A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [114]
As I turn off the main road, away from the sea, the traffic intensifies. Cars, trucks, more and more cyclists – on motorcycles, bicycles, cyclos, and scooters – join the fast-moving pack. Crossing an intersection is a heart-stopping maneuver, frightening and thrilling at the same time, filled with the roar of engines all accelerating simultaneously as we swarm across a square, only a foot or two from people on both sides. I squeeze past a line of trucks on the bridge across the channel. In the water, the gaudily painted red-white-and-blue fishing boats are coming in toward shore.
Local legend has it that when Nha Trang was the base for US military activity in the area, the CIA and Special Forces used to kick prisoners out of helicopters over this channel – wire a few tire rims to their necks and out the door. Now, there’s little evidence of what was once an enormous American presence. As elsewhere in Vietnam, there’s plenty of infrastructure, which the Vietnamese have all too happily adapted to civilian use, but the obvious signs are gone. No more shantytowns built out of cans hammered flat and scraps of military detritus, housing whores and cleaning ladies and laundresses. Quonset huts, officers’ clubs, barracks, and parade grounds are gone – or converted to more practical purposes. The large hotels and villas once used to house high-ranking military personnel are now the property of government officials or rented out to tourists. The only people on Nha Trang beach are a few French, Germans, and Australians, most staying in the modern foreign-built resort-type buildings clustered together at one end of the bay. Yesterday on the beach, a kid approached me with a box of used books in English. It was the ubiquitous Vietnam collection: pirated editions of Tim Page, Michael Herr, David Halberstam, Philip Caputo, Neil Sheehan, and Graham Greene – pretty much like the collection on my bookshelf at home. But among the crudely Xeroxed covers and the dog-eared copies of left-behind drugstore paperbacks, the kid extracted a novel by a Vietnamese author: Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War.
‘Not legal this book,’ said the kid, looking theatrically in both directions.
Needing a good beach read, I bought the book. The author, a war hero, served with the NVA’s Glorious Twenty-seventh Youth Brigade. Of five hundred officers and enlisted men who went into battle with him, only ten survived. It’s a remarkable document. Change the names and it’s an Oliver Stone movie. The members of the hero’s platoon have nicknames, just as in every American war movie you’ve ever seen. The conflicts described are bloody, pointless, and horrific. The soldiers are frightened and superstitious. They get high on weed, on any psychoactive substance they can, whenever they can. Innocents are cruelly and foolishly killed. The ‘good guys’ are responsible for brutal rapes and atrocities. The hero returns to Hanoi cynical, embittered, and hopelessly screwed up, only to find his girlfriend has become a prostitute. He spends most of his time with other similarly screwed-up veterans – all of whom spend most of their time drinking and getting into fights, having lost faith in everything they once believed in. It’s a remarkable book, mostly for its eerie parallels to similar American works. It’s a Vietnam book – like so many Vietnam books – only told from the other side.
By a Cham temple on a hilltop, I turn right down a narrow dirt road, splashing through muddy puddles until I find the fish market. People are eating everywhere. Among the pallets of fish and fast-moving deliveries and the crowds of marketers, large groups of people – old, young, babies, and children – sit on low plastic stools and squat, leaning against walls, slurping noodles from bowls, drinking tea, nibbling rice cakes, and eating pâté between baguettes. There’s food cooking everywhere. Anywhere there’s room for a fire and a cooking pot, someone has food going. Little storefront coms sell pho and noodles and ‘roll your own beef.’ Street vendors sell spring rolls,