Bangkok: Water Spinach And War

When I land in Bangkok on my way to Cambodia, the first thing that hits me is the stifling heat and the smell of fish sauce as I emerge from my airport taxi into the warrens of Thailand’s biggest city. I sit down at a street stall on a Saturday afternoon, an hour before sunset, and order one of my favourite Asian meals of chicken noodle soup, but they haven’t got it.

“Pork!” snaps the noodle cook, jabbing a finger at her spidery-scrawled sign. She doesn’t do anything else, and nor does her husband, who’s crouched at the back, busy prepping a grimy tub of water spinach.

I perch on a stool by the roadside, my knees up to my ears. My bowl arrives in seconds. There are a few slices of pork, tandoori red around the edges, a scattering of sliced spring onion greens, a few slivers of crisped garlic, golden brown in colour, angel hair noodles, and beansprouts. The nod to vitamins is the single piece of kale that somehow found its way into my bowl on the back of a spoon.

Four pots of garnishes are thrust at me - pounded dried chillies with what looks disconcertingly like a pube sticking out, an explosive chilli vinegar, sugar, and crushed peanuts. A bottle of fish sauce, toothpicks, and a plastic drum of napkins complete the street food decor.

Except I was wrong about the lack of greenery. As I delve deeper into the last loop of noodles, a piece of water spinach appears in the bowl. For some reason, I think of a story I heard about the Vietnam War, or American War if you live in Vietnam. About how the Americans were literally hoist with their own petards when they bombed the vastly underequipped but ruthlessly cunning Viet Cong making their way from north to south through the mountain passes of the Ho Chi Minh trail.

The passes were marked and American bombers flew over blowing holes in the mountainside. The men with their shoes made from old truck tyres were slowed but still they came, clearing the rubble and finding other trails. And as the monsoon rains started, the bomb craters became pools.

Messages were passed and the next group of Viet Cong brought live fish with them and stocked the pools, and the fish slowly multiplied in their new mountain home. Then they planted water spinach cuttings, which quickly spread - long, hollow stalks with a few leaves at the top, delicious when fried with garlic and fish sauce. As each unit of National Liberation Front militia arrived, they found pools full of fish and swamp cabbage to feed them.

I bite into the tube and imagine those fighters sitting around a pot, sleeping off their evening feast provided by the bombs that were meant to kill them. I sip away at my ice-cold Singh beer as the last of the light fades, the car lights come on, and Bangkok puts on its neon clothes and waits for the hustle and shrieks of night.

The noodle cook sends her young son to fetch more beer from a nearby store. Outside it is a newspaper stand packed full of today’s editions of German and British tabloids - they know their tourist market in Bangkok. At the bottom is The Sun. “Pleb And Buried” is the headline. “Cop slur minister quits at last.” London seems a long way away.

MORE: Vietnam: Remnants From A Stricken Land

Vietnam: Remnants From A Stricken Land

I got up early and then went back to bed again, and then eventually got up and caught a taxi to the War Remnants Museum to see the sort of conditions Ngo Van Toai was held in. Well, about a mile short of there. I got fed up sitting in traffic, so I walked the rest of the way with my T-shirt stuck to my back in the midday smog.

I got lost, and then there was a cloudburst so I scurried for shelter under the porch of a posh-looking hotel. I asked a porter for directions, and was looking at my scrunched-up map when a loud, irritating Aussie, dressed in the international sex tourist kit of shorts, vest, and money belt, butted in.

He was looking for the museum too. I tried to get rid of him, and sat on a step as the deluge continued, hoping he’d wander off. But he continued to strike up conversation.

“I was only going to the museum to shelter from the rain,” he said looking up at the sky. “What else can you do on a day like today?”

He was soon eyeing one of the club signs. “Karaoke AND massage bar,” he leered. “Wonder what happens in there...”

“Maybe you get a singing masseur?” I shrugged.

Thankfully, a receptionist with good English appeared and asked me where I wanted to go.

“I think that’s a polite way of asking us to move on,” said the Aussie.

Us? He’d definitely said “us”.

I told him that I’d head down to the museum later, and pretended to walk round the corner, and watched as he slouched off in the bucketing rain. I left it for 30 minutes, worried I’d bump into him in one of the torture exhibits.

The first thing you see when you go into the War Remnants Museum (it used to be called the Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes until officials finally got fed up with the complaint letters) are a collection of US helicopters, tanks and planes.

They’d polished them up so much, they gleamed like muscled beasts of the apocalypse. Round the side, past the bins, was the rusty North Vietnamese stuff – two tins connected by a piece of string, and a World War One starting pistol.

A Dutch couple walked past me, smoking small cigars. “Oh lovely,” the woman said, pointing at an A-1 Skyraider (below) that had been used to drop napalm and phosphorus bombs on starving villagers.

I’d read a lot about the museum’s propaganda, but I was still surprised how blatant it was. One of the exhibit rooms was called “Historic Truths”. There wasn’t even an attempt to get any balance in there, but I suppose history is written by the victors. When you compare it with the hundreds of war films America’s Hollywood PR agency has pumped out, and the US still calling the war to this day “the Vietnam War” despite the fact that it engulfed all three countries – Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam – that had formed French Indochina, it’s a drop in the ocean.

An all-enveloping, digital smog of an ocean that will no doubt leave Americans in 100 years thinking they single-handedly saved the world from speaking German, defeated terror, and helped Mel Gibson kick the English out of Scotland.

There was no mention of the atrocities carried out by the North Vietnamese Army, or the way it had backed the Khmer Rouge’s genocide of up to two million people, or its invasion of Cambodia – an invasion that much of the world saw as a greater evil than the Pol Pot regime it overthrew.

In every fact box and poster, Vietnam was portrayed as a victim of America’s Goliath might. There were statistics of the number of aircraft and tanks the Americans had given to the “Saigon Puppet Government”, together with the money the US had spent on the war compared with World War Two and the 1950-53 Korean War, but no mention of North Vietnam’s capabilities or the Soviet billions.

A large area was devoted to the tortures inflicted in Con Dao Prison on Phu Quoc island. I thought about Toai and what he would have endured in his years there. Burning in the relentless sun, day after day in a tiger cage.

It was shocking and extremely depressing to read the victims' stories, and I left the place feeling strangely guilty that I had never been through similarly grotesque experiences. I’d never suffered true hunger, or seen my loved ones shot in front of me, let alone been guillotined, or had live snakes shoved down my trousers.

I felt dreadfully inadequate, and as I say, extremely lucky to be living in an age when I was far more likely to be bitten to death by a shark than forced to sit under a drip with my scalp shaved, so that every drop of water soon felt like a hammer blow.

There was waterboarding too. Seeing it being used alongside seemingly far more mediaeval interrogation methods obviously shows how effective it is at freaking people out, and why it is such a favourite at Guantanamo. And it makes it even more bizarre to read how some politicians still insist it shouldn’t be classed as “torture”. I don’t know where they stand on the use of live snakes.

There were brutal methods going on elsewhere in Vietnam, particularly with the US military’s use of jungle-clearing Agent Orange. It was terrible to see photos of the mutations the toxic herbicide caused, particularly of infants and young children, and there were plenty of pictures of them. You couldn’t help wonder at the crazed minds that decided on that appalling campaign, deforesting huge areas of Vietnam, eastern Laos, and parts of Cambodia just to flush out the Viet Cong they couldn't find.

On the way out, victims of Agent Orange - Vietnam claims up to one million of its people have died or been left with serious birth defects from its use - were singing to raise money for their charity.



I left, bloated with sound bites from defected US pilots, draft-burning students, and world figures critical of Washington’s obsession with controlling tin and tungsten resources in Indochina to underpin the manufacturing growth it so craved.

Anyway as I say, it got me thinking about the USA’s napalming and bombing, and widespread use of chemical herbicides, and then I realised how hungry I was and stopped at a KFC on the way back.

My Zinger meal was extremely dry. The burger had obviously been sitting there for a while, so I went back to the counter and ordered two pieces of hot and spicy chicken because they hadn’t bothered to cook any of the original variety (no-one seems to buy it in Vietnam). It came with proper cutlery - I couldn't see them dishing those out at KFCs in Brixton.

I glanced at my plate. It said “finger licking’ good”. Not when the chicken is properly eaten with a knife and fork, I thought, and then went back to thinking about the atrocities of American imperialism again.

The Cafe That Changed The Vietnam War

It’s hard to imagine a restaurant the size of Pho Binh was used to house 160 people, let alone launch an attack on American-led forces only 100 yards from the US military police barracks in Saigon. But that was the pivotal role played by the bustling eatery during the Tet Offensive in 1968, a turning point in the decade-long conflict.

The fact that the non-descript cafe is not easy to find only adds to its character. I must have asked ten people for directions, only to discover I had passed the place several times. All that differentiates it from the hundreds of other noodle joints in the former heart of Saigon is a couple of plaques that have seen better days.

It’s still a popular spot for tourists visiting Ho Chi Minh City, and the story is kept alive by the cleaner, who is only too delighted to tell tales of his comrades’ bravery during the Vietnam War, especially that of its owner, Ngo Van Toai (below).


Toai had bought the three-storey house – 7 Yen Do Street – in 1966, and with money from Viet Cong coffers turned it into an undercover command post to co-ordinate attacks deep within American-controlled territory. He lived a double life, smiling at the diplomats and US soldiers he cooked for every day at Pho Binh (it means “peace soup”) while City Rangers from the communist north planned deadly assaults against them in a room upstairs.

A month before the 1968 spring offensive, he was told to start secretly bulk-buying rice, wheat and other foods – enough to feed 200 people a month. On the first day of the Lunar New Year, commanders gathered and encouraged the guerrillas on their certain-death mission.

The co-ordinated strikes, including one on the US Embassy in Saigon, failed tactically, but they proved a great political coup for the north. Pictures of the Tet Offensive and aftermath were beamed into sitting rooms across the world, fuelling the peace movement’s arguments that the Americans could never win the war.


The noodle shop was raided, and Toai was arrested and tortured for 20 days but he did not “open his mouth even half a word”, the cleaner said. He was sentenced to life in the notorious Con Dao prison on Phu Quoc island, and released when the war ended in 1975. He died a few years later from ill health.

“I was not afraid of death,” the old soldier explained in an interview after his release. “I had offered my home to the revolution. I cared nothing for myself. I was willing to sacrifice.”

As I sat down, where US soldiers had slurped noodles four decades before, the cleaner handed me two books. One was filled with photos and press clippings of Toai and his noodle shop, and the other was a visitors’ book, littered with observations that very little had changed in the last 40 years, and America was still involved in foreign conflicts far from its shores, this time in the name of crushing terrorism rather than communism.


The restaurant only offers two dishes – beef noodle soup or chicken noodle soup - just as it did for all those years when American forces ate there, not knowing they were just a few feet from the enemy. The cleaner pointed to the 62-year-old man making my noodles, and said he was Toai’s son. I could see the facial resemblance, and the pride in his eyes, but there was sadness too, and not just the sadness of a man who clearly has a lot to live up to.


He was cutting up meat on a wooden board. Near him were large joints of beef, covered in yellow fat that looked like melted candle wax. It was the same recipe and board his father used during the war. The cleaner prepared my chicken noodle soup, adding hoisin sauce, chilli, and lime juice, and scattering thorny coriander and basil leaves, before mixing it all carefully with chopsticks. A wide-eyed American tourist walked in and sat down behind me.

“Chicken or beef?” the cleaner asked.

I passed her the two books, and warned her about the anti-US language in one of them. She had that same slightly embarrassed look that many American travellers seem to share today when the subject of US foreign policy comes up.

When I’d finished my meal, the cleaner showed me upstairs. There was an airy kitchen out the back with steps leading up to what he called the “classroom”. It was a shrine to the Viet Cong guerrillas who had launched the attacks.


One photo showed the inner circle sitting around a small table, sipping tea and planning their bloodshed. The table was still there – despite long pleas from the communist government for it to be housed in the War Remnants Museum in Saigon.


The cleaner said he often takes pictures of tourists pretending to drink tea from the table, some of them American veterans who fought in the war, and want to make peace with their past.

In the far corner were mug shots of two women and two men, who had carried bombs into buildings and blown themselves up for the cause. He called them “heroes”. In front of a cabinet containing war medals, stood a photo of Toai in his military uniform.

“Police come many times, but they hide photo behind Buddha picture on wall, and they no look there,” he chuckled.

He showed me the narrow alley at the back of the building – so narrow the police never bothered looking there. It offered the only escape route out of the restaurant – a 30ft drop.


The rest of the three-floored building had served as sleeping rooms, but it was difficult to see how 160 people could have crammed in, even sleeping nose to foot.

As I sat there at the table, and wondered at the fear they must have felt knowing the horrific tortures that awaited them should they be caught, I imagined Toai downstairs boiling beef for his pho bo. It was ironic that Vietnam’s unofficial national dish, a meal created in the communist north, had played such a part in America’s humiliating retreat from South Vietnam.