DRUG OVERDOSES BY BACKPACKERS

Backpackers relax on guesthouse terrace, on less than scenic Boeung Kak Lake

“I have to go support my heroin habit.”

I never expected to hear those shocking words in Cambodia. I heard this on the street, in the Lakeside neighborhood of Phnom Penh. The young man who said it was a British English teacher, on his way to work. To this day, I don’t know if he was kidding or not.

Lakeside is where all the cheapest accommodations are for the thousands of foreign backpackers who come visiting the city. It’s also where many of the foreign drug addicts live. Here there are cheap restaurants, cheap bars, and cheap guest houses. Plop down your backpack, and you can have a bed for five dollars a night. It also happens to be where the drug dealers come to prey on gullible backpackers.

I originally came here this morning looking for cheaper lodging, on recommendation of my buddy Kenny. He's a former US Marine, and Vietnam War veteran I met in Saigon. As he's a Southeast Asian nomad, I had run into him downtown on one of his swings through Cambodia to visit his Khmer girlfriend. Kenny recommended to me a hotel in Lakeside. But I’m finding this borough isn’t what I expected.

Most of the guesthouses here are built on stilts, backed up on Boeung Kak Lake. That sounds ideal, but the lake itself isn’t very picturesque, mainly because it’s so polluted.

This lake north of the downtown is one of the main destinations for area drainage during the rainy season. Unfortunately, developers have taken over much of the area's land. With money on their minds rather than good sense, the developers plan to fill in the entire lake. Environmentalists are concerned that this will cause even more flooding in Phnom Penh during the rainy season.

The shady Lakeside neighborhood of Phnom Penh

After a spaghetti lunch in a local restaurant, I step out in the street, to be greeted by a drug dealer. Then another. And another. It seemed that about every ten steps, somebody was trying to sell me drugs. I politely decline. I recall that Kenny likes to smoke marijuana now and then; now I know why he stays in this neighborhood.

I shouldn't be surprised that local pushers throng to Lakeside, since there are plenty of  hippie backpackers that stay here. Unfortunately, a few of them don't leave Cambodia alive.

Backpackers who smoke marijuana occasionally decide to try something new, with tragic results. They’ll ask the corner pusher for cocaine. Eager for money he agrees to get them cocaine, although he doesn’t know much about anything except marijuana. So he goes to look for a white powdery drug, and he ends up bringing back pure heroin. The backpacker goes back to his cheap guest house, and is dead by morning. The next morning, the hotel cleaning lady enters the room, and screams when she discovers his cold dead body. More than one foreign backpacker has ended up dead this way.

In another incident, the body of a backpacker was found floating out in Boeung Kak Lake. But this wasn’t a drowning accident, it was an overdose. My expat friends tell me that local police charge a guest house hundreds of dollars to remove a corpse. After the hotel staff found the foreigner's body dead from an overdose, they wanted to avoid this expense, so they dumped the corpse in the lake. So much for respect for the dead.

Back in the 1990’s there were occasional deaths of foreign backpackers, kidnapped and killed by the Khmer Rouge. Thankfully, they are no more. Today, backpacker deaths in Cambodia are self-inflicted.

View of guesthouses on Boeung Kak Lake

LADY BAR OWNER IN VIETNAM

Bartenders spin flaming bottles in a Danang bar

Chau is an attractive, friendly Vietnamese woman, with a wide smile and a kind voice. She speaks English well, and at 30 years of age, she’s already the owner of her own business in downtown Danang.

“I have this bar two year,” she says proudly from behind her dimly lit bar. Tonight's a rare occasion when she’s wearing tight clothing, and it complements her womanly figure. This gets more than a few looks from her male customers. Some are Vietnamese, but most are western men. But unlike less reputable places, this isn’t a bar for working girls. In Chau’s bar, (name is withheld), she doesn’t allow prostitutes. “When they come in, I ask them to leave,” she says.

Chau isn’t from Danang, she’s from a village outside the city. She may be a businesswoman now, but capitalism wasn’t always popular with her family.

“My father was Viet Cong,” she confesses to me. “He no like Americans. He still hate Americans. Many VC, still hate Americans. But most of them are dead now.”

Back in the war years, Chau’s hometown was a Viet Cong stronghold. Her father’s side may have won the war, but his family paid a high price. “His two brothers died. His mother and father died,” Chau tells me. Her father was also wounded by a US bomb, and his old injuries bother him in his old age. For the first time, I’m hearing about a Vietnamese that still hates Americans. Given all that the war did to her father’s family, I’m not surprised. Fortunately his hatred didn’t spread to his chipper daughter, who seems to enjoy chatting with me. 

Chau says her father doesn’t understand her. “He ask me, ‘how can you talk to Americans’? I tell him, that (the war) was long time ago. That finished,” Chau says. “I don’t have a problem with Americans.”
Chau first came to know Americans as a tour guide, when she traveled extensively doing tours for returning US veterans. “Most of them nice. Some of them not so nice,” she says, giving her view of the vets. 

She traveled with them all over the region, from Danang, to the former De-Militarized Zone, and even to the infamous site of My Lai.

“What was it like with them there?” I asked.

“They cry,” she says. “They feel bad. They talk with lady there who tell them what happen. She tell (them) their story. Another lady was a child (then). They cry.” 

Chau's village endured fighting during the war

Chau also brought the veterans to an orphanage, where children continue to arrive today with deformities attributed to Agent Orange. The vets cried there too. Now that Chau owns her own bar, she doesn’t travel with vets anymore. But she’s still happy to translate for American medical teams that come to Danang, who treat the sick in poor communities for free.

Chau likes the American doctors, but there is another group she despises. “The old American men, they come back Vietnam. They marry young Vietnam lady. I don’t like,” she says with disdain. She allows these old men with young brides to come into her bar and drink, but that doesn’t mean that she approves. Nightlife is more relaxed in Danang than in Ho Chi Minh City, so she's had few problems with customers.

“Have you had many bar fights?” I ask, remembering the brawl I had witnessed in the former Saigon. 

“Only one time,” she answered. Predictably, the bar fight involved an American, although he didn’t start it. “It was old American man in the war.”

During an evening at Chau’s place, an American Vietnam veteran was talking with a twenty-something English teacher from England. They both had their share of drinks, when the subject of the war came up. Among other things, the burly young teacher told the veteran that he thought the Americans were baby killers. It went downhill from there.

“The English man, he know boxing,” Chau said. Being bigger, younger, and a trained fighter, the Englishman wasn’t afraid to back up his words with his fists. Chau kicked the brawling pair out, but not before a lot of blood was spilled in the bar. The American got the worst of it.  But that wasn’t the end of it. The American lives in Danang, and he got the last laugh. The Englishman had a well paid job at an international school, and the American found out which one.

“The American, he have Vietnam wife,” Chau told me. “They call the school where he work. Teacher fired.” Out of a job, the English 'boxer' was soon out of the country.

I ponder over this conflict. During my whole time in Vietnam this is the only fist fight I’ve heard of that involved a disagreement about the war, and no Vietnamese were even involved. The two pugilists were from two countries that are supposed to be allies.

Chau tells me later of a fight in a different bar, that ended tragically for her family. Some years back, one of Chau’s brothers was killed. He was just a university student then, out for a night with his friends when the fight broke out. He tried to break it up, and was stabbed fatally in the melee.

The new river front walkway in downtown Danang

The perpetrator was tried and sentenced to a long prison term, but he wasn’t behind bars for long. Less two years after her brother’s death, Chau’s family found out that the killer had already been released. He was long gone, and nowhere to be found. It turns out that the prisoner’s father was a powerful figure in the government. Chau’s father also worked in local government and was a war veteran, but that wasn’t enough power to guarantee justice for his murdered son. In the end, he didn’t have anywhere near the clout that the father of the killer did.

These days, Chau is doing very well. Her parents have retired, and with her pub thriving, she earns enough money to support them. She’s even saved enough to do some traveling. Unlike most Vietnamese, Chau has seen a lot of the outside world, and has traveled throughout Southeast Asia. She’s even flown to New Zealand and her favorite, Australia.

“I would like to go see America some day, but it very far,” she tells me.

I ask her if she would like to go work in America, but she doesn’t see the need. “Here I do what I want,” she says. “I’m free.”

I suppose it’s all very relative. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press don’t concern her. Chau enjoys the freedoms that she wants the most. She has the freedom to travel, and the freedom to run her own business. In her case, that’s all the freedom that she needs.

THE WAR KILLED MY LIFE

Duc served with Americans on a PBR like this one. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

I’ve heard refugees and veterans speak of war’s awful consequences before, but I’d never heard it put into these five simple words.

“The war killed my life.”

I heard these words from Duc (pronounced 'Duke'), a veteran who had fought for the losing side of the war in South Vietnam. Despite him losing so much from the conflict and its aftermath, Duc had managed to survive. Duc was my tour guide in Cu Chi, and compared to the usually reserved Vietnamese, he’s a very vocal and excitable fellow.

“I’m not very handsome like before,” Duc joked, and the tour group I’m in lets out a collective chuckle. At 59 years old, he’s slight in stature, with a touch of an Asian moustache. A tour guide for more than 10 years, he knows how to keep foreigners interested. Wearing a ball cap and 80’s style mirrored sunglasses, he has the air of a military veteran. Through Duc’s speeches to the tour group, and later conversation I shared with him, he had a remarkable story to tell. In between his puffs on cigarettes, his story unfolded.

Duc had begun life with so much. He was born to a Vietnamese mother from an upper class Saigon family. She was a professor at a local university. His father was a diplomat from the Philippines. From such a family, Duc was able to attend excellent schools. As he grew up in the southern capital, his family’s status kept him relatively insulated from the war.

Duc's unit patrolled dangerous waterways, such as here in the Mekong Delta

“For 125 years Vietnam people fight. They never stop,” Duc told us. It was a long road of conflict. There were so many years of war fighting the French, the Japanese, the Americans, and each other. His family’s life had been struck by the tragedy of war before. His grandmother was killed in 1944, when a Japanese bomb struck their house during their World War II occupation.

During the 1960’s, Duc was a university student in Saigon, studying to be a doctor. At that time the city was reasonably peaceful, and for him, the war was something far away. Then the Tet Offensive happened in 1968. With so much fighting around the city, Duc was shocked to see bodies lying in the streets. He was also shocked to learn that one of his female classmates was a Viet Cong, killed in the fighting. With his country in crisis, Duc decided to join the fight to defend it.

Unlike so many who ended up in the army, Duke was put in a naval unit. His service included assignment at bases in America. He served at bases in Philadelphia and San Diego, teaching new  coast guard and naval recruits how to drive the PBR boats (patrol boats) used in the Vietnam's waterways. Although many Vietnamese dream of living in America, Duc missed his country, his family, and Vietnamese food. “I don’t like American food. It’s horrible,” Duc said bluntly. He looked forward to going home.

In 1969, he was sent back to Vietnam. He had reached the rank of warrant officer, and was attached to an American Naval unit patrolling the rivers of South Vietnam. His unit even had a young naval lieutenant by the name of John Kerry. This was the same John Kerry who would later become a senator, and presidential candidate.(Note: since I 1st posted this story, Kerry has become Secretary of State.)

Duc fought in John Kerry's unit (State photo)

One of his unit’s duties were missions to retrieve servicemen who were missing in action.(MIA’s) Some of Duc’s most dangerous missions were to recover live American pilots, or bodies of American servicemen killed in action in enemy areas. Duc was shot during one of these missions, recovered, and returned to duty. Luckily for him, his small stature made him a smaller target for communist gunners.

When the US signed the peace agreement and left in 1973, the American officers in his unit offered to take Duc with them. He refused. “Vietnam is my country,” he said, “I love my country.” He didn’t want to abandon it. Additionally, his mother had gotten divorced, and he didn’t want to leave her either. Patriotism and duty to family meant more to him than escape. And besides, he’d been to America already, and he still hated the food.

Two years later, the North Vietnamese Army advanced on Saigon. The end was imminent. Duc’s mother begged him to leave the country. He wouldn’t do it. With the end near, Duc took his service revolver, and went outside to commit suicide. With tears in his eyes, he raised the pistol to his head… and he couldn’t do it. He just couldn’t pull the trigger. Somehow, Duc would survive.

After the communists took over, thousands of those like Duc who had fought alongside the Americans were captured and imprisoned. Duc was sent away to a ‘re-education’ camp. For three years, Duc had to sit through daily sessions of political cadres spouting communist propaganda. Conditions were difficult. Duc got malaria in prison, and his captors refused to give him any medicine. Some other prisoners died from the malaria. Duc shivered and suffered from fever. Eventually he recovered. When he was finally released, he returned to Saigon, only to find that his mother had died during his imprisonment. He had never even been informed. Duc found that his brothers and sisters had also fled the country. He couldn’t move back into his family’s house either. It was now occupied by another family with connections to the new government.

Duc boarded cargo boats much like this one, as they searched for smuggled Viet Cong weapons

Duc would learn that despite his communist ‘re-education’, it was very difficult for him to find work. The government was refusing all professional jobs to anyone from the former South Vietnamese military.

Eventually, Duc found himself a good Vietnamese woman, and married. “My wife so ugly,” he joked in his crass style, “but I love her so much. She very good cook.” He settled into a family life, and had two sons. As the Vietnamese economy liberalized, his English speaking skills helped him get a job as a tour guide, where he still works today. He also managed to locate his siblings. His brother and sister returned this year from Australia for a family reunion during the Tet holidays.

Duc has regained a somewhat normal life, but he decided that he won’t work for much longer. His oldest son will soon finish medical school, and when he does he’ll be able to support Duc. He’ll be 60 years old then, and will retire from being a tour guide. Having worked six to seven days a week for years, he’s looking forward to the rest.

I'd like to show you a photo of Duc, but having him identified publicly, may get him trouble again with Vietnam's communist government. I'd better keep the photos I have of him private. Duc has suffered enough.

FEAR AND UNDERGROUND WAR IN CU CHI

The dark, forboding war tunnels of Cu Chi

I’m in another spooky tunnel, and this time it’s dark. Extremely dark, with no lighting. Yes, it’s so dark, I cannot even see my hand in front of my face.

This time there’s no tile floors, or concrete walls. I’m surrounded by clayish-dirt. I’m in a very tight earthen cave, and there’s very little space around me. It is so cramped down here, that I’m forced to crawl on my hands and knees. With my vision useless, I can rely only on my sense of touch. As I crawl ahead slowly, each of my hands reaches forward in the blackness, feeling only damp dirt beneath. The walls and ceiling are so tight, it’s impossible for me to turn around. So this is what claustrophobia feels like.

I’m in the Cu Chi war tunnels, just north of the former city of Saigon. This was an enormous tunnel network built by Vietnamese rebels for use first against the French, and later used against the Americans. It is enormous in length only. The height and width of most of the tunnels were kept to a minimum. This meant that a short Viet Cong soldier could crawl through without much difficulty, while the taller, bulkier American soldiers couldn’t get through at all. That was the idea behind their narrow construction. American soldiers weren’t likely to follow the Viet Cong into small spaces where they couldn’t fit.

“It’s going down,” I hear from a nervous voice up ahead, another visitor in this world of darkness. I’m aware that this section of the tunnel has been widened, so someone as tall as I can still crawl through. But as if the dark and tight conditions weren’t enough already, now the tunnel is starting to slope downward. I’m going deeper underground. Crawling forward on a downward angle in the darkness is even more nerve wracking.

I’m inching through the tunnels with a group of visiting tourists, but most of the tour group hasn’t made it this far. Our larger group first entered the tunnels about 200 meters behind us. Back there, closer to the entrance, there was some lighting. But as we crawled ahead in the cramped conditions, the lights eventually ran out. Rounding a turn, the blackness surrounded us. Most of the other tourists couldn’t handle either the darkness, or the claustrophobic conditions. Since the war’s end, the only residents of these tunnels have been snakes, spiders and scorpions. The others escaped their fears by climbing out through side exits.

Now, there are only a few us left, feeling our way forward across the clayish soil of the tunnel floor, in total darkness. I’ve never even imagined conditions like this before. Try crawling for 400 meters sometime. Then try it totally blind. Next, try it in a tunnel so tight, that your shoulders bump the walls on both sides, and your head scrapes along the dirt ceiling. During the war the Viet Cong crawled around down here every day, and they crawled for far longer distances.

This vast tunnel network was more than 200 km long! The clayish soil of Cu Chi made for perfect tunneling conditions. The network stretched from the outskirts of Saigon, all the way to the Cambodian border. Some tunnels even reached under the American military bases. This underground network had just about everything the Viet Cong needed. These narrow tunnels widened out to become rooms for various uses. There were bunkers for fighting, and bunk rooms for sleeping. There were kitchens, storage rooms, meeting rooms, and even underground hospitals. In some places there were as many as three levels, descending deep beneath the earth.

The Americans eventually put together a unit of soldiers to pursue and fight the VC down in the tunnels. Shorter and smaller in stature than average American men, they became known as the Tunnel Rats. It’s hard to imagine how difficult it was down here then, crawling and fighting for their lives, armed with only a pistol and a flashlight. It's spooky enough down here as it is now. I can't imagine how terrifying it must have been down here then, when the Tunnel Rats and Viet Cong guerrillas fought to the death in the darkness.

While the tunnel rats fought undergound, American military might tried to destroy the tunnels any way they could. Aerial attacks, artillery, bulldozers, explosives, gas, and defoliants, none were enough drive the Viet Cong out of Cu Chi’s underground world.  By the end of the war, Cu Chi became one of the most bombed out places in Vietnam. Between the craters and lack of vegetation from Agent Orange, the place resembled a moonscape, and the environment was destroyed.

Unexploded US bombs found in Cu Chi. They are still being found today.

Despite their vast firepower and technology, the American military never managed to destroy the tunnel network. The network was just too long, and the VC kept right on digging more tunnels.

On the opposite end, despite many attacks, the Viet Cong never managed to capture any of the vast US bases around Cu Chi while the Americans were still here. The conflict here was more or less a stalemate. But the VC did manage to maintain a presence, and continued to harass the American bases. In that sense, the Cu Chi war tunnels aren’t really a monument to victory. They’re more of a monument to Vietnamese tenacity.

SAIGON'S DARK SIDE, COPS & THE GODMOTHER

An Alley scene near Pham Ngu Lao.

Travel books recommend Saigon's Pham Ngu Lao area, and it is indeed reasonably safe and cheap. Most tourists eat and sleep here with few problems, taking advantage of the low prices. The neighborhood has a dark side though, giving it a bad reputation among Saigon’s residents.

In among the shops and legal street vendors, are many hustlers. Attracted by the foreigners with money, there are many scammers. The cyclo, taxi and motorbike drivers tend to be the worst offenders. Some will charge a foreign backpacker double, or triple the usual fare.

The closest thing to violent crime in this neighborhood, is an occasional purse snatching. One day in Pham Ngu Lao, two young Vietnamese men on a motorbike grabbed a purse from an older western woman, knocking her to the ground in the process. While making their getaway, a nearby policeman tried to stop them with a flying kick. He missed. The driver then cut a sharp corner, skidded, and the bike ended up on the ground. That’s when the crowd descended. Vietnamese shopkeepers who had been watching this drama unfold, attacked. The two thieves took off running. The first was captured immediately. The second, pursued by more neighbors and police, was brought back in minutes. The woman’s purse was returned. Admittedly, it’s rare for purse snatchers to be caught, but it shows that average Vietnamese will occasionally gang up on street criminals. They are victimized by thieves even more than foreigners.

Then there are the drug pushers and pimps who pester the westerners, sometimes to the point of harassment. Take the case of Dave. He was walking through Pham Ngu Lao one night, when he came to a street corner. Heavy traffic forced him to wait before crossing, and a short young drug dealer approached him. “Marijuana? You want marijuana?”

“No,” he firmly replied.

With traffic heavy, he still couldn’t cross the street, and had to wait. The little Vietnamese drug pusher pestered him further, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Final straw: the pusher tugged his shirt sleeve.

Wondering if the little pest was trying to pick his pocket, Dave lost his temper, swearing at the pusher to finally leave him alone. The pusher came right back at him, and the confrontation nearly escalated into a fight. Knowing that few pushers in Vietnam have guns, Dave could have easily pummeled him, but decided to do the right thing and inform the police. He quickly walked to a nearby police station.

Inside, he heatedly explained what had happened, informing them that the drug dealer was only 50 feet down the road. If they hurried, the police could easily catch him. The policemen stoically listened to the upset foreigner, and did nothing. They declined to leave the station, and instead began setting up a DVD player to watch a movie!

Infuriated at their inaction, Dave lost his temper again. “You’re worthless,” he bellowed at the policemen, “absolutely worthless!”

He then stormed out of the police station. He couldn’t get them to arrest the two-bit drug dealer, but he still felt better. After all, he had yelled at a roomful of lazy policemen, insulted them, and had gotten away with it. Apparently Dave wasn’t the only person who decided that that particular police station was worthless. Months later, the station was torn down.

New location of Godmother's Bar. The Godmother is a battle scarred ex-Viet Cong.

One night in Pham Ngu Lao, I checked out a hole in the wall bar popular with long term expats. Once inside, a buddy introduced me to the Godmother. As I shook her hand, I managed to avoid staring. The Godmother has a deformed face. Her left eye is out of place, and her nose has been shortened, twisted off to one side. The Godmother may have a scarred face, but she’s lucky to be alive today. The left side of her face was torn up by a grenade blast during the Tet offensive in 1968. At the time, the Godmother was a 17 year old Viet Cong fighter, taking on the American Army.

This female war veteran owns this bar, and it is appropriately named,  “Godmother’s Bar”. As her name implies, the Godmother is from a very connected family. Her relatives had fought on the communist side for decades, first battling the French, and then the Americans.

As the war ended, Saigon boomeranged from capitalism, to communism, and back to capitalism again. The Godmother went along for the ride. She went from being a communist Viet Cong guerilla, to a respected businesswoman today. Since her side won the war, her family’s political connections have paid off well. The Godmother owns four bars in the city, and has her hands in a few other businesses as well.

Her connections have even benefitted her foreign customers. When one of her long time German customers was robbed of his mobile phone, one of the thieves was immediately caught. The stolen phone ended up in the possession of the police, who refused to return it. It only took one call from the Godmother, and the phone was returned to its rightful owner.

She spends most of her time these days at Godmother’s Bar. It’s popular with expats living in Saigon, especially the English teachers. Without air conditioning, foreigners still come for the food and low prices. A bottle of beer is only 20,000 Vietnam Dong, about US $1.20. Some of her regulars even include American veterans of the war, who have returned to live in Saigon. I’ve watched her toast and drink with these old veterans on occasion, men she would have eagerly killed in her youth.

Today there are no hard feelings between them. She doesn’t speak much English, but between these old war veterans, words aren’t really needed. In her bar, everybody knows who everybody is, and what their past is. The war is in the past, and she's happy to welcome them as her customers.

My buddy Kenny, the former US Marine veteran from the war, is a frequent customer here, and the two old adversaries are friends now. Since he’s friendly and speaks some Vietnamese, he’s popular with the Godmother, and the bar staff. One night in the bar, a loud drunken American was being rather belligerent. Spewing obscenities, he shoved one of the bartenders off a stool. Kenny stood up, and walked over to his fellow American. Then Kenny picked him up, and threw the drunken idiot out of the bar into the street.

You don’t mess with Kenny, or his friends at Godmother’s.

STREETWISE CHILD WHERE EAST MEETS WEST

The neon lights of a bar in Pham Ngu Lao

"Saigon hasn’t changed. It’s the same now as it was then. The bustle, the hustle, the prostitutes. Except now there’s more traffic, more pollution. But Saigon hasn’t changed.”

This is the view from Ed, another American war veteran I met who has returned to live in Vietnam again. Ed was in the US Army back then, and served two tours of duty. He began as a company clerk, (like Radar on M*A*S*H) before switching to communications. Since he had an administrative job based in Saigon, his military service wasn’t particularly dangerous. He had a much easier time as a clerk in the big city, than the infantrymen who were out fighting the Viet Cong in the countryside.

Ed tired of the fast paced life in America, and with a soft spot in his heart for Vietnam, he came back to live here two years ago.

“I like Vietnam,” he says. “I like the people. I like the slower pace of life here.”

Ed rented a building in the touristy Pham Ngu Lao neighborhood, and opened a respectable restaurant bar. (There are still some disreputable bars around.) He named it the ‘Buddha Bar’, and runs it with his pretty Vietnamese girlfriend. Ed says proudly of his cooking, “I make a great Po-Boy sandwich.”

Before they took over the property and made it a reputable place, the previous bar here was much different. This locale used to be a darkened bar frequented by prostitutes. It was closed after the Vietnamese woman in charge was arrested. She was jailed for human trafficking, for sending Vietnamese prostitutes to Cambodia. As tourism rises, the Pham Ngu Lao neighborhood is improving. It’s becoming less seedy, and more gentrified.

Pham Ngu Lao has long been a well known neighborhood for budget travelers. It’s packed full of cheap hotels, restaurants, travel agencies, internet cafés and souvenir shops. The low prices bring foreign English teachers here as well. Due to globalization, English is now the second language of almost everyone in Vietnam doing business with foreigners, especially for tourism.

In recent years, Vietnam has seen a tourism explosion. With the war over the borders opened, foreign visitors soon discovered Vietnam’s scenery and pristine beaches, It’s reasonably safe, cheap, and tourism has grown every year since the end of the Cold War.

With the rise of tourism, some businesses in town have taken English names to attract more foreigners. “Big Man Beer” is one warped example. But translation can also be a problem. An oddly named restaurant I spotted in Pham Ngu Lao is called, “Dung Café”. Dung is actually a Vietnamese name here, but I don’t think they get a lot of foreign business.

The buzzing Saigon neighborhood of Pham Ngu Lao, where many westerners stay. 'Dung Cafe' is on this road.

On the sidewalks around the neighborhood, street vendors are everywhere. They  sell sunglasses, street food, cigarettes, watches, chewing gum, shoe shines, and on and on.

As I amble down the street, I hear a voice ask me, “Buy some book?” I turn to see a walking bookseller, toting a single stack of more than 30 counterfeit books. The towering stack is wrapped with a single cloth, and balanced high on her hip. Impressive.

To the long term residents here, flower vendor Ngoc is a familiar sight. Ngoc is a cute, intelligent Vietnamese girl. Only ten years old, she has already been selling flowers at night on Pham Ngu Lao’s streets for five years. Ngoc speaks English, and learned it only through her flower sales to foreigners. She speaks it fairly well, but she’s nearly illiterate, since she doesn’t attend school.

Fortunately Ngoc has been wise enough to steer clear of the foreign pedophiles (you may have heard of Gary Glitter) who have prowled around Vietnam. She often sold flowers or chewing gum to foreign English teachers, who quickly recognized her intelligence. Seeing her need for an education, a group of them took up a collection, and paid for school tuition for her for six months.

Ngoc began attending the school. One month later, she was back on the street selling flowers, and no longer attending. Ngoc’s mother wanted the money from her daughter’s flower sales, much more than she wanted her daughter to have an education.

For the child vendors and child beggars in the neighborhood, the foreign visitors are easy targets. Generous and well meaning tourists give with the best intentions, but they unintentionally keep up a vicious circle. When they give money to a begging child, or child vendor, they’re only condemning the child to more life on the streets.

The reality is that the children get little of the cash themselves. Most of the money goes to the adults who are exploiting them. Fagin would have felt right at home here.

AMERICAN WAR VET IN VIETNAM TODAY

View from Marble Mountain on coast near Danang. Kenny's old Marine base was located down this road.

When I first met Kenny in Vietnam, I never would have thought that this easygoing American had a rough and dangerous past. His voice is pleasant and calm. He’s a man that seems comfortable with himself, and with his current surroundings in Vietnam. He’s big, tall, and in great physical shape. You wouldn’t think that he’s 61 years old. His name fits his personality well. it’s not Kenneth, or Ken, it’s Kenny. He’s a plain talking, friendly mid-westerner from Iowa with an eagle tattoo on his forearm.

An English teacher friend introduced us, and with Kenny’s easygoing demeanor, he was always good to chat with over a beer. It was during these chats that I learned about his military past.

Kenny is a former US Marine, who served as a medic with a Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol (LRRP) back in 1969. Nicknamed, ‘Lurps’, they were much like commandos, an elite unit that often fought behind enemy lines. Although he was based just south of Danang, Kenny spent much of his time in the field across the border in Laos. There he took part in dangerous reconnaissance missions along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the infamous supply line of the communist forces. This was at a time when ‘officially’, there were no American soldiers fighting in Laos.

Sometimes his unit operated in jungle so dense, that there weren’t clearings big enough that would allow helicopters to land and take them out. On those missions, helicopters had to hoist his unit out of the jungle, lifting them above the forested canopy on the end of a long cable.

As a LRRP medic, Kenny had to be not just a fighter, but also a field doctor, treating the war wounds of many of his fallen comrades. Taking part in many dangerous missions, it wasn’t long before he was wounded himself. He saw the worst side of war. The Vietnam War left many strong men physically and emotionally scarred, including Kenny.

After he returned to the states, like many Vietnam veterans, Kenny faced a difficult life. He had a series of failed marriages. At one point, he was living out of a van. He basically went from being an elite soldier, to a hippie.

With his background as a medic, he knew a lot about drugs. After he left the military, he became a heroin addict. But Kenny’s tough. Over time he eventually overcame his heroin addiction. As he grew older, another challenge came along: throat cancer. Kenny beat that too.

These days Kenny is still affected by Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from his war experiences. “I still have nightmares,” he once told me, “but not as much as I used to.” More than anything else, Kenny is a survivor.

When America’s soldiers finished their tour of duty in Vietnam, most left and never came back. Kenny is a Vietnam veteran who not only returned, but he now calls Southeast Asia home. He doesn’t keep a regular apartment. He spends a lot of time living in guest houses between Vietnam, Cambodia, and other countries in the region. He also speaks Vietnamese, not fluently, but well enough to get by.

For the most part, Kenny has come to terms with his past, and is proud of his military service back in the 60’s. “I’m still Semper Fi,” he says, a shortened marine mantra which means, “Always Faithful”. When Kenny walks down the street, he still stands tall, with the good posture and confident step that he learned as a young marine.

Children play in southeastern Laos river near the former Ho Chi Minh Trail, Kenny's unit fought near here

Kenny’s been free of heroin and other hard drugs for years, but he’s still no angel. Today he sometimes smokes marijuana, and occasionally patronizes prostitutes. He’s no wild man though. He prefers to spend more of his time sharing stories with friends over a cocktail, relaxing and playing pool. I played him a sometimes, and rarely won.

Despite all that Kenny’s endured, he has a balance to his life now, and seems to have found peace with himself. As a result of the PTSD, he now gets disability and social security. With the low cost of living in Vietnam, this gives him more money than he needs. He wouldn’t call himself retired though. Kenny  occasionally leads scuba diving trips around southeast Asia. These are not trips for the weak; he runs them similar to how things were back when he was a marine. His tours cover multiple countries, traveling fast, while getting in as many scuba dives as they can.

“I don’t need the money. I do these trips to give myself something to do,” he told me. Scuba diving is a passion for him.

One day, Kenny was at a train station in Vietnam, and an older porter came to help him with his bags. Being his friendly self, and speaking some Vietnamese, Kenny struck up a conversation with him. It turned out the porter was also a war veteran, a former soldier of the North Vietnamese Army. After the two spoke for a while, Kenny discovered that this old soldier had also fought in the same valley of Laos where Kenny used to fight along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It was possible that their units had even fought against each other. Like Kenny, this old soldier had been wounded too.

But that was years ago. All the old hatreds were gone, and the past was past. When before these men would have quickly killed each other, now they could talk and share stories.

Kenny has his pension, so he isn’t in need of anything. On the other hand, the other old veteran’s pension is very small, which is why he still has to work as a train station porter.

Before they parted, Kenny held out his hand to his old adversary. “Peace,” Kenny said to him.

The other veteran shook his hand, and smiled. ”Peace,” he said back in agreement.

 The old hatreds between these two old warriors, had been replaced with mutual respect.