Word: minh
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...could tell you the truth about the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but the authorities might arrest us for spying." Ho Thi Van throws back her wrinkled face and cackles at her own joke. It remains one of the most mysterious byways on earth, but Van and her husband, Phan Huu Luc, have a unique view of the Ho Chi Minh Trail: they've lived on it for more than 30 years. Luc spent three of them in backbreaking labor, carrying ammunition and rice to North Vietnamese troops as American bombs rained down. "It was a hard job," says...
...astounding feat of wartime engineering and defiance, the Ho Chi Minh Trail was actually a 16,000-kilometer network of roads, hacked by hand out of the jungles of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. It helped the communist North win the Vietnam War. U.S. forces never managed to destroy it, despite carpet bombing and the use of Agent Orange. Since the war ended, however, the trail has been largely reclaimed by jungle and myth; only a few, isolated fragments are accessible. Christopher Hunt's 1996 book Sparring with Charlie documented his trying, and mostly failing, to trace it. Indeed...
...Like so much else in Vietnam, the trail is changing. A few kilometers from Van and Luc's home, a construction crew is pouring fresh tar. They are building the new Ho Chi Minh Highway, a $353 million, 1,241-km project scheduled to open any day now. It traces one of the main north-south trunks of the original trail and will also open up dozens of arteries previously off-limits to tourists. We set out on rugged Minsk motorcycles, eager to explore...
...FREED. THICH QUANG DO, 74, prominent Vietnamese Buddhist dissident; from house arrest; in Ho Chi Minh City. Do, a leader of the banned Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, had been confined to a monastery since 2001 for agitating for religious freedom and human rights. A Communist Party newspaper said Do was released because of the government's "humanitarian policies." But some observers speculated the authorities might be trying to blunt the strong international condemnation over the recent 13-year jailing of another dissident, Pham Hong...
SENTENCED. TRUONG VAN CAM, a.k.a. Nam Cam, 56, Vietnam's most notorious crime lord; to death for charges ranging from bribery to murder; in Ho Chi Minh City. Cam's gambling, prostitution and racketeering empire was reportedly pulling in about $2 million a month when he was arrested in December 2001. The case exposed the link between organized crime and the ruling Communist Party. At the trial the 155 defendants included 18 officials, most on Cam's payroll. Three were senior Party cadres who have been sentenced to four to 10 years in jail...