GRAHAM GUY BARRATT

By the road I stop to stretch my legs after the early start form Hanoi and several hours in the back of the car. The sun strikes across the flat landscape waking and bringing out the locals to do their day before the sun rises any higher creating a sluggish laboured pace in its wake. They seemed to be intrigued as much by my arrival as I was of their modes of transport but as the buffalo boy said his was the best because he could go anywhere with his. The bike boys agreed but said they where more interested in speed.

Arriving in Nha Trang from Danang during the afternoon of Christmas Eve I check in to my hotel that will be home for the next few days and decide on a walk along the beach into the center of town to familiarise myself with both the locals and the local. Soon enough the people recognise a stranger in town and it’s then that I here a voice in perfect English asking me if I’d like to sit and have a coconut with her. Accepting then and returning later in the evening as Christmas Eve couples meandered along the beach front I became quickly familiar to her and the various people and stallholders around and over the days that followed we’d sit pulling up deck chairs in a circle and talk of a far off country called England and an apparently much nearer one called Vietnam. It was here I learnt how supporters of the southern government had been interned after the war and once re-educated allowed back into society although now denied the status they had once held. Here the educated who had sympathised with the loosing side are now lost in their life after the great communist victory and unable to hold any station of considered social status. And that’s how the Coconut and refreshments lady arrived here today, teaching English outside of the education system for no charge to kids unable to attend school in this ideal society. Considered too poor they are kept in their place and if you’re too poor to own a school uniform then you are considered to poor to be worth education. They in turn though are only too keen to reciprocate freely helping on her stall in return for their lessons, willing to sit and listen to any passer by their teacher may attract who may be able to improve their English further.

A grandson with his mother and grandmother at the main market, three generations between them and a history from French colonial Indo-China through theatre and occupation in the Second World War, to the misfortune’s of the Vietnam war and onto the re-education of a society emerging into the modern world and the fabled ‘Tiger Economy’.

There is in the Vietnamese language which is given to much poetry and irony a saying that “Only when the house burns, do you see the faces of the rats” and it was here where today school kids play football outside the original walls of the U.S. Embassy after a hard days studies that the American crusade in Vietnam ended on the 30th April 1975. It was from here as the Vietnam War drew to a close and the North Vietnamese Army invaded Saigon where the American Ambassador finally left. It was 2.30 am on the 30th April when Henry Kissenger telephoned Graham Martin the ambassador telling him to end the evacuation by 3.45 am. Half an hour later Martin emerged with a attaché case, suit bag and Stars and Stripes folded in a carrier bag. Walking in silence he climbed the stairs to the sixth floor where a helicopter rotors cutting the night air awaited. He climbs up into the hovering machine and a crackling clipped voice announces “Lady Ace 09 is in the air with Code Two” over the tied circuit as the flew to the 7th Fleets aircraft carriers waiting off the coast in the South China Sea finally signalling the end of the American invasion and war games in Indo China that will hopefully never to be played out again.
What was left of the Embassy was looted and after the dust had settled the state owned oil company Petro-Vietnam moved into the building. The years passed by and as hostilities between the two countries thawed and diplomatic relations re-established in 1995 the American Embassy succeeded in getting their old property back and were surprised to find still on the rooftops old tattered sandbags leftover from those final days of the evacuation two decades before. Petro-Vietnam moved out and the now rather shabby six story chancery building was torn down. Some of the land next door is now commercial while also being flanked by the French Consulate next door and the British Consulate across the street. In a small twist these old foreign powers may not call the shots or wield their weight here in South-East Asia anymore but do still occupy some of the most exclusive real estate in town.

This man is the best. I meet him on my first afternoon in Hanoi and Vietnam and immediately believe him to be the usual patter man, the guy that gives the talk. But time tells and Thanh by the next day has with my doubts unfounded already become one of those people you meet and trust without knowing why while at the same time knowing exactly why. Over the following days Thanh peddles me through the streets of Hanoi in his borrowed silver chariot showing me his wonderful city known to many as The Paris Of The East.

Gates of the former American Embassy weeks before they where finally demolished and the opening of a new era in the life of Saigon.
Le Duan Boulevard, Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City if you prefer.

The M41 was the first post-war American light tank to see worldwide service, and was exported in considerable numbers by the US, particularly to Asia and the war here in Vietnam. Being super seeded between 1972 and 74 by the M48 Patton many were abandoned by the ARVN during the PAVN's 1975 Spring Offensive and captured being used against in turn by the PAVN against the ARVN at the Fall Of Saigon at the end of April 75.