Vietnam Photographer Heads Down NVA’s Memory Lane

Philip Jones Griffiths, a photographer who spent three years covering the Vietnam War, took a trip down memory lane last year. But he did it the hard way--on remnants of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

When he first saw what once had been North Vietnam’s famous, much-bombed main supply route south, he suffered a bit of photographer’s regret:

“I suppose what I was thinking is that I should have been here 20 years ago. The photographer’s instinct is to say, ‘I’ve been cheated. I should have been here.’ ”

His “Ho Chi Minh Trail” expedition, filmed for the BBC’s “Great Journeys” series bought by 61 public TV stations, will start airing later this month--Aug. 11 here and Aug. 13-16 in other cities.

The trail was a network of dirt roads, river crossings and trails, mostly covered by jungle, that stretched south for up to 300 miles into Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam.

It was heavily bombed by U.S. planes and periodically infiltrated by Army Special Forces troops, but few Western journalists ever traveled it during the war.

No doubt puzzled, officials in Hanoi last year gave Griffiths and his crew permission to film what it looks like now--at least those portions still passable in the Soviet-made jeep they loaned him, along with a guide.

As you might expect, it was tough trip, says Griffiths, 54. Large chunks have been reclaimed by the jungle, “and once you stop upkeeping a road like that, it disappears very quickly. So our biggest task was actually finding it.

“Occasionally, you’d find what looked like a hopeful bit of road. But after half a mile, there would be so many old bomb craters that no vehicle on earth could traverse them. They were too close together.”

Griffiths got to travel only the trail’s Vietnam side. His attempt to follow it through Laos, starting at what had been a major wartime entry point called the Mu Gia Pass, was blocked by guards.

That was not just because the trail was washed out, he says: “The Laotians wouldn’t let us go in. They try to maintain a little independence from the Vietnamese, so they were anxious that it wouldn’t seem they were being ordered to let us in.”

But he doubts that the network through Laos exists any more, although he concedes “there’s no real way of finding out” without Laotian permission.

The Welsh-born Griffiths, whose documentary is liberally filled with North Vietnamese wartime footage of the trail, got only as far as Vietnam’s Central Highlands before his expedition ended.

The reason: the continuing war in Cambodia in which the Vietnam-backed government is fighting insurgents who include the Khmer Rouge.

“We couldn’t get too close to the border at times, because when you start coming around the edge of Cambodia, the Vietnamese began getting worried about the Khmer Rouge,” he says.

Griffiths took a philosophical attitude about the possibility that the Cambodian Communist forces might have crossed the border and mined parts of the road on which he traveled.

“My feeling is that the bits the Vietnamese kept in repair were pretty well traveled, and if the Khmer Rouge had ever booby-trapped them, they certainly weren’t going to tell me about it,” he says.

The early part of his tour took him through what once was the so-called demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam, then past two famous battlefields: Khe Sanh and the A Shau Valley.

He spent one night in the latter, which in May, 1969, was the scene of the bloody, controversial battle for what U.S. troops called Hamburger Hill.

“There’s sort of a people’s committee building on the valley floor right opposite Hamburger Hill,” Griffiths says. “You sit on the balcony in the evening, and you look at Hamburger Hill.

“It just looks so peaceful and green now. That’s one of the disappointing things about old battlefields. They don’t look like old battlefields.”

Elsewhere in television . . .

Diane Meets the Secret Police: For tonight’s “PrimeTime Live,” Diane Sawyer and her camera crew have taped what ABC calls “an exclusive inside look” at the Soviet Union’s secretive KGB intelligence organization. She also interviewed its chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov.