Daniel Stolar
Vietnam Challenged
Hanoi
"The first time I came to Vietnam, I got off the plane and someone handed me an M-16; this time they handed me a bouquet of flowers. Guns into flowers, how's that for hippie progress?" Jerry Stadtmiller was twenty years old when, a month into his tour, two AK-7 rounds ripped into his face. Where once he had an eye, there is now only a sunken orbit of smooth skin; his nose and jaw have a sort of Picasso-like looseness to them. After nearly one hundred operations, he's left with five percent of his sight, no sense of smell, none of his original teeth, one third of his tongue. Over the next couple weeks I will have the opportunity to spend several days on a tandem bicycle with Jerry. It is a surprisingly intimate, almost visceral connection--his hands at my hips, my balance dependent on the semicircular canals of his middle ears. Each time he shifts or adjusts, something he does constantly, it is translated along the top tube into my body. There is a rawness to Jerry--part physical, part something else; as our teammate, the cyclist Greg LeMond, will put it: "You gotta love Jerry, he drools on you." But these observations point to a lesson I will have to learn and relearn over the next three weeks: to not reduce him to his disabilities, to not assume that every aspect of his personality has its root in the damage done by those two Vietnamese bullets. Likewise, on this bike ride through Vietnam, it will take a conscious effort to remember that the veterans on our team are not a set of characteristics determined solely by their war experiences. Jerry is corny, emotional, obscene, moralistic, irreverent, inspiring, funny, gossipy, generous, outrageous, snide. The joke about the flowers is one of his very few that I could print. But now, on the tarmac of the Hanoi airport, as we are treated to the handshakes and bouquets and speeches of the first of many warm and generous Vietnamese receptions, he is one of several American veterans--still relative strangers to me--choked up by being back in Vietnam. I watch their faces. Ever since we poked through the clouds, the non veterans on our team have watched the veterans edge nervously to the windows for their first view of this country in more than twenty-five years. From five or ten thousand feet in the air, it must look almost exactly as it did then.
Over the next three weeks, our column of uniformed American will attempt to push its way down the length of Vietnam--on bicycle. The route this time is the opposite of the U.S. military's proposed route thirty years ago: from North to South, from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. And in some small way, our mission is to undo what was done before as American and Vietnamese, able-bodied and disabled, Veteran and neophyte all ride side by side in a symbolic thousand mile bike ride for awareness, empowerment and reconciliation. I am a member of the approximately twenty person volunteer staff for the Vietnam Challenge, the most ambition project to date of World T.E.A.M. (The Exceptional Athlete Matters) Sports, a Charlotte, N.C. based organization dedicated to demonstrating the "unifying power of sports," usually through challenge events in which able-bodied athletes and athletes with disabilities compete together. The added twist to this project is that many of the cyclists are Vietnam War Veterans--both American and Vietnamese--some able-bodied, some who lost limbs or eyesight or mobility in the war. Almost all with emotional scars.
Before we pedal the first mile, we will spend three days in Hanoi introducing ourselves and preparing for the ride. These days are spent largely in meetings in the conference room of the Metropol Hotel, a Western-style hotel, several blocks from the hotel where we are staying. For many of the American Vets, like for Jerry, just being in Hanoi is enough to jolt the senses. My own efforts to understand these reactions will be aided throughout the trip by the first teammate I meet, fellow Tucsonan Dean McKee. Dean is a readjustment counseling therapist at the vet center in Tucson, and like me, he is on the temporary Challenge staff, in his case in the role of therapist. A former pilot, Dean tells me of flying the fixed-wing "Spooky" gunships on raids over Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. "Those things were murderous," Dean tells me with clear, serious eyes. "I killed a lot of people over there." He also suffered. One day, Dean and another pilot exchanged crews and Dean's entire six-man crew was shot down and killed. By the time he returned to the States, Dean's wife, who had supported his decision to go to flight school, had become a "dove," and their marriage could not survive the gulf. Even before we leave the U.S., Dean and I form a friendship that will grow stronger over the next weeks in Vietnam and in the months after the trip, but we have no sooner entered into this conversation than Dean tells me it will be the last time until after the trip that we talk about his personal experiences, that his job as the team's therapist precludes it. He will stay true to his word. Over the course of our trip, Dean will tell me about the importance for vets with post traumatic stress of returning to the symbolic stressor, of "validating" the experience. He tells me that both the therapeutic potential and the potential downside of this trip are tremendous. The vets will begin to share some of their incredible stories during these meetings in Hanoi, but their most revealing reactions will be on the periphery of things, in hushed conversations of twos or threes, in anxious moments alone, some of which I will find about later.
There are no Vietnamese in these early meetings. As will be the case throughout the trip, logistics will dictate policy--the simple fact is that any meeting which includes Vietnamese translations takes three times as long and meetings of this length would become unbearable, but the absence of our twenty Vietnamese teammates from these tone-setting meetings is also telling, and throughout the ride, we will struggle to bridge the gap. The language barrier alone is nearly impossible to traverse, and good translators are in regrettably short supply on our trip; in fact, in what will prove to be a remarkable oversight, there is not a single translator who is regularly on bicycle.
There is an episode of early controversy. Wayne Smith, one of two black team members takes the podium the third morning. He says that he has been visited in the night by two spirits: the first one is war, Wayne says, echoing the thoughts of his fellow veterans; the second spirit is racism, Wayne says, and the room goes quiet. "I'm looking around this room now and I don't see the same America I saw in the war." It is an explosive moment for many reasons. For one, the camera is rolling--as will be the case throughout the trip, the Sports Illustrated documentary film team creates an additional audience, and it is sometimes difficult to tell when the emotions are--consciously or unconsciously--playing to the camera. The permanent staff of World Team Sports and the WTS Board members are furious; the project that they have poured their lives and money into for the past two years is in danger of being undermined in front of rolling cameras and the whole team--before we've pedaled the first mile. Wayne has been with the project three days; he can't possibly know what has gone into assembling this team. I overhear the suggestion that Wayne is using this forum to push his own agenda--for the past three years he has been working on a memorial for Black Veterans of The Revolutionary War--and that he knows that controversy is what's most likely to survive the documentary's editing. Over the next couple hours and days, I overhear harsh, harsh words spoken in response to his comments. And yet, as I look around the room, I can't help but agree that this is not a representative sample. Though several of the staff members have disabilities, none are minorities. I find myself largely siding with Wayne, though I think it unfortunate that he has used the word racist. I wonder if choosing different terms might have led to serious reflection instead of this knee-jerk defensiveness and fury. For me, this incident and, just as importantly, the reaction to it, will introduce several themes which dominate my thinking about the trip: the power of the camera, the role of self-interest in what is to be a humanitarian effort, the difficulty for each person to step outside of his or her own story. Is it not this inability, I will wonder repeatedly on this trip through a country whose name has become synonymous with a war, exaggerated a million-fold from the level of the individual to the level of the country, which leads to war in the first place? I will come to know Wayne over the next one thousand miles. He is an intelligent, introspective, articulate and measured man, a man who has seen more than his fair share of trouble and come out the other side. When, two weeks later, I ask him privately about his comments, he will say that as much as he appreciates this project and its mission, he stands by what he said, including his choice of words.
The morning we are to leave Hanoi several city blocks are cordoned off as we are treated to an elaborate send-off with a marching band and a synchronized sixty-person martial arts demonstration. Music from the band clashes with the patriotic music blaring out of bullhorn speakers on the lead vehicle as the Challenge team takes to the bikes. There are approximately eighty riders (including the twenty Vietnamese) ten on hand cycles, four pairs on tandems, seven vans, two jeeps full of police and countless more police in a motorcycle escort. Sidestreets and sidewalks are crammed full as one of Hanoi's major thoroughfares has been choked off during rush hour. Some in the crowd are clearly baffled by this group of mostly Americans in yellow and black uniforms and helmets--we resemble a swarm of aerodynamic bumblebees more than anything--but most wave to us, cheer us on. "Hello," they shout. And we shout back, waving, "Xing Ciao. Xing Ciao." In the din of horns and sirens and music and shouting, it is too loud to hear our walkie-talkies or shout instructions between bikes. The scene is as chaotic as it is inspiring. It is lucky that one of our bike mechanics spots the hand cyclist dropping out of the pack with a flat tire after less than a mile, because the message never could have been communicated otherwise.
Team Meeting - Vinh
We have just finished the second day of biking when Gruffie Clough, World TEAM Sports's team-building consultant, calls for that rarest of entities, a meeting which isn't about the impossible logistics of moving this odd group of 80 people and their bikes across the country. Important to the mission of this trip is that it is more than adventure travel; this is designed to be a transformative event, and as much as we'll focus on broadcasting our message, we all realize that perhaps the best hope for lasting change is within the team itself. Gruffie's job on this trip will be especially difficult as several factors--the language barrier, the endless logistics, the overlapping but often distinct missions--seem to conspire against her, and she often seems to be chomping at the bit of what she wishes she could accomplish.
At this point, early in our trip, this meeting is for Americans only, and the veterans quickly take over. We are in a dusty, gray cement cube of a meeting room inside a dusty, gray cement cube of a hotel. I wonder if the oppressive architecture--so clearly Eastern Bloc--reminds the veterans of their loss. Does it further complicate the matter by simultaneously pointing out the limitations of the victors, reinforcing the American conception I'm beginning to sense that inferior somehow beat superior in this war? Many of the veterans still seem to be involved in staking out their territory. Are you with us or against us? They tell their war stories. And I have to admit that like most of the staff leaders of the generation born during the war, I probably contribute to this dynamic. I hang on every word. At this point, at the beginning of the trip, I want to hear the gory details. I want to know where guys served and what they did. If they slept with prostitutes and tried opium. How they were shot.
We have ridden far; the town is dark and drab and dusty. And just as some vets relish the cathartic possibilities and the spotlight of telling these stories, others emphatically don't want any part of it. The meeting designed to foster "teaming" is quickly deteriorating. Wade Sanders is suddenly on his feet, declaring: "We came over here to fight a war. War is an ugly thing. I'm not going to sit here and whine about what we did. I signed up to come here because I believed in the war."
Just as abruptly, Arman, a retired school teacher from upstate New York, is up and talking. "Nobody's whining. Just because we don't agree with a wrong war doesn't make us cry babies. And how can you not feel bad about the pain inflicted on this country which has nothing to do with ours?"
"I was a soldier; I did my duty."
"That doesn't make everything o.k."
You can feel the room divide into camps, some siding with Wade, many more siding with Arman. Even the men who say the other vets should get over it, say so with revealing vehemance. ("All that geopolitical stuff is one thing," Dean McKee, the vets counselor, will respond to my frequent questions, "but the guys who fought the fucking war need to sleep at night.") The only consensus reached in our meeting is that the vets want to have a vets-only meeting afterward, without World TEAM Sports staff or other non-veterans. But with the documentary film team.
Later that night, I have my first real personal exposure to the famed psychological demons of this war. It is after 1:00 a.m. and I am one of the last to head up to my hotel room when I see Duane coming toward me from the darkness across the highway in this dreary ghost of a town. Duane lost both his legs from the knee down to a mortar in this country. He is an accomplished cyclist and he boasts that he is the best double prosthetic walker in the United States, and, indeed, to see him in pants, you have to look closely to even detect a wobble. For this trip, he has had specially constructed American flag prosthetics made. Now, he is flushed, sweaty, panicky. He can't finish a sentence, or stand still. "Oh man, oh man." He weaves on his glittering red, white and blue prosthetics, two steps forward, two back. "Oh man, I mean," he says, motioning wildly to the darkness, "that was them, that was Charlie, right out there, all around. That was it, man. I'm scared." I know enough of the lingo of post traumatic stress disorder to mentally label what I'm seeing: hypervigilance, perseverating. I spend the better part of an hour talking to Duane (talking him down is how I think of it) and eventually I walk him back to his hotel room in a different building; he doesn't want to walk back alone. Then I knock on the door of Dean Mckee and wake him up. To my surprise, he is already aware of Duane's situation, and decides that if he is settled in his room with his roommate, best not to disturb him. Though I can't speak for Dean who is always professionally close-lipped about these things, I will come to realize that some portion of the staff thinks that there is secondary gain in Duane's symptoms, and I hear it remarked that his symptoms tend to be most pronounced when the documentary film team is nearby. This is not the case when we talk this second night of riding.
On Bikes
For long stretches we ride past the incredible verdant green of rice paddies immortalized in countless Vietnam War movies. I almost expect to hear choppers overhead, to watch the paddies explode. If this is my association, how must the vets feel? What we see instead are kids streaming from the horizon toward the road, running along the raised paths between rice paddies to greet us. They stand on the side of the road and shout Hello, hello, hello. We high five them as we glide past. Even the adults point at the hand cycles and tandems and giggle. Particularly touching are the many amputees who walk or crutch their way to the side of the road on wood pegs or without prosthetics altogether. Even from bicycle, we see the dawning understanding in their faces as they study our group going past; suddenly they are beaming, pointing excitedly back and forth between their own injuries and the hand cyclists, pumping their arms in encouragement.
In the back pockets of our bicycle jerseys, we have wads of postcards with a first-day picture of the entire team. On the opposite side is an explanation of the Challenge in Vietnamese. When we stop for breaks, we are swarmed by the kids, and the postcards seem to make a valued gift. In this country of well over ninety percent literacy, it strikes me as a meaningful gift as well. I watch as even some of the younger children turn over the postcards, and, smiles still lingering on faces, read the back. They look up at our strange group with new perspective. Here we are, Americans and Vietnamese, able-bodied and disabled, and though it may just be a moment in one hard rural work day out of a lifetime of hard rural work days, it's possible to feel that we've made an impression, maybe even influenced some attitudes.
Some of the vets are especially good with the kids. Artie Guerrero with his broad face and enormous biceps, is close to the ground in his hand cycle. "Vietnam-USA Number one," he shouts in a deep baritone which always seems to emerge from the center of a throng of children. The two bullets in the spine he received in Vietnam have combined with multiple sclerosis to whither his legs, and his hulking upper body tapers into spaghetti strap legs. There are other gifts that we pass out, metal pins, stickers which don't convey the mission of the trip and these don't leave me with such a good feeling; as we toss these to the throngs of kids, I can't help thinking that we are the rich Western power bartering our useless bounty for adulation. Still, it's impossible to look at the faces--of the children especially--wide eyed, smiling, shouting, and not wonder how two peoples could ever be driven to kill each other. Impossible not to ask that fundamental question: what is it that we learn during the course of our lives?
Dud Hendrick, our daily director of operations, and the commander of an Explosive Ordinance Disposal Team during the war, points out from his bike the pits and craters still left from American bombs. "I used to see them from the air when I flew over," he says. "The entire country was pock-marked." At our rest breaks, Dud names for me the unexploded ordinance that we occasionally encounter.
"The last person I killed was near here." This is Wade Sanders, riding next to me, and until the moment he says it, he's really been pissing me off. For the first time on the trip, I'm one of the two staff members in charge of maintaining the front of our pack. Over the past few days, I've heard a lot of conversation about how difficult this job is, and partly because it doesn't strike me as difficult, I've volunteered to do it today, at the end of one of our longer, harder, hotter days. We are caked in hot dust, our mouths grimy, our saddles sore. As a group, I think it's safe to say that our ambassadorial good-will is fraying. "He was fourteen years old," Wade goes on, "I sent his effects back to his family. He had a note on him which asked whoever found him to do this."
Wade is difficult for me to understand. He has solid, squared off features and looks the part of the military man that he still is--he has spent the last thirty years in a military career, most recently as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Reserve Affairs. He seems to feel no remorse for having killed the boy; I sense respect for the boy, sorrow for his family, but I don't sense any of the ambivalent feelings about his role in the war which many of the other vets share. Still, as I look at the impenetrable dark shades staring ahead, it seems clear that he is moved by the memory. (The last night of the trip, Wade, who has never seemed to make much of an effort to ingratiate himself to the Vietnamese--or to most of the team for that matter--will sing a rousing solo, acapella rendition of the Woody Guthrie song, "Put an end to war." The translator does his best to translate. I hear later that many of the Vietnamese team members find this the single most moving moment of the trip, even as a couple of Wade's American teammates mumble about his hypocrisy. )
Wade has spent the entire trip near the front and now he is part of a group of cyclists--approximately half Vietnamese, half American--competitively jockeying to be in the first couple rows as we approach town. I don't get it. This is not a race; in fact, the pace is almost painfully slow for the better bikers, most of whom hang toward the back to enjoy the occasional sprint of bringing someone with mechanical problems back to the pack. Yet this has been a constant issue during the course of the ride, and especially for the last few miles before riding into town at the end of each day. There has been repeated grumbling among the Americans that the Vietnamese insist on being first into town. To me, the grumbling itself undermines the point. Why do the Americans care? If the Vietnamese want to be the first into their own towns, so be it. And, as I am being edged into the outside of the fourth row, I have to acknowledge that this is a more difficult task than I could have imagined. The American riders shout instructions to Vietnamese: three to a row, no passing on the right, you're riding too close; the Vietnamese smile grimly and continue doing whatever it is they are doing. There are no translators here. Wade, for one, is explicit in his intentions: "This is the town where I was stationed, I want to ride in first." A minute ago, I thought Wade's insistence on being near the front remarkably childish--I was on the verge of telling him so; now I glimpse yet again how little I know as I try to imagine what it means to go through the personal effects of the fourteen year-old you've just killed--if, as in Wade's case, it helps to believe that the cause is just.
Greg LeMond will add his usual personality to this mix--that of well-intentioned, but incorrigible trouble-maker--as he zooms suddenly ahead of the entire group, presenting the temptation, universally irresistible to anyone on a bike, to pull away from the pack with Greg LeMond. Throughout the trip, Greg's presence will be a welcome breath of fresh air amid the often frenzied seriousness of logistics and safety, and the sheer baseline democracy of the man is something that transcends sport. He may not always behave himself, but he'll merrily misbehave with all people equally, and when he's with you--on a bike, in a disco, drinking a beer on the beach--he's entirely with you. I have the same respect for our other celebrity athlete, the swimmer Diana Nyad, whose quietly forthright style couldn't be more different, but whose enthusiasm and dedication are equally important. But now, when we've barely gotten the front of the pack in control, and Greg whizzes past me, I'm ready to throttle him.
At the day's final water break, the team leaders huddle up. We lay down the law: a row of hand cyclists will enter town first, two Vietnamese and one American. We corral LeMond by putting him on the front of a tandem. I can see Wade bristle at the fact that he will not be in the first row into town. Through translators who are riding in support vans--and are thus available to us only at breaks--we explain the procedure to the Vietnamese riders. But the dynamic is an interesting one: this group of American team leaders telling the Vietnamese riders how to ride in their own country. Just as there were no Vietnamese in the orientation meetings, there are no Vietnamese among the team leaders and none is carrying one of our fifteen walkie-talkies, a visible and all-too-audible sign of authority.
On another level, the Vietnam-USA society, the Vietnamese police, the People's Committee of the town we are riding into--these Vietnamese groups form what seem to be shifting, uneasy, and provincial coalitions, and they control, to an often infuriating degree, what our entire group does. Often we are slowed to a crawl outside of town covering the last three or four miles in an hour (at the end of 90 miles and eight hours on our bikes) so that we can arrive according to some schedule unknown to any of us. Not only does the group not understand why we are being put through this physically painful slowing, we don't even understand who is making the decision. Blame circles around us. There is a fair amount of under-the-breath, culturally insensitive generalizing and I can't help but feel it myself: they don't know how to run these things, they are more worried about show, everything here is a hundred times more difficult than it needs to be. There can be little doubt that the resentment many of us feel toward the unseen Vietnamese controlling our destiny spills over into our feelings toward the Vietnamese riding next to us with whom we can share only the simplest words and hand gestures. Maybe if we could talk to them, we could cut through the differences, share some universal impatience with the beaurocracy which holds us hostage. But, again, there are no translators on bike.
Even further behind the scenes, there is another, tenser, more telling struggle for power. For over two years, the WTS staff has been organizing this event and the process has been torturous. The executive director of WTS is my good friend Steve Whisnant, the reason I am along for this ride in the first place, and I know that he has poured his life into this thing, traveling to Vietnam six times over the past year and a half, regularly arriving at his office at 4:30 a.m. so that he could reach Vietnam on the phone, working late into the night. This is the largest collection of American veterans in Vietnam since the evacuation of Saigon; far more miraculous than our thousand-mile bike ride is the fact that we are here at all. Not a single brick of the path which has led us to this point has been put in place without extensive negotiation and the results are often of tremendous symbolic importance: a ceremony at the Vietnamese tomb of the unknown soldier, the inclusion of only North Vietnamese, the staunch refusal to allow some of the American vets to detour from the ride to visit the places they were stationed.
Yet for all of these small Vietnamese victories, the larger picture shows a bike ride which is an uniquely American idea, proposed by Americans, organized by Americans, carried out largely by Americans. I get the sense that to some extent we have shoved this ride down their throats and that on some level the Vietnamese making us wait now is an effort to salvage control of this event taking place on their own soil. Here again, consider the symbolism: a team of Americans imposing their will on Vietnam, in Vietnam.
The truth is, it often seems that if the Vietnamese officials assigned to our charge had their druthers, we'd bike the first five miles out of town accompanied by a noisy police escort, then load up the bikes, hop in vans and shuttle to five miles outside of the next town where we'd again begin riding to renewed fanfare, thus maximizing visibility while minimizing risk. WTS staff members will tell me that this is the influence of communism--there is no motivation to take risks; success in this system is nothing more than the absence of a failure for which one can be held culpable. Graft is rampant. As if justifying their frustration, several of the World Team Sports permanent staff will cite for me the same magazine article where Vietnam is ranked as the second most difficult country in the world to do business in. They will tell me how foreign companies--most notably Chrysler--saw the demographics of financial potential here and invested in plants only to see their efforts bogged down in endless difficulty. I don't doubt that there's truth in these interpretations, but I wonder if there isn't more at work here. We agonize over these last few miles into town; throughout the trip, we agonize over the Vietnamese officials trying to limit the amount of miles we'll cover in a day. We complain about them, about how they are getting in the way of our doing this ride, but I can't help but wonder: did they want this in the first place? Sure, now that it's an actuality, they will share in its success at the times when it's successful--and that will lead to a certain, distinctly American brand of for-their-own-good rationalization on our part--but did they want this? And I wonder, in Vietnam, of all places, do we want to get into thinking along the lines of doing something for their own good?
Eventually we get the front of our pack under control, and after meeting up with the police motorcycle escort and the unofficial escort of countless civilians on mopeds, we get the official word (from what unseen voice?) passed down to the members of Vietnamese-American society accompanying us and again to our police escort to ride into town. Here again, there is a shift in the group's spirit as we ride between the shouting throngs of people along the side of the road. Are they here to see us? As a result of the stopped traffic? Whatever the case, they are mostly shouting and waving, welcoming us into town.
We are met at the entrance to the hotel by young Vietnamese women in the beautiful, flowing ao dai. They intersperse within our group, seeking out each biker to hand us a bouquet of flowers. In the smaller towns, the hotel is invariably block-like, usually gray cement, as the architecture is always the most immediately recognizable sign of the decades of Communist Eastern-bloc influence. Members of our advance team hand out m&m's and Cokes, tell us where to leave our bikes, where we'll find our keys. Then there is a presentation. Members of the local People's Committee take their turns on the microphone. They give long, formal speeches welcoming us, referring to us as heroes, their new American friends. The local translators often struggle to make sense of it in English. We are hot, crusty with sweat, eager to shower and change clothes, but the reception is heartwarming. Eventually members of the People's Committee will present us with a group present, usually a glossy painting of a local landscape. A couple members of WTS's board of directors accept and make their own speeches, translated in turn to Vietnamese.
These men are traditional white male American power brokers and even at the end of hundred mile days, they look good with their strong chins jutting out over their shockingly clean collared shirts. They are comfortable standing in front of the People's Committee, accepting plaques and awards. If the American Western capitalist/consumer system is a mountain, these men sit on its pinnacle. And, as they look out over the team and the event that their money has largely made possible, it strikes me that the irony here runs thick. They have given away more money to this project than the People's Committee--not to mention the citizens of these small towns--can imagine. That non-profit ventures such as ours would be mostly impossible without the generosity of such civic-minded heads of industry is nearly a given in our country. And this does not diminish the importance or the good accomplished. But what should also not be taken for granted are the implications of this sort of largesse. Particularly here, where millions died defending their freedom from American imposition.
At the fulcrum of our system, our faith in capitalism and free markets, is what we can do. If we can create the structures which make the product which bring the income to pay the employees to buy the product, then everyone will have food in his belly, and democracy will have the baseline level of citizens' independence it needs to be viable. This is the theory. And in it, and in our national jargon, capitalism and democracy have become virtually synonymous, with freedom in the former equated to freedom in the latter. But even more than that, in our country, what we can do becomes a quick shorthand for who we are. This ride, in many ways, is the natural outgrowth of that system--at its essence is what we propose to do, to cover this distance with this group. To scale the mountain. Repeatedly on our trip, I am struck by what an American concept this whole thing is. As baffled as we are by the Vietnamese police and Vietnam-USA society not wanting to take the risk of us biking the entire way, they are equally baffled by our insistence on doing so. Our success or our failure--and even, to take it further, the virtue of our endeavor--will lie in our ability to do it. These men, up there now, accepting the awards, taking credit for what we're doing, are men who've made lives out of being able to do it. To literally, as the saying goes, make millions. But I can't help thinking that there's something missing from this equation. As Americans, we focus on our ability to make this ride happen, to do this thing, in spite of what we see as Vietnamese resistance. And in our success, we see our validation. Furthermore, we are validated by what is occurring on a larger scale as Vietnam, closed for years to the U.S. and the forces of capitalism, begins to open its doors. Defeated in war, we are seeing the ultimate victory of our system during peace. But this strikes me as a sort of social Darwinism, assigning superiority to a system simply because it best propagates itself, and even though, as a country, we have arrived at the point of denouncing our role in The Vietnam War, we are still quicker to point to the course of history and proclaim the ultimate victory of Our Way. The collapse of the Iron Curtain, the (until recently) worldwide economic boom spurred on by our insistence in the forces of unfettered capitalism--all lead to what I see as a national smugness, and I feel like I'm watching it being played out in miniature here.
What am I trying to say? Countless times over the three weeks, when things don't run smoothly, when we are convinced of Vietnamese inefficiency, when we take note of peasants farming with water buffaloes as they have for centuries, I will hear the jibe: "Can you believe we couldn't beat this country in a war?" And I wonder if one of the reasons that the Vietnam War is so embedded in the American psyche of the last half of this century is that it represents the most glaring example of what we could not do. There is a conflict here and I will see this conflict--between Americans and Vietnamese, between systems, between our desire to push ahead, to do, and their efforts to maintain control in their own country--as an extrapolation of the conflict thirty years before. Our intentions are hopefully more noble, our means certainly more peaceful, but still, there is an insistence on Our Way here and it makes me nervous. I mean here we are with our bright shiny bicycles and t-shirts full of corporate sponsors, pedaling through an actual flesh and blood communist country. A place where we waged war to stop communism, and lost, and now our new Cannondales, designed for adventure travel, are the nicest bikes in an entire country where everyone rides bicycles for transportation. Look at us. Look what we can do. And, by God, we're going to pull this thing off. The documentary cameras will make sure everybody knows it. And here are the captains of capitalism taking credit for it now.
The Hai Van Pass
There are days when it all works. January 9th, a day we have been building toward. The Hai Van Pass, a grueling six-mile, 3300 foot climb along some of the steepest switch backs I've ever seen. The morning includes two lesser climbs and by the time we stop for lunch, many of us are already hurting. The temperature is well into the 90's and at lunch there are stern announcements by several team leaders stressing that we don't all need to push it, that the vans are there to help us.
After lunch, the team spreads out as soon as we hit the incline. On our bikes, we are considerably quieter than usual. We are concerned especially about the hand cyclists. The incline magnifies the discrepancy in leverage. They cannot stand up on their pedals. Yet, to concede as a group that the hand cyclists will not make the pass would undermine our whole purpose; it is important to us all that this is an integrated challenge.
I hang near the back of the pack with a couple of the stronger riders and several of the hand cyclists. The many switch backs accentuate the distance between riders until we can only see a small number of our teammates. We spread out even further. I stay with Hung, a Vietnamese hand cyclist. Even as I ride by his side, I wonder if it is out of my own need to feel useful, to prove to myself the merit of what's going on here. Through one switch back, then another, I ride beside him. For me the work is strenuous. For Hung, this climb must be murderous. I ask him if he needs help. He shakes me off politely. I ask myself who I am doing this for. We have few words in common, but I am reminded of the section of my Vietnam guidebook which talks about the need to save face. This is how little I know about the country--after ten days here, I'm still mentally referring to the guidebook. How far will he push himself in order to save face? The steep continues with no end in sight. Above us, I see a support van with several of the Vietnamese contingent--including Vietnamese media--pulled over to the side. They are shouting encouragement, waving and clapping us on. Hung's enormous biceps are rippling with strain; he is soaking wet; we are crawling up this mountain.
Though I trained hard for this ride, I am by no means an accomplished cyclist. Before this trip I had never pushed anybody, hand cyclist or bicyclist, and I have no idea if I'll be able to do it on these steeps. About two miles into the mountain, we hit a particularly steep stretch. Hung is a proud man, quiet and ruggedly handsome, with long, beautiful flowing black hair, and I know that over the 400 miles we've covered so far, he hasn't accepted a single push. His face is grim and determined, his biceps straining. But he's nearly at a standstill. There is a vertical pole fixed into the back of his hand cycle to provide a handhold. I lean out over my bike and grab the pole. We've passed the van of Vietnamese and we are alone now in our section of road between switch backs. Maybe this is the reason he doesn't stop me. My front wheel wobbles and touches his side wheel, but we don't go down. And Hung doesn't protest. Soon we are crawling together up the mountain, a five-wheeled, two-person contraption powered by both arms and legs. And though I'm hesitant to speak for Hung, I'd like to think that as we climb this mountain together, we are both pushing through some kinds of boundaries.
But today is a breakthrough for the team in other ways. The power struggles which have accompanied this project throughout came to a head the night before. In a series of closed door meetings at the hotel, the Vietnamese working with the leadership of WTS announced that we would not be allowed to attempt the pass. They just didn't think this team could do it. For many Vietnamese, especially the members of the Vietnam-USA Society, this ride, gaining in publicity throughout, stood at the center of increasingly important American/Vietnamese relations and the downside potential of any disaster far out-weighed the importance of riding the actual miles. But for the morale of the team, the Vietnamese and Americans pedaling the miles, the opposite was true. Hai Van Pass was to be the heart of the Challenge.
The leadership of World TEAM Sports was furious. Of the many levels of relationships incorporated into this supposedly transformative event, I think we all realized that perhaps the most meaningful changes would be among team members, and our best hope for any elusive team unity would definitely be undermined by this last minute announcement. Finally, a couple of WTS permanent staff's leaders lost their tempers, something which (also according to my guidebook) is almost never done in Vietnam. We could see them through the glass door off the lobby in our hotel in Hue, the beautiful Colonial capital of Vietnam: the Vietnamese in their work pants and shirts, sitting glumly, the Americans in athletic shorts and t-shirts, standing up and sitting down, gesticulating wildly with their hands. For hours they were in that room. What could they possibly be discussing? Finally, I would learn later, there was an ultimatum by the leadership of World Team Sports: if we weren't allowed to try the pass, the whole trip was off, we'd pull everybody out of Vietnam. Two years of planning hinged on a moment.
I have to admit, even as a team leader for this event, but somebody outside of the WTS leadership, I didn't understand all the concern. So what if we didn't pedal the actual miles, if we took a van ride for the day? Was it worth this level of disagreement in the midst of an event supposedly symbolic of reconciliation?
Hung and I are among the last to make it to the top. In front of us and behind, we can see the magnificent shoreline, to our right are our teammates, clapping us on. Hung' s massive biceps ripple with strain, the veins bulge out of his forearms. We are both soaking wet. He nods me on, letting me know that I can let go of his hand cycle. A grudging smile comes over his stoic face. Our teammates swarm us, dousing us with water, high-fiving and hugging us. Even the police, usually so reserved with their pressed olive-green and red uniforms and expressionless faces, ignore our sweat and greet us with hugs. Sixteen hours earlier, they had been among WTS's staff's most entrenched opponents.
That night, I'm still heady with the emotion of the day. The entire project makes sense to me in a new way; the power of overcoming that mountain as a team has changed us, at least for the moment. Sitting in my concrete block of a hotel room that night, I take my turn to write a journal entry on one of the team's two lap tops for the educational web-site we are maintaining in the states. I can barely contain my enthusiasm as I conclude the day's entry with the following paragraph: "It is a small moment bridging the gap between people, between Vietnamese and American, between able-bodied and disabled. I don't want to overemphasize the importance of what we did, but I can't possibly overemphasize the power of what I felt. I have always found mountain passes inspiring--that moment when you can see the mountains falling away on both sides of you, when can simply see. . . over distances which used to be blocked off by the very land you've just crossed. It is a moment which makes me both humble and hopeful. And for today, at least, I am convinced of the power of trying to climb mountains--those inside of us as well as outside--in the hope that we might better see across the distances between us."
.
My Lai
A strange and hard day. From the Vietnam-USA society and the Vietnamese Police escorts to the individual members of the permanent staff of World Team Sports to the temporary Challenge staff to the team members, information is handed down imperfectly. On the one hand, word follows this rough chain of command, disseminating throughout the group, but on the other hand, in the endlessly shifting pack of riders and conversations, everybody talks to everybody. It would be an ideal testing ground for how rumors are spread. And when the subject is as hot as the site of the My Lai massacre, everybody is talking about it. But no one has the facts. The word changes throughout the day. The Vietnamese want us to make an appearance at the site of the My Lai Massacre. Many of the American Vets don't want to. It's some distance out of our way; some component of the visit will be optional.
We have ridden nearly eight-five miles when we are waved off of Highway 1 onto a paved but rutted road perpendicular to the highway. Is this the way to the memorial? Or to our hotel? Nobody seems quite clear. There is a fair amount of grumbling. The light is beginning to drain out of the sky and the swirling dust motes churned up by our bikes hold angled evening sunlight. Finally we are waved off the road into what proves to be the memorial's parking lot. It is a ten mile round trip out of our way--a haul for everyone at the end of this long and hot day, but particularly for the hand cyclists. (What we won't find out until we return to the highway in near total darkness is that we were less than half a mile from our hotel when we were waved off Highway 1 in the first place.) The American vets are visibly upset as they get off their bikes. This is what you call optional, they say, waiting outside in the parking lot?
Most of the American vets decide not to go in. Throughout the trip, there's been a sense of solidarity among the vets--something that most of the them clearly play into, and that a few try to avoid--a noticeable staking out of territory, so that many of the vets have made it a point to know where the others stand. I notice it now especially, as they watch each other make this decision. I decide to go in--the truth is I want to see the memorial, want also to see the reaction of those who decide to go in. I lean my bike against a tree, take my helmet in my hand and walk through the white stone gates in my skin-tight lycra bike shorts.
There is the famous statue ahead, a mother holding her dead baby, raising her fist to the heavens. It is the same statue we saw at Bach My Hospital, the hospital destroyed by the U.S. military in the Christmas bombings. There are the trees and ditches which still hold the bullets that killed women and children shot at point blank range. To the left are a couple of white stucco exhibition buildings. In the first building, a presentation is already taking place. I take a seat quietly in the back. A Vietnamese woman is telling the story of the massacre. Another woman is translating in halting English. She lists the atrocities singly: a seventy year-old man shot in the back, a five year old girl and her mother. The translator starts the recital of each atrocity with the words: "Then the American soldiers . . . " The repetition of those words, followed by the atrocity the soldiers committed is relentless. Is it the translation, a cultural way of speaking, or does she mean to hammer home these details, these numbers, to the visiting former soldiers? To show what our country did? Our Vietnamese team members are sullen. The American vets are visibly bristling.
I linger after the speech to work my way around the room of photographs, to read the captions. Again, I note the same relentless sort of blaming of the captions, and I cannot help but wonder if this is just the Anti-American rhetoric of a communist government, the outdated captions of an old museum, or some reasonable representation of a lingering anger toward Americans which I have not yet detected. I have been to concentration camp memorials which did not have nearly the air of vindictiveness I sense here.
I want to understand this. I want some final word to hold onto, to wrap my mind around. I hear one vet say that My Lai was the exception, an instance where one particular commander cracked. He obviously feels little connection to what happened here. I hear another vet say that this kind of thing was repeated in smaller scale throughout the war, that it made sense--it was impossible to tell who was a villager, who working with the Viet Cong. Impossible to know which farmer or old lady or little kid might try to kill you. For him, too, his explanation seems to sever any personal connection. But most of the vets who decided to go in, who are not kicking their feet angrily in the parking lot, move around silently, and the sullen shadows across their faces do not invite conversation.
Gnoc is one of our younger Vietnamese teammates, born years after the My Lai massacre. He is boyishly handsome, clean cut and athletic, and around his American teammates, he compensates for his very limited English with his enthusiasm. He is always ready with a beaming high-five or thumbs up or pat on the back. Seeing him coming toward me down the path, I forget myself for a moment. "Knock, knock," I say, my usual pun on his name which I've had explained to him. I raise my hand for a high five. But I am left with the idiotic grin frozen on my face. He has not forgotten where he is; he doesn't even look up at me.
Dalat
For many people, this is a low point of the trip. Intestinal problems and a flu bug have claimed probably a third of the group, too many late nights and early mornings have claimed another third. And, as we spend the day crammed in vans, winding our way from the coast to this town in the mountains--car sickness, exhaustion, nausea, crankiness are pervasive throughout our team. We couldn't possibly have biked the entire uphill distance from the coast to Dalat in one day, and the official story is that without any major towns in between, there was no hotel to break up the days. But after days of partial information and confusing motives, these explanations do not sit well with a tired and grumpy team, crammed to capacity in our seven support vehicles. "It's not a challenge," is one of the gripes. "The Vietnamese are dicking us around." "This thing's ending with a whimper and not a bang."
Once in Dalat, we unload the bikes, don our yellow and black uniforms and ride twice around the lake. Seven miles in total. It is a strange moment. I can understand the importance of ceremony to the Vietnamese, but this one feels particularly hollow--there's nobody to see us. Dean McKee tells me how especially sensitive many Vietnam vets are to the idea of being used for the purposes of others. At the moment, it is hard not to agree with their carping that we have indeed been trotted out for this like puppets. The anger threatens to erode some of the good feeling between teammates--between Americans and Vietnamese, between team members and staff leaders who are held partly responsible, and even between staff members and permanent WTS staff, who, it seems, are not telling us everything they know.
That night, it is impossible not to hear the wary pockets of grumbling. I hear actual talk of trying to go home.
I think that part of what is hurting us is that we do not feel a clear enough sense of mission. The very ambitiousness of this project works against us. Are the returning vets the focus of the ride? They have naturally attracted the most attention, especially the vets who were disabled during the war. But our group also consists of vets without disabilities, people with disabilities who had nothing to do with the war, a sizable staff, a handful of able-bodied riders whose only connection to the project is that they have been financial supporters of World TEAM Sports. Our Vietnamese contingent is also made up of veterans and non-veterans, able-bodied and those with disabilities. World Team Sports' mission since its inception has dealt with disability, not veteran, issues. And our project has included not only the ride but numerous outreach programs at hospitals and schools, a $200,000 promised gift to Bach Mai Hospital, an extensive educational website in collaboration with the Asia Society in the U.S. At the Hai Van Pass, the challenge which we had to overcome united us as a team, but now the challenge aspect of the event has been undermined by the time in vans. Furthermore, it's hard to feel that the country is rallying behind us after our unattended laps around the lake. Even the inroads made between American and Vietnamese teammates feel tenuous, the perception--right or wrong--that the team is being manipulated by unseen Vietnamese officials a further impediment to open communication. What is this trip? A physical challenge? A gesture of peace and reconciliation? Of healing? A ride for disablity awareness? Worn down by the time on the road, the nights in stale motel rooms, the persistently high emotions, we are unraveling at the seams without a common rallying point.
Steve Whisnant, the executive director of World Team Sports, addresses us the next morning. When I tell people about the nightmare logistics of this trip, I tell them about Steve; I say that I've watched him age over the two years of planning this trip. Now, Steve stands in front of the group at breakfast. He has a creased, sun-soaked face, a reddish tint to the balding crown of his head. He is an interesting mix of idealist and pragmatist, a believer in what he does and a savvy fund-raiser who has little patience for idle words. The ambitiousness of this project is a direct outgrowth of his expansive, if sometimes scattershot, intellect. "I'm sorry if World TEAM Sports has misled you," he speaks in a quiet waver, forcing us all to lean in. Emotion is no longer optional when Steve talks about the Vietnam Challenge--he has put too much of his life into this. "I know that this is not a physical challenge for all of us, that the goal of riding every mile between Hanoi and Saigon has been taken away. The relationship between ourselves and our Vietnamese hosts is sometimes frustrating and complicated. I have also been at the point of throwing up my hands." He purses his lips and looks around the room, making eye contact with many members of the team. "But the Vietnam Challenge is much more than all that. Think of the looks on the faces of the kids running to the side of the road to greet us. How many of you were there when Jerry Stadtmiller visited the grade school in Hanoi? When a young girl asked him about his worst memory from the war and he answered that it was not when he was injured, but when he had to shoot a teenage boy on the other side? I know that none of you will ever forget their faces when the girl came up to hug Jerry afterword, when she told him that it was not his fault. It's not your fault, she said over and over again. This is what the Vietnam Challenge is all about." At first the cafeteria is silent. Then several team members approach Steve to shake his hand or hug him. As a group, we are humbled. Steve has called upon us all to make the Vietnam Challenge personal for ourselves.
Team Meeting--Phan Tiet
It is nearly two weeks after the meeting in Vinh when our schedule permits another teaming event. The set-up this time is considerably different. Because we are approaching Ho Chi Minh City, our team has been joined by a number of guests--members of the Ho Chi Minh City contingent of sponsoring corporations, local dignitaries--and for the first time we have enough translators to permit many small group conversations. Along with a couple other leaders and a translator, I take a small group of Vietnamese and American team members down to the beach for a discussion.
In our group, there are four Vietnamese, none of whom speak English well, and none of whom I've had a real conversation with. There are two American vets, Blas and Duane. To my surprise, Duane and I have not grown close since that emotional night in Vinh. In fact, it's almost hard for me to believe now that we've ever had a talk that charged or that intimate. Duane is one of the handful of veterans whose emotional roller coaster over the past two weeks has been both pronounced and public, and I know that several of the team leaders have helped calm him down at one time or another.
Two and a half weeks into a trip designed to promote awareness about people with disabilities, and in taking my discussion group to the beach, I've led a double amputee to a point where he has to walk on sand. And my first reaction when he complains is annoyance. The truth is, I bring too much personal agenda to this meeting to act as an unbiased facilitator. I'm frustrated by our inability to connect with our Vietnamese teammates--I think that it is a serious shortcoming of our entire endeavor and I think this meeting is long overdue; I must also confess that I'm frustrated at what I see as a related phenomena--the tendency on the part of many of the vets to continue to set themselves apart based on their experiences twenty-five years ago.
I change plans and collect the group closer to the cement walkway, but Duane's still focusing on the sand. Now he doesn't want to sit on it. We grab him a chair from the nearby patio. Our other American vet is Blas. Though he has no lasting visible injuries, Blas, too, was seriously hurt by a Vietnamese grenade, and as a vets counselor, he has devoted the past thirty years to the ravages of this war. Blas decides that he also wants a chair. The rest of the group settles on the beach and it wouldn't take an expert in group dynamics to realize that there are subgroups within our little group. The two veterans are on chairs above us angled slightly away from the circle, the four Vietnamese sit in a neat row, the team leaders and translators are sprawled on the sand between, trying to make it look like a circle. Frankly, it is a repetition of the divisions obvious on bikes, in hotel lobbies, and at every meal so far.
The meeting gets off to a terrible start. From the height of their chairs, Blas and Duane take over. They want to find out which of the Vietnamese are vets. The translator translates. Two of the Vietnamese raise their hands. It seems then that they nod at each other in a way that might as well be a salute. The respect of soldiers. The usual staking out of territory. Now, we are on to where each of them was stationed--both the Vietnamese and the Americans. And now, the familiar routine of how the Americans were greeted, spat upon on their return to the U.S. What is at work here? We have heard some version of this story many times over the past three weeks and though I don't doubt the lasting damage done to these men by their homecoming, I can't help but wonder what happens when you say something so many times that it becomes a part of you. Even as they set themselves apart, they talk about how the country ostracized them. Can they possibly feel the hurt each time? And, as with all dogged self-definition, I wonder if the answers and safety which this one offers them compensate for its corresponding confinement.
At seventy-eight years old, Mr. Bao is the oldest among us. He sits in the sand in the darkness, a tiny man, and he begins to talk to us through a translator. He has thinning white hair, loose sinewy muscles, a resilience which seems to emanate from the very core of him. He always rides near the front of the pack. Five of his immediate family members were killed by American bombing during the war. His mother, his siblings. These were not soldiers, Mr. Bao stresses, not people killed in face to face combat, but people killed in the night, from the remove of bombers. He hated Americans. He came on this trip hating Americans. But we surprise him. He likes how forward we are, even if it makes him uncomfortable. He even likes how loud we are, how much we joke around, how we try to use the few Vietnamese words we know. How we are quick to help each other out. The other Vietnamese nod vigorously when he says that the Hai Van Pass is used only for training elite cyclists and he never thought this collection of riders could make it to the top. (I make a mental note of the fact that it is this American trait that I am so wary of--this focus on plowing ahead, on doing--that gets the most enthusiastic admiration from our small subsample of Vietnamese.)
Now I see in miniature a phenomena that has been going on throughout the ride. We are humbled by this man's account. Five family members died in this war. No American losses can compare. And though it is difficult to infer through a translator, he seems more absolved of the war than we are. (Difficult as it is to make such inferences and generalizations, many of the team leaders agree that it does seem that Vietnam has somehow gotten over this war more than the United States.) What happens, I wonder, to the American veteran of Vietnam who has used this war to define himself when he comes to the country where everyone over twenty-three years of age was in the war? Until now, I hadn't noticed the changes taking place in our group, but they are there. The opening of this meeting aside, the war stories have fallen away over the past couple weeks. Even as veterans have visited the places where they were stationed, the places where they lost friends or limbs or eyesight or innocence, they have talked less about the sensationalistic details. Maybe, as both individuals and as a group, we have moved through these things. Mr. Bao is not talking about the effects of the war as a way to define or classify himself, he is talking about them as a backdrop for getting to know Americans now.
The rest of the meeting follows Mr. Bao's lead. We take turns telling what we have discovered over the past couple weeks. What we have learned about each other. Blas and Duane speak in low, almost reverential tones, when they talk about the reception they have received in this country, the universal respect here for soldiers. It is clear that they are both moved. Their courage is clear as well. When we get up from the sand and head to the hotel patio for dinner, there is a palpable change in the group. We divide up further as we find seats for dinner, but the new divisions are not along the usual lines; with the increased number of translators, we continue the previous discussion in small, informal groups of Vietnamese and Americans.
I will soon learn that almost all of the group leaders feel that their meetings are tremendous successes. At the meeting two weeks before, the vets didn't even want other Americans in the room; wasn't it telling, I wondered, that they simultaneously insisted on their separateness and blamed those who would impose it? If the moniker Vietnam Vet is the way in which many of these men have come to see themselves, maybe it was because in a country where success is the same as justification, these soldiers represented what we did not want to see in ourselves. Not only did the men and women coming home from Vietnam represent the ultimate failure in, and of, our system--what we could not do--but, in places like My Lai, they also showed us ourselves in another way--what we incontrovertibly did. And ours is a country where what we do is quickly equated to who we are. No small part of the tragedy of the Vietnam War has been that some number of the men and women who fought in it, have never been able to shed that skin. For any marginalized and traumatized group, one of the ultimate prices of marginalization and traumatization is when, as a defensive--and often times, defiant--posture, the group takes on the identity assigned to it; when faced, such an identity can be the path to personal freedom, but when blindly accepted, it can also be the very impediment which prohibits it. Here, on the beach in Phan Tiet, as the Vietnamese and American Vets help each other to their feet, as they find seats for each other at dinner, it's possible to believe that we're in the presence of something as terrifying and hopeful as personal freedom.
Ho Chi Minh City
For miles leading into the city, escorts and blockades hold the teeming traffic of pedestrians and two-wheelers and carbon belching trucks at bay, so that we are surrounded in all possible directions by people and vehicles and noise. Everywhere, sirens are howling--not just from the police escort but from civilian motorcycles and mopeds as well. As always, it's difficult to tell what amount of this commotion is a reaction to our ride, what to the fact that regular traffic has been choked off to let us pass. But the last few blocks before the palace are wide open park land with little ancillary traffic, a perfect place for pedestrians to come to see us at the end of our country-long odyssey. A perfect place for the ticker-tape type reception that the hype along the way has led us to expect. But there are no crowds lining the street. The park is empty. There can be no question that our ride gained tremendously in publicity in Vietnam throughout the eighteen days. We saw it in newspapers, on t.v.; we heard the instant recognition in the voices of the few people with whom we could communicate. But the simple fact is that as we ride toward the gates of reunification hall, the streets and grassy park land alongside are all but empty.
As we ride these final, eerily quiet yards to reunification hall, I wonder what we have done. We have pulled off a logistical miracle; we have collected the largest number of American vets in Vietnam since the end of the war; we have moved this eighty person team the length of the country. With tremendous difficulty, we have navigated the strange power dynamics of members of two very different cultures not sure if they were working together or in opposition. There is a fair amount of jubilation upon our arrival, and I share in it, but I can't rid myself of the voice which says that the jubilation is generated solely by us. It feels like an MTV party on the beach: a small number of people in a relatively tiny area making as much noise as they can for the cameras, surrounded by an expanse of silence. As always, we are treated to a lavish reception, including welcoming speeches by top politicians and diplomats. But there is no public here to greet us. If part of our mission was to raise awareness about disabilities in this country which has a high percentage of people with disabilities and a low level of accessibility, then the resounding silence around us seems like an irrefutable measure of our impact--on this front at least. Even as I celebrate, I am almost overwhelmed by pessimism. It's hard for me not to feel like a group of Americans came to this country to pull off something for our own sake, that we've succeeded almost in spite of the country itself and the lack of a climactic end makes the often questionable means even more troublesome.
Dan Jensen and Tran Son
Sometimes I think I spent a lot of the ride missing the point. I wonder if, in my relentless desire to understand and sum up, I missed what was going on right in front of me. If maybe, in my need to see the big picture, I have something in common with the governments which would send people to war in the first place.
Dan Jensen was a long-haired nineteen year-old working in a car wash in Newport Beach, CA. when he was drafted. He thought hard about going to Canada. He told a psychiatrist about dropping acid in the hope that she would disqualify him. The night before his physical, Dan took a hammer to his left ankle, bruising it badly, only to be told that it would heal during basic training. Eventually, Dan found himself in the 101st airborne infantry division, in the monsoon-soaked mountain jungle near the DMZ. "I was scared," says Dan, "everyday I thought about ways to go home." He says that he didn't understand the war and didn't believe in it. The first thing he thought when he stepped on the land mine that would destroy his right leg was, "Now I get to go home." Then he was lying on his back, holding his leg up in the air and there was nothing there. He remembers screaming six times.
Dan would spend the next nine months in military hospitals. When he finally returned home, he made a point of throwing away his uniform and his purple heart, and not until fifteen years later when his father gave him the medal as a Christmas present did Dan know that his father had fished it out of the trash. Twenty years after his injury, Dan received a state of the art prosthetic which changed his life. "I went and ran a mile. It was incredible, the first time I'd run in twenty years. Running is still incredibly emotional for me. Every time, it's like I can't believe I'm actually doing this."
For the first part of the trip, I found Dan distant, somewhat aloof. He is distance-runner thin with a nervous, herky jerky way of moving which disappears when you talk seriously with him. But early on, he seemed to stay on the edges of things; he didn't volunteer anything in the team meetings. What I didn't know at the time was that he had had his first ever anxiety attack that first night in Hanoi. That he was afraid he was literally going to throw himself off the third floor balcony of his hotel room. He says that it was one of the worst things he'd ever felt: "Complete emotional and physical paralysis." He would miss the team's scheduled activities and spend the night walking the streets of Hanoi with Dean McKee. Never one to publicly cathart or make a study of his own emotions, Dan says only, "I don't know what it was, just being back there I guess, the long plane ride, everything. I'd never felt like that before."
The first day of the actual ride, amid the frenzied celebration of leaving Hanoi, Dan found himself holding hands with Tran Son, a Vietnamese amputee who had also lost his leg in the war. "I don't know if we'd even met at that point," says Dan, "but he was an amputee, I was an amputee, we were both taking off on this ride. We were shouting and waving--I guess we just got caught up in the moment." A few days later, they tried, with their few common words, to talk about their injuries. Dan had brought along extra stump socks and he offered one to Tran Son who had a regular cotton sock on his stump. Then there was the enthusiastic motioning that was our group's most common means of communication--Tran Son and Dan, each pointing to his sock, giving the thumbs up sign. But a day later, Dan came down from breakfast to find Tran Son on crutches; he had fallen in the shower, and cuts to his stump made his prosthesis unwearable. Dan gave him gel caps, a cushioning device which Tran Son had never seen before and which enabled him to use his prosthetic and continue the ride.
We all got to see the deepening friendship a few days later. We were nearing the DMZ when we stopped for one of our snack breaks at a military cemetery. A shady tree-lined lane led from Highway 1 to the rows of nondescript markers, radiating out in four directions from a square shrine in the middle. The caretaker of the cemetery was a weathered old man on wooden crutches, his dark work pants knotted just below his knee where he, too, had had his leg blown off. I don't know whose idea it was, or how it started--Dan says he doesn't remember--but next thing I saw there were four of them: Dan, Tran Son, the cemetery caretaker, and Derry Mason, a strapping twenty-four year-old whose father's exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam has been blamed for his being born with a withered right foot. Surgery when he was a boy shortened his leg further, and enabled him to wear the prosthetic with which he has become a superior athlete. The four men were dancing. They stood in a line, their arms linked over each other's shoulders, and kicked their legs. They had all removed their prostheses. The "stump chorus line," they would call it later. "Three generations of legs blown off by the war," Dan says. "The old guy, me and Tran Son, Derry." Tran Son and Dan talked for the first time then about their passion for running. As it turned out, they were both marathoners. Then, with no fanfare, they were off on a hundred yard dash, a race the length of the tree lined lane and the whole team caught on to the cheers of those nearby.
Dan describes Tran Son, who I never got to know, as a schmoozer, a natural p.r. man who often commandeered one of the Vietnamese photographers for himself, who staged shots of Dan and himself burning incense together at grave sites. Dan says that Tran Son seems remarkably free of anger and that he can be suddenly, surprisingly profound. Six of Tran Son's family members were killed in the war, most of them at one time shortly after Tran Son was injured. He had to leave the hospital to bury them. After his injury, he was forced to return to the military and served another two years, often in underground tunnels for long stretches at a time.
It was at the cemetery that day that Dan and Tran Son first discussed the idea of Tran Son visiting the U.S., of getting him a more modern prosthetic to replace the one he had now. When Dan returned to the States, he told this story to the local Sioux Falls paper. Jim Cynkar of Orthotic and Prosthetic Specialists saw the article and responded immediately. The company flew Tran Son to the United States and replaced his prosthetic. Tran Son stayed with Dan and his family. "He was amazing. He brought out things in my girls [eighteen and thirteen years old] that I'd never seen before myself." As luck would have it, a high school in Dan's hometown was having an after-school program on the Vietnam War. Everyone was shocked when Dan showed up with a North Vietnamese Vet. According to Dan, everyone was in tears when, after telling the story of his family, Tran Son begged the high school assembly, "Please, remember this. Please, think about this in the future if you are ever in a position to make war."
What happens when we look at people and see instead ideas? The Vietnam Challenge bike ride was a complicated endeavor, with complicated motivations and interactions. My ambivalence during the three weeks was often powerful and the ride has resisted my equally powerful need to generalize, to sum it all up. It was meant to be a symbolic ride, and much of the symbolism troubled me. But maybe what scares me is what we, as a people, cannot escape, a particular set of characteristics which work toward shaping such a loose thing as a national identity, and maybe, if there is a lesson to be learned from some of the these disabled athletes, it is that we cannot brush aside the difficult aspects of who we are. Certainly this ride has taught me something about the hard, hard relationship between disability and identity, and the inevitable, transformative role of human character. As a country, we are in an unique position of worldwide influence; surely the first requirement of such influence is that we take a long, hard look at ourselves. Our usual foreign policy of expediency has its roots deep in our national identity. But just because something works, does not make it--necessarily and entirely--right.
Or maybe my problem is simply the age-old issue of scale; maybe I'm using a wide angle when what is needed is telephoto. On November 1, in New York City, Dan Jensen and Tran Son fulfilled a promise made to each other at a roadside cemetery in Vietnam when they completed the New York marathon. Two men who would have killed each other twenty-five years before, who must surely have thought that they would never again be able to walk as a result of their enemies' explosives, joined hands after running twenty six miles and raised their arms together in victory.