Tet Pt. 2 - The Dark Side

Tet marks another milestone for Vietnam - and for America. On the first day of Tet in 1968 the North Vietnamese army launched country-wide surprise attacks against US and South Vietnamese forces throughout South Vietnam. Up to that point, president Johnson and the Dept. of Defense had been unflappable in their insistence that the ability of the North to mount or sustain any campaign had been irretrievably broken. Anyone who lived through it or who bothered to learn recent US history knows that the Tet Offensive , instead, turned the tide of public opinion in America against the fighting that was killing so many of its sons. In the ensuing malaise, Lyndon Johnson chose not to run for re-election and Richard Nixon was elected on the basis of his (secret) plan to end US participation in the war. We know where that led.

The upcoming fourth anniversary of "Shock and Awe" will distinguish the American war in Iraq as the second longest in US history . . . after Vietnam. Additionally, the money spent in Iraq and on the wider "war on terrorism" since 9/11 is also reaching levels that have only been surpassed twice in our history: "If U.S. involvement continues on the current scale, the funding for the Iraq war — combined with the conflict in Afghanistan and other foreign fronts in the war on terrorism — is projected to surpass this country's Vietnam spending next year. " (From a recent LINK Los Angeles Times story - full story below.)

In his book about the Vietnam War, Dispatches , Michael Herr said of the human and capital expenditure of that conflict, "There was such a dense concentration of American energy there, American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lit up Indochina for a thousand years."

Surely one has to wonder if history has not, in painfully short order, repeated itself costing lives and money no one would choose to spend if not for all the fear fomented by our government. Do we know where this is leading? I read quotes from members of Congress saying the only acceptable path is one that leads to victory. Large-scale, direct US military involvement in Vietnam lasted about ten years. The country, engulfed in what was essentially a civil war, still fell to the North. What will "victory" accomplish in Iraq and what are we willing to pay?


War costs are hitting historic proportions
The price tag for the Iraq conflict and overall effort against terrorism is expected to surpass Vietnam's next year.
By Joel Havemann
Times Staff Writer

January 14, 2007

WASHINGTON — By the time the Vietnam war ended in 1975, it had become America's longest war, shadowed the legacies of four presidents, killed 58,000 Americans along with many thousands more Vietnamese, and cost the U.S. more than $660 billion in today's dollars.

By the time the bill for World War II passed the $600-billion mark, in mid-1943, the United States had driven German forces out of North Africa, devastated the Japanese fleet in the Battle of Midway, and launched the vast offensives that would liberate Europe and the South Pacific.

The Iraq war is far smaller and narrower than those conflicts, and it has not extended beyond the tenure of a single president. But its price tag is beginning to reach historic proportions, and the budgetary "burn rate" for Iraq may be greater than in some periods in past wars.

If U.S. involvement continues on the current scale, the funding for the Iraq war — combined with the conflict in Afghanistan and other foreign fronts in the war on terrorism — is projected to surpass this country's Vietnam spending next year.

And the accumulating cost is adding to resistance to President Bush's war policy in Congress as well as in public opinion, even though concern about the cost in human lives, the war's impact on America's place in the world and other such factors loom larger.

Last week, when Bush unveiled his new war plan — which included sending an additional 21,500 U.S. troops to Iraq and launching another effort to provide jobs and public services in Baghdad — the cost issue was raised by Republicans as well as Democrats.

But it had been simmering for more than a year.

Members of Congress have talked relatively little about the war's accumulating price tag because of the human costs, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) said. "But certainly we're cognizant of it," she said. "When you say for what we're spending in a month in Iraq, you could fully fund and double the science budgets of the United States and come up with a viable alternative to oil, it puts it in perspective."

Even so loyal a Republican as Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, who chaired the budget committee until the Democrats took control of the Senate this year, criticized the administration's approach to war costs, calling it "without any discipline as to how much is going to be spent."

"They're gaming the system," Gregg said.

At a media briefing before Bush's speech Wednesday night, a senior administration official said the president's plan would entail $5.6 billion in military expenses and $1 billion in reconstruction and other civilian costs.

In the broad landscape of federal spending, those are not huge numbers, though $6.6 billion is more than enough to cover the budgets for all the country's national parks, national forests, historic monuments, protected wetlands and wildlife refuges for a year.

What makes the cost issue increasingly sensitive is not just questions about whether it will buy success but also the fact that the new plan's cost will add to a mountain of bills for earlier military and reconstruction efforts with what many see as little or no positive return on the investment.

Some Republicans, especially fiscal conservatives worried about the deficit, are particularly unhappy because, they say, the president and the Defense Department have refused to address the war's impact on the budget in a straightforward way.

Instead of including war costs in the regular budget, such as the one Bush will send to Congress next month, the administration has been asking Congress for emergency-spending bills that short-circuit many of the usual review procedures for appropriating funds.

"Muting and undermining the legitimacy of the congressional role in funding is, I think, undermining to some degree the commitment to the war effort itself," Gregg said.

The administration says its approach is necessary because it is unable to determine what it will need for the war in the coming fiscal year, which begins each October. Critics say that may have been true early in the war but that by now most costs are predictable far in advance.

Last year, Congress approved a provision in the annual defense authorization bill calling on the administration to change course and put its request for war funds in regular spending bills subject to full congressional review.

Said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the provision's author: "Neither the White House nor the Congress is making the tough decisions about how we are going to pay for the ongoing wars. Adding hundreds of billions of dollars that are more conveniently designated as emergency expenditures — so they do not have to be budgeted for along with other national priorities — is only making our fiscal problems that much greater."

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) proposed that Congress block Bush's new plan by withholding funds. To date, Congress has not used its power of the purse to limit Bush's prosecution of the war, partly because it doesn't want to seem to deny U.S. troops any needed support.

"If you cut off funding, you're cutting off support for the troops," said Rep. C.W. "Bill" Young of Florida, a top Republican on the House Appropriations Committee. "Whether you support the battle they're involved in or not, the vast majority of the American public is still very supportive of our troops."

During Vietnam, Congress did threaten to limit the use of the defense budget. At one point, for example, it prohibited the use of funds in Cambodia.

But Congress flexed its fiscal muscles only toward the end of the Vietnam War. Bush's war on terrorism is in its seventh year, and at a comparable stage of Vietnam, antiwar lawmakers could muster only a handful of votes for limiting funds.

From the beginning of President Lyndon B. Johnson's troop buildup in 1965 to the fall of Saigon in 1975, the United States spent the equivalent of $662 billion in 2007 dollars, according to the Congressional Research Service. The war in Iraq is harder to measure because its costs tend to be mixed up with those of the war in Afghanistan and Bush's broader global war on terrorism, says Steven Kosiak, director of budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.

Starting with the anti-terrorism appropriation enacted a week after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Kosiak figures the United States had spent $400 billion fighting terrorism through fiscal 2006, which ended Sept. 30.

For fiscal 2007, Congress has so far approved $70 billion. The president is expected to ask Congress for $100 billion more.

Even if the fighting stopped soon, which few expect, the bills would continue to accumulate as the Pentagon pushed to restore what the war had cost in troops and material.

Happy New Year....er, Tet!

That's right, by the Vietnamese (and Chinese) calendar, today is Tet, the first day the year of the Pig. Over the past week we've seen a growing frenzy of excitement in the towns and cities. The markets have been even more bustling and crowded than usual as people buy all the traditional decorations, foods and gifts that go along with Tet. If ushered in properly, Tet holds the potential for an auspicious upcoming year. People take that seriously here. Following tradition, people decorate with the proscribed flowers; clean house, shop and temple; clear outstanding debts (try that America!); buy new clothes for the children and more. This is the most important holiday of the year in Vietnam and you can feel it everywhere. Being especially nice to others (including foreigners) augurs well for relations in the upcoming year, so we've been the recipients of more smiles and hellos than ever. Very nice.

A Long Road

A few mornings ago, as I packed my backpack and the sun reddened the eastern horizon, I asked, "how many towns has it been?" In the fourteen months since leaving our house to when we arrived in Hoi An, where we are now, we've slept in 121 places. I was surprised how easy it was to trace back through each of them, some no more than a single night sleeping in an open Arkansas field or a non-descript Indian guest house. I guess that says something for the ability of variety to inscript your memory.

A few weeks ago we observed we were carrying six (it's now seven) kinds of currency. Only two of them are in throw-away quantities.

Hello . . . can you read me?

Barring Thailand, Vietnam has been the most materially comfortable place we've visited since Europe. The Vietnamese are a little like northern Europeans in that they work hard and keep things in order. One rather ominous downside, though, is that there are some websites that you cannot view from inside the country, notably Blogspot/Blogger. We can post but we can't read what we post once it's up. Weird.

In many parts of the world, dissident political dicussion, banned from all mass media, is forced to migrate to the World Wide Web. Voices find their outlet on blogging sites . . . unless they are in Vietnam or countries with similar free-speech restrictions.

Here's a link to a BBC story discussing a handbook to protect your blog or website from censors: Link
Actual web address: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4271062.stm

Made It

Made it on the bus and enjoyed the six-hour ride from Kon Tum to Da Nang on the coast. Took the above photo over the shoulder of our driver on a stretch of what used to be the old Ho Chi Minh Trail very near the area of Dak To, an area of very extensive battles forty years ago. The Vietnamese are slowly re-grading and paving the former North Vietnam army supply route as the second north-south route in the country.

So, we made it as far as Da Nang that night. Our goal was Hoi An, 30 kilometers further south but there were no more busses running by the time we arrived. We found a guest house and, fortuitously, a vegetarian restaurant and settled in for the night. We woke up just after dawn the next day to some scratchy anthemic music and distorted, loud speech echoing above the traffic noise. I went to the roof of the guest house and saw this commemoration in the roundabout just down the road.

Don't Believe Everything You Hear

Woke this morning before sunrise to catch a bus. We're trying to get from the central highlands town of Kon Tum out to Hoi An, on the coast. Supposedly the bus companies have to pay more for insurance for westerners than Vietnamese so the price for the ticket (we were told) was almost twice that for locals. This happens a lot in Vietnam. After travelling for a while, especially in poorer countries, you get used to folks trying to make extra cash off your white skin. Fair enough, but we have to try to bargain. Also, after a while on the road, bargaining becomes part of the sport and even an obligation.

So, we argued...and argued - and as we argued, one bus after another left the station for various destinations - including ours. In many towns, there is one big, morning departure then only infrequent buses for the rest of the day. We had two local moto-scooter drivers (sort of a taxi driver) who shadowed us at every bus we queried and every time we went to the ticket desk. At first I thought they were sabotaging our effort to pay the local fare. Then I thought they were just trying to help us as our Vietnamese is very limited and English is almost non-existent. Everytime we'd struggle to ask about price, time and destination; the moto drivers started chattering in Vietnamese. The driver or ticket taker inevitably listened to them and told us there were either no tickets or gave us some riduculously inflated price. By the time the last bus left the station, I concluded the moto-jerks were, indeed, running interference and had stranded us. Hey, it happens. It hasn't happened much at all to us on this trip but here we are. After the station emptied, we ended up getting a normal ticket on the afternoon bus - our fingers are crossed in hope that they actually let us and our backpacks get on board. We found an internet cafe and are trying to fill some time. Let's see if we make it.

Aftermath

A final, belated note about Cambodia. You'd have a difficult time moving around in the country without crossing paths with some persons who've been physically maimed by war. The following is from the web site Mekong.net

• "Unfortunately, one of the most lasting legacies of the conflicts continues to claim new victims daily. Land mines, laid by the Khmer Rouge, the Heng Samrin and Hun Sen regimes, the Vietnamese, the KPNLF, and the Sihanoukists litter the countryside. In most cases, even the soldiers who planted the mines did not record where they were placed. Now, Cambodia has the one of the highest rates of physical disability of any country in the world. While census data for Cambodia is sketchy, it is generally accepted that more than 40,000 Cambodians have suffered amputations as a result of mine injuries since 1979."

Click on the link and check out the rest of the history. It's a singular study in ongoing human suffering.

I add this information as images like these have been difficult to get out of my mind. Cambodia really won me over. Her people were the single biggest reason for that. Even after so much suffering, they live with a love of laughter uncommon in my experience.

Landmines are still manufactured and used widely in conflicts around the world. More often than not, they are placed in an area for some short-term war need, then left only to be stumbled upon years later by someone who had nothing to do with the conflict. If you want to learn more about landmines you can see the web page of The International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

Really Cool

We have a friend back in the Bay Area who's done a lot of travel over the years. He's a genuine adventurer and when he goes out on the road he dives right into whatever experience is before him. I'm only guessing, but I'd say he's been traveling for almost as long as I've been alive. He's seen a lot and when you've visited as many parts of this world as he has, I think you get a more tempered perspective on what's exciting. This isn't to say he doesn't get thrilled or enjoy interesting experiences. Even now, he still travels more than anyone I know. I think he just feels less compelled to "sell" his excitement. If a place is worthwhile to visit, he'll say it's "pretty cool". If it's exceptional say, like Macchu Picchu in Peru, he'll amplify that to "really cool". It doesn't seem to matter if he's talking about someplace that might break and ordinary person's heart. If a place shouldn't be missed, he'll let you know with a "really cool".

After a more than a year on the road seeing wonder upon wonder, the last week Tami and I spent wandering around the ancient ruins of Angkor. It was really cool.

Link to Angkor Photos

A Country of Hustlers and Jokers

Around the ancient ruins of Angkor, the children are the most motivated vendors. Moreso than perhaps any place I've ever visited, the kids know how to work the charm. Their most effective weapon is their stylized use of English. The letter "r" changes to "ah", "v" changes to "b". Syntax gets modified so the kids sound a little like Yoda, from the Star Wars movies. Statements come out in a sing-song, rise and fall of the voice - the end always trailing away on an elongated, plaintive drawl.

• "Buy one moah my beeah (beer)..."
• "Gib me one moah orange again..." (From a girl who saw oranges in a small bag we carried. We had given her no oranges in the first place.)
• "Buy my cold drinks, okayyy...?"
• "Buy my post card nowww..."
• "Don't say no, say yes..." (after I answered in the negative.)
• "No? Buy twooo..." (after I answered that I didn't want one.)
• "Hello Sah (sir). I sell you cheap, cheap big plan. Two Coke for one dollahhh..." (from a boy running up to us, menus in hand.)
• One common tactic involved the kids trotting up the final twenty or so steps to us saying "hello" breathlessly. Initially, we asked them what was wrong. They'd answer something like, "I ran so far to catch you." It took us a couple times to realize this was a sympathy ploy for us to recognize their hard work.

I mentioned in the prior post that Cambodians seem to love to have a laugh, especially if it's at the expense of a 'falang'. One morning I saw this crude looking saw laying on some blocks. I thought it looked interesting so I clambered over for a photo. A small group of women workers eating close by took an interest and started talking. At first they watched me maneuver around the rubble trying to get a good angle. Two came over to look at my camera screen to see why the heck I might be trying to take a picture of a weed chopper. One woman sitting facing the group started a monologue that elicited periodic ripples of laughter and affirmations from the others. I could tell she was talking about me because she and the others would glance in my direction just before or after the laughs.

I got my shot and walked past. Her monologue continued without a break. Both she and the others tried to stifle increasing laughter. Since I was the obvious object of the joke, I stopped to watch. The monologue lady was laughing so hard she was rubbing her belly, gasping and wiping her eyes yet still she talked on. This had been building for something like two minutes. Just behind her, facing myself and the ladies, sat a small group of men groundskeepers. Throughout, the guys never fully shared in the laughs. After I stopped to watch, they only smiled nervously shooting me furtive glances I can only assume were intended to confirm, without a doubt, that I didn't understand what she was saying.

What entertainment I could have provided by merely taking a photo, I have no idea. I could still hear the laughs and the occasional "falang" as I rounded the corner of a ruin.

Cambodia for Sale

Roadside, hand-filed keys.


I'm not sure what I expected of Cambodia. No other travelers we'd met said they really liked the country but none said they really hated it either. It made me curious how they almost all paused, thoughtfully reassessing their experiences to see if anything had changed since the last time someone had asked their opinion. We'd heard that it was 'lawless', a bit like the wild west, that you had to watch your back. I knew, like its neighbor Thailand, Cambodia had a thriving sex trade. I'd heard the legends about shooting ranges where you could fire off AK47's or grenade launchers. (True, even now.) We heard from more than one person that, if you wanted it, you can get it in Cambodia. The past half century has seen Cambodia struggle to get out from under the yoke of the colonial French, stagger from the horrific maelstrom of violence that flooded over from the U.S. war in Vietnam only to then fall into a ghastly genocide at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.

What we found after we arrived was a surprise, if a surprise can unfold slowly over weeks. I don't know that I've ever visited a country that confounds and charms the way Cambodia has. It's a scruffy land of hustlers who seem to love few things more than having a laugh at the expense of a "falang" (foreigner). Easy to obtain visas, low cost of living and the ability to live under the radar have drawn expatriates from around the world who've opened all manner of businesses, notably bars, restaurants or other entertainment oriented ventures. I didn't know Bogie's Casablanca still had modern day cousins but Cambodia seems like that kind of place.

• You can rent scooters or motorcycles easily. Forget the helmet, though. Cambodians don't bother with those.
• Traffic flow on the streets is akin to blood cells in a vein. Where there is space, bikes, scooters, cars or cycle rickshaws crowd into the lane until they can flow freely. At intersections, it's very common for the two-wheeled vehicles to cut the corner by cruising right through a gas station or parking lot without slowing.
• Books, the backpackers' great indulgence, can be had here for a fraction of what they cost even next door in Thailand. Cambodia puts little effort into copyright protection. There is a cottage industry re-printing (i.e. photocopying) books. DVD's and CD's can also be had for extra cheap. There is even a small chain of shops (see photo below) here that allows you to download MP3's to your audio player from "their" very extensive catalogue. For the local folks looking for Asian pop music, some enterprising Cambodians simply set up a computer, a monitor and some headphones on the sidewalk and allow people to plug in and get music right on the street as if it's a snack.

• Sex for hire is as common as coffee here. It's an old, routinely accepted practice in southeast Asia. Some entrepreneurial expatriates put new spins on it, though. Down on the coast, Russian "investors" (i.e. mafia) opened a club where customers choose from girls who swim in a pool mermaid style or lounge with large snakes.
  
  A lady and a potential customer.