by Cork Graham

Published in Prism Mag. 1995

IN CU CHI, an area famous for its tunnels, many Americans received purple hearts, as did many more Viet Cong with their own equivalent. But were one to hear it from the government in Hanoi, one would think that not many communist soldiers died in the war.

Nguyen, 47, points at the government cemetery on the way to the tunnels. "The government say that not many die, but we all know that not true." Like many South Vietnamese veterans, Nguyen works as a Saigon moped driver and freelance tour guide because he has been prevented by Hanoi from a better profession.

At the tunnels, which were originally turned into a propaganda tour for Vietnamese nationals, the anything for an American buck attitude in Vietnam, very apparent in Saigon, becomes even more apparent upon entry into this government-run tourist trap. Considering the ambiance it seems hard to believe that so many lives were lost here only 25 years before.

While Vietnamese nationals can still get in for free, foreign tourists, at $2 U.S. per person, can enter the tunnels and have a look at the cramped conditions Viet Cong and American "tunnel rats" endured in their battle with each other. The woman at the ticket counter scowls when she is paid in dong instead of dollars, as though Vietnam should be paid in American dollars only.

First on the tour is a video show in which the government makes its stab at how much Vietnam is still a victim of the "American Dogs". Flanking the television are diagrams and maps long with examples of armaments from the war. The show and later speech by the tour guide lasts just under an hour.

"I don't go U.S. in 1975, because I love my country and family too much. I don't listen to my captain when he say I should leave," says Nguyen, as he follows the tour guide through a dense area that during the war had been completely defoliated by Agent Orange and heavy B-52 carpet bombing.

Nguyen continues, "I think because I no kill anybody, Hanoi government don't do anything to me." He emphasize the irony with a smile. Nguyen had served in a non-aggressive role in the South Vietnamese navy, piloting a hospital ship. Upon the "Liberation", he was sent to Hanoi and almost died in the seven years he spent in the concentration camps, still called re-education camps by the North.

The tour guide, definitely too young to have fought in the war, is dressed in the typical North Vietnamese army garb which is now the uniform of all Vietnamese soldiers. He stops and says, "You have one minute to find trap door."

The guide has stopped in a small clearing where the ground is covered in dead brown leaves, still moist from the morning of a rainy season that is just winding down.

"It's right under your feet," he says, and after asking the tourist to move aside, he brushes away the leaves, uncovering a rectangular outline in the brown earth.

"We have made them bigger for American tourists," the guide says of the hatch that measures 24 inches by 18. "We are good at hiding are we not?"

The tour ends. A souvenir shop awaits, as do refreshments down at the open air restaurant where young women dressed in the black pajamas and checkered scarf uniform of the Viet Cong sit during a break from their Mickey Mouse-like posing for tourists in this morbid Viet Cong Disneyland.

For those wanting to leave with a bang, there is the rifle range, where tourists can fire a selection of weapons from the Vietnam War. There are typical weapons like the American-made M-16 and Soviet AK-47. There are also the not so well-known weapons, like the World War II vintage M-1 Garand, M-1 carbines, and even a Russian bolt action rifle from the Czar's army that makes it seem as though the Soviets sent anything they could to back the Viet Cong and earlier Viet Minh.

"One dollar a shot," says the woman behind the desk, and then she says, "Follow him." A uniformed Vietnamese leads the way to a row of tall concrete slabs that serve as shooting benches.

The rangemaster locks the muzzle of the assault weapon in an iron bracket atop the concrete slab. Down range at 60 meters, life-size drawings depict snarling wild animals indigenous to Vietnam.

A cloud of dust erupts behind the heart of the wild boar. "A hit!" says the rangemaster.

He grins. "One more dollar. One more shot."

This time the paper tiger bites the dust.

In Saigon, a city that only 11 years ago was hidden by night because the country was so steeped in communist bureaucracy and poverty that it could barely pay a small electric bill, Tri Ky restaurant seems like a giant, painted-white messiah, adorned with multicolored lights trying to draw foreign patrons with American dollars. Here the wide variety of meals are prepared with Vietnamese wild game.

It is considered a fancy place because they have white tablecloths. Most restaurants in Vietnam only have the wood or vinyl of the tables on which to set a plate or bowl.

Here at Tri Ky, not only are the tablecloths white, but the waitresses are dressed in white ao-dais (pronounced ow-yai) and the waiters are dressed in white shirts and black slacks, the two colors of death in Vietnam.

Nguyen haggles over prices with a waitress who, because the guest is American, starts at $30 U.S. for a cobra meal. In a multitude of cages and fish tanks there are bats, Southeast Asian raccoons, eels, bullfrogs, electric eels, monkey, cobras, and even the more deadly krait.

But it is the sight of three sun bears, locked in a cage barely able to hold one bear, much less three, that draws the most attention. The owners of the restaurant don't pay attention to the fact sun bears are endangered.

"No, we don't cook them," says the lead waitress, in between haggling with Nguyen. "We just have them for the guests to look at."

Finally, the price for a three-foot cobra is mutually decided upon at $15 U.S., as long as the American also spends his dollars on drinks. The entourage disappears with a hapless cobra.

Soon, the lead waitress comes to the dining table with the cobra twisting tightly in her hand. A tray is wheeled in front of her. All the angrily hissing cobra has to do is release itself from the petite hands of the waitress and it will be within easy striking range of a number of people.

She speaks to Nguyen who says, "She asks if you want to drink the blood."

Nguyen nods and speaks to her. She immediately puts the head to a chopping block on the tray and chops off the head. The waitress aims the blood into an empty bottle of Hennessey.

With moves more calm and sure than when she wrestled the live snake, she expertly slices down the belly and removes the heart. She walks over to the table and shows it to those seated, as though to confirm to them that the snake was freshly killed. There is no question in anyone's mind.

The heart, still pumping with the excited beat it had at the moment of the cobra's decapitation, is plopped into a waiting cognac glass. The cobra carcass is whisked away on the tray, and the heart disappears in a mixture of blood and cognac poured from the Hennessey bottle.

It is offered to the honored guest willing to pay $15 for a cobra meal. "Good for the liver," says Nguyen.

The concoction goes down strong, short of swallowing the Vietnamese equivalent of the Mexican tequila worm. No taste of blood is perceptible.

The freshly killed cobra is soon served, simmering in a peanut and curry stir-fry. It is sweet and tasty, having a texture between tough, dark chicken meat and calamari.

Suddenly, the sun bears bawl for their freedom.

"Ugly American" used to mean just about any American GI with a passion for Lyndon B. Johnson's military ideas in Vietnam, along with a complete disregard for the Vietnamese culture and people as a whole. Nowadays the term "ugly American" best describes American students fresh from college, heads filled with book facts while closing their eyes to the reality happening around them.

Semester at Sea, a program set up by the University of Pittsburgh, has pulled into port three days ago. Like sailors on shore leave, these college students unleash themselves upon Saigon this warm night in October.

Most of them collect at Apocalypse Now, a bar taking the movie title to heart. As though trying to catch a little of that craziness, these students whose parents paid $15,000 for them to spend a semester sailing around the world in search of an education, are filling their minds more with San Miguel beer.

David King, 22, says, "You know we don't spend all our time in bars. We go out and see the country and in the month before we arrive at the port we know everything about the culture and language, because that's all we study. Famous people come on board for a few days. Peter Arnett was with us for the last four days. We all talk with him and get to ask him as many questions as we want."

Above King a fan rotates like a helicopter rotor, an intricate part of the war-deco painted on the ceiling. Except for the turning fans in this depiction of a night sky during a firefight, illumination flares and Hueys stand frozen in time.

Soon a call is made for the students to head back to their ship before the ship's 11 p.m. curfew. In ones and twos, they pile into cyclos, bicycle driven passenger carts supposedly outlawed in Ho Chi Minh City. The group floats out on air scented by beer and the smell of burning marijuana. Two girls think they are safe from bribe-hungry police by smoking a joint hidden between their legs.

Because of the students' drunken state and evident inability to speak the language, the cyclo drivers pedal them four times around the Tran Hung Dao statue, the bright lights of signs advertising American and Japanese products creating zigzagging lines. Finally, through hand signals and broken English, the students get their drivers to turn away from the statue and drop them off at the Saigon Port.

After realizing they've been swindled into overpaying the cyclo drivers, they head to the port bar. A conversation ensues about the advances in Vietnam, in which Carla, a Semester at Sea student from Pittsburgh, sits in her chair and says, "I don't know how anyone could even expect to understand this country in a short time. I've been here three days and I don't think I've learned enough about Vietnam."

A young Vietnamese woman sits at the hotel desk doing her homework for the following day. She is not a student but a teacher. Her day job is teaching French and English to students in a high school at the outskirts of Saigon.

She looks up from her textbook and says, "Education has become better in the last five years. There is more competition. Before if you knew someone in the government you were guaranteed a position.

"Now we must all work harder."

What of the new government? Where does she see the government heading, the one that now has normalized relations with the United States? Does she see it staying communist, or does she see the communists being completely pushed away?

She looks around as though to make sure no one is looking. But she smiles and says nothing.

Asked again she repeats her gestures, but says, "I wish I could tell you. . . But, I cannot speak of such things."

An ex-ARVN Ranger, unable to get work in the city because of his "criminal record."