Cao Bang Province, Vietnam – “How many of you have looked into the sky and have seen an airplane flying overhead?” the big man from Boeing asked the children of Tam Kim Primary School. “Has anyone here flown on an airplane before?”
As his questions were translated into Vietnamese, there was some giggling. The odds that any of these kids has boarded an airplane are very slim.
Two-thirds of Tam Kim’s 147 students in mountainous Cao Bang Province near the border with China are classified as “needy.” On a frigid January morning, many were wearing thin plastic sandals, some without socks. But at least they had new winter coats – blue for boys, pink for girls – that featured logos of Boeing and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (VVAF).
At nearly two meters tall and maybe 250 pounds, Boeing’s Jim Polmanteer was surely the biggest man in town this day. Sharing a stage with a bust of the late President Ho Chi Minh and the son of the late Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, he could not help but symbolize America as well.
The occasion was the inauguration of the school’s new $180,000 six-classroom building, funded by Boeing as part of a campaign organized by VVAF. The company that built the B-52 bomber, which decades ago rained destruction and death on this country, began doing business in Vietnam in 1994 and counts Vietnam Airlines as a customer.
Vo Hong Nam, the son of the legendary Gen. Giap, who died in October at age 103, delivered equipment for a computer lab, books and blankets for the needy. He described how his father learned the local Dao, Tay and Nung languages while creating Vietnam’s original 34-man army in the nearby forests about 70 years earlier. Over the next 30 years, the People’s Army would vanquish the French and American forces to establish the Vietnam depicted on maps today.
I tagged along with some Vietnamese journalists on a three-day historical pilgrimage organized by VVAF. The bus journey up the winding mountain roads, made treacherous with two-way truck traffic, led to a place so out-of-the-way that foreign visitors still seem exotic. After a Tam Kim teacher treated me like a celebrity, I met a local celebrity.
As a teenager, 89-year-old Ban Thi Chu had secretly worked as a cook for Gen. Giap’s nascent army, delivering meals deep to their forest hideouts. With Gen. Giap’s death, Ba Chu is one of the few remaining witnesses to the seminal history. She sat with Gen. Giap’s son at lunch.
She walked with a bamboo cane, age having bent her like a question mark. Sometimes she flashed a lively betel-stained smile as a TV crew interviewed her. With a local official translating Chu’s Tay into Vietnamese, the smile vanished as she spoke of her sadness after Gen. Giap’s death – how she could not eat for days. My new friend Nhung, home from her studies in America, kindly interpreted the translation into English.
Chu told me more about her life – working in the cornfields, raising three sons and a daughter. Together they provided her with nine grandchildren and, so far, two great-grandchildren.
Her oldest son, she said, became a soldier and fought the Americans. She recalled seeing American helicopters flying along the ridges of Cao Bang and spoke of how, years later, she evacuated the area during sporadic clashes with Chinese troops.
Paved roads, not trails, now enable visitors to travel through the forest to the spot where Gen. Giap established the initial “armed propaganda” battalion on Dec. 22, 1944. In what is now a national park, we considered a concrete bas relief sculpture that depicts the event, and lit joss sticks at an altar for Gen. Giap. We walked a short distance to a commemorative marker that, in Vietnamese, describes how the general explained the new battalion would serve as a “big brother” to many more which would be created as the revolution pushed to Hanoi and nationhood. The names and ethnic roots of the original 34 soldiers are listed, with seven marked Liet sy – killed in action. Later our bus stopped at the Tam Kim site of the unit’s first victory, a home that had been commandeered by the French as a military outpost. Now it is an understated museum.
The children of Tam Kim may be directly or indirectly the descendants of these revolutionaries. Over time, some of them will make the journey themselves to Hanoi, where the historic sites now include the new B-52 Victory Museum, commemorating the defense against the so-called “Christmas bombings” of 1972. The broken carcass of one shot-down bomber is on display, or they can see the landing gear from a fallen bomber that protrudes from the pond known as “Lake B-52.” Hanoi’s defense against the Christmas bombings was one of the last battles of what people here call the American War. It is odd that the American company that built those bombers would later help build their school.
Nobody brought up these aspects of yesteryear’s news on this day of celebration at Tam Kim Primary. Teachers and students performed songs and dances. A video featured U.S. Ambassador David Shear, who talked about how Boeing’s airliners help bring people together. That was after the man from Boeing told the schoolchildren how a child, in a contest, provided the name for Boeing’s newest, biggest carrier – the 787 Dreamliner – because it was the child’s dream to fly. And so the children were left to imagine that someday they might grow up and travel from their villages and farms and see the world beyond.
Đăng ký: VietNam News