War and peace

I apologize that I am a few days behind on posting because of busy travels, but more to come! Currently en route from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

From 7/22:
Yesterday the group spent a day in Ho Chi Minh City being tourists. Having already visited the American war museum and the zoo, we went to the Cu Chi tunnels to see for ourselves a site where major guerella warfare went down during the American war. 

The tunnels are in the jungle and on rubber plantations, and consist of 3 levels of VERY small tunnels all networked together and complete with disguised air holes and fresh water wells. We got to crawl through the "expanded"version of these tunnels (which are still uncomfortably small), which reminded me of some of the obstacles we completed during the tough mudder this past spring. To give you an idea of the size, fellow wildcat Davion (football safety) got stuck for a moment in between tunnel levels. Given, most Vietnamese people are much smaller than most Americans, but that is still an extremely uncomfortable place to be--those with claustrophobia should definitely avoid crawling through these tunnels. The Vietnamese guerillas lived in the tunnels during the day and farmed their rice paddies at night, picking bullet casings out of the way. The whole system was incredibly clever, with tons of trap doors and misleading signals to confuse and slow the opposition. They made tiger traps, which are swinging trap doors covered in grass such that when a tiger or American soldier stepped on it, he fell into a ~6 foot deep pit and onto many 2 foot long sharp spikes. There were lots of gruesome traps tat aimed to wound and slow down the opposition instead of killing them instantly. The Vietnamese re-used everything. For example, they made awesome sandals out of tire treads such that one could not distinguish the direction a man was traveling based on his footprints.

During the tour, gunshots were being fired in the background, which I initially thought was a scary way to make tourists understand what the "ambience" was like during the war. We found out later that there was actually a firing range that tourists could pay a buck or two to shoot  military weapons without experiencing the kickback (they were fixed). I have never shot a gun (aside from shooting tin cans with bebes in Gabe and Eli's backyard), and my group all wanted to split a round so I gave it a shot (pun intended). Never in my life have I  wanted to even come close to an AK47, but YONO so I somehow was convinced to shoot 2 bullets from an AK47.  It was SO loud and shot very far. I will never do that again, but it really gave me an idea of how powerful these guns are from such a long range--I can see why they are so deadly. I was even more surprised when a a tourist next to me shot a round from a REALLY scary gun, an M16. Honestly, it seems pretty twisted to me that we come to a site and learn about how many people died in a really tragic war, and then a bunch of European and American tourists get all excited about shooting machine guns. The more I think about that, the  more upset I get.

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Monday evening, Juicy, Thao and Snowee (three awesome Vietnamese coaches living in Saigon) came to visit us at the hotel. It was so nice to see them again! I realized how much I will miss them (and the other coaches, both Vietnamese and American), and how lucky I was to have made such great and interesting new friends. They are already planning to visit the kids in Hoa An again (despite a 6 hour bus ride), and they receive calls from the campers all the time telling them how much the coaches are missed.

Aside from the kids and my new friends, the thing I will miss most about Vietnam is the open and ubiquitous friendliness. Especially when they find out that we know/understand a little Vietnamese, they are so surprised and excited! These are collectively the  nicest people I have ever encountered. I feel so fortunate to have had this experience!
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