Coming back through the window: Vinh Linh to Dong Ho

December 23, 2016

AN expression for persistent people in French is that you push them out the door only for them to climb back through the window.

There's a lot of that in Vietnamese people. There's a resilience that's easy to sense even if it's difficult to define.

Take the village of Vinh Moc, for instance. It's small even now that it's grown and the only remarkable thing is that it stands on a promontory close to the old border with South Vietnam. It wasn't a military position. The best the Americans could claim was that villagers were supplying an island garrison from which American bombers could be shot at as they flew north to wreck Hanoi.

The penalty for that was to repeatedly bomb the civilians of Vinh Moc in the expectation that they would leave or behave themselves. The Americans bombed it repeatedly, hundreds of bombs at a time falling on a peasant community.

But the people had nowhere to go. What they had, even if it was destroyed, was better than nothing at all elsewhere. So they stayed. And they dug long, interconnecting tunnels into which they moved. And there they built dormitories and a school and even a nursery.

There were many entrances - here much improved, for visitors - to provide escape routes and to bring fresh air into the tunnels

Seventeen children were born in candlelight, including a man who now cares for the little museum there. He pointed excitedly at a photo of infants in a row of small beds, then at himself. Then at a photo of a bare-chested young boy carrying weapon on his shoulders. Again he pointed at himself.

Children were born in the tunnels and cared for in a nursery

A boy - we believe now the man who runs the museum - carries a weapon

I was born in the tunnel, the man gestured

His was one of 90 families that lived in the two kilometres of tunnels, tunnels so narrow and low that only a child could walk upright. Digging them spread over two years, getting lower - 12, 15 and then 23 metres - as American bombs grew more destructive. Frustrated and not knowing where the villagers had gone, the Americans dropped seven tons of bombs for every single person in the tunnels.

Families lived ever deeper in the darkness as American bombs grew more powerful

We went into the tunnels today after a wet, windy and rolling ride along the coast, not lightened by my having taken us well off our route. We left moved by the resilience, the passive fighting, against an enemy that attacked from out of reach in the sky, an enemy from another continent devastating a country against which it held no grudge.

There are people you can throw out the door but who come back in through the window.

A fragment of American bomb served as an alarm bell at the suggestion of another wave of bombing

Today's ride: 66 km (41 miles)
Total: 1,081 km (671 miles)

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