Ellington

"I thought I was having a hallucination," student Sharon Yoo wrote in her journal. "It was like the scenery from the movie ‘Avatar.'"

The natural wonder that produced such awe for the student is Ha Long Bay, an offshoot of the Gulf of Tonkin, a calm bay with blue-green water that has more than a thousand huge limestone karst formations rising straight up out of the water. It is one of many sights and experiences in Indochina that do not conform to most Americans' expectations about the region.

My first daylight view of Vietnam was a reassuring one. After arriving in Hanoi at night, the next morning I opened the curtain on my hotel room window and saw an American flag hanging from a pole just outside, above the front door of the hotel. That was on the first of my three recent trips to the country whose name dominated American consciousness four decades ago.

When I returned there in January leading an adult tour of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, my concerns had evaporated. And in May, when I took a group of nine Millsaps students to Vietnam and Cambodia, I was able to reassure them they had nothing to fear.

Millsaps is not the first American college to offer a course on the Vietnam War in the places where it happened, but such offerings remain unusual.

Apart from haphazard and ineffective attempts to block some of the free flow of information on the Internet, Vietnam seems to be much freer than one would expect. There is essentially zero visible police presence, and just about the only uniformed military people I have seen in the country are the guards at the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Hanoi. It certainly doesn't have the feel of an authoritarian state, and it's well worth seeing.

"Oh, they Vietnamese. They LUUUF it!" That was the response of Ngoc, our guide in the north, to several questions about what Vietnamese people think about this or that. Ngoc speaks English well but is more fluent in French. And when he and one of the students, Anne Waldrop, had a long conversation in French, he was amazed. He said he had never heard an American speak French so well—quite a feather in the Millsaps cap.

The trip wasn't all beauty and fun, though. "The mood drastically changed from adventurous to silent and moody as we entered the area," student Sharon Yoo wrote of our arrival at Khe Sanh. The American military assigned this spot major importance in late 1967 and early 1968. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong kept the base under siege for several months. A substantial number of Americans lost their lives at this remote location. The North Vietnamese were apparently using Khe Sanh as a diversion to draw American forces away from Hue and other cities for the Tet Offensive. Once the siege ended, the Americans abandoned the base, which had been of no strategic importance in the first place.

"Hell looks a lot different now," one returning Marine had written in the guestbook. A Vietnamese man there tried to sell us bullets, other artifacts, and most disturbingly, dog tags from American GIs.

Student Kate Sundell wrote, "I never want to forget how I felt at Khe Sanh, but I hope I never have to recollect it after this. Does that make sense?"

It does to me.

As emotional as our visit to Khe Sanh was, it was exceeded two days later when we went to My Lai. To Americans of my generation, this name brings an overflow of emotions. After our visit to the village, these students have similar emotions.

I had arranged for us to meet with a survivor, and we were ushered into a conference room to meet with Pham Thanh Cong, who was a boy of 11 on March 16, 1968, when American troops killed the other five members of his family and nearly 500 others. He survived beneath a pile of corpses, including those of his family.

Just hearing this survivor's story was moving. But, by chance, was also in the room was an American Marine who had been stationed in 1968 just up the coast and had loaded the helicopters that went out that fateful morning. He was distraught and apologetic.

"It was one of the most powerful and deeply moving days of my life," Anne Waldrop. "In these moments the war became extremely personal."

"Tension. Immediate," Kate wrote. "I struggled to meet (the survivor's) gaze. How could I forget? How can anyone?" None of us will forget this day. It was an educational experience that could never be attained in a classroom.

Saigon, aka, Ho Chi Minh City, is an entirely different world from the rest of the country and an experience that everyone going to Vietnam should have, but it's not my cup of tea. It's too big. It's too crowded. Downtown, there are stores from many of the most expensive designer names in the world. Hanoi is the official capital of the so-called Socialist Republic of Vietnam, but Saigon is plainly the real capital of what is actually the Capitalist Non-Republic of Vietnam.

Anne, who is white, summed it up nicely: "If Saigon is communist, I'm black."

Cambodia
We were at Ta Prohm when the rainy season began. It was ungodly hot when we got to Siem Reap, the gateway town to the amazing temples of Angkor. Ta Prohm is the so-called "jungle temple," where the ruins are overgrown with massive roots. We all greeted the downpour with open arms—literally, stretching our arms out and soaking up the rain.

Students rode elephants at Angkor Thom, saw the majesty of Angkor Wat (where some of us tried a snack of fried crickets—I thought they could have used some Tabasco), and had one of the best days of the trip when we journeyed out to Phnom Kulen, the holiest mountain in Cambodia, having excellent local food as we sat in a hut by a river and later splashed beneath a beautiful waterfall.

In between these many happy moments, though, there were frequent reminders of the atrocities the Khmer Rouge had committed by beggars with missing limbs lost to land mines to the Siem Reap killing field, which is now a temple with a display of hundreds of human bones and skulls of victims.

So recently a place of unspeakable horrors, Cambodia today has the feel of extraordinary freedom and happiness. Visiting there reinforces the hope that human goodness can triumph over the worst in our natures.

All the students say the trip immeasurably enriched their lives. "This trip broke all boundaries of a class taken for credit," Anne remarked. "Such experiential learning could never happen in desks or in front of chalkboards!"

Robert S. McElvaine is a history professor at Millsaps College. He will lead an adult trip to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in early January. For more information, visit http://home.millsaps.edu/mcelvrs/Vietnam-Cambodia-Laos-Jan-2011.htm or contact him directly at {encode="[email protected]" title="[email protected]"} or 601-974-1291.