Driving south along the coastal highway from Da Nang to the Vietnamese honeymoon capital at Hoi An one’s eye is drawn to a series of fenced in plots surmounted by giant billboards attesting to a bygone era. ‘Paradise in Water and Marble’ declares a sign for a new luxury beach resort overlooking the South China Sea. ‘The Shark Strikes Again’ boasts another for Montgomerie Links, an eighteen-hole golf course complete with rippled fairways and a club house designed by the Scottish golfing legend.
With the support of the Vietnamese national tourist board and international property developers, the Quang Nam authorities have poured millions into redeveloping this 30 km stretch of coastline. In their eagerness to ‘beautify’ the area they even bribed the villagers to disinter their long-dead relatives and relocate them to new cemeteries in the nearby hills. Given the fact that in Vietnam it is not uncommon for several generations of one family to be buried in the same grave, this must have been a heartbreaking - not to mention gruesome - business. Wandering among the shattered marble gravestones mined from the nearby hills, it also struck me as senseless. Here and there, I came across a low wall with a security guard posted at the gate, but there was little sign of construction and with buy-to-let market in freefall I couldn’t help wondering if they would ever be built now.
Vietnam’s rush to give the ‘Heritage Coast’ a Western-friendly makeover just as global capitalism is in meltdown seems even more incongruous when you consider Da Nang’s iconic status in the history of the Vietcong struggle. Lying just south of the demilitarized zone, it was here that in March 1965 American marines first touched Vietnamese soil, massing at China Beach to defend the nearby US airbase, and it was here that a few months later at Cam Ne, a village ten kilometres inland, marines opened fire on innocent Vietnamese villagers for the first time, presaging the later and more infamous massacre at Mai Lai. As Lyndon Johnson ordered the strafing of Vietcong positions, Da Nang soon became synonymous with everything that was wrong with the American prosecution of the war. ‘Da Nang, me, Da Nang, me, why don’t they get a rope and hang me?’ mocked Adrian Cronaeur, the acid-tongued disc-jockey portrayed by Robin Williams in the film Good Morning Vietnam. However, the image I will forever associate with Da Nang is the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ scene from Apocalypse Now where Robert Duvall’s surf-mad Colonel Kilgore orders a squadron of helicopters to blitz the tree line at China Beach, before stepping onto the sand to utter the immortal line, ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning.’
In fact, except for the months of September and October, when this stretch of coast gets the tail end of the southern typhoons, the surf at China Beach and nearby Non Nouc is pretty lacklustre. If you want to know what Da Nang looked like before it caught the eye of the golf-and-sun lounger brigade then Hoa’s Place, a backpacker hangout 100 yards from the break at Non Nuoc, is a pretty good place to start. A slight man with an easy-going manner, Hoa opened his lodge 15 years ago and likes nothing better than to hang out at the bar with a cold beer exchanging pleasantries with his gap-year guests. A room is between $5-9 a night, the beers are on the honesty system, and on the rare days when the surf’s up, Hoa will even rent you a battered foam board. ‘Thanks for the best welcome in Vietnam,’ reads a typical entry in Hoa’s guestbook. ‘It’s so great to be around people who are genuinely interested in you and not just those dollars,’ reads another. Or as third puts it rather more succinctly: ‘Paradise.’
Unfortunately, Hoa’s little slice of Eden may soon be going the way of those roadside graveyards. ‘There’s a strong possibility I may not be here next year,’ he told me when I caught up with him on a sunny afternoon in February. A hotel group had been sniffing round the village, he explained, and there were rumours that the authorities were about to issue a compulsory purchase order on his land. How much would he get? Hoa shrugged his shoulders and took another sip of beer. ‘Probably 150 million dong, maybe 200m.’ I did a quick calculation, just $10-15,000, hardly enough to pay for a new car let alone a new hotel. ‘It’s a little bit scary,’ Hoa admitted as his wife emerged from the kitchen to replenish our plates with homemade nam rolls. ‘As you can see, we have a good business here and we’re not young anymore.’
By now our conversation had caught the attention of Will Gilmore, an ex-marine who’d returned to Vietnam to write his memoirs and was busy tapping away at a laptop at a nearby table. A softly spoken man with grey hair and glasses, Gilmore had, like me, been appalled by the sight of the roadside graves and was shocked to hear how little compensation Hoa and other villagers stood to receive. ‘Those are ancestral burial grounds,’ he said, adding that in America the authorities would never allow the similar destruction of ‘Indian lands’.
Gilmore explained that after the war he’d taught archaeology in Wisconsin but had never forgotten his experience in Vietnam and had now returned, as he put it, to ‘make amends.’ His first stop had been Hoaxnang, a village a few miles inland where he’d been posted in 1969 as a member of US Marines Civic Action Group with a brief to win the battle for hearts and minds by providing the villagers with medical aid and other forms of support. Unfortunately, the action appeared to have been doomed from day one. ‘We shipped a load of hens over from New Jersey with the idea of providing a supply of eggs for the village,’ Gilmore explained. ‘At first they seemed to be doing well, but one morning I got up to see this bird staggering around and a few days later they were all dead.’
The rumour quickly went round that the chickens had been poisoned by the Vietcong and that anyone who collaborated with the Americans would suffer a similar fate. In fact, said Gilmore, ‘we simply forgot to vaccinate them.’ The Vietcong, he later learned, had known everything that went on in the village but didn’t consider the CAG unit a threat so let them be. However, Gilmore’s superiors were convinced the area was riddled with collaborators and issued orders for the marines to shoot suspected ‘unfriendlies’ on sight. ‘We did some bad things, some very bad things,’ Gilmore admitted, but was reluctant to elaborate further. Instead, he told me about returning to Hoaxnang where, armed with a book of photographs, he’d succeeding in locating the company’s interpreter, a 12-year-old boy they’d dubbed ‘Cowboy.’ Now aged 59, Cowboy was still being punished by the authorities for being a collaborator and now ekes out a living by collecting scrap metal which he fashions into farm tools.
Gilmore had been somewhat luckier, being absolved of his sins by a local Buddhist nun. ‘She told me she wanted no part of my Western guilt, that what had happened in Vietnam was the fault of the American government, and that I should go home and get on with my life.’
But staring wistfully towards the surf Gilmore was clearly having trouble letting go. ‘It was so fucked up,’ he muttered. ‘We spent most of the time drinking beer, smoking weed and wrestling in the sand.’ Had he even seen anyone surfing, I asked? Gilmore looked astonished: ‘No, I never so much as laid eyes on a surfboard.’
Thanking Hoa for his hospitality, I made a mental note to Google the GI surfing story and headed back to the highway (I later discovered that Coppola had shot the Valkyrie scene in the Philippines where the surf is more consistent and the stories of GI ‘surfer dudes’ was almost certainly a myth). Continuing south to Hoi An it wasn’t long before I was passing more giant billboards, including one showing a woman sitting on a deckchair with her back to the viewer looking out on a pristine beach. The caption above her head read simply, ‘My Space.’ On the opposite side of the road female coolies in straw hats were watering a newly laid fairway as a mechanical digger carved a fresh bunker. A little further on there was yet another fenced-in plot and, to the left, a ruined cemetery.
Parking my motorcycle, I picked my way through the bracken for a closer look. Whereas the other cemeteries had only a few broken gravestones, this one looked as if it had been systematically vandalized. Cracked bricks and the shattered marble remains of grave markers lay strewn across the sandy scrub. Hoping to make out a name or date, I crouched down to take a closer look, but most of the markers were rubble. Finally, I found one that was still intact and began removing the sand and mud that obscured the lettering. It contained the names of five brothers and sisters and the date on which they had died: 1971, the height of the American bombing campaign: Da Nang, me, Da Nang, me, why don’t they get a rope and hang me.
I scratched at the stone in the hope of discovering their birth dates or where their bones had been taken, but there was nothing: just a gaping hole in the ground where their bodies should have been and, behind, retreating into the distance, a line of empty dunes.
