Customer Reviews

Hitchhiking Vietnam: Letters from the Trail [VHS]

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I served in RVN in the delta with the US Navy's Helicopter,Attack,Light,Three squadron during the final days of ground combat. Our mission was to cover SEAL operations, Navy river patrol forces, local VN outposts and villages. We lived with and worked closely with local South Vietnamese in training them to defend themselves.

I am always curious at to what happened when we left in Feb. of '72. Karin Muller reports her 1998 adventure in a some what non-political, humorous light as she explores some of the places as we operated in and around the Mekong Delta. She starts her journey there and goes north to Hanoi and places in between, finding parts of the elusive Ho Chi Minh Trail, all in search of the "real" Vietnam. Her work is a clear-sighted, refreshingly human account of her close encounter in a now forbidden land.

This video, along with her book, "Hitchhiking Vietnam", completes the story. A great addition to my historical collection, giving some closure to my time in our turbulent Vietnam era. I recommend her work to any Vietnam vet.

With our renewed rapport with Vietnam it would be good to view or review that area if the world.

This is a diary of sorts of a seven-month trip around Vietnam. Not one of those glossy government or fancy travelogues, but a personal trip that was documented with letters. As with any experience there will be differences of opinions as to the environment and people. My Vietnam of the 60's was vastly different from the war movies of the time.
There are some parts that may be gory to some people during food preparation times. Others would be appalled at the wanton destruction of forests and wild life.

I was reading the book after viewing the film with my wife to show her a little bit of what it was when I was there. She immediately said that the villages (especially the huts) seemed surprisingly like the dwellings in the Yucatan.

Even thought this was a well put together documentary, I was disappointed as my time there was mostly in the central highlands Peiku, An Khe, Kontum and there about. And when she went up the coast she missed all the high spots.

The Montagnards she interviews were Mongol invaders; they were not the Montagnards I was aquatinted with. The Montagnards of the central highlands are approximately 14 to 16 separate people that were in the highlands before the people that call themselves Vietnamese invaded from China thousands of years ago. In essence they are to the Vietnamese the equivalent of our native Americans.

The book is one of the rare descriptions of today's Vietnam and worth reading as I was able to be places that I missed on my tour and imagine the rundown state of the country today