Paul's Oriental Travelogue

Donald P. McGrane

A week and half ago in Vietnam I took care of some family business.

Fourteen years before I was born, my uncle Donald McGrane was killed in Vietnam, along with three other men, when his helicopter was shot down while trying to rescue another downed Navy pilot. To avoid losing more men, the pilot was abandoned and later died in captivity. The typical account of the incident can be found here.

I've known about this story most of my life but the most striking thing came in an email from my dad. When Donald died in North Vietnam, leaving two kids and a wife, he was 24 years old -- about a year and a half older than I am now. Especially after drawing orange lines on a blue map for two months, I feel like I know everything. But 24? Very short.

The site of all this action is about 75km south of Hanoi, so on Thursday, March 25, I made the trip down to see where Donald died and was buried for fifteen years (his remains were returned to Waverly, Iowa in 1982).

I had high hopes. I'd get to Ba Sao village in Ha Nam Province. Using landmarks like the karst formations, roads, and streams, I'd get close or at the site of the long-gone wreckage, maybe photographing the hill where the pilot, Hartman, held out for three days. Maybe I could locate the man who first approached the wreckage and buried two of the bodies. What an inter-generational photo-op that would be! Instead, the reality of my excursion turned out a frustrating, confusing, and somewhat unresolved parallel to that thirty year old war.

The first task Thursday morning, was to find a driver. You can get cars and guides "fluent" in English, I suppose, but I figured a motorbike was more suited to exploring dirt roads in remote villages. The day before I had arranged with a driver who spoke English well enough, but he had gone AWOL. I walked down to the (modern) Hanoi Hilton where I had met An, grilling all the motorbike drivers on the way in the rudiments of English. With no prospects, I involved the Hilton concierge and we had a little moto-bike pow-wow on the sidewalk. Finally a plump man in an army-green rain jacket and a mustache was produced. He was from Phu Ly, the provincial capital near to Ba Sao, and it was claimed he could speak a little English.

Dhan, as I understood his name to be but it might be way off, and I rode the two hours to Phu Ly in chilly silence. It's not easy to chat on a bike in a noisy, wind-whipped highway with trucks and buses honking past. It was chilly not from any rudeness but because northern Vietnam in March, and in a 60kph road wind, is really cold. I don't know how Dhan held on.

I was ready to start plotting on my handy 1:50,000 scale map of the province but we drove right through Phu Ly, then west on the road to Ba Sao. Fine with me.

When I saw the big Karst formations I was hoping to use as landmarks I realized this job might be more than I'd bargained for. They're not the convenient monoliths I had imagined, but more like jagged small limestone mountains rising straight from the earth. And they were everywhere -- at first a wave in front of the road, then enveloping around us. If not for the green rice paddies this terrain could easily pass for Mordor.

Asphalt gave way to muddy dirt roads and we soon enough stopped in downtown Ba Sao Village. It's the typical affair of wooden shack stores selling unappealing, indecipherable packaged goods. Stained concrete buildings and houses. Very short stools, people watching the world go by.

Now what?

Dhan did not speak English as well as had been promised. Most people would say he does not speak it at all, but I am flexible. Also, even at 1:50,000 my map would not help me pinpoint the crash site without days of surveying.

We got a little crowd gathered and I passed around a photo I had printed out, of Donald in front of a helicopter, as well as the name of Nguyen Minh Tien, the first man on the scene those years ago.

I think the photo helped to establish what exactly I was up to, although people may have thought I was back in some official guise. There was a lot of chatting -- about what I don't know. Everyone repeated the name but no one got a bright look and pointed in a particular direction.

Dhan and I went to the police station and sat with an officer in a room for a few minutes. Waiting for someone, maybe? Searching for Mr. Nguyen? Just taking it easy? The language barrier is frustrating but I got the sense nobody had any more clues than I. I drew a crude map of the crash site based on the details from a 2000 US expedition -- a small stream five meters west of a north-south dirt road, 20 meters north of some sort of Longan (Caay Nhanx?) planting, at the base of a karst formation. Maybe they would recognize it? Wishful thinking; it could be anywhere.

We gave up there and I directed Dhan northwest out of the village on a likely-looking road, based on karsts and streams on the map.

The road ran through a hilly country with more views of stark karsts rising up out of flat rice plains. Eventually it dead-ended into a compound of some sort.

We played the same game with the helicopter photograph (Dhan also thought it the best way to communicate our goal) and Mr. Nguyen's name. The guard looked puzzled and didn't speak English but he summoned someone who did.

A short, balding, pudgy man emerged along with a crowd of unhealthy looking men and women. I understood he was a doctor of some sort. He spoke English well enough and acted rather unwillingly as an interpreter. Mostly he spoke quickly with Dhan and his fellows and lectured me.

It turns out Ba Sao is the site of a large prison and I was not allowed to be here, at least not without some certificate from the government. The villagers, he warned, would be scared to speak to me without this document. He warned I'd better high-tail it back to Hanoi to get my paperwork in order before trying anything else. He actually waggled his finger at me.

I promised to investigate it, but this was almost enough for Dhan. We drove back into the village and he was ready to head for Hanoi, but I pleaded to drive southwest and try a little bit longer.

A work detail from the prison marched past. I would have liked to take some pictures but I didn't want to press my luck. They didn't look so unhappy. Some had their arms around each other, which would make any westerner raise his eyebrows but this is quite common among Vietnamese friends of all ages and genders. A Vietnamese girl at my guest house in Hanoi later said it was a prison only for "drug dealers, murderers, and thieves". So no political prisoners, right? Right?

There are a lot of karsts, a lot of dirt roads, and a lot of streams. Without a GPS receiver I wasn't going to get much closer to an overgrown crash site that hadn't even left a crater when it was new.

Still a ways north of where I was eyeballing the map coordinates, we found Nguyen Minh Tien. A woman herding some cows answered Dhan's questions and pointed us around the corner to an L shaped house in a grove of trees.

An old woman emerged from the porch looking pleasant and not especially surprised to see a 20-something white kid pull up in her remote Asian driveway.

"Is this the place?" I asked Dhan. "Nguyen Minh Tien?"

"Vang, vang, Nguyen Minh Tien." That's one of our clearer exchanges. Vang is yes.

I ducked my head through the broad doorway and saw a small thin man with rumpled hair and big searching eyes rising from a hard wooden bed.

"He saneeky," Dhan warned.

"Sleepy?" I pantomimed laying my head on my hands.

"No, saneeky. Saneeky."

Translations back in Hanoi confirmed my guess. Senile. Forgetful. Seventy year old Nguyen Minh Tien could not remember exactly where the crash had occurred one spring day when he was forty-three. I kind of thought he'd at least remember the general area. But all we got out of him was that it was about two or three kilometers off in some direction (probably south of there but I was confused about orientation, with an obscured sun, having forgotten a compass). I tried pointing directions to show my question. Mr. Nguyen pantomimed a helicopter crash with his hands and some sound effects. I guess he remembered a little bit. Or maybe just showing he knew what I wanted even if he couldn't help.

We had some tea with Mr. Nguyen and his wife. I still had my shoes on, but so did they. Out in the hills with the muck, when your floor is bare concrete I guess you don't bother so much. Small puppies outdoors, chained on actual metal chains, yelped and strained against them. A roughly twelve year old girl kept peeking around walls and the tv cabinet, but popped away when I looked over. It was surreal.

I showed Mr. Nguyen the photo of Donald in front of a helicopter. He pointed to it excitedly. He seemed to remember the large number on the front of the fuselage, but indicated it was not the 67 of the photograph but maybe 68. Or something like that. I think Dhan managed to communicate that the man in the photograph was my father's brother since we'd gotten that through with the bilingual concierge back in Hanoi.

It didn't seem we'd get anything else here so we began to take our leave. I shook Mr. Nguyen's hand and thanked him in my best Vietnamese: Càm ón.

I wanted to get a picture of the man, and maybe the two of us together but he refused adamantly. No pictures. Bummer. I might have tried a surreptitious one earlier if I'd known this would be the case but it was too late now. Their hospitality was exhausted. We drove off and I waved back and took a blurry picture of the driveway.

Dhan was gung-ho for Hanoi. I pleaded to try a few more roads but they all wound back on each other and were becoming too muddy for navigation. I finally sighed and said, "Alright, back to Hanoi." Close enough, Donald. Sorry.

I contemplated getting some paperwork, a better interpreter, and making another trip down. The more my legs ached during the freezing two hour journey, the less I liked that idea.

Dhan figured I was staying at the Hilton and when we returned there, An was waiting around ready to chastise me. But he could also be an interpreter!

This is how I found myself in a Vietnamese bar in Hanoi-- the sort of squat joint an American would walk past a thousand times never dreaming of the business it does -- plotting with two Moto drivers and an ex-Viet Cong "capitan" about how to bribe and connive an old man into revealing his secrets, while drinking glass after round after tray of Viet Ha beer. These moto drivers don't mess around at 5PM. Apparently I was buying, but at six beers for $1 I didn't mind.

An thought I could get the appropriate document from the American Embassy. That and a present of maybe 100,000 Dong to Mr. Nguyen might refresh his memory. Hmmm perhaps! Apparently he was angry because the American MIA team that had made a final survey of the crash site four years ago (looking for the still missing pilot) had never returned to thank him. The guys agreed this was an odd attitude, but maybe an old man just needed softening up.

I spent most of Friday chasing this imaginary piece of Communist bureaucracy. The American Embassy off in the west of Hanoi is more of a fortress than most I've seen. Instead of a walled-off compound, it's along a regular avenue of upscale shopfronts. But the bottom 30 feet are a sheer concrete wall with one small metal door. Two guards with machine guns stand outside (the US Embassies are the only ones with US employees guarding them from the street. Hanoi police had booths off to the side.) and two huge blue cargo containers taking up the right lane of Lang Ha Street as blast shields. I felt a little silly asking for some tourist pass.

I was pointed around the corner to an office building for Consular Affairs. The guards there also had no idea what I was talking about and gave me a number to call instead of letting me into the club. I called from the street and chatted with some flunkie who was also totally in the dark. An, who claimed he knew the name of the document I needed, mentioned it but without success.

Finally we went to the Vietnamese Office of Public Safety and Immigration. An American gets a lot of curious looks in an office where I assume one applies for Vietnamese citizenship. Even passed along to a supervisor, nobody had any idea what sort of paperwork I'd need to visit Ba Sao. I mentioned there was a prison there so that was the likely problem. Did I want to visit the prison? No, no. Well I'd probably have to take it up with the provincial government in Phu Ly. They must be the ones restricting travel.

Something about a right hand and a left hand...

I still seriously considered making another trek down to Ha Nam. The tricky part was my visa expired on Sunday (it was Friday then). I could get it extended but that process could only begin on Monday (so there would be a fine) and it would not come back to me until Wednesday at the earliest. Surely I'd need my passport and a valid visa if I was to talk with a provincial officer about a pass. So I'm looking at spending a second week in Hanoi, spending $40 on a visa extension, plus some fines, to chase a paper and a karst in the countryside.

I had actually forked over the cash and gotten a receipt for the visa extension when I could stand the madness no longer. "Forget it," I said, or something very similar. "Get me a plane to Laos."

Under prepared, with the vaguest of goals but the highest hopes, I was exhausted in the mire of Vietnam. I ramped up my pursuit to the point of madness and beyond. Eyeball to eyeball, I blinked first, waved a V sign with both hands and flew out of the country.

Stamped April 6, 2004 11:48 PM in Vietnam