Emily Moeck
YOU, SOLDIER, AND OTHERS
I
was on the phone, in the middle of booking a ten-day tour for a couple’s thirtieth when I got an email from an old friend with your name in the subject. At first, I couldn’t help but laugh at the odds. But I guess they were pretty high, ever since Vietnam was voted one of Travel and Leisure’s “Top Ten Most Beautiful Places To Visit” a few years back. Now, the age of the internet has reduced my clients to the pseudo rich and the elderly and I run the whole thing out of my garage in Tarzana. “Have you ever been?” the woman on the phone asks. “Not really.” When I tell her about the tunnels I can almost hear her eager fingers flipping through the index of her Rick Steve’s, scanning the page till she finds it under Things To Do in Ho Chi Minh City (but to me it will always be Saigon). They always insist on reading their travel guides out loud to me over the phone. This is my job, I want to say, but I let her get excited. “The Chu Chi tunnels were dug with simple tools and bare hands,” she reads slow and methodical and in her pauses I can almost see her eyes squinting as she leans towards the page, careful not to skip a line as she follows with her finger, “The tunnels provided the Viet Cong with refuge and defense against the American and South Vietnamese forces. American soldiers used the term ‘Black Echo’ to describe the Viet Cong who would emerge from the tunnels at night, all muddy, to scavenge for supplies or engage in battle. Air, food, and water were scarce in the vermin infested tunnels, and during periods of heavy bombing or American troop movement, they would be forced to remain underground for many days at a time.” A long pause and I imagine her looking up from the book,
EMILY MOECK | 73