Y Van Hotel

Topophilia. Da Nang.

by Adaptor-Plug

Enter US Military... Exactly, Precisely, Here.



I asked the driver "where did the Marines hit the beach?" and he showed me the exact spot. Exactly where the first lot stepped in. He was also there. Nine years old. Watching it happen. With one of his sisters.

The spot really is just where the coke sun shade is. Really. Just right there. They've got concrete steps from the promenade down to the sand now, but they didn't back then.

Behind us, behind to the right, there stands a couple of huge gas tankers the armed forces left. And further south on the road there are concrete shelters, where they parked their important things.

"The movies give us heroes and very life like gore but they can’t portray the deep gut horror that actually is war. TV news shows war’s children, all hollow eyed and bones, but it doesn’t show the soldier’s terror of night watches stood alone. The women, booze, and bravado in films that makes war seem like fun can’t make the jungle friendly when your best friend is a gun."

"But if I had it to do over without question I would go, even if I knew then what now I’ve come to know. That from the trenches to the ovens from Seoul down to Saigon, only who gets hurt is different but the hurting still goes on. I cherish my country’s freedom and to preserve it I would fight but that doesn’t mean that I like war and it doesn’t make war right."

written by Glenn. March 2005.

So I've seen both ends now. I've seen where the lads ran in and up the beach. And a decade plus ago, in Saigon I stood outside the old American Embassy, the one with the sixties architecture and concrete patterned curtain wall (holed in Tet), and saw from where the helicopters flew. I touched the compound gates, the ones that closed behind those leaving and kept out the crowds.

My driver in Da Nang didn't manage to get out through those Saigon Embassy gates. His sisters did.

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