The book's more extended references to the Vietnam War almost all adopt a Vietnamese perspective. Remembering his days at a listening post on the Thai banks of the Mekong, Karber writes of the time "... inflicting mass carnage was known as pacification; the military invasion and occupation of another country was called liberation; and search-and-destroy really meant destroy-and-search. This reverse speak, coupled with the deceptions of the secret war, were tell-tale signs of a wider condition ... ."
A typical chapter is entitled May 5, 1968 and refers to a day of savage fighting in which a friend and fellow American resident in modern Vietnam, John Lancaster, lost the use of his lower body. Lancaster joins the duo in his wheelchair at Danang, and after a long description of the day's events 34 years before, the question arises as to whether the Vietnamese soldier who shot him survived. Lancaster, who now works for the legal rights of Vietnam's possibly 10 million disabled, replies "I feel certain he got wasted. They [marines] blasted the whole area once he showed himself. But maybe not. I hope like hell he made it."
This is not the Vietnam experienced by today's many young travelers, for whom the war is past history. To them the beaches of Mui Ne and Nha Trang, and the old cities of Hue and Hoi An, feature highest on the agenda. Such a perspective is not available to Karber, however, who has other, often very disturbing, memories.
Even so, the book is surprisingly upbeat in tone. It ends with an excursion on Russian "Minsk" motorbikes (much in evidence in Vietnam's northern hills) to Pac Bo near the Chinese border where Ho Chi Minh lived in hiding for a time. It was an "Arcadian communist beachhead," Karber concludes, and his group of expatriate bikers respectfully (but also jovially) lunch there on salami, processed cheese, baguettes and a bottle of French wine.
One omission from this otherwise excellent book is any extensive account of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City). It's common enough to hear it denigrated in comparison with Hanoi, but for me this lively metropolis on which the French lavished so much love is the nicest city in Asia. It's really surprising that Karber finds it worth only a few casual and dismissive sentences. But perhaps if you're a Hanoi resident, decrying the bigger and richer Saigon is something that's done as a nightly ritual over the deceptively potent bia hoi.
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