Hal Jespersen's Vietnam Tour, March 2025 (Part 1)

This is my (Hal's) report on the trip “Return to Vietnam,” a mostly military history tour hosted by Valor Tours. This is my third tour with the Sausalito-based company. And other than two brief stops in Vietnam on a Southeast Asia cruise in 2001, it is my first time back since the war. I served with the US Army in the Saigon area in 1972–73, right at the end of the US military involvement.

Because this is a lengthy report with a lot of photographs, I have divided it into three parts:

• Hanoi, Ha Long Bay, Khe Sanh, Dong Ha (this page)
• Hue, Da Nang, Hoi An, Can Tho
• Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City)

Note to purists: Although I often try to spell foreign words in their native language and characters for these reports, I have mostly Americanized them here. For example, instead of Hà Nội, I use the romanized Hanoi.

Saturday–Monday, March 1–3 — to Hanoi

I met our group of travelers at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), where we introduced ourselves in a small food court and waited for our flight on EVA Air at 11:30 p.m. The airfare was included in our tour package. The business class on the 777 was quite comfortable, although it was designed for people of smaller stature—at least the legroom when lying down was sufficient for me. Additionally, we had access to the SFO Air France business lounge, which was a nice touch.

Our flight took us 14 hours to Taipei, Taiwan, followed by a three-hour layover. The EVA lounge during the layover was spacious and offered a variety of unusual breakfast options that were not commonly found in American restaurants. After the layover, we had another three-hour flight to Hanoi. We arrived in Hanoi early afternoon on March 3.

In comparison to the 24-hour cattle car flight I took with MAC in 1972 (which was from Travis to Honolulu to Guam to Saigon), this 20-hour passage was much more pleasant.

Monday, March 3 — Hanoi

Getting through airport immigration was relatively easy, considering the hundreds of people in line. However, two of our group were not able to get visas processed before they left, so they were subjected to about an hour’s wait and higher prices than the rest of us who got them online in advance. While we waited I went to an ATM to get some local currency. I chose 1 million dong because it sounded like more than enough, but it turned out to be worth $39. There are eight of us on the tour, including Dean Armstrong, our leader. Only two of us were here during the war. Our actual guide for the next few days is a Vietnamese man, Nguyễn Đức Tuấn, who goes by the nickname Tony. I was expecting to be crammed into a tiny van, but we had a mid-sized bus, with maybe 40 seats, so we were comfortable. The airport is about 40 minutes from downtown Hanoi, and the highway is modern and in good shape. There are a lot of moderate skyscrapers on the skyline nowadays, but the weather was severely hazy, so we could not see very much in the distance. The urban/metro area of Hanoi has a population of 11 million.

At this hour, traffic was surprisingly light. We headed straight to our hotel, Le Jardin, located in the older part of the city. I’d rate it a 3 stars in an otherwise unattractive neighborhood. Despite its dingy surroundings, we were warmly welcomed with cold towels and a refreshing fruit juice drink. We were given two hours to freshen up, and I seized the opportunity to explore the neighborhood. The sidewalks were packed with parked scooters and food carts, forcing me to walk mostly in the street, dodging some rather energetic traffic. I ventured to the nearby Truc Bach Lake and back, but the clarity of weather wasn’t cooperating, making it difficult to capture a visually appealing photo of this famous landmark.

Afterward, the group embarked on a cyclo tour of the old city. Cyclos are like rickshaws in reverse—a passenger sits on a small bench seat under a canopy in front of a driver pedaling a bicycle mechanism in the rear. So we all got individual rides through the leafy and colorful old sections, where many of the streets are named after the goods that artisans produced and sold in those areas, such as Silver Street. It was quite unnerving to ride these clumsy vehicles through masses of fast-moving rush-hour traffic, primarily hundreds of scooters. I was also unnerved to find out that one of our group had his pocket picked and wallet stolen within a couple of blocks of the hotel, so I had to keep a firm grip on my iPhone while we drove along. One of the great things about Vietnam is the traffic lights. They all have prominent digital countdown timers for both the red and green directions.

Returning to our bus, we took a ride through the French Quarter of the city and noted a number of famous buildings and monuments, including the Sofitel Metropole hotel, built in 1901. We adjourned to dinner at a bustling buffet restaurant called Sen Tay Ho, which was like a cross between Golden Corral and an Epcot international pavilion. There must’ve been over 100 different varieties of foods served, including some gratuitous western items like spaghetti and little hotdogs, and we all ate too much. Most of us had a bottle of beer, which turned out to cost $1.13 each.

Tuesday, March 4 — Hanoi

After a nice buffet breakfast, we drove to the Temple of Literature, which was a university from 1076 to about 1800. The place was very crowded with young children on a school field trip. Tony told us about the Confucius exams, which were used to select people for civil service jobs. Although this was a very pretty park-like setting with low temples, I am uncertain as to why we stopped there on a military tour.

Next was the Hanoi Hilton, which was known as Maison Centrale by the French, Hoa Lo colonial prison by the Vietnamese. It was once a large compound extending over blocks, but 70% of it has been redeveloped as modern high-rises, so the museum is just a corner of what was. It’s a nicely presented series of exhibits about the prison throughout the years, including views into tiny, depressing dungeon cells and a creepy guillotine used by the French. There’s a memorial to the anti aircraft defense of Operation Linebacker II; during 18-29 December 1972, they shot down 23 B52s, 5 F4s, and 2 F111s. In the exhibit about the American POWs, they spun the brutal treatment as humane, with better living conditions than the average civilian. There are photos of POW volleyball games and caring medical treatment.

We went to Indochina Station Cafe, where most of us had strong coffee drinks, but I had a delicious peach tea. The attraction here is the narrow gauge railroad line about two feet away from the tables. This is a famous street in which large trains just barely squeak through the claustrophobic space, barely an alley. Then we had a long lunch at a restaurant called Cai Mam, in which there was a fixed menu for us with about eight different dishes. All were excellent, but there was much too much food for us elderly guys.

100mm SAM-2 MIG 21 (4 f4s)

Next was the B52 Victory Museum. Although the outside has a very interesting collection, including a partial wreckage of a B52 and some impressive anti-air missile systems, the inside is relatively bland, mostly photos. It is captioned almost entirely in Vietnamese with very few translations. However, the upstairs section on the ‘72 Linebacker II Christmas bombings had more details, including forced confessions and apologies by American aircrewmen.

We drove southwest through a more modern section of the city, with huge hotels and apartment buildings, looking much less like a third-world country. We visited the Air Defense — Air Force Museum. Once again, the outdoor exhibits were excellent with dozens of fighter jets, helicopters, big radar sets, and missile launchers. One Soviet freight helicopter was the biggest I have ever seen, and there was a poor F4 wreck in terrible shape. I was told that after the pilots ejected, it landed mostly intact, and the severe damage was actually the result of US bombing, meant to destroy the technology before the Soviets could analyze it. The inside of the impressive modern building was not so interesting, rather duplicative of the B52 museum. I attempted to get our tour guide interested in taking us to the Vietnam Military History Museum, but I did not succeed.

Our final stop was on the shore of Hoan Kiem Lake for a traditional water puppet show. There was a large crowd frantically trying to pile in, like this was a Broadway show. And like those shows, the seats were crammed together, resulting in painfully small legroom. The show was visually inspired, but it was very difficult to follow what was going on. There was a lot of yelling and singing, all of which was in Vietnamese. There were dozens of puppet characters, including fishermen, sea serpents, giant geese (phoenixes?), dancing ladies, and boatloads of people, in many cases thrashing around in the water for unexplained reasons. The performers behind the scenes manipulating the puppets were really talented, and it was difficult to figure out how they did some of the maneuvers that they pulled off.

We took a lengthy, extended walk through the night markets of the old city, and then caught the bus back to the hotel. It was interesting to see people eating street food, crouched on tiny stools about a foot off the ground. A few of us went to the hotel's rooftop bar and enjoyed cool weather and slightly better visibility than on the previous night. We had a view of the lake where John McCain‘s plane crashed. After the giant lunch and a tiring day, none of us were interested in going out to dinner.

Wednesday, March 5 — Ha Long Bay Cruise

Today is the start of an overnight cruise expedition. We drove about three hours east to Ha Long Bay, a small portion of the Tonkin Gulf, one of seven UNESCO World Heritage sites that were selected for physical beauty. So it looks like the next two days will have limited military content. There was one rest stop along the way in which we got to browse through a busy grocery, snacks, and souvenir market. It was a modern highway most of the way after we left Hanoi, and we saw some pretty vistas of rice paddies.

We checked in at a marina and rode a small ferry boat for about 30 minutes to reach our cruise ship, the Paradise Grand, moored in a bay with about a dozen similar craft. Quite lovely fittings throughout. We had a buffet lunch with some Asian and Western dishes that was pretty good. The cabin for my one-night stay was very nice with a comfortable balcony, and I enjoyed an hour as we cruised close to a number of the hundreds of islands and limestone karsts in the bay. The experience would have been enhanced by nice weather, but it was solid overcast and hazy, so everything looked gray. (On the other hand, at least the weather was very pleasantly cool.) We were told that this area was originally the delta for the Red River, which runs through Hanoi, but about 500 million years ago, the sea engulfed it. One military hook, I guess, is that the US mined these waters to deter traffic into Haiphong Harbor.

After an hour or so, we boarded a tender and sailed a short way to a dock on Cat Ba Island, the largest in the bay, and the site of antiaircraft batteries covering Haiphong during the war. I took a small electric cart a few scenic miles to a village called Viet Hai; some other passengers rode bicycles. In the village, there was a small tourist exhibit with living quarters approximating life in 1954. I got a sample of some local rice wine (avoiding the option of the wine with a very large snake in the jar), watched some tiny kittens playing, and watched some Brazilian ladies getting their feet nibbled by fish in a pond. Back on the ship, there was afternoon coffee and tea, and then a cooking demonstration of fried spring rolls and a happy hour (BOGO). The ship moored for the night in a bay with seven similar ships. Dinner was not a buffet, and the food was pretty good. Service on the ship is excellent. The ship offered squid fishing as an after-dinner activity and said they would cook up your squid for breakfast. I passed.

Thursday, March 6 — Back to Hanoi

It rained overnight. The activity for today was to take a local bamboo boat or individual kayak at 7:15 a.m. to visit Dark and Bright Cave, which is a passage 3 meters high under one of the islands. I demurred because of the cold and dreary weather, so I have included two photos I found on the internet. It turned out that none of our group went out either. The rest of the morning was a buffet breakfast and sitting around in the lounge waiting to disembark at 10:15. I have read that these Ha Long Bay cruises are the number one tourist destination in Vietnam, but I would be reluctant to recommend them to friends. Perhaps if the weather had been beautiful, we would’ve had a different experience.

We met Tony and our bus and drove to Hanoi Airport, about five hours on minor roads, including a few stops. Along the way, we stopped for forty-five minutes at one of those typical tourist trap shops with various artisan things for sale and a line of buses disgorging shoppers. Then, concerned that we would get to the airport too early, Tony took us on an expedition to see a “real village.” We traveled for quite a while on a narrow and potholed levee, reaching a vacant pagoda and then a pottery factory and shop. At the airport, Tony treated us to a meal of delicious beef pho (traditional noodle soup). Our Vietnam Airlines flight to Hue was about an hour.

We met our new guide, Bao (Johnny), and boarded a 28-passenger bus for the 20-minute drive to our hotel for the next three nights, the TTC Imperial. Beautiful lobby, large and very nice rooms.

Friday, March 7 — Khe Sanh, Dong Ha, DMZ

Great breakfast buffet today. I had pho, which is a very common Vietnamese breakfast, but there were many Western choices as well. We’re heading northwest today towards the former border and DMZ near the 17th parallel. The forecast was light rain all day, but that seemed to apply only to the city of Hue—farther north and west were only overcast. Four entrepreneurial ladies stood outside the hotel trying to sell us ponchos with polka dots on them.

After two hours, we stopped for coffee at a little shack on Highway 9 west of Dong Ha. Nearby is the famous Rockpile, a solitary karst outcropping that was used as an Army and Marine Corps observation post in the late sixties. It is at the junction of five valleys and infiltration routes from the DMZ. The only thing you can do here is observe it from a distance; there is no access to the former observation base at the top, which had to be supplied by helicopter.

Continuing west into mountainous terrain, we reached Khe Sanh, site of the famous 1968 battle that immediately preceded the Tet Offensive. Three PAVN (People’s Army of Vietnam, what we used to call the NVA) divisions besieged a couple of Marine regiments and some other troops from late January until July, when our troops withdrew.

There is a small museum about the siege as well as Operation Lam Son 719, an ARVN push up Highway 9 into southern Laos. It is all told from the North Vietnamese perspective, of course, calling it the Khe Sanh Liberation Campaign, painting the US defenders as rather pathetic, cowering in their bunkers. They use the term LA (Liberation Army) instead of PAVN. This must be what Southerners feel like when they visit the Gettysburg visitor center. There are a few artifacts inside such as American uniforms and light weapons, but outside there are a number of military vehicles including a Huey helicopter, a Chinook, an M48, an M113, and a C130.

We visited a monument commemorating the battle of Lang Vay, in which the PAVN 198th Tank Battalion attacked a US special forces camp February 6–7, 1968. Dean had read a book about this and arranged for us to drink a toast to SP5 Daniel R. Phillips, missing in action. There is a Soviet PT-76 amphibious tank in pretty good shape on the monument. We had lunch at a modest restaurant in Khe Sanh.

One of the group was very interested in the rescue of an officer, Lt. Col. Gene Hambleton (played by Gene Hackman in the movie Bat*21). He was shot down during the NVA 1972 Easter Offensive and was the subject of the greatest search and rescue effort of the war, resulting in the deaths of eleven airmen. We searched for a couple of locations west of Dong Ha relevant to his rescue.

In Dong Ha, in Quang Tri province, we stopped to see the town square with a derelict M41 Walker Bulldog tank and a recovery vehicle on display. Then, the bridge at Dong Ha over the Cua Viet River. Here, Marine Capt. John Ripley delayed the North’s 1972 Easter Offensive by placing 500 pounds of explosives under the bridge and destroying it, receiving the Navy Cross for his heroic personal action. The current bridge is significantly larger than the one destroyed and is not very photogenic.

We drove north into the DMZ and found the actual border between the old North and South Vietnam, the Ben Hai River; it is not literally the 17th parallel as usually portrayed. At the Hien Luong Bridge, now a pedestrian bridge, there are a few monuments. One has a tall flag pole, which recalls a competition between the two countries in which they kept trying to outdo each other by erecting taller and taller flag poles. Another is the Aspiration for Reunification monument, also known as the Unified Memorial of Hope. We got back to the hotel after twelve hours, so I was too tired to go out to dinner; just a snack in the Panorama Bar on the 16th floor.

• Hanoi, Ha Long Bay, Khe Sanh, Dong Ha (this page)
• Hue, Da Nang, Hoi An, Can Tho
• Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City)