he asked solicitously at lunchtime. We quickly realized that "eat rice" is the literal translation of the Khmer "eat." Cambodians ask each other "Did you eat rice?" almost like "How are you?"

From Angkor Wat he took us to Angkor Thom, which was once a city of 9 square kilometers. At its heart is the Bayon, famous for its many faces looking down on the worshipper from all the towers.

The Bayon was built during the reign of King Jayarvarman VII in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. He also built Ta Prohm (dedicated 1186) in honor of his mother, and the goddess of wisdom. Intriguingly, this is the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, rather than Hindu.

Ta Prohm was our favorite. You could find places where people weren’t climbing all over it, but more cool is how it’s gradually getting absorbed back into the jungle. Trees have become parts of the structure and the structure part of the trees. You could even say where man imposed his will on nature in honor of the gods, nature is reimposing herself, but at a much more glacial pace.

At Ta Prohm, we once again saw familiar faces. Outside the gate I heard someone calling “Hello girls!” It was the Brazilian guy and girl from the night of the plankton. All those legs of journey from Koh Rong, and there they were at the same temple at the same time. They agreed with us that Ta Prohm was the best.

I’m not sure what to make of Cambodia overall. I really enjoyed it, but the disparity of wealth is hard to understand: why on earth are there so many Lexus cars? And who pays nearly $12 for imported detergent? 

We found this in a supermarket near the U.S. embassy, one of those enormous, well-stocked places which, when refugees arrived from a communist country, caused them to burst into tears. It was great to be able to buy a Santa hat and a candy cane, but I can’t imagine most Cambodians could afford anything there.

But my recurring impression of Cambodia is: At least it is trying. There’s still one political party that dominates, and you see signs for it everywhere. But that’s because it actually has to compete. There is a viable opposition here. At least Cambodians are trying to have multiparty democracy.

There’s still a big problem with trash, particularly plastic bottles—a problem directly related to the fact you can’t drink the tap water here. How we take for granted drinkable tap water when so many countries can’t! But at least Cambodians are trying to recycle.

Next stop: we transit back through Bangkok.

Advent people in a Good Friday world

We left Saigon on a high note. We climbed up several flights of stairs in an old apartment building tucked down an alley, to emerge on the roof, where there’s a lovely restaurant called The Secret Garden. Homestyle food, some of the most delicious we’ve had. Then we caught a bus across the border to Cambodia.

I was instantly happier in Cambodia. The sun came out, which it almost never did in Vietnam. Not that that was Vietnam’s fault. But I was in a new country, with a new currency. Not, as you might expect, the Cambodian riel, but the U.S. dollar! It is possible in Cambodia to make every transaction in USD, only getting small change in riels. Automatic banking machines even dispense dollars.

We arrived in the capital, Phnom Penh, and walked into a guesthouse. Well, we walked into three before we found a room we liked—$10 a night with a fan and a surprisingly nice bathroom. I will never get over how easy this is in Southeast Asia. It shows how much we’ve gotten used to that the tile and plentiful supplies marked the bathroom as “nice.” After all, it was still a wet room, where the shower sprays all over everything and just drains through the floor. But some things we have gotten used to.

Others I never will. Almost everywhere we’ve eaten in Asia, except Indian restaurants, they just bring the food out in whatever order it’s cooked. I think this is because they assume everybody shares dishes family style—which we do in Indian restaurants too—but really, rice getting cold is not a course in itself. Even in Hong Kong, our friend told us if a main course happens to be ready, they’ll bring it, never mind if the appetizer hasn’t come yet. First World issues, eh?

The first friend we made in Cambodia was our remork driver. The Cambodian version of a tuk-tuk is a kind of wooden chariot, sort of like the ones on a carousel, that is integrated with a motorcycle in front. It’s a lot stabler than it sounds! This guy called up to us on the balcony of our guesthouse and offered his services, which we negotiated while he (astonishingly) identified T. as a Mancunian. I didn’t think there was enough of an accent there, certainly not for a Cambodian to hear it, but he’s a big Manchester United fan. He also turned out to know the words to “O Canada.” 

Wat Phnom, the temple on the hill

The old and the new: Phnom Penh riverfront

When he asked us brightly, “Would you like to go to the Killing Fields tomorrow?” we had to accept. It’s not the kind of invitation that sounds, well, inviting. But we were in Cambodia and it had to be done.

For all the horrible things that human beings did to each other in the last century, it is hard to think of a worse string of luck than Cambodia’s. This is a country with a great ancient civilization, the Khmer empire, and whose colonial power (France) really did “protect” it, to some extent, from neighboring Thailand and Vietnam. When King Norodom Sihanouk declared independence in 1953, things really started to go well for Cambodia. Then the hell started.

Norodom Sihanouk monument, Phnom Penh

It is bad enough that Cambodia, ostensibly on the pro-U.S. side, was used for part of the ingenious Ho Chi Minh trail, prompting massive bombings. (It was this escalation of the war into Cambodia that students were protesting in 1970 when the Kent State killings happened.) It’s bad enough that it became the most mined country on earth, with corresponding casualties. Before Saigon even fell in 1975, Cambodia was embroiled in its own conflicts, the upshot of which was the coming to power of what Sihanouk called the Khmer Rouge. 

You could look at the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge and take it as a lesson that communist, no less than fascist, fanatics commit devastating violence. What strikes me most about it, though, was that Cambodians killed Cambodians. Most of the (depressingly not rare) genocides, intentional or unintentional, have been of one people against another whose lives they don’t value: Jews in Nazi Germany or aboriginal peoples in Australia and the Americas. But in Cambodia, almost everybody suffered.

Not the leader called Pol Pot, or his cronies, like Ieng Thirith or “Duch” (another nom de guerre). Ironically, although I’m ceasing to believe in irony in communism, they were highly educated people, the kind of people marked for death under their rule. Pol Pot was a teacher who ordered the murder of teachers. Ieng Thirith was a woman who studied Shakespeare at the Sorbonne and was the first Cambodian to earn a degree in English literature. Duch was a math teacher.

So they didn’t suffer, but everyone else did. Including the peasants, though the theory was class struggle in which the peasants were going to rule. Telling this to ignorant boys was how the Khmer Rouge got the man[sic]power to enforce their hideous regime. One of these young recruits, ordered to kill “traitors to the revolution,” recalled: “We were told that we had to catch up with the cycle of history.”

We heard this at an excellent memorial, Choeung Ek. There were many killing fields in Cambodia, but this one is accessible from Phnom Penh. It is where many of the men, women, and children imprisoned and tortured in a former high school in the city were brought to be murdered. (You can visit Tuol Sleng too, but I hope my readers will forgive me; we just couldn't.) After 1979 mass graves were discovered at the Choeung Ek killing fields. Not much else was left.

Grave of 450 people

It’s a tough place to visit, but very well done. You get to walk around with an audio guide and your own thoughts. The narrator in English is a Cambodian survivor of the regime; his family was split up after being forcibly removed from Phnom Penh, and many did not survive. The many voices you hear at Choeung Ek make the story personal: how could Cambodians do this to millions of their own countrymen? 

One clue is that by 1975, 80% of Cambodians were living in extreme poverty. That statistic is as staggering as the estimated 25% of the population who ended up dead because of the Khmer Rouge. The country had just been wrecked by a war that wasn't even its own. When Pol Pot came along and said let’s start over…

One ghostly flip flop. Evoked the "shoes without people" at Auschwitz death camp

“Starting over” literally meant “Year Zero” for the Khmer Rouge. They wanted to wipe out any trace of civilization in Cambodia, and largely succeeded. They killed Buddhist monks and nuns and damaged or destroyed almost all the temples in the country. For reasons that are hard to grasp, they wanted everyone in Cambodia to work on collective farms, producing rice at a rate that was not humanly possible. At one point in the late 1970s, the entire country was basically one huge slave labor camp. 

Perhaps because the horror of the Khmer Rouge was contained within Cambodia, and the borders were sealed, it took time for the rest of the world to gain awareness of what had happened there. For some time after Vietnam overthrew the Khmer Rouge, it was still considered the legitimate government of Cambodia by Western countries, including the U.K. and U.S. Perhaps some people were reluctant to recognize anyone who had been installed by communist Vietnam. 

But when the killing fields were acknowledged, here is what was found: 20,000 people murdered just at Choeung Ek. One hundred and twenty-nine mass graves. Across the country, up to three million Cambodians killed by their own people in less than four years. No wonder it was hard to believe.

A peaceful place for contemplation now

There are no buildings left from the time of the killing fields. By the end of the regime people were starving, and they took any materials they could use. All you find there now are graves, and the occasional tree.

When confronted with what had happened at this tree (“taketh and dasheth thy little ones...” as the Psalmist said), the man known as Duch broke down. Later, in the tribunal, he accepted responsibility for the murders and refused to blame his subordinates for carrying out his orders. He also said that he prayed for the souls of his victims.

Duch defected from the Khmer Rouge in the 1980s and became a Christian. He is the only member of the regime’s leadership to have admitted his crimes or expressed remorse.

Religion, being an expression of humanity, was one of many things the Khmer Rouge was bent on destroying. But for many Cambodians, their Buddhist faith was part of what got them through those terrible years. At the center of Choeung Ek is a stupa, a Buddhist site that traditionally holds holy relics. This one is a charnel house. It holds the skulls, teeth and bones of some of the eight thousand human beings whose remains were recovered for this purpose.

You can take pictures in the stupa, but I didn’t. I didn’t know what to do, in the presence of these people; I don’t know how else to describe it. I removed my shoes, of course, and thought I’d say some kind of prayer for peace for the victims. But what actually came to my lips was the prayer of St. Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love.”

I didn’t think that out consciously. The prayer that came to me was Christian, not Buddhist, because that is my tradition. It may sound naive in the face of so many horrors, but I really did come out of that place feeling that I must be a better person, or do more, or something. If faith means anything at all it can’t just be my tradition, but make some kind of difference in real life.

And this was tested right away, because as we moved into the week before Christmas, the question was raised: If God, in the person of Jesus Christ, became man and performed miracles and all that, why would he then leave the world to it? When it’s obvious that we make such an awful mess.

Now, I know that there are men, and at least one woman, who have devoted whole books to this question. Virginia Mollenkott wrote Godding based on I John 4:17: “As He is so are we in this world.” I was raised to believe that I should "always be prepared to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you" (I Peter 3:5). But in Cambodia, in the final week of Advent, I really didn’t have an answer. Not one that would speak to the bones of Choeung Ek.

Of the many Cambodians’ voices we heard on our audio tour, perhaps the most moving was that of a young man who survived imprisonment to emigrate to America and, eventually, return to work on trying to heal Cambodia. This survivor, when really just a boy, was held in a prison full of adults. There was a man there who spoke up to the prison authorities, insisting that this child did not belong in an adult prison and they should let him go. Eventually they did, but the young man said he realized that by repeatedly speaking up for him, the other man had sacrificed his own life.

Was this older man “Godding”—being as God is to his fellow man in this world? Is this an answer? I don’t know, but as with every such story, it was humbling. And in this world that can seem much more like the crucifixion than the manger, it was the closest I could get. 

Born in the U.S.A.*: South Vietnam

Hoi An was the last chance we were giving Vietnam. It can now be told that, up to this point, Vietnam was the dirtiest, grubbiest, ugliest, most trash-heaped country I have ever seen. We kept hearing, and reading, about this or that place that was beautiful, but what I got out of Vietnam was a history lesson. I don’t know where people went that was beautiful or where they wished they could have spent more time.

A clue came when we started talking to an older (our age) Australian man who’s been here sixteen times. Sixteen! We had to ask about the trash. He said he doesn’t notice it. Fifty years ago, he went on, people didn’t have plastic so all the trash was biodegradable, and they still throw their scraps on the floor (as in restaurants in Dien Bien Phu). I didn’t mind that so much, as someone really was picking up the tissues and the chicken bones. Here they figure “someone” is paid to pick up the trash, but it’s still there, an eyesore on every beach, in the foreground of every picture.

After Hoi An our last stop would be Ho-Chi-Minh-City-formerly-known-as-Saigon. Australian man started talking about history, and how “the Americans” kept the 1956 election from happening because they didn’t want Ho, and the communists, to win. (It is certain that the failure to hold those elections precipitated the division between South and North Vietnam, which was followed by the North’s invasion…) I always make sure at this point that the speaker knows I’m originally from the U.S. I dread this moment too, though, because then they always want to talk about Tweeter. They say they don’t, but they’re the ones who bring him up.

One thing he said I wholeheartedly agree with, though. He waved around us and said, “You can’t beat capitalism.” What he meant was that the Communist Party may be the sole source of power in Vietnam, but there’s never been a more enterprising bunch of people. Everybody and his granny, literally, are running a small business from the front of their home and/or the back of their bike.

Hoi An became a trading port first with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. Japanese, Chinese, Dutch, and other nationalities later settled, and—rarely for Vietnam—the city was never wrecked in war. As a result, today it is a beautifully preserved old town.

It helped that we’d arrived on the comfortable “sleeper bus,” though we weren’t on it overnight. Some backpackers travel throughout Vietnam this way. We walked into a very friendly guesthouse, with a pool! Throughout our stay, we were the only people in it, as the weather was considered “cold” for Vietnam.

Today, many of the old ironwood houses in Hoi An are shops or restaurants. We went to one of them and tried several local specialties: “white rose” shrimp dumplings, wontons, cao lau (thick noodles with sliced pork), and banh xeo (rice pancakes). Worth trying once.

The next day, we rented bicycles again, willing to brave the light traffic in Hoi An even without helmets, which were unavailable. We wanted to go to the beach, though it wasn’t beach weather. We’d seen pictures of An Bang Beach on the internet and, even though there was trash in the pictures, people still said it was beautiful. So we set off along the coast road.

I know it was December and gray, and “cold” (the woman who served us beachside drinks shivered in her coat, while we let the sea breeze cool our sweat). But there was Styrofoam and rubbish everywhere. We couldn’t bear to walk any further in search of beauty, so we biked over to Cam Nam Island. There, a friendly masseuse pointed us towards a riverside place for lunch. When we got there, we couldn’t wake the only visible worker, who was snoozing in a hammock. So we gave up!

I read in the otherwise helpful Lonely Planet guidebook that biking the back roads would show us “the real Vietnam.” But we know what the real Vietnam is. It’s waterfalls and buffalo, like Laos. I loved Laos and for whatever reason, fewer people or greater awareness, the parts we visited were not spoiled. So we decided to concentrate on what Hoi An is best at: the UNESCO World Heritage Site structures.

Japanese covered bridge that once linked Japanese and Chinese neighborhoods

We visited a couple of houses that have been in the same Vietnamese family for seven or eight generations.

There was fair-trade shopping, traditional music, people watching, and simple but good food. 

Interior, temple of the Fujian Chinese community

Hoi An is good at food. Every day we could have great coffee and pastries thanks to a French-named bakery across the road. One morning, we started chatting to a Belgian couple there, who seemed a little shell-shocked. They’d just come from Saigon and the woman told us the traffic was “worse than Hanoi.” Oh, goody!

Before the development of the trading port, from the second century, this region of central Vietnam was a Hindu kingdom, Champa. Ultimately the Cham were squeezed between the Vietnamese to the north and the mighty Khmer Empire to the south, but their legacy remains in two ways. We had some of the best Indian food of our travels at Omar’s Namaste Restaurant.

And, we spent a half day visiting another UNESCO World Heritage site: the temple ruins at My Son.

These Cham ruins are atmospheric, but our real reason for going was to get into the shadow of the mountains and see, we hoped, some relatively unspoiled scenery. We were not disappointed in this. We set off walking on our own rather than follow our guide. He told us, “There used to be ruins of seventy temples but now there are only twenty. Can you guess why?” Well, I didn’t even bother to put my hand up. There is only one answer around here: “American bombs.”

My Son means “beautiful mountains, and they were. We came back to Hoi An partly via boat on the Thu Bon River. It helped immensely that that day, we saw the sun for the first time since Hong Kong!

And so we left for the last leg of our Vietnam journey: a flight from Da Nang to Sai Gon. On the drive to the airport, T. observed someone working and remarked, “If your ladder’s not long enough just tie it to another ladder!” The two bamboo ladders, strapped together with packing tape, reminded me of something my Grandpa would have jerry-rigged. 

In the Danang airport I noticed, once again, that there are no newspapers in Vietnam. There is, however, a Burger King. “Since 1954!” the sign proclaims, a year I now know (but was told most Vietnamese don’t) as the date France’s colonial rule came to an end. I was embarrassingly glad to get a burger.

I listened to the strains of a jazzy “Let It Snow” and wondered what, if anything, Vietnamese people read. There had been a bookstore in Hoi An, and the South China Morning Post was, interestingly, available on Vietnam Airlines. How much is censorship and how much is the worldwide scourge of ignorance?

Hoi An had redeemed itself and, in part, Vietnam. Saigon continued the trend. (It is sometimes and officially called Ho Chi Minh City, but Saigon seems to be the preferred name, even among Vietnamese people.) There are parks, wide (if crazy) streets, and some beautiful French-era buildings. 

Notre Dame Cathedral

The Central Post Office was designed by Gustave Eiffel.

Opcra House

Continental Hotel

Nonetheless, when people say Saigon, I first think “the fall of.” And so we made our way to Independence Palace, on the site of what was once the French governor’s residence. This was the presidential office building through whose gates North Vietnamese tanks smashed in 1975. The building, complete with bunker, is weirdly frozen in its 1960s design.

Cabinet room

Bunker

We emerged from Reconciliation Palace, as it’s now called, to the strains of “Mary’s Boy Child” coming from a nearby coffeeshop. “There is hope for all to find peace,” sang Boney M.

A similarly jarring Christmastime experience occurred at the coffeeshop outside the War Remnants Museum. There, they were playing “Silent Night.” It made me think of “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night,” recorded by Simon & Garfunkel in 1966. For the War Remnants Museum was the most harrowing, and necessary, stop in our Vietnam travels.

It used to be called the Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes, but it’s not as one-sided today. It can’t be, because the star of the show is a display from the Commonwealth of Kentucky. You may have seen it in book form: Requiem. It features photographs from many journalists who died in the Indochina wars. Some are well-known Americans, like Robert Capa and Larry Burrows; others are French, Japanese…and Vietnamese.

Photograph by Larry Burrows at Khe Sanh

Dickey Chapelle, another of the many press photographers who died in Vietnam

In The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis wrote that a healthy patriotism involves (among other things) knowing the difference between heroes and martyrs. In other words, we are not to confuse our country’s cause with God’s. As far as I can tell from translations into English, Vietnam officialdom does not know the difference. In the introduction to Requiem, only Vietnamese are presented as “martyr-journalists.”

But they cannot do anything about the truth of the photographs, even those on another floor of the museum, about U.S. atrocities and Agent Orange. The My Lai Massacre really did happen. U.S. (and allied) soldiers were also poisoned by dioxin. Robert McNamara, the former defense secretary, really did write in his memoirs, “We were wrong.”

“Wrong” has so many faces in this war. It was wrong to throw stones or shout “baby killers” at soldiers who came home from Vietnam. It was wrong to treat any human beings as those at My Lai or Thanh Phong were treated. Worse, these massacres made the world doubt that the U.S. was here for the people of South Vietnam. It is bad enough to do this to your enemy; but to the people you are supposed to be helping?

It was wrong, in international law, to drop napalm and phosphorus bombs and toxic chemicals, on a scale unseen in human history. It was wrong for American veterans not to receive any compensation for twenty-five years. 

American war veterans who were injured by Agent Orange

And it was in this museum that I again saw a clue to the self-defense of democracy. For we know about these wrongs because of Western sources. Many of the photographs and reports were from American journalists. People began to question, then to protest, the conduct of the war because of what they were hearing from a free press.

We know about the My Lai Massacre because of U. S. sources.

I will never forget a World War II copy of Life magazine that I somehow saw as a young person. There was a picture of a Japanese soldier about to do something, no doubt something barbaric to Americans. "The face of the Jap" was characterized with words I won't quote because I can't remember them exactly, but I know I was shocked by the dehumanization. 

Yet I understood where the caption came from. The writer was remembering the Pearl Harbor attack, something only savages would do. After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese did not seem like people to Americans; and yet we know this type of thinking also led to the internment of Japanese-Americans. Some of them had family members fighting on the U.S. side.

“Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.” —Graham Greene, The Quiet American

When we got to Saigon it was steamier than it had been anywhere else in Vietnam. We found a family restaurant down an alley off Pham Ngu Lao, backpacker row, and I ordered vegetable fried rice and broccoli with garlic sauce. These were the dishes my friend Fritz and I would always order, when we met for Chinese food back in Elizabethton, Tennessee.

Of all the men and women who fought for the United States in Vietnam, only one was a good friend of mine with whom I talked about the subject. Although Fritz has been gone for twenty-four years I still think about him often. But especially these past few weeks.

Major Fritz Bernshausen was Airborne

Fritz was older than a lot of the men in Vietnam, because he wasn’t drafted; he was a career soldier. He was in the Army Special Forces and as patriotic an American as I’ve ever known, but he wasn’t born in the U.S.A. He was born in Germany in 1928. I never knew exactly when his family immigrated to America; all he ever told me about the World War II period was “My mother was a Nazi and my father was not.”

I’ve written about Fritz before (he liked my versions of his stories) and I’m sure I will write more. His perspective, though unique, came to me with the assurance of someone who had lived through battle and respected the art of war. For his part, Fritz never referred to himself as a “veteran,” always as a soldier. (“Old soldiers never die.") And he knew enough about soldiering both to be critical of decision making on his country’s side, and to respect the abilities of others—Erwin Rommel or the Viet Cong—no matter how much he deplored them in other ways.

Fritz would say, probably with an obscenity thrown in, that his enemy in Vietnam were fighting on and for their own land, while Americans were not. You fight differently if someone is actually attacking your country. Most of us would not blame someone for defending their own home with force. It was difficult, even at the time, for many Americans to see how Vietnam was a threat to their own country. 

Fritz was proud of his profession and considered himself a good soldier, but if anything that made him more protective of his comrades’ lives, and more critical of politicians who might throw them away. “Those boys are going to die for a barrel of oil!” he told me during the Gulf war, with tears in his eyes. To Fritz, human lives were precious, and supporting the troops meant being very, very careful of how we use them.

Like Fritz, I wholeheartedly embraced a country that I emigrated to. I travel on my Canadian passport and have a prime minister, not a president. But I could never deny where I’m from. Here’s to Fritz, his compatriots, and the end of our adventure in Vietnam.