As I walked down the Saigon street in the stifling mid-afternoon heat, my eyes wandered to the banners adorning every other utility pole. “19-5.” I wondered what that meant? Why was it so important that it belonged on the multiple red banners waving above the sidewalks?
I sipped more of the now-lukewarm energy drink and mused about how I’d survived the heat as a child in Saigon. Forty years later, I was struggling to stay hydrated. Back then we hadn’t even owned water bottles. It boggles the mind.
My 2015 trip to Vietnam was a chance to “follow in my father’s footsteps,” and I found the experience more enlivening than I’d anticipated. The city was pulsing with good, high energy—not what I was expecting from a communist country
One of the banners featured the smiling face of the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh and the penny dropped. The Vietnamese, in European fashion, listed dates with the month first. Thus 19-5 was May 19th and the banners were announcing the celebration of Ho Chi Minh’s birthday.
The numbers had also caught my eye because they, usually in reverse order, represented my brother Mike’s date of birth. When I realized that he was born on the same day as the Communist leader, I couldn’t help but chuckle at how that coincidence might have stuck my dad.
(Sidenote: Only recently did my sister Marina remind me that my father shared his birthdate with the radical communist leader of China, Mao Zedong. “That always drove him crazy,” she said.)
However, Ho Chi Minh’s “brand” of communism was far different that Mao’s. According to Stanley Karnow's description of him in Vietnam, a History, Ho Chi Minh was a nuanced character:
But for his Asian features, he might have been an impoverished young French intellectual, a familiar sight in the Paris of the early 1920s.
Small and frail, with a shock of black hair and piercing black eyes, he occupied a shabby room in a hotel on a dead-end street behind Montmartre, eking out a livelihood by enlarging and retouching photographs . . . He was never without a book, either Shakespeare or Hugo or Zola, and he rarely missed a weekly meeting of the Club du Faubourg, a genteel group that discussed drama, literature, and sometimes even spiritualism, but generally avoided political issues.
Earnest yet gentle, reserved but not timid, he would speak up in fluent French at those sessions, his intensity tempered by wit. Or as a contemporary French acquaintance recalled later: “He seemed to be mocking the world, and also mocking himself.”
He first called himself (in France) Nguyen Ai Quoc, Nguyen the Patriot. Two decades later, during a more tumultuous period, he would assume a more appropriate nom de guerre, Ho Chi Minh -- the ‘enlightened’ leader of the Vietminh. (pg 97, 1983)
In January 1946 Ho Chi Minh appealed to the U.S. for assistance. According to the Records of the Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State:
Ho Chi Minh sent this letter to President Harry S. Truman on the occasion of the assembly of the United Nations, asking for American help in securing Vietnamese independence from France. The United States did not support the Vietnamese struggle, however.
The U.S. government adopted a neutral policy when France went to war to recolonize Vietnam in 1945; and President Harry S. Truman later authorized financial and military assistance to the French in 1950. (National Archives Identifier: 28469393)
Because Ho Chi Minh had studied the philosophy of communism and because we were allies with France during World War II, siding with the third-world country was just not a good fit.
As we know, Ho Chi Minh began a revolution that was unstoppable and his determination to win his country back—and America’s inability to recognize that zeal—resulted in a devastating loss of life.
He may have begun as “earnest yet gentle” but he put in motion a vicious military strategy that picked up steam in his later years and was carried on well beyond his death in 1969.
On that 2015 afternoon in Saigon, besides the revelation of the meaning of the banner notation of “19-5,” I also witnessed a very fun and jam-packed Hip Hop competition. A little research showed that it was “one of the most reputable B-Boy Global Tournaments—the R16 Vietnam 2015.”
On the edge of the crowd was yet another banner with Ho’s face, commemorating 40 years of freedom.
This time my chuckle was aimed at him: I could not help but wonder what he’d think of such a commercial event taking place in the city “reclaimed” by his communist army in 1975.
I wonder if he’d walk down a Saigon Street today and look around in awe and consternation as I did in 2015 or as Karen Kaiser* did in 2008.
The hustle-bustle of Ho Chi Minh City amazes me. Motorbikes carrying young people roar down the wide boulevards en masse. Traffic stops for no one. Gaggles of children wearing red scarves around their necks in honor of Uncle Ho cavort on their way to and from school.
Downtown, the streets are swept clean. Sunlight glances off new skyscrapers that cast long shadows over the crumbling old city. Sophisticated shops and restaurants line a street once known as Tu Do—now Dong Khoi—where American G.I.s had barhopped. I’d expected something more austere. Workers labor to restore the old French opera house, the meeting place of the former regime’s National Assembly. The city is almost unrecognizable.
Where is the Saigon I remember?
*Karen was the school librarian at my elementary school in 1974-75, also know as the Phoenix Study Group.
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this essay, please like, comment, share, or subscribe. These free weekly “Stories of Vietnam,” offer a historical and personal glimpse into the Vietnam Era as we approach the 50th Anniversary of the End of the Vietnam War.
Good recap of how the U.S. involvement began.