Nguyen

//

 

The interport student for Vietnam was named Nguyen.  He was a cool dude with interesting curvy glasses who spoke good English and I believe was a junior studying Foreign Relations and wanted to study at the American University in Cairo after he graduated.  I could be wrong, but the general idea there is right.

 

Anyway, Eric is Vietnamese himself, and I’m pretty good friends with Eric, and on the second day the three of us walked around together.  Eric’s planning to study at the National University where Nguyen goes to school next year, and he wanted to have a look around and maybe talk to the professors.  So we walked there (on the way we saw the chalk wall) and we were EXTREMELY HOT.  Apparently this is the hot season – May is the hottest – and otherwise it’s a little bit cooler, or windier, or rainier.

 

Anyhow, the college was pretty much a city block.  There were no residential halls, and Nguyen said he had to drive a half-hour every day to and from school, although some people lived close by.  A lot of it looked kind of old and a little bit rusty, and it was small and I believe almost all not air conditioned.  There were big fans in the halls that you could plug in or unplug if you were waiting in a room.  He said he had one class with 150 people in it that really only had room for like 50, and there was no air conditioning, and it was just awful.

 

Anyway, we didn’t find any professors because it was a Saturday, so we just went to the shade of the cafeteria and had some water and talked.  There was a white professor sitting next to us.  There was a little store in the back of the cafeteria, and there were chop sticks at the table and a tiny little waste basket at the bottom of each table.  The other two went to the bathroom and then we left.

 

We eventually wound our way to the war remnants museum, which is all about the Vietnam / American War and the atrocities that America committed.  There are tons of pictures of mutilated men, dead women and children, beheading, Agent Orange victims, the weapons we used, chemical victims, deformed fetuses, burn victims, burning villages, dead people being pushed from helicopters, mothers escaping through rivers, girls being forced to fight, etc.  It’s pretty awful.  There was one really interesting picture of a bunch of American soldiers with dead Vietnamese laying around them and it had the caption:

 

“The above pictures shows exactly what the brass want you to do in the Nam.  The reason for printing this picture is not to put down G.I.’s but rather to illustrate the fact that the Army can really fuck over your mind if you let it.

 

“It’s up to you, you can put in your time just trying to make it back in one piece or you can become a psycho like the Lifer (E-6) in the picture who really digs this kind of shit.  It’s your choice.”

 

 I thought the stuff there was pretty interesting in general, but that picture in particular.  It was all pretty powerful too.  I had a conversation with Nguyen about it afterward.  He’s the one who told me the stuff I put in the first post about culture.

 

After we left, we went to the post office, which was HUGE and wooden inside and really really nice.  There was a Japanese girl there.  I should have said “Koko a doko?!  Watashi a dari?!”  (Who am I?! Where am I?!) but I wasn’t quick enough with it.  She left before I could.  She was from Kobe, she said.  I bought six post card stamps and something for Uncle Bill and we went back to the ship.