Traveling in modern Vietnam, you quite often meet Americans who fought in the Vietnam War. Two separate couples I encountered last year were there to visit children they had adopted and whose education they were paying for. This was clearly something in the way of a guilt offering, attempting to alleviate a sense of wrong-doing that the Catholic Church wisely attends to through the ritual of Confession.
Arkansas-born writer and former businessman Phil Karber fought in the Vietnam War while still a teenager. In the late 1990s he went back, with his wife, to live in Hanoi, drawn to experience again a country first witnessed in very different circumstances. Then, in 2002, after four happy years there, he set off with an English artist friend to travel in leisurely fashion through Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. It would be a journey, he writes, "where my memories would shape my impressions, and my own aging would be juxtaposed against an area I helped devastate."
The result makes absorbing reading. But it's not a book of soul-searching or mawkish regret. Instead, it's a mixture of stylish eloquence, bar-room tales, good-natured observations, and frank horror at what was done in the name of freedom.
The tour, not surprisingly, began and ended in Hanoi. First the two men traveled up to Kunming by train, then voyaged down the Mekong through Laos and Cambodia to the Mekong Delta. There they turned back north and traveled through Vietnam back to Hanoi overland.
Anyone who knows the region will immediately be carried back there by even Karber's most casual descriptions. Sitting on a plastic stool in a Vietnamese street at night drinking home-brewed beer (bia hoi, at some NT$20 a liter), watching the city traffic, mostly two-wheeled, negotiate intersections without the benefit of traffic lights, resisting the cries of cyclo (bicycle-rickshaw) drivers as the stars shine in the pollution-free night sky — innumerable moments in this book made me catch my breath in sadness at not being there even as I turned the pages.
Karber is probably a better writer than he knows. Of Hanoi he writes, "The traffic circle dinned as the Konika and Fuji electronic billboards flashed ads like screensavers ... Postcard boys latched onto tourists one last time before vanishing for the night ... The traffic heaved and swirled into a white blur of light, like the slow-shutter exposure of a comet." He expresses gratitude to editors for pruning an "overwritten" manuscript, but my suspicion is that itchy editorial fingers may have lost us some pearls of great price in the process.
But then Karber will characteristically relapse back into jokes about "Pancakers" (backpackers — because of their perceived fondness for banana pancakes) and "Buddha Bellies" (heavy drinkers). His English painter friend, Simon Redington, at one point remarks that the duty of an artist is to live an artist's life. Perhaps Karber should have taken to heart similar advice as applied to writers, and not spent so much time in his former business pursuits where he perhaps encountered low-caliber humor a couple of times too often.
Laos and Cambodia receive more cursory treatment than Vietnam. Luang Prabang is largely seen as a former Buddhist and royal enclave, while in Phnom Penh the pair concludes that it was "unsuitable to take one's pleasures in a city that had felt so much pain."
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