“This one goes out to a couple of guys on their way to Nha Trang…” ~ Good Morning Vietnam
No matter how many times I come to a Vietnamese port in the course of my shipboard career, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to like it. This time is no different.
For us now, Nha Trang is a holiday resort, people come here with their kids, lie out on the beaches, bake themselves in the heat (and Freya is it ever hot). For heaven’s sake we come here…
I stand out on the sports deck, running pointless events for overheated passengers, so that they can compete for equally pointless prizes, and I just find that I want to scream “do you KNOW where you are? Do you KNOW?” Do any of them even think about it? Does it even cross their minds?
People didn’t just die here. People were massacred here. They buried what pieces they found of them….
Hey hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?
Here, you walk out of the AC of the ship and your clothes become a second skin. Everything sticks to you, even the light cotton of our day uniforms. For the first time in ages, I willingly bind my hair up into a bun when we stop here (and a lot of you can probably count on one hand the number of times you’ve seen me with my hair properly ‘up’), because otherwise the heat plasters it to the back of my neck and I can’t stand it. I can only imagine what it must have been like in fatigues, tramping through the jungle, knowing that around any corner there could be someone waiting for you, and you couldn’t find them and they couldn’t find you, and you didn’t even know who you were fighting.
Some people say that I won the only ‘lottery’ that counts: the one that decides where and when you’re born. In the words of Sara Crew, “it is only chance after all, that you are not me and I am not you”. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re not…
The jungles may have absorbed the blood now; it looks like it’s all been washed away. But it’s not gone. As I said the last time we ported in a Vietnamese town, the land doesn’t forget. Places have memories….
I’ll never like stopping in Vietnam….