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On The Ho Chi Minh Trail: The Blood Road, The Women Who Defended It, The Legacy
A mix of travelogue, history, and mediation on a journey through the Ho Chi Minh Trail that reveals the critical role women played in defending it.
Offering both a personal and historical exploration of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, this book highlights the critical role the Trail and the young women soldiers who helped build and defend it played in the Vietnam War. Accompanied by two traveling companions, Sherry Buchanan winds her way from Hanoi in the north to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, in the south. Driving through the spectacular scenery of Vietnam and Laos, she encounters locations from the Truong Son mountains, the Phong Nha Caves, ancient citadels, and Confucian temples to the Khmer Temple of Wat Phu at the western-most point of the Trail in Laos.
Buchanan records her interactions—both scheduled and spontaneous—with those who experienced the Vietnam War firsthand. She listens to the women who defended the Trail roads against the greatest bombing campaign in modern times, walks through minefields with the demolition teams hunting for unexploded ordnance, and meets American veterans who have returned to Vietnam with an urge to “do something.” Buchanan weaves informative, and often humorous, tales from her journey with excerpts from the accounts of others, situating the locations she visits in their historical and political context. On the Ho Chi Minh Trail brings together geography, history, and personal accounts to reveal the scale of the tragedy, its harmful legacies, and our memory of it. Buchanan challenges American exceptionalism and calls for redress for those harmed by US military actions during the Vietnam War and America’s subsequent wars.
Offering both a personal and historical exploration of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, this book highlights the critical role the Trail and the young women soldiers who helped build and defend it played in the Vietnam War. Accompanied by two traveling companions, Sherry Buchanan winds her way from Hanoi in the north to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, in the south. Driving through the spectacular scenery of Vietnam and Laos, she encounters locations from the Truong Son mountains, the Phong Nha Caves, ancient citadels, and Confucian temples to the Khmer Temple of Wat Phu at the western-most point of the Trail in Laos.
Buchanan records her interactions—both scheduled and spontaneous—with those who experienced the Vietnam War firsthand. She listens to the women who defended the Trail roads against the greatest bombing campaign in modern times, walks through minefields with the demolition teams hunting for unexploded ordnance, and meets American veterans who have returned to Vietnam with an urge to “do something.” Buchanan weaves informative, and often humorous, tales from her journey with excerpts from the accounts of others, situating the locations she visits in their historical and political context. On the Ho Chi Minh Trail brings together geography, history, and personal accounts to reveal the scale of the tragedy, its harmful legacies, and our memory of it. Buchanan challenges American exceptionalism and calls for redress for those harmed by US military actions during the Vietnam War and America’s subsequent wars.
- GenresHistoryNonfictionTravel
280 pages, Hardcover
Published March 12, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 18, 2022
This is a beautiful book. Published in London and printed in Italy, it contains maps for each section and color reproductions of art, as well as of photographs of women and landscape taken by the author. It is also a confusing book. In her Preface, Buchanan says she made the journey to collect stories “from both sides of the front line.” She wanted their testimonies “to confound the abstraction of war that makes it acceptable to those of us who live in more peaceful places.” That alone makes a profound and almost unique contribution to the all-too-limited awareness in the United States of the stories of individual Vietnamese people. She does not let that stand on its own, though. Threaded throughout is a personal quest that competes for attention.
The welcome that Americans receive in Vietnam, usually called “forgiveness” (although it is unclear if the words are understood in the same way in both cultures) is so mysterious and compelling that many Americans, and Buchanan seems to be among these, look to Vietnamese for answers. In all her interviews, for example, Buchanan asks probing questions, such as whether the person she is visiting was afraid or felt hatred or thinks the United States should pay reparations. By the time she reaches the Epilogue she has decided that she went on the Trail because she “cared that a government that claims to bring democracy and human rights to the world—and preaches it to others—was partly responsible for two million civilian war dead in Vietnam and hundreds of thousands more in Laos and Cambodia.” She decides the United States has not done enough, that colonialism should be confronted, and the civilian deaths we are responsible for should be commemorated. By the end, the journey has become personal, a lament for the damage war inflicts, for how it affected her own family, and how she has moved on. It is difficult not to feel that once again the stories of Vietnamese have been subsumed into the stories of Americans.
(excerpted from review in Fall 2021 edition of VVAW's The Veteran
The welcome that Americans receive in Vietnam, usually called “forgiveness” (although it is unclear if the words are understood in the same way in both cultures) is so mysterious and compelling that many Americans, and Buchanan seems to be among these, look to Vietnamese for answers. In all her interviews, for example, Buchanan asks probing questions, such as whether the person she is visiting was afraid or felt hatred or thinks the United States should pay reparations. By the time she reaches the Epilogue she has decided that she went on the Trail because she “cared that a government that claims to bring democracy and human rights to the world—and preaches it to others—was partly responsible for two million civilian war dead in Vietnam and hundreds of thousands more in Laos and Cambodia.” She decides the United States has not done enough, that colonialism should be confronted, and the civilian deaths we are responsible for should be commemorated. By the end, the journey has become personal, a lament for the damage war inflicts, for how it affected her own family, and how she has moved on. It is difficult not to feel that once again the stories of Vietnamese have been subsumed into the stories of Americans.
(excerpted from review in Fall 2021 edition of VVAW's The Veteran
February 11, 2025
Triumphant! An American woman whose father fought in the Vietnam War travels through Vietnam to figure out *why*. She gathers some guides, translators, and friends and sets out to travel the famous (infamous?) Ho Chi Minh Trail. Taken in by the beautiful countryside and Vietnams wondrous culture, she picks up many perspectives along the way from veterans of the war. She interviews women who served the Viet Minh, a widow of a Southern Vietnamese soldier, US veterans who returned years later to “give back”, and members of the diaspora who have returned.
Sherry attempts to expand current understandings of the conflict by adding a gendered component. She centers the women who served their country. They weren’t hapless victims but imperative to the success of the liberation of Vietnam. They defended the roads, bridges, and passages the North needed to win. They were also bombed, shot at, and shot back. After the war they then set about rebuilding.
“After the war, these same women encouraged a culture of forgiveness for the foreign event that contributed to their resilience and ability to rebuild, move forward, and make Vietnam the success that it is today.”
The main theme of this book is, I’d say, reconciliation. The strength of the book is that she gives plenty of room for different sides to fully state their perspectives. The reader can fill in their own opinion.
For example, one US Veteran returns to Vietnam in his later years to help with clearing out the hundreds of thousands of unexploded bombs the US Military left spread across the countrysides of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. He felt obligated to return something positive that he contributed so horribly to.
Later in the book we are introduced to another US Veteran who returned to build a Kindergarten because he felt bad about abandoning his allies (The South Vietnam). He also seems unable to accept the reality of what he contributed to (not an opinion the author states!). Instead, after reading page after page after page about the US’s relentless bombing of EVERYTHING - schools, bridges, hospitals, huts, combatants, noncombatants, enemy cities in the North, allied cities in the South, fleeing villagers, neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia, farms, religious buildings, etc etc. This guy is allowed to say that he was intentional about only bombing enemies and never civilians. Okay bud. I understand accepting reality would make it hard to sleep at night but yknow what, I appreciate the author just leaving it alone for me to roll my eyes. Again, she wants reconciliation not I-told-you-sos.
- don’t get me wrong, a majority of the interviews are with Vietnamese people, mostly women. They are great! I give the only two US Vet interviews as examples to juxtapose. This is NOT another book trying to cover US perspectives over Vietnamese ones. Just want this to be stated. -
A couple other conversations with others sit odd with me as well. Particularly a woman claiming that all the North Vietnamese were indoctrinated communist automatons. A common anticommunist propaganda line. But then what we do see is that, even despite these differing interpretations of what went down, here is a country of people working together to make it right.
In that way the US Empire failed. Failed in its attempt to divide and conquer.
Sherry attempts to expand current understandings of the conflict by adding a gendered component. She centers the women who served their country. They weren’t hapless victims but imperative to the success of the liberation of Vietnam. They defended the roads, bridges, and passages the North needed to win. They were also bombed, shot at, and shot back. After the war they then set about rebuilding.
“After the war, these same women encouraged a culture of forgiveness for the foreign event that contributed to their resilience and ability to rebuild, move forward, and make Vietnam the success that it is today.”
The main theme of this book is, I’d say, reconciliation. The strength of the book is that she gives plenty of room for different sides to fully state their perspectives. The reader can fill in their own opinion.
For example, one US Veteran returns to Vietnam in his later years to help with clearing out the hundreds of thousands of unexploded bombs the US Military left spread across the countrysides of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. He felt obligated to return something positive that he contributed so horribly to.
Later in the book we are introduced to another US Veteran who returned to build a Kindergarten because he felt bad about abandoning his allies (The South Vietnam). He also seems unable to accept the reality of what he contributed to (not an opinion the author states!). Instead, after reading page after page after page about the US’s relentless bombing of EVERYTHING - schools, bridges, hospitals, huts, combatants, noncombatants, enemy cities in the North, allied cities in the South, fleeing villagers, neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia, farms, religious buildings, etc etc. This guy is allowed to say that he was intentional about only bombing enemies and never civilians. Okay bud. I understand accepting reality would make it hard to sleep at night but yknow what, I appreciate the author just leaving it alone for me to roll my eyes. Again, she wants reconciliation not I-told-you-sos.
- don’t get me wrong, a majority of the interviews are with Vietnamese people, mostly women. They are great! I give the only two US Vet interviews as examples to juxtapose. This is NOT another book trying to cover US perspectives over Vietnamese ones. Just want this to be stated. -
A couple other conversations with others sit odd with me as well. Particularly a woman claiming that all the North Vietnamese were indoctrinated communist automatons. A common anticommunist propaganda line. But then what we do see is that, even despite these differing interpretations of what went down, here is a country of people working together to make it right.
In that way the US Empire failed. Failed in its attempt to divide and conquer.
August 15, 2021
Full of insight (and pretty pictures). I’m glad these stories are being told.
May 4, 2024
Tôi đã kỳ vọng một điều gì đó sâu sắc hơn.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews