In The Hanoi Airport

Geoffrey S. Poor   |   geoffpoor@gmail.com

Setup: After a few days in Hanoi, I'm at the airport to catch a flight down to Hoi An on the coast. I am astonished by what I see on a television in the restaurant.

When I get to the Hanoi airport for the flight to Hoi An it’s late afternoon. I have an hour or so to wait before checking in, so I walk outside and across a parking lot and driveway to the airport restaurant for a final bowl of northern pho. It’s an open-air room with glass doors all around that are folded up accordion style, and soft breezes flow through bringing a slight aroma of jet fuel. Three restaurant employees are watching a movie on a TV over the bar along one side. There are about 25 tables, but the only other customers are a pair of Japanese businessmen in suits. I pick a table in the middle, order my pho and a bottle of water, and sit back to watch the movie. It’s in Vietnamese with no subtitles or dubbing, and it follows the pattern of all the dramas I’ve seen on Vietnamese TV: very melodramatic, with stylized acting and simple clarity that remind me of soap opera. This is no studio production, however. It’s a war movie, the Vietnamese vs. the Americans, shot in the countryside. 

Two Vietnamese soldiers are taking a rest along the banks of a stream deep in a forest. One of them is swimming in the water, his rifle leaning against a tree and his clothing folded neatly on the ground next to it. The other, sitting with his back against the tree, is day dreaming, and we see his visions in a soft bubble over his head. He’s having dinner with his family, all smiles and laughter and bubbling conversation. Now he’s with friends at a restaurant, joking and sharing secrets. Now he’s strolling slowly with his girlfriend down a quiet country lane in morning sunshine and birds singing in trees. They’re looking deeply into each other’s eyes. My pho arrives and I start to eat; a young European couple comes into the restaurant, but they opt for a side dining room that’s air conditioned.

A rustling of leaves announces the end of the daydreamer’s reverie. An American soldier steps out from behind a tree, startling me with his familiarity. The clothing, the patches (he’s Specialist Fourth Class Bartlett), the rifle, the helmet -- they’re all perfect, and he looks just like we did. He looks like me. The Vietnamese soldier sees him too late, and Bartlett quickly aims and kills him with a single shot to the forehead. He dies with his eyes open beneath the neat bullet hole. I’m no longer eating, and hardly breathing. I’m expecting the restaurant workers to turn and glare at me -- See what you’ve done! I wonder if chopsticks have ever been used as weapons. But everyone’s just leaning back and watching the movie. Now and then one of them yawns. They could be watching a garden show. On the TV, Bartlett is joined by his sergeant, who looks at the dead soldier, slaps Bartlett on the helmet and shouts in English without subtitles, “What the hell you doin’!?!” They both walk back into the bush. The second Vietnamese soldier comes out of the water in his underwear and sees what’s happened. There’s a closeup of his face going through shock and disbelieve, and then finally fury. Suddenly he’s dressed and dry, and with perfect hair and a scream of rage he grabs his rifle and runs into the forest. After a few moments he stumbles into a clearing, and there, of course, resting in the sunshine, is Bartlett. The jig is up. The camera closes in first on the Vietnamese soldier's grim, determined face as he aims and three shots are fired, and then on Bartlett’s “US Army” chest patch, where three holes appear and blood starts to ooze out. Bartlett falls back and dies, and the screen is filled by a toothpaste commercial.

I don’t know what to make of this and I’m stunned. When I was a soldier, I was lucky. I never had to shoot at anyone, although there were times when I thought I was about to. On guard duty -- whether in our squat perimeter “towers” which were really more like bunkers sticking their heads up out of the berm to see what was going on, or when we had only a strand of barbed wire and hastily dug foxholes for a perimeter -- during those nighttime hours so quiet and still that those of us staring and searching through the moonlight and shadows felt like the only living souls on earth, the debris left by the bulldozers would seem to dance. Did that rock really move or was it my frightened eyes? Wasn’t that bush a few feet to the left last time I looked? Oh, please don’t move again, because if you do I’ll have to shoot. I don’t want that confirmation of attack, I don’t want to start the explosive crashes that will leave me shaken for days. I don’t want to shoot.

The rocks and bushes never did move enough to force my reluctant trigger finger, but other activities, other jarring moments of awareness in those dim and disjointed days of youth, gave guilt its dark license to work into me and plant itself. Shortly after my arrival, still trying to fit into the combat engineers’ work-in-war culture with its easy banter, and as our complaining alternated with silent and private thoughts while we struggled to keep tired muscles moving in the sun, I was with my squad at the airport, building concrete pads for 155 mm howitzers. As I shoveled wet concrete from wheelbarrows into the pads’ forms on the ground, filling and covering the crisscrossing patterns of rebar and glancing at the hulking guns sitting a few feet away, barrels pointing this way and that with threatening randomness, I realized that those guns for which my sweat was helping to make a home would soon fire their 100 pound shells miles off into the surrounding countryside. They would land, if all went according to plan, on some VC or NVA; if not, on dirt and trees, or on a farmer in his field, perhaps a cart full of sugar cane pulled by an old woman on a dirt road, or a schoolroom full of children. In any case, dirt and rock and shrapnel would fly up and out in a whooshing percussive cone, and everything nearby would be ripped along with it; trees, bushes, walls, arms, legs and faces.

These and similar thoughts compete for space in my head as I pay for my lunch, my racing and shaking mind contrasting with the unbothered ease of the room and the others in it. It slowly occurs to me that they don’t know my nationality; there are many more European and Australian tourists here than American. But that’s not it. I’m trying to make sense of what happened 38 years ago, but the people in this room couldn’t care less about that. For the great majority of Vietnamese born after 1975, the “American war” means little. It’s something they had to read about in school. They’re miles ahead.