IndoChina Chronicles

Phil Karber

Description

In this insightful travelogue, American war veteran Phil Karber takes you on a journey down the roads, rivers and rails of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. He writes insightfully about the political effect of the Vietnam War on the people and places, adding a whole new perspective on the region's history and culture. Accompanied by a friend, London artist Simon Redington, they follow the Mekong River from China to Saigon, to the infamous Tiger Cages on Con Son Island, and to the city sidewalks of Hanoi, where the author lived for five years.Along the way, the stories will capture your imagination and transport you to a beautiful region, undaunted by war and poverty. Indeed, this book brings to life the harsh realities of the region's history, culture, politics and people. Together with its unforgettable images of locals, veterans and expatriates, this transcends normal expectations of travel literature.

Informations

• Publié par: MarshallCavendishM
• Date de parution: 02 janvier 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9789814435413
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright 2005 Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited Reprinted 2007, 2010
Author: Phil Karber
Cover picture: Eric and Hoa Herter
Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions
An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International
1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Request for permission should be addressed to the Publisher, Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited, 1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196. Tel: [phone], fax: [phone]. E-mail: [e-mail]
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National Library Board (Singapore) Cataloguing in Publication Data
Karber, Phil, 1951-
The Indochina Chronicles : travels in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam / Phil Karber. - Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2007.
p. cm.
Previously published: Times Editions-Marshall Cavendish, c2005.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978 981 4435 41 3
1. Karber, Phil, 1951- -Travel - Indochina. 2. Indochina - Description and travel.
3. Indochina - History - 1945- I. Title.
DS535
915.9 -dc22 SLS2006050543
Printed in Singapore by Times Printers Pte Ltd
To Joyce, Joellen,
Maggie and Parker
My sense is that cultures and individuals are subtler than their governments and actually are the only way we can make bridges between them. Governments are rooted in their ideologies and survive by keeping up the sense of us versus them. They have to have a keen sense of enmity; whereas many individuals don t have that. So that s one reason I ve become a great advocate of travel, especially for Americans. I think it s dangerous in a global world to screen ourselves from realities.
-Pico Iyer, travel writer, A Sense of Place .
Contents
Prologue
Introduction
A Trip Down the Mekong
You Like Opium?
Silky Strides of Moral Authority
Guernica without a Picasso
Gauguin on the Mekong
Coming into Khmer Country
Himalayan Fantasies
Saigon to Hanoi
Your Power Has Collapsed
Tiger Cages of Con Son Island
The Ghosts of Old Friends
May 5, 1968
A DMZ Tour
Hanoi Vignettes
The Bosom of the Former Beast
Harnessing the Masses
Epilogue
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
About the Author
Prologue
The war in Indochina first touched me and my hometown of Fort Smith, Arkansas, in 1966, my sophomore year of high school. During a pep rally one Friday morning, the head football coach walked onto the field to present one of the team s outstanding former linemen, Charlie Belue, five years my senior. Until the coach said his name, no one recognized him. He was a shadow of his former robustness, after having taken just one wrong step in Vietnam, onto a landmine.
Old Belue didn t take the mike for a speech. He never was much of a talker, but that day his presence spoke volumes. Hobbling on crutches, he put his weight onto his right leg and new orthotic foot, with the left leg of his jeans folded back at the knee. The students applauded thunderously. He seemed embarrassed, though, by all this attention. I was transfixed, blanking out the cheers around me, my pulse racing in empathetic terror. If the war could do that to Old Belue, a natural born fighter, then we were all in for a heap of trouble.
Over the next two years I began to sense that I too would likely be sent to Vietnam. It was otherwise the happiest time of my life there in Fort Smith, a blue-collar town of 50,000 at the foothills of the Ozark Mountains, along the bluffs and banks of the Arkansas River. There were beautiful estates mixed with Babbit-style neighborhoods, sylvan hillsides and stream-fed valleys. Rodeo arenas, well-groomed baseball parks and football stadiums were hallowed ground, lighting up the nights with the magic of the Maji s North Star. White church steeples fenced the horizons. With Cleaver-family conformity, the Karbers took pride in our prim slice of America.
The widening Arkansas River slips around the city in a light brown noose, cinched firmly with middle-America morals, and knotted loosely on the outer banks with old outlaw enclaves with names like Tenkiller and Shady Grove. Long ago known as Hell on the Border, Fort Smith was famous for its hanging judge, Isaac Parker. In the latter part of the 19 th century, Judge Parker sent 79 outlaws to the gallows, thus a determined runner-up to Robespierre s guillotine notches a century before. The judge s whitewashed gallows are now enshrined as Fort Smith s main historical attraction, located just off Garrison Avenue, the frontier business district where five brothels operated openly throughout my rite-of-passage years.
About five miles from Fort Smith was a World War II army base, Fort Chaffee, where my father John Karber Jr. spent weekends training as a pilot in the Arkansas National Guard. He wore a uniform 30 years, both in the Guard and during World War II. He had a day job as County Agent-the local Mr. Green Acres.
On parade day at the end of the Guard s summer training in the stifling heat of August, Governor Faubus would drive up from Little Rock, join the flag rank officers in the shaded reviewing stand, and fan his fedora while inspecting the troops as they marched to Sousa. Owing our livelihood to Roosevelt s New Deal, my mother and father would line their five boys up in stair-step formation to shake hands with the defiant segregationist governor, himself a Democrat.
One of my first jobs was shining boots at 50 cents a pop for my dad s officer friends during summer camp starting in 1960. After a few years of that easy money and several other summer jobs, I was a civilian KP (kitchen patrol) at Fort Chaffee, a job that paid 1.70 an hour for washing crusty pots and pans and peeling potatoes 12 hours a day, six days a week. It sounds like penance, but by all accounts at the time I had landed a plum job.
During those years, my passions were less for work, study and sports, and more for fast cars, whiskey and fast girls. My indulgences soon caught the attention of local police and school officials. Although I had been kicked out of school several times, and thrown in jail more often than that, my rebelliousness caught fire in 1968.
That same epochal year, rebellion and turbulence seemed to be sweeping all of America, even the planet s far reaches. On January 23 rd the USS Pueblo was captured by North Korean gunboats, a stunning escalation of the Cold War. A week later the Tet offensive swept South Vietnam. Many American bases were nearly overrun. The evening news broadcast play-by-play glimpses of fighting in the streets of Saigon and Hue. The body bags piled up. Militarily the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese lost heavily-up to 100,000 killed-but politically they may have won the war during those weeks following Tet.
I had many friends in Vietnam at the time, some I knew to be in heavy combat-in alien places like Pleiku and I Corps. By the end of March, with the feverish fighting of Tet ongoing, U.S. President Johnson announced he would not seek re-election. He was a man defeated by his own dilemma; the demons of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh had consumed him personally and politically.
Only a few days later, on April 4 th , Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. With the country already riven by race riots, Dr. King-the voice of reason, of Ghandi-esque passive resistance-had disappeared in a single puff of focused hatred. The streets of urban America quaked for weeks, while race riots spread to over 130 cities.
The all-white Fort Smith School Board held out to the bitter end on desegregation, and had only partly integrated by the time I d entered high school. They couldn t bring themselves to give Dr. King the same remembrance accorded President Kennedy a few years before, voting only to allow the blacks to leave school to watch the funeral. I walked off campus that day anyway, and was kicked out of school for my act of disobedience. I did, however, see part of the funeral. Senator Robert Kennedy delivered a healing eulogy.
Only a month and a half later, I was en route to my early morning summer job as a civilian KP at Fort Chaffee. The car radio was all news...Robert Kennedy had been shot the night before and died in the early morning hours. It was a somber, tiring day. Although Kennedy had run on an antiwar platform, even the GIs hung their heads.
By mid-August my KP gig was up, and I collected my last paycheck of 70 early one Friday evening. After a typical weekend evening of good-ole-boy fun, around midnight I went home and threw a pile of clothes into the middle of my bed sheet, tied it in a knot, and slunked out my bedroom window like a cat burglar stealing my own freedom. Three friends were waiting outside in a white Ford Fairlane. Within minutes the car swung over the Oklahoma bridge and before daylight we were on Route 6