1. A moment in time
Russell Grenning
Dammed if I know why but recently I have been remembering an incident that
happened almost five years ago on a beach in Vietnam.
We had gone to Vietnam via Bangkok, landing in Hanoi, and with an English-
speaking guide spent a leisurely three weeks heading south to Ho Chi Minh City
which we discovered the locals still call Saigon despite South Vietnam having
disappeared off the map in 1975.
If we were taken to one museum which was little more than a collection of abandoned
or wrecked US military equipment, we went to dozens. It all became rather tedious
actually although I did secretly like the fact that the locals referred to the war as “The
American War”. Somehow, obscurely, it made me feel a little less guilty. Just why I
should have felt guilty puzzled me; after all, I wasn’t responsible for the whole bloody
mess.
And so, eventually, we came to Da Nang, about half-way through our odyssey.
At the height of “The American War” in the late 1960s, Da Nang was the site of a
vast US military complex and one of the busiest airports in the world. Each and every
day, more than 2,500 aircraft landed and took off. It was here, in 1972, where the last
US ground combat operation took place. God knows how much money was poured
into the place – it was a more than a military base, it was a symbol of American
prestige and power.
We went for an early morning drive along the coast. For what seemed an eternity, we
passed by on a long straight road what remained of that airbase - crumbling hangers,
cracked tarmacs, guard towers leaning at absurd angles, administration buildings
vandalised and decrepit, fallen fences and all overgrown by weeds. The locals were
passing by on their bicycles on their way to work without so much as a passing
glance.
It brought to mind Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias whose “traveller from an
antique land” recalled “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” standing in the desert
and, nearby, “half sunk, a shattered visage lies whose frown, and wrinkled lip, and
sneer of cold command, tell that the sculptor well those passions read which yet
survive, stamped on these lifeless things, the hand that mocked them and the heart
that fed.”
I asked our driver to stop so I could take a better look. I surveyed this decaying
symbol of the futility of war then went across the road to stand on the grassy verge
that gave way to a narrow beach fringing the gently rippling South China Sea.
I was lost in thought when I heard someone approaching me from behind and I turned
to see tall, well-built American man – he was wearing an American Legion (the US
RSL) cap. We nodded and he went to the very edge of the water.

2. Looking at him, I guessed he was somewhere in his well-preserved 60s and his whole
demeanour indicated serious money – old money even – power, authority and
respectability. From what I could see from his neatly clipped iron gray hair to his
hand-made Italian shoes, I imagined him to be an attorney, a banker, a corporate
executive or a successful society medico. No doubt he was a respected figure in his
community, I thought, and quietly influential; perhaps he was an Episcopalian or a
Presbyterian and almost certainly a Rotarian and a tower of strength at the country
club.
In fact, he was cast from the same mould as Republican Senator John McCain who
later that year would challenge and loose to Barack Obama.
He had something in his hand and occasionally would look down at it and then again
out to sea apparently lost in thought and memories.
Then I heard a woman’s voice – initially I thought querulous but then realised was
more anxious, even distressed. “Honey,” she said, “Are you OK? Please come back
honey.”
She was also late middle-aged but beautifully preserved – a triumph of art over nature
- and her impossibly golden hair was like a helmet that could have been worn by one
of the Valkyries. She stood by a black Mercedes and, at a respectful distance, their
Vietnamese driver was waiting, impeccable in his black suit, white shirt and black tie
and chauffer’s cap. His face was a mask – utterly impassive.
The man seemed to sigh and he turned and looked back. For a moment the early sun
caught his face and I could swear that his eyes were glazed with tears. “Yes, honey,”
he said, “It’s OK. It’s all OK now.”
He headed back to his wife. His shoulders were slumped as if some of his life had
drained away and he somehow seemed suddenly much older. As he passed me what
was in his hand dropped but he didn’t notice or perhaps even care. The car drove
away.
I was curious about what he had dropped and retrieved it. To my astonishment it was
a faded black and white photograph which seemed to have been taken on that very
beach. It showed a group of strapping clean-cut young men in swimming costumes,
laughing, happy, confident – the world at their feet. All white and all American like
extras from one of those 1960s beach party movies.
Was he in that photograph? And what of the others? How many had survived “The
American War”?
I didn’t know if he would return to try and find his photograph so I left it partially
secured by a rock but still visible. I hoped that I had given it a decent burial and I can
still see it in my mind’s eye. I guess it has now crumbled to dust as the once
impregnable Dan Nang air base has.

3. At what appeared to us to be a frantic pace, the old base is being consumed and
replaced by very exclusive up-market resorts. Vietnamese communists could have
given Bjelke-Petersen and my old boss Russ Hinze and the whole white shoe brigade
lessons in fast-track developments.
Do the locals appreciate the irony and get amusement from the fact that American
tourists now pay them a fortune to come and see the scene of one of their most
catastrophic defeats? I’m sure they do and I hope, at least, they preserve a bit of the
old base as a curiosity like those fragments of the Berlin Wall.
Shelly wrote in his poem about the traveller’s tale from an antique land that the
shattered visage contained these words, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings, look
on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.”
And so it was on that beach at Da Nang – again to quote Shelley – “Nothing beside
remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and
level sands stretch far away.”
Perhaps for the first time I did believe that the past was another country.