Ho Chi Minh Trail: Memories of War Still Linger in the Dust : Vietnam: The 12,000-mile footpath helped defeat a superpower. It has since opened up rich, vast areas to commerce and farming.

Here it’s a dirt track, unmarked and unmapped, lazing through lush green like any Carolina country lane except that kids know better than to kick at odd bits of metal in the grass.

High up the mountain, it is a widened rut in the rocks and mud where drivers stop their trucks at precarious turns, night or day, to light incense at roadside shrines to the unrecovered dead.

In Hanoi, the thought of it is enough to moisten the eyes of an aged general who relives for visitors the relentless air strikes that took perhaps 30,000 souls.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail, a simple jungle footpath that grew to a 12,000-mile invisible interstate system and defeated a superpower, is now emerging as the last indelible trace of the Vietnam War.

Today, almost 20 years after the war’s end, the old supply routes penetrate Vietnam’s wild west, opening rich new areas to coffee and rubber planters and farmers desperate for land, as well as smugglers and timber thieves.

But to many Vietnamese, the economic benefits are a side issue. More, their trail is a military masterwork worthy of Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great, a monument to a people’s determination.

It was the reason for all of those names behind America’s “Vietnam Syndrome”--Ia Drang, Khe Sanh, Hamburger Hill and the rest. After every battle, the trail brought more men and arms.

In the once-famous A Shau Valley, just below Vietnam’s old north-south dividing line, only an archeologist could figure out where U.S. troops sunk their roots. But the trail remains, the original crater-pocked track paralleled by a newer paved highway.

Americans pounded away with twice the bomb tonnage used in World War II, using space-age gimmickry against a no-tech ant column. They tried everything, once considering drops of Budweiser beer so trail drivers would party instead of drive.

“It was not a road but a state of mind,” said U.S. Army Maj. Robert West, who combs the dramatic Truong Son range for pilots still missing. “To get an idea of it, just study the veins on your arm.”

In the end, the Ho Chi Minh Trail was four north-south routes through Laos and Cambodia and a fifth within Vietnam, all linked by 21 cross tracks and countless detours under jungle cover.

From North Vietnam, it funneled down toward Vietnam’s deep south, to the tangled riverbanks of the Song Be, Apocalypse Now country near Loc Ninh, just 80 miles north of Saigon.

Col. Xuan Van Tien spent 10 years among the snakes and malarial mosquitoes, supervising various stretches of roadway.

“We built the trail in cooperation with the Americans,” he recalled with a chuckle. “They bombed, and we went another way. They bombed again, and we moved again.”

Two million people moved up or down the trail during the war, the Vietnamese say. Peak traffic ranged above 20,000 tons a month of arms, food and other supplies.

Freight went by six-wheel-drive truck, reinforced bicycle and elephant. But the mainstay was a steady stream of human beasts of burden, men and women humping 100-pound packs.

Nguyen Viet Sinh, a slender man with the mien of a retired schoolteacher, was a hero of the People’s Army. Over six years, he carried his weight in cargo a distance equal to the circumference of the globe.

Soldiers and porters slipped along ancient smugglers’ routes and freshly cut paths, sometimes climbing ladders on trails so steep that marchers were often kicked in the face by the person ahead.

At the trail’s start, in North Vietnam’s southern panhandle, trucks lurched up three Truong Son mountain passes into Laos, over open ground exposed to bombers. During the rainy months, they stalled axle-deep in mud or slid down steep canyons.

Drivers inched along at night behind a tiny pool of light, guided by helpers perched on a fender, ready to leap for cover whenever gunships screamed out of the mists.

Where bombs and defoliants parted the triple-canopy jungle, the camouflage of tree branches could not mask the convoys. People died, cargo was lost, and yet more trucks rumbled southward.

Plenty got through. One pilot looked down to see a brilliant white, 60-foot yacht headed down the trail. It was a gift from China to Cambodian Prince Norodom Sihanouk. The pilot missed it.

North Vietnam’s Group 559 not only rebuilt and restored the roadways but also defended them, claiming 2,458 U.S. aircraft kills. The Americans admit to about 400.

The unit’s name stood for May, 1959, the month the trail was blazed. The 559 grew from 400 hand-picked men to a force of 75,000, including the women who repaired roads and strung phone lines.

The watchword was secrecy. No foreigners used the trail. The first motto was: move with no road, live with no roof, cook with no smoke. Messages went by field phone and whisper, seldom by radio.

In hindsight, strategists on both sides say the supply line determined the war’s outcome.

“Absolutely, that was the crucial factor,” said William Bundy, an assistant defense secretary in the 1960s. “We could not cut the trail.”

At the Ho Chi Minh Trail cemetery, 10,330 graves near Con Thien in the Demilitarized Zone that separated North from South, words carved on an imposing stone monument say the same thing.

“The Truong Son Road was the turning point in our struggle,” wrote Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the supreme commander, using Vietnam’s name for the trail. “And it is the key to our future prosperity.”

A mustard-yellow Stalinesque statue at the cemetery depicts three warriors who symbolize the spirit of the trail. Two brandish weapons. The third holds a crank for kicking over truck engines.

In 1959, five years after defeating France and three years before U.S. advisers appeared, Ho Chi Minh ordered Col. Vo Bam to find a secret route so that North Vietnamese could infiltrate the South.

Through the mid-1960s, newly available records show, U.S. forces in Vietnam had only a sketchy idea of the supply network they faced. With the 1968 Tet offensive, Vietnamese tanks materialized out of the jungle and overran the astonished Special Forces camp at Lang Vei, near Khe Sanh, set up to watch the trail.

Vo Bam, now 82 and still sleeping in his Truong Son campaign hammock in a Hanoi tenement, laughs when he talks about how his men outwitted the overconfident Americans.

“At first, we suffered heavy losses because we had no logistics experience, but we learned fast,” he said. “Once we figured out that the Americans always bombed on a schedule, it was easier.”

When the subject switches to the times that B-52 bombers found their target, scattering holocaust along his hidden columns, his voice cracks.

After the 1968 offensive, bombing intensified. But it was too late. The “trail” was an impregnable fortress, with service areas, field hospitals and a fuel pipeline that stretched nearly to Saigon. On a single day in December, 1970, U.S. surveillance counted 15,000 trucks and jeeps on the trail.

U.S. commanders made a last desperate stab in 1971, sending 17,000 South Vietnamese troops toward Tchepone, the trail’s chokepoint just inside Laos. It was a debacle.

Now that it is over, returning American veterans shake their heads in disbelief at what went on under their noses.

Tran Van Tra, the Viet Cong chief who took Saigon, summed it up:

“For me, it was very simple. No modern weapon can defeat human will. Committed people can outwit anything devised by man.

Jungle has reclaimed the trail in Laos and Cambodia. But in Vietnam the government has built upon it to open up areas where American bombing turned dense virgin forest into grassy farmland.

For the new Vietnam, this is a mixed blessing.

Where hardwood forests were bombed and defoliated to expose the hidden roadways, fields of tall “American grass” choke off competing growth and confound farmers who clear the land.

Where the old trail penetrates virgin forests that survived the war, loggers have taken over the devastation. Huge areas have been burned to make room for rice, cassava and cash crops like rubber.

In the Central Highlands, the trail has turned the old social order on its ear. Large areas of Montagnard country have been opened to farmers from the north.

Nguyen Van Xuan’s peanut and corn fields are separated by strands of barbed wire that once protected the airstrip perimeter at Plei Me. Now used to malaria and isolation, he feels at home.

“Oh this?” he said, when a reporter warned him of a possibly live phosphorus grenade lying near his feet. He picked it up and flung it toward the fence. “I see thousands of these things.”

In the 1970s, Cuban aid paved Highway 14 through the A Shau Valley. Farther south, in the Central Highlands, Highway 14 continues on through Dak To, Kontum, Pleiku and Ban Me Thuot, paralleling the elusive wartime network. Overhead, a $200-million power line from the north to the south runs along Vo Bam’s original route.

The back roads connecting with the Cambodian border reportedly are used by smugglers trafficking in consumer goods, gold, gems and hardwoods.

At the trail’s southern terminus, near Loc Ninh, local authorities plan to widen the road and build a Ho Chi Minh Trail park by 1995, 20th anniversary of the war’s end, to help the Vietnamese remember.

Few who were alive then are likely to forget. Almost everyone has a trail story.

Near Cam Lo, a hitchhiking policeman was asked if he had gone down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. He replied by holding up a fingerless hand and pointing to a glass eye.

At the Gala Restaurant in Hanoi, hostess Nguyen Dieu Loan keeps a scrapbook of her days as an entertainer for the troops, when curtain calls were often cut short by 1,000-pound bombs.

“There was no toughest part,” replied Trinh Phi Binh, a veteran trucker who was asked what he remembered most about the trail. “It was all a horrendous nightmare, from beginning to end.”