A Pilgrimage to Quảng Trị
On July 12, roughly two weeks before the Vietnamese War Invalids’ and Martyrs’ Day (July 27), I went on a pilgrimage to Quảng Trị province, home to the 17th parallel separating North and South Vietnam and one of the most war-ravaged battlefields in the Vietnam War. This essay is a humble reflection on my experiences at the historic Quảng Trị ancient citadel and Thạch Hãn river.
Taken inside the citadel museum
Context
The Quảng Trị ancient citadel is well-known for the bloody Second Battle of Quảng Trị, which lasted 81 days from 28 June 1972 to 16 September 1972 [1]. In an attempt to recapture Quảng Trị, a strategically located province that had fallen under the control of the North Vietnamese People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) since the First Battle of Quảng Trị, South Vietnam’s Army of the Republic of Vietnam launched a forceful attack that involved support from the U.S. Air Force and Navy [2]. Throughout the 81 days, a total of 120,000 tons of bombs and approximately 1.6 million shells were dropped onto the citadel [3], turning it into what participants describe as a “meat grinder” (cối xay thịt) [4]. Both sides suffered huge casualties: South Vietnam lost more than 8,000 fighters, whereas an estimated 4,000 North Vietnamese soldiers were killed in the battle [5]. Notably, a majority of the fallen North Vietnamese soldiers were university students in their early twenties. An ex-commander emphasized the excessive losses incurred by the PAVN, recalling that “on average, one company, or about 100 people, sacrificed per day" [6].
According to the commander, the Quảng Trị citadel assumed great symbolic significance in the context of Paris Peace Accords negotiations. As wins and losses in the citadel battle would influence each side’s negotiating power in Paris, neither the U.S., standing behind the South Vietnam regime, nor North Vietnam was willing to give in. Therefore, despite asymmetries in military prowess, the PAVN tried to defend the citadel at all costs. Although they ultimately lost the battle, the PAVN’s relentless efforts in defending the Quảng Trị citadel are believed to have hindered the U.S.’ and South Vietnam’s plan to quickly retake Quảng Trị province and contributed to their success in negotiating the Paris Peace Accords [7].
Today, the Quảng Trị ancient citadel and Thạch Hãn river, another key site in the 81-day battle, are two of the most popular sites of war commemoration in Vietnam. It was an extraordinary blessing for me to partake in the pilgrimage to these two places and pray for the martyrs. I will recount my experiences at the citadel and the river, respectively, before sharing some of my reflections on the pilgrimage.
Quảng Trị Ancient Citadel
It was 2:30PM when we arrived at the ancient citadel. The materiality of the citadel struck me immediately: this is it, steadfast in its presence, an ages-old structure bearing witness to heart-breaking tragedies and carrying countless wounds itself. It felt otherworldly to encounter a structure embodying temporalities and spatialities of such staggering contrast: herein I, a twentysomething from a realm of peace and relative prosperity, am to enter a sphere of destructive war and its afterlives. Multiple temporalities and spatialities converge on the citadel, rendering any visit a sentimental escape from the linearity of everyday life.
Fortuitously, it was a day when groups of war veterans came (back) to Quảng Trị to commemorate their deceased comrades. Outside the citadel, I saw a limousine adorned with this banner: “The group from Thái Hòa town celebrates the 50th anniversary of the 81-day-and-night battle in defense of Quảng Trị Ancient Citadel (1972-2022).” To me, little can be compared to navigating a historical relic among those who made its history. I followed elderly visitors donned in either dark-green military gear, accompanied by classic pith helmets and sparkling badges, or ao dai and non la into the interior of the citadel. From afar, I could see people lining up, in the burning sunshine, to make prayers at the memorial. As the queue was long, I joined other veterans in the domed corridor beneath the memorial, where the martyrs’ souls are said to have concentrated. Everyone gathered around a glass box containing a soldier’s gear, placed in the middle of the corridor next to a huge bell commonly seen at pagodas. The pink lotus blossoming from the ceiling brightened up the corridor, sowing in a space of death the seeds for salvation and eternal tranquility.
The corridor beneath the memorial
As we proceeded to the backyard, a spacious area filled with greenery, a guide started presenting about the 81-day battle. At this point, my emotions reached a climax. As I listened to the description of the young soldiers’ plight and a martyr’s letter to his family, I couldn’t hold back my tears. The letter begins as follows: “Dear my beloved family, today I’m here writing my last words in case you find it sudden when I have “gone on a secret research trip underground”” [8]. Obviously, the soldier couldn’t bear mentioning “death” to his loved ones. His last words include heartfelt greetings to his parents, siblings, nephew, and wife; his wishes for how they would continue living in his absence; and instructions for locating his body. “I’m going now. Farewell my family, village, and homeland,” the letter ends. It was written on the 77th day of the battle—at the height of the bloodshed, when the soldier had a premonition of his death.
Le Van Huynh's letter to his family, now kept inside the citadel museum
How must it have felt to write your loved ones a farewell letter? How must it have felt to foresee your death and find yourself powerless to stop it? How must it have felt to accept that death was inescapable, and that any imagined, longed-for future would be forever delayed? The fact that there was an actionable interval between life and death, and yet neither the soldier nor his family could have done anything to stop death coming, is a tragic reminder of multi-level, multi-angle power inequalities inherent in war. Towards the end of the guide's charged presentation, sobs blurted out from the crowd, and I glanced at a woman wiping tears off her wrinkled face with her handkerchief. I wondered to myself which gamut of emotions the old veterans around me were going through. Born after the war, I can never dare to speak for them. However, emotion-wise, I found it a blessing to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the veterans through these moments of reflection. I may have experienced what Émile Durkheim terms “collective effervescence”—in my case, an extraordinary sense of belonging and gratitude as a humble part of a group with intimate connections to the commemorated past, all of us forced to confront the cruelties of war, the immensity of losses, and the value of peace. After the presentation ended, I spent time walking around and praying alone. The quietude of the landscape—the sun shining over trees, the trees casting shadows over cement walkways, gentle winds hovering over grass and flowers—made me even sadder. If only this citadel had always been blessed with such serenity. As it is, the peacefulness of the citadel is inseparable from its history of violence, and it was impossible for me to appreciate the landscape without thinking about the thousands of lives buried underneath. The only source of consolation was knowing that the soldiers can now rest unperturbed, healed by the soothing nature and rites of remembrance. Perhaps because they were my age at the time of death, I felt strong sympathy for them.
The visit to the museum inside the citadel brought me quite different emotions, though. The museum does a great job of exhibiting photographs taken during the battle, of which I was most impressed by those showing the young soldiers’ everyday life. As I moved around the museum, I found myself smiling at pictures of camaraderie—of young men giving each other a haircut, or sharing a jackfruit. It seemed to me, from the exhibition, that the soldiers had stayed positive for a large part of the battle, and it warmed my heart to imagine them eating, washing, chatting, and laughing together. Oh, the youth’s simple joys! Juxtaposed with depressing photographs of smoke-filled battlefields, these pictures of comradeship and brotherhood evoked a counterbalancing sense—not necessarily of optimism, but of a heartful human connection that instantly touches. Visualizing the battle in this way exercises opposing yet interwoven effects: as it foregrounds the humanity underlying the battle, which cheers the audience up, it also reveals it is this beautiful humanity that was crushed by the conflict, compelling the audience to reflect on the destructiveness of war.
Heart-warming brothership between the soldiers
Before leaving, I climbed to the memorial and burned incense for the martyrs. There is a lot to say about the memorial, which is also the martyrs’ collective grave. As far as I can remember, the memorial is designed according to bagua (bát quái) and yin-yang (âm-dương) principles to guarantee salvation. The eighty-one steps to the memorial symbolize the eighty-one days of the battle. It was heartening to see the meticulous efforts put into the construction of the memorial, a tribute to those who had sacrificed themselves for the nation. I prayed that the fallen soldiers would lead peaceful next lives, empowered to fulfill their ambitions and accompany their loved ones until the end. Much later, when I scrolled through the photos in my phone, I recognized that there was a rainbow in the picture I had taken of the memorial. It was as if the martyrs had heard my prayer out.
Thạch Hãn River
Đò lên Thạch Hãn ơi… chèo nhẹ/ The boat on Thach Han… please paddle gently
Đáy sông còn đó bạn tôi nằm/ My friends are still lying at the bottom of the river
Có tuổi hai mươi thành sóng nước/ Someone’s twenty has turned into waves
Vỗ lên bờ mãi mãi ngàn năm./ Breaking on the shore for thousands of years.
(Lê Bá Dương, Lời người bên sông/Le Ba Duong, The words of a person by the river)
Before the pilgrimage, I thought Thạch Hãn was only a small river inside Quảng Trị citadel. When I stepped off the minibus, I knew I was wrong. The long and wide river runs across the town, separating the side where the citadel is situated from the other part of Quảng Trị. Thus located, the Thạch Hãn river became another killing field: as North Vietnamese reinforcements crossed the river to reach Quảng Trị citadel, they were attacked by South Vietnam’s artillery and the U.S. Air Force. Our driver-turned-guide stressed that many of the North Vietnamese soldiers had been killed before they even joined the citadel battle. Like what had happened earlier at the citadel, I struggled, and shuddered, to imagine that this peaceful, slowly flowing river—flanked by vegetation, its plain water reflecting the purity of the cloud-stuffed sky—had once been a “blood river” (sông máu) in local people’s terms. I couldn’t help but ask myself what had been submerged under the surface, and my heart felt like being squeezed asking that question. “The boat on Thạch Hãn… please paddle gently. My friends are still lying at the bottom of the river.” Recalling Lê Bá Dương’s poem at the sight of the Thạch Hãn river brought a huge lump to my throat. Sitting on the bank of the river with the citadel, I got emotional and drained thinking about the lives that had never made it to this side. Once again, a poignant sense of afterness—which had engulfed me throughout my meditative walk in the backyard of the Quảng Trị citadel—pervaded my heart. I knew that the tranquil landscape in front of me was only what came after; before it, thousands of young people my age—most of them cheerful men whose smiles irradiate the citadel museum—had been condemned to moments of excruciating pain and desperation leading up to their death. They didn’t deserve that. “Mom, it’s too painful.” The last words of a young soldier, recounted to us at some point in the pilgrimage, haunted me.
The Thạch Hãn River
That afternoon, Quảng Trị townspeople were preparing for the 50th commemorative ceremony that would involve releasing flower garlands and colored lanterns (hoa đăng) along the Thạch Hãn river at night [9]. The purpose of releasing hoa đăng is expressing gratitude and praying for the martyrs’ salvation. Seven lotus flower models were installed on the surface of the river, next to a floral display of Vietnam’s national flag. On the bank where we stayed, workers were finishing up structures necessary for the ceremony. I climbed the stairs down to the large incense burner facing the river. It was one of the most extraordinary landscapes of mourning I had ever witnessed: incense, lotus flowers, boats carrying the national flag, and an endless sky with dense clouds and golden highlights. Upstairs, a stone screen inscribed with heart-wrenching lines from Lê Bá Dương’s poem stood opposite a temple worshiping the martyrs and President Hồ Chí Minh.
Lê Bá Dương’s poem
My group didn’t conduct our collective prayer for the martyrs on this bank of the river because it was quite teeming and noisy. We hopped onto the car and traveled to the other side, where houses are scattered and there is more space, physical and emotional, for contemplation. A gust of wind blew when I closed my eyes at the beginning of the prayer. At that moment, I thought back to one of our previous prayers that started by acknowledging the presence of the spirits we were praying for in different forms, including winds. The wind—as did the burning incense sticks that each of us placed on the bank of the river—connected us to the fallen soldiers and, the way I see it, confirmed that they would benefit from the spiritual power of our prayer. From this side, I gained the perspective of young soldiers trying to reach the other side against the river currents. As recurrent thoughts of their desperation subsided, I gazed at the river in silence. The only sounds left came from the engine of a boat crossing the river, and our movements in the last few minutes of personal meditation. In a subsequent sharing session, one of my co-pilgrims told us that the fallen soldiers had been integrated into the nature surrounding the river. Her statement implied a cycle of existence in which death is constitutive of life rather than its negation. This opinion gave her peace of mind, and to me, it was another call for the gentleness with which one navigates Quảng Trị. In this town, every inch of soil contains part of someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s husband, someone’s father. No matter where one’s feet reach, it is important to keep this in mind, even if one cannot remember details of the battle.
Some reflections
The pilgrimage to Quảng Trị made me wonder if we can approach sacrifices through a framework other than glorification. At and beyond historical sites, it is common to encounter narratives that almost exclusively emphasize the heroism of martyrs, framing their deaths in association with the gains of campaigns (for example, the number of American bombers shot down) and as part of a consistent nation-building project. The martyrs’ heroism in fighting for their ideals is undoubtable, yet highlighting it to the exclusion of complexities and ambiguities in decision-making risks oversimplifying historical actors’ choices. As the narrative of heroism predominates, it is easy to forget that any soldier’s decision to join the battle must have resulted from hard calculations. Choosing between taking care of one’s significant others—parents and wife, for instance—and going to the frontline where death always looms couldn’t have been a straightforward decision.
Of course, it is arguable that fighting for the nation is a way to take care of one’s family, since the family and the nation are closely intertwined. Nevertheless, this argument is likely made on a purely rational basis by peacetime observers. Anyone living in an age of conflict and instability, put under constant threat of separation, would have agonized over leaving their loved ones behind to enter zones of death. That it was mostly compulsory for male adults to join the army complicates the question of volition in decision-making and, accordingly, the meaning of sacrifices. Is it possible that someone hesitated to make such a decision? While the discourse on soldiers’ hesitation and unwillingness carry political consequences, I consider it necessary, and humane, to recognize the emotional complexities underlying soldiers’ participation in national defense.
Rather than glorifying sacrifices, I suggest that we contemplate them as difficult trade-offs. Complicating these trade-offs are tensions between personal desires—for stable livelihoods, care-taking for parents, dating, a secure marriage, quality time with one’s children—and a citizen’s responsibilities, which, in some cases, means dying for the nation. Trade-offs should be understood in their specific, interrelated contexts as a person’s choice calculation is shaped by complex socio-political processes. Finally, it is worthwhile musing upon the agency of soldiers. Could they have acted otherwise? In asking this question, we should be open to diverse possibilities rather than centralizing any structure of thought and emotions.
Indeed, we can also reflect on trade-offs using observations of post-war Vietnam. The treatment of “national heroes” lies not only in the remembrance of martyrs, but also in support for veterans, many of whom bear life-sustaining injuries and lack educational capital for integration into the capitalist economy. A tragic accident in 2016, in which a cycling child died from being jabbed in the neck by the construction materials transported by a cyclo rider, coincidentally reveals the post-war precarity of veterans. A number of them get by on low-paid, high-risk blue-collar jobs while suffering from war-induced psychological problems. War veterans’ contemporary situation, a testament to the uncertainty and complexity of social reciprocity, adds a crucial yet oft-overlooked dimension to our contemplation of sacrifices as trade-offs.
[1] See more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Battle_of_Qu%E1%BA%A3ng_Tr%E1%BB%8B.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] See more: https://soha.vn/chien-truong-quang-tri-khoc-liet-doi-mat-voi-tu-than-tai-coi-xay-thit-20201029080852209.htm.
[5] See more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Battle_of_Qu%E1%BA%A3ng_Tr%E1%BB%8B.
[6] See more: https://vnexpress.net/cuoc-chien-bao-ve-thanh-co-quang-tri-50-nam-truoc-4456532.html.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Read more here: https://dantri.com.vn/doi-song/buc-thu-thieng-o-thanh-co-quang-tri-va-hanh-trinh-tim-hai-cot-chong-20210602135554627.htm.
[9] See pictures of the ceremony here: https://vnexpress.net/dem-hoa-dang-tri-an-liet-si-tren-song-thach-han-4487417.html.
