Free We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam by Harold G. Moore;Joseph L. Galloway

people have fought many wars in the last thousand years. They are all Vietnam wars, so we must call them by different names to be more specific,” one of the translators said.
    Besides, he added, Vietnam today is a country, not a war. Before we finished this journey we would come to accept the truth in that statement.
    In our stops for fuel or a bit of lunch over the next week of a road trip that would take us all the way south to Ho Chi Minh City, a.k.a. Saigon, we would get acquainted with Vietnam the country as well as Vietnam the war, trying to square our old memories with the reality of today, something the Vietnamese themselves seem to have done without regret.
    Nearly two decades had passed since the last Americans were pulled off a rooftop by Marine helicopters in Saigon and South Vietnam fell to the Communists. The changes were evident and astonishing to those of us who had last seen these towns and villages in 1966. Over 65 percent of the people living here today had been born since the war ended, and the hordes of smiling, excited Vietnamese children who surrounded us to practice their English—a required course even in the smallest village schools—were testimony to the truth of the statistic. The end of war had clearly set off a baby boom of monumental proportions among these industrious, hardworking people.
    The war so disrupted village life and rural rhythms that for most of that decade the United States shipped in millions of tons of rice to help feed the population. Today Vietnam is again one of the largest exporters of rice in the world. That population boom meant that the small, dirty towns and villages we remembered from combat operations long ago had grown like wildfire and now were large, dirty towns and villages bursting at the seams with people hustling to make a living. There were new schools for all those children, electric service in the unlikeliest of places, and a new form of entertainment that had spread across the land: billiard parlors. I’m talking pool here. Maybe only one table in a small thatch-or tin-roofed open-air pavilion with two shooters and a crowd of onlookers offering advice, but along Highway 1 most wide spots in the road had their pool hall.
    Where the passion for pool came from was a mystery to us. None of us remembered any pool tables in the clubs and recreation centers for American troops during the war, so clearly it was not an American legacy. Joe mused that during his years living in just-developing Asian countries like Indonesia where television had not yet arrived, the people were starved for any recreation at all. In Jakarta in the late 1960s promoters filled a soccer stadium with a huge crowd of ticket buyers to watch a local “strongman” do battle with a toothless and obviously drugged old African lion. Even when the strongman, the Great Lahardo, slapped the lion across the nose with a slab of raw meat, he couldn’t get a reaction. The crowd was so incensed that it took platoons of soldiers to get the Great Lahardo out of the stadium alive. Some Vietnamese entrepreneur had seized on a similar hunger for amusement and somewhere to go in these little villages and introduced the locals to the game of pool.
    The smells of this tropical country—simultaneously exotic, mysterious, and at times gross beyond description—are rooted in the memory of every American who ever did a tour here. All of them were still there to refresh that memory, from the smoke of charcoal cooking fires to unutterably foul gutters to ducks, pigs, and water buffalo living in backyards and along back alleys. Ah, yes, and there it is: the eye-watering, nose-twitching smell of nuoc mam, the fermented fish sauce so vital to any Vietnamese meal. Nuoc mam is prepared by filling small kegs with layers of whole fish separated by layers of salt. The kegs are left out in the sun for several months. The resulting juice is drained off the bottom. A little dab will do you.
    As we made our way south we