The Pits Win

During the Vietnam War, the Communist Viet Cong underground fighters created a huge maze of tunnels that crisscrossed the region from the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City (which was known as Saigon at the time) all the way to the border of Cambodia, 250 kilometers away. It was an underground empire that not only enabled the Communist fighters to move from place to place without being exposed to the Americans, but also served as a place to live for months or even years. They built hidden kitchens that emitted steam at certain angles so that the Americans wouldn’t detect the smoke, they had hospitals, workshops and residences — all underground, far from the bombardments.

As I creep through the dark tunnels, it’s hard not to compare them to the tunnels of Gaza. And like then, once again a technologically superior army scorned the primitive tunnels yet paid dearly for doing so.

In January 1966, American B-52 bombers dropped thousands of tons of munitions that turned the verdant jungle of Cu Chi into a pocked moonscape. Then, 8,000 soldiers were dispatched to comb the area and to inject gas and boiling tar to the tunnels and to seal the openings with explosives. The American command declared success and moved onward.

But it was an obstinate Australian officer who recognized the real significance of the tunnels, and realized that the victory celebrations had been premature. He sent small cells of soldiers into the tunnels and discovered that they were actually an army base in every sense. And worse, they had hardly been damaged by the bombardments, and could easily be repaired.

As a result, the Americans tried to attack again, this time using special combat forces nicknamed “tunnel rats.” They worked without an organized fighting credo, with lots of improvisations, and moved through the tunnels armed only with light weapons, flashlights, knives and a cord that they held on to, so that they could find their way out.

“Do you want to see some of the traps the Viet Cong prepared for them?” Tan asked with a little glint.

He removes a wooden trapdoor and shows us a deep pit, inside which are sharp bamboo pegs coated with some type of organic poison. As we move on, he demonstrates the rotating door that would toss the person standing on it into a pit full of snakes, or the tripwire that would overturn a jerrycan full of scorpions on the person. It’s no wonder the Communists were able to completely exhaust the Americans.

The tunnel grows narrower, the lights are dim, the walls feel like they’re closing around me. My breath comes in rapid, shallow spurts. And this is all when the only thing lying in wait for me around the bend is my guide, Tan, and his explanations. I stop for a moment and fervently say a chapter of Tehillim for our brethren in captivity, for the IDF soldiers fighting in the tunnels and the hostages who are wasting away there.

“There’s no reception here in the tunnels,” Tan says when he sees me murmuring, assuming I’m trying to make a phone call.

I quickly correct him. “The One I’m calling has reception even in the darkest places.”

Along for the Ride

Ho Chi Minh City wakes you up — there’s no need for an alarm clock here. First light brings an endless cacophony of honking, screaming, growling, construction noises, and motors. But more than anything, you hear the motorbikes.

Only the wealthiest people here have cars. All the rest get around on their mopeds or motorbikes or any other two-wheeled vehicle, completely ignoring traffic laws, signs, or speed limits.

Crossing the street in a big city in Vietnam is not for the faint of heart. On our first day there, one of the locals explained the rules to me: No one will stop for you. Forget it. They’ll drive around you, of course, and try not to hit you, but they will never stop for you.

The only choice is to choose a direction, take a deep breath and walk into the road, with the thought that the drivers don’t want you hit you any more than you want them to. But if you hesitate or try to evade them, you’ll put yourself into unpredictable danger, since they can’t then guess where you’re going.

“And if I’m still afraid?” I ask this person who seems to be a wealth of information.

The man shrugs. “Find some local grandmother and cross with her.”

No less astonishing than the brazenness of the drivers is the sheer number of them.

Only a few inches separate one motorbike from another, and they all pour into the street like a river of metal and rubber and helmets. I watched as one young man riding on his motorbike didn’t take his eyes off his phone once along an entire street. There was a lady riding on the bucket seat next to him, and behind her, a big dog trying desperately not to fly off.

I watch as a family of five somehow manages to pile onto one moped without any helmets or protective gear, while simultaneously committing every possible traffic violation. While Vietnam is actually a rigid Communist, one-party dictatorship, what you see on the streets is primarily anarchy, where it’s every man doing as he pleases.

A local guide named Lin takes me to a rental agency where I can rent a vehicle that will serve me for the next few days: What else but a motorbike? I say Tefillas Haderech with kavanah and then leap into the motorized tidal wave flooding the streets.

A short ride takes me to the home of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Hartman, the Chabad shaliach in Ho Chi Minh City, who together with his wife, Rachel, run the local Chabad House. I tell him about my ride, that there were moments I wasn’t sure I’d make it here.

“Well,” he said, “You know that there’s no Jewish cemetery in Vietnam. It’s a segulah for arichus yamim.”

Even on the scale of remote communities, Rabbi and Rebbetzin Hartman’s kehillah is quite modest. He estimates that until Covid, there were about 300 Jews in the city. Today there are less: businesspeople seeking to take advantage of the economic opportunities that this developing country has to offer, tourists and backpackers who are trekking across the Far East, and a handful of Jewish families who somehow landed up here. He has a small shul, a small grocery for kosher products, a mikveh (before that, it was necessary to travel to Singapore), and a tiny class for children.

“There’s no anti-Semitism here,” Rabbi Hartman relates. “And whatever way the regime is officially Communist does not at all prevent us from observing our religion.”

I equip myself with a nice amount of kosher food and take leave of the shaliach, who is doing holy work bringing Jews closer to Hashem even in this remote corner of the world. It’s raining out, but that’s nothing new. Hot rain is a regular feature of the local climate. I just check that my non-la hat, made of leaves to protect the wearer from rain, is tied firmly under my chin.

Like the different head-coverings of Torah-observant Jews, the non-la hat, made of palm leaves and bamboo sticks, comes in dozens of styles and types, and those in the know can expound on all the nuances. I don’t know if they’ve thought of a non-la style shtreimel yet, but a hat made of pineapple leaves is made for horsemen, and a hat with words of song embroidered inside the pleats are for special occasions. All the hats, though, have one thing in common: They have broad brims that provide reasonable protection from the endless rain.

With my hat and my provisions, I’m now ready to set out. I turn the motorbike southward, toward the Mekong Delta

Sly as a Snake

If there’s one place where it’s possible to feel the real pulse of rural Vietnam, it’s the Mekong Delta. The southwestern part of the country is made up of an endless network of canals, green rice fields and floating markets — a world in which is seems time has stood still.

After days of the urban heat and endless traffic in Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon, I’m on my way to a place where the roads are actually rivers, where the market is floating on the water. The scenery changes as I drive past the outskirts of the city: The skyscrapers are replaced by little villages, supermarkets by fisherman in small boats, and children wading around in the river, as green fields stretch out as far as the eye can see.

While the scenery is captivating and the slow pace of life exudes a sense of tranquility, an encounter with the locals clarifies to me just how deep the gulf between us really is.

A guide taking me to the floating market makes a casual remark about the many idols that fill his home, a number that would have put Terach’s idol shop to shame. “I have lots of statues — one really big one and some smaller ones.”

“One big one and a few small ones?” I echo, curious.

“Yes,” he explains simply. “The main idol controls everything, but the small ones help us in the day-to-day things.”

I smile. I understand that multiple gods are as natural to him as my firm belief in one and only G-d.

“But you know,” I say, “that in fact there is only one real G-d, right?”

He raises an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Yes,” I reply. “The Creator is one and only. There are no two or ten. Just one.”

He thinks for a moment. “But we believe otherwise.”

“I know,” I smile. “But think about it. The world runs so smoothly — nature, the stars, life — if there were multiple gods, how would it all work together?”

“I never thought about it like that,” he finally concedes.

Enough theology for now. He tells me about some of the wildlife in the area, and then suddenly says, almost as an afterthought, “Be careful. There’s lots of kog here.”

“What’s kog?” I ask.

“A big snake. Very dangerous,” he explains.

“And what do you do when you see one like that?”

“Sometimes we eat them.”

I freeze for a moment. “You eat snakes?”

“For sure,” he says easily. “We have a special ceremony. We drink the blood while it’s still alive, and it brings good luck.”

I will not share any additional details, because of bal teshaktzu, but I’ll suffice with saying that the beverage, called “snake wine,” is actually quite popular in Vietnam.

I look at him in shock. “You know that it’s forbidden?”

His eyes narrow. “Why?”

I explain to him about the Seven Noachide Laws, and that eating eiver min hachai, a limb from a living animal, is one of the basic prohibitions that were given to all of mankind, not only to the Jews. And we have an obligation to let them know it.

“G-d does not want people to eat that way,” I say. “There are laws that protect us, even if we don’t always understand them.”

He listens seriously, and then, after a short silence, says:

“You know, because of what you told me, I won’t participate in this ceremony anymore.”

I’m surprised. One responsible word and here’s a person who understands something new.

No Place Too Far

It makes no difference how remote a place is. You could be at the end of the world, but there will almost always come a time when you’ll turn around to hear someone speaking Hebrew.

I meet Shachar, who tells me that he and his friends have been trekking here for a few months already, taking in all the different kinds of G-d’s wonders. But their minds and hearts remain in Israel. “Achi, we see news every day, we are sitting here in peace, but inside… our stomachs are churning,” he says.

“I’ve been here for four months and I haven’t put on tefillin,” says Tomer, another hiker. “I used to put them on occasionally, but since the army… somehow, it just petered out.”

We find a quiet corner near the riverbank. The sun is about to set, and the air is filled with the humid odor of water and tropical plants. I take out my tefillin. At first, Tomer hesitates. There’s something unexpected, unplanned, maybe even strange, about putting on tefillin here. But as he begins to wind the straps around his arm, something changes.

His face softens. His gaze focuses. For a moment, he’s not an Israeli trekker in Southeast Asia, he’s just a Jew who is connecting. “Baruch Atah Hashem… lehaniach tefillin…” he whispers, and his voice blends with the whooshing flow of the river.

When we finish, he is quiet for a moment, and then says: “Wow. It suddenly feels so different.”

“Because it’s real,” I say. “Because it’s yours.”

Vietnam may be far from home, but when HaKadosh Baruch Hu is everywhere, maybe there’s no place in the world that’s really far.

Fight to the Finish

There’s something about Vietnam that I just can’t reconcile, and it takes me time until I put my finger on it.

Vietnam is etched in my mind as the mire in which America got stuck, of Communists fighting against “Western imperialism,” of the desperate and unforgettable image of the “last helicopter out of Saigon,” when the south fell to the north like a ripe fruit after the Americans pulled out of the south for good.

I have visited places where Communism is still very dominant and obviously present — China, North Korea, Cuba. But here in Vietnam — nothing. As if it had never been. Except for the Cu Chi Tunnels, where a languid effort is being made to preserve the memory of the fight-to-the-finish war against the Americans, it appears that for the average Vietnamese citizen, that decade never took place. Not only is there no apparent animosity against Americans, the generation of young Vietnamese are constantly trying to copy and imitate anything that comes from the West.

After all, the war was half a century ago, and the young people, at least, were born long after the war ended — for them it’s ancient history. Additionally, the war against the Americans was only one part of a 20-year-long war involving Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, with North Vietnam supported by the Soviet Union and China, while South Vietnam was supported by the US and other noncommunist nations. After the US withdrawal in 1973, the war continued until 1975, when all three countries became unified under Communist rule.

But the simplest explanation is that ultimately, America — or at least its capitalist culture of abundance — has won.

Communist ideology still buzzes somewhere in the background, through the propaganda slogans and government announcements blared through loudspeakers in the centers of some cities. But the locals largely treat these as a noisy irritant and nothing more.

“Everyone here pays for everything, including health care,” my guide Lin tells me. “The government hardly provides anything. Sweden is more socialist than Vietnam.”

“So what makes it Communist?” I ask.

He scratches his head. “Communism just means that we’re governed by one political party,” he says, explaining his basic understanding of civics. “There are those who are bothered by this, but it doesn’t interest me at all as long as the government generates a comfortable atmosphere for businesses and for good life.”

The reality is a bit more complex.

Two years after America abandoned South Vietnam in 1973, North Vietnam violated its commitment and captured the southern part of the country. The world, as usual, reacted with a shrug. The new regime enforced Communism in the familiar brutal way. The name of Saigon, the capital of the south, was changed to Ho Chi Minh City, and Hanoi, the capital of the north, is currently the capital of all of Vietnam. Millions were sent to “reeducation camps,” thousands were murdered, and the fortunate ones fled the country. Over the next decade, about 800,000 Vietnamese “boat people” made their way to safer shores.

The Communists celebrated their big victory until they discovered a confounding fact: Communism just didn’t seem to work.

A unified Vietnam was no better than the Soviet Union, North Korea, or Cuba. The poverty reached scandalous levels, inflation raged, and the rice crop in the Mekong Delta, which used to be the food basket of Southeast Asia, was so meager that the government had to import rice to prevent complete famine.

In 1986, the government very quietly announced the Doi Moi (Restoration) efforts, and without using the word explicitly, capitalism was admitted through the back door.

“It was as if they put the Karl Marx and Adam Smith into a blender and this is what came out,” said commentator and writer Michael Totten.

The results speak for themselves. Within ten years, the poverty level dropped from 60 percent to 20 percent, Vietnam became the second largest rice exporter in the world after Thailand, and economic annual growth reached 8.5 percent.

I return to Rabbi Hartman’s Chabad house to continue preparing for my upcoming trip to Cambodia. Outside, night falls on the tumult of Ho Chi Minh City, and the lights go on in Landmark 81 — the tallest skyscraper in the city. Advertising billboards flash and blink in the streets as business keeps humming on in this city that never stops.

With its strong foreign investment inflow and productivity growth, Vietnam in the last five years has even surpassed Singapore’s economy. Vietnam’s shift from a centrally planned to a market economy has transformed the country from one of the poorest in the world into one of the most dynamic emerging countries in the East Asia region.

I think about the irony: After thousands of tons of napalm bombardments, seven million tons of bombs, and 20 million gallons of Agent Orange that America dropped over Vietnam in a decade of war, after the ruthless jungle battles, with 58,000 American soldiers killed, another 300,000 wounded, 1,600 MIAs, and 20 million North and South Vietnamese civilians and soldiers dead, what ultimately prevailed over Communism in Vietnam was Burger King, Dunkin Donuts, and French designer fashion.  —

Vietnam Timeline

July 1954: The Geneva Accords

A deal was reached that divided Vietnam into two countries, after France was defeated in the first Indochina War.

December 1960: Establishment of the Viet Cong 

The Communist-driven guerilla force that fought against the South Vietnamese government. American soldiers referred to them as “Victor Charley.”

August 1964: Gulf of Tonkin Incident

A conflict between the United States and North Vietnam leading to a decision in Congress that allowed President Johnson to expand the war.

March 1965: Marines Land in Da Nang 

The arrival of the first installment of 3,500 US Marines on the beaches of Vietnam, the beginning of the expansive ground involvement of the United States.

January 1968: The Tet Offensive 

A surprise coordinated attach launched by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces against South Vietnamese and US military targets, who initially sustained heavy losses before finally repelling the Communist assault. While Hanoi believed that a mass armed assault would trigger a popular uprising leading to the collapse of the South Vietnamese government, that rebellion never materialized, and the operation turned into a military defeat for North Vietnam.

April 1970: Invasion of Cambodia 

American and South Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia to fight against Viet Cong bases, which led to mass campus protests all over the United States.

December 1972: Operation Linebacker 

A massive aerial assault by the United States on Hanoi and Haiphong, intended to bring North Vietnam back to the negotiating table.

January 1973: Paris Peace Accords 

A peace agreement that brought about the withdrawal of American forces from the region, prisoner exchanges, and a temporary ceasefire between the North and South.

April 1975: Fall of Saigon

The capture of the capital of South Vietnam by the North Vietnamese Army, which marked the end of the war and the unification of Vietnam under the Communist regime, which officially exists to this day.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1057)