Red flags were plastered and hung everywhere around the train station...

I’d come as a flashpacker, heading out on the Reunification Express line, train #SE4, from Da Nang to Hue.

The train ride was sold as beautiful, and it was, aesthetically; known as one of the world’s most scenic, jaw-dropping train routes, it lived up to its reputation.

Train tracks snaked through lush jungle, and gazing out the window, I peered out at the tropical, verdant mountains, rugged streams, and sinuous valleys of the Hai Van Pass.

Straddling the pass were the lapping waves of the South China Sea, their undulating, yale blue waters bubbling and foaming into squiggly shores of eroding rock and bronze sand.

Aside from spotting a gun tower, it was generally hard to fathom that a place as picturesque and serene was once a conflict zone, a place of unspeakable barbarity, carnage.

Communism...

The train itself was more what I would have expected. It was run-down, utilitarian.

My train seat was hard, though it was sold as the soft option. Sitting in it numbed my lower back, legs and ass.

A tiny cockroach scurried by my feet. I wondered, that if sentient, would the cockroach be communist or anti-communist ... I couldn’t see it being apathetic or apolitical. Not after 300 million spins around the sun...

Cigarette smoke wafted its way through the carriage. A middle-aged Viet in high-riding blue jeans, a white “same same” t-shirt and shiny leather shoes poked his head into the space between the cars, coffin nail dangling from his lips.

Disinterested rail employees in blue uniforms sold snacks and water, and without any hint of irony, a hammer and sickle were embroidered on their carts’ moneybags.

One train employee sat in the seat next to me for a time, watching a historical drama set in Nguyen Dynasty, on his phone, without earphones...

The scenic surroundings gave way to urban sprawl as the train arrived in Hue city.

Seeing the red star flags, hammer and sickles, portraits of “Uncle Ho” everywhere had me thinking communism, thinking in confabulations, perhaps due to my indoctrination as a child in the US school system of the 1980s.

But, in fact, in 2020, I’d discovered through observation, conversations with locals and browsing online that Vietnam is probably the most capitalist place in the world...

Everything is to be sold. Anything can be bought.

Human organs. Human beings included, if you have the right connections.

Regulations, laws take a backseat to cash.

There are little to no environmental regulations, at least that are enforced. Garbage, leaves, plastics are burned on sidewalks, in front and backyards of houses, apartments...

The traffic, roads are Darwinian, more of a jungle than anything in the Mekong.

There’s little to no social safety net. It’s every man, woman and child for themselves.

Government cash flow flows into a super small, select few. The rest of the masses are left to fight for scraps.

If not for the strict censorship, monitoring of media and draconian anti-drug, anti-porn, and anti-vice laws, Vietnam would be a libertarian utopia.

This Vietnam, the Vietnam of today, is communist in name, power structure, and superstructure only...

I’d come to this communist turned capitalist utopia as a solo traveler, trekking through the center of Vietnam, to Hoi An, Da Nang, and, finally, Hue.

Unlike us Americans, the Vietnam War, or, as the Vietnamese refer to it, “The American War” isn’t much on the minds of the local people.

Unlike America, where we still discuss, pain over it, refer to unwinnable conflicts, quagmires, warzones, and general dumbfuck foreign policy as “this or that Vietnam.”

Unlike America, the Vietnamese don’t think much of it, aside from learning about their victory over the Americans in schools.

Aside from that, they don’t spare a second (or first) thought when walking or riding their motorbikes by a decommissioned M-46 towed field gun, or a captured US warplane or chinook helicopter with its belly, its ballast cemented into the pavement out in front of a government building or museum...

I’d grown up in the 1980s, in the long shadow of the war, when Vietnam, the war there, remained etched into America’s recent memory.

It was a stigma, a trauma.

A festering, open wound.

As a nation, we had collective PTSD.

There were those I knew, personally, who’d returned from the front lines, and I’d heard their stories...

Like an uncle of mine who’d served, taken a bullet in the ankle, was honorably discharged.

Every single night since the war, for years afterwards, he’d been plagued by night terrors. Vivid dreams.

Him back in the green, trudging through the caws, echoes and marshes of boobytrapped jungle, his friend, Derrick, in tripwire; the whoosh of a bamboo whip; the young marine writhing and twisting on the spikes, his eyebrows upcurved, dark blood curdled in his mouth.

My uncle, in his dreams, would hear those wretched gurgling murmurs Derrick uttered, as mortars clapped and colored the sky.

Every night he’d see Derrick’s face in a deathmask.

Every day, my uncle’s limp, tottering gait served as a reminder.

He’d taken to smoking reefer to calm his nerves. He and my dad, staying up late into the night, watching baseball, puffing joints and laughing.

It was the only time he was happy, my uncle, when he was stoned enough to forget...

And there were those I saw but didn’t know, who’d returned from the war.

The homeless vets.

My neighborhood was dotted w/several homeless veterans, sleeping rough, shellshocked, unable to function in society.

I’d see them on the street, faces blanched, cracked eyes and 1000-yard stares.

Cardboard signs asking for money and food.

Jingling Styrofoam coffee cups full of loose change.

American flags hanging from their shopping carts...

There was a constant stream of movies I’d seen on cable, late at night.

Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Rambo.

Assorted B-movies featuring yellow people, commies, being shot or blown to commie bits by someone w/a mullet or Chuck Norris or someone resembling Chuck Norris or someone resembling someone resembling Chuck Norris.

And I’d watched documentaries, news footage in grainy color, bloody bodies hurried away on stretchers, that little Vietnamese girl napalm victim, her ghastly gesticulations and nudity, and helicopter crashes, John McCain, prisoners of war in tiger cages, carpet-bombing planes and ejaculating flamethrowers, buildings aflame, charred thatched roof villages, bullet-riddled, burning and burned bodies, amputees.

That was my idea of Vietnam. A warzone, a panoply of destruction, a hot rainy jungle hell of death.

Not my superlative vacation destination...

And that was my idea of communists, communism.

Warfare, alongside starvation, bread lines, death. Siberia. Nukes. Steely grimacing vodka people in furry hats.

Boat people. Boat people in Miami. Bay of Pigs. Schoolchildren ducking under desks. Gorby and that big birthmark on his head. The Berlin Wall. Crises.

Yellow people in jungles, jumping from trees, armed with long knives, stabbing and slashing Americans. Female snipers shooting at Matthew Modine, Animal Mother and Cowboy.

A world of shit...

Communism was the Evil Empire, everything that was evil.

As a child, growing up in the last decade of the Cold War, I’d learned to hate everything communist.

(Being called a “commie” in school was even worse than being called a “faggot.”)

The fucking commies wanted to fucking nuke us, and wanted to do other horrible things to me, everyone I knew. What those horrible things exactly were, I didn’t clearly know. But I did know they were horrible...

However, eventually, communism, its fiscal methodology, lost. Capitalism won.

Colonel Sanders turning out to be America’s finest commander.

America’s bankers and corporations finishing off the mission in Vietnam, decades later...

The Cold War was won. The Iron Block fell. The USSR collapsed. China became mercantilist. Laos, while still authoritarian, opened to business. Cuba is slowly opening.

Only North Korea remains true red communist, Stalinist, and even it’s got its own thriving underground commerce, markets, and may one day follow the PRC into mercantilism...

Although I’d been in Asia awhile, traveled extensively throughout the continent, because of the mental image I had of Vietnam, because of the war, communism, I’d always had an aversion to visiting.

Even though a few friends, coworkers had loved traveling in Vietnam, praised and recommended it highly, I still couldn’t bring myself to go.

I felt guilty, shitty. About us inflicting so much death. I especially felt ashamed after learning about “Agent Orange,” and how that affected, and continues to affect, veterans and locals alike.

Then on a trip to Australia, I had an unavoidable connecting flight that was delayed, making it necessary for me to spend 48 hours in Saigon, or, as it’s now known: “Ho Chi Min City.”

Contrary to my expectations, preconceived notions, learned wariness, I loved it!

The buildings. The cavalcades, waves of motorbikes. The electric, buzzing and chaotic streets. The freshest fruits, vegetables; the banh mi, pho noodles and yummiest milk coffee concoctions I’d ever tasted.

(Ever had an egg coffee? Salty coffee? Or coconut coffee? Well, dear reader, you should!)

I was taken aback by how friendly, talkative, and welcoming the people were. How wired the city was. Every little café, corner restaurant, mom and pop noodle spot having a WIFI router, the password posted on the wall or table. The net speedy too.

I’d even met and had sex with a tour guide. A Vietnamese girl. Never could I imagine that I would have, technically, had sex with a communist, had sex with a member of the communist party. But I did.

(And it was glorious!)

Vietnam certainly was, still is, as of this writing, a developing country, with nagging issues like wealth inequality, traffic safety, pollution, corruption.

But, to me, an outsider, a casual observer, a dilettante, Vietnam, with its large young population, looks to be on the verge of- something.