Tour of Vacation

So this one is a little late, but I wanted to get it up nonetheless. After all, I made a promise to Slim about contributing to the blog, and I'm definitely only going to break the promise a fair amount rather than entirely.

Growing up, I was obsessed with Viet Nam. One of the first movies I remember was Platoon and the first television show I really remember watching over and over again was Tour of Duty. If you're not familiar with it, it rain on CBS for three seasons from 1987 to 1990. Season 3 is preposterous and not worth watching, but Season 1 in particular tells some solid stories following the members of 2nd Platoon Bravo Company at Firebase Ladybird. The show can be cheesy at times, but as a child, it helped me create some sort of reference for what I thought my father might have gone through.

It's absurd, but when I landed in Viet Nam, I couldn't shake the idea of my father landing as a 20-something almost fifty years earlier. I kept looking for a deuce and a half hauling soldiers down a dirt road and imagined a whole world that in most ways has disappeared. It was the first time I had ever been in a country about which I had such strong preconceptions. I knew Viet Nam would be nothing at all like the movies about a war long since ended, but I couldn't help but try to reconcile the two and was surprised by feelings of nostalgia for a place I had never lived and a life I had never experienced.

In Hanoi, there were men walking about in the old NVA helmets and plenty of people wearing peaked hats. On our way to Halong bay, there were plenty of rice fields and a few water buffalo to be seen. Outside of Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon, the Cu Chi tunnels still exist and were particularly eerie to see during the Tet Holiday. But the NVA helmets were worn by armies of people riding on motorcycles going to and from work, home, and God knows where else, the rice paddies dotted a well-traversed highway leading to a tourist destination and one of the most beautiful places I've seen in my entire life. The tunnels no longer serve guerrillas, but teach Vietnamese children about their country's long and violent history and the path to reunification.

I can't wait to go back. We, of course, have a laundry list of places to go in the region, but a return trip to Viet Nam is a strong possibility and I wouldn't mind serving in Hanoi or Saigon for a couple years. I'm still going to replay the old Tour of Duty episodes, but I can't wait to see more of what the country has to offer outside of the film reels.