CENTRAL ONSLOW, N.S. – The first thing that hit John Flanagan as he stepped off the plane in Saigon was a wall of heat and humidity.
The second was the tropical smell, which he described as “…not offensive. It was like decaying vegetation.”
It was 1956, and Flanagan was a Canadian soldier who formed part of an international effort to stem the flow of weapons to Communist Vietnamese guerrillas.
When asked what his favourite memory of Vietnam was, Flanagan’s answer is blunt.
“Leaving it. Probably because I’m a North American – and the heat. For example, on New Year’s Day we were sat out in the heat and it was about 40 degrees Celsius.”
A death in Saigon cut his time there short.
“We had a diplomat killed in Saigon and I brought his body back,” said Flanagan, now 85. “He was the Canadian permanent resident to the commission in Saigon. I was there nine months and had another three to go – and that’s why I came back.”
While there, he was part of the International Control Commission, whose job it was to implement the 1954 Geneva Accords that granted independence to North and South Vietnam, as well as Cambodia and Laos. The four countries were previously under French colonial rule, forming part of Indochina.
After independence, Flanagan’s Canadian unit worked with soldiers from Communist Poland and neutral India to implement the Geneva Accord rules, which included halting illicit shipments of weapons, ammunition and other supplies to Vietnamese insurgents and other forces loyal to Ho Chi Minh.
All the while, weaponry from the Soviet Union and China kept trickling in to both North and South Vietnam, leading to increased guerrilla warfare in the countryside.
He joined other soldiers inspecting Vietnamese ports, airports and rail junctions for illegal weapons shipments. Under the Geneva Accords, they had no powers of arrest, but they could confiscate anything deemed suspicious.
However, supplies on trains that should have been confiscated were simply moved elsewhere and ended up in the hands of the guerrillas.
Meantime, the famous Ho Chi Minh trail was taking shape. It started out as a network of jungle trails, but later in the war it included paved roads to shuttle soldiers and supplies into South Vietnam.
“What they were doing then was hacking it out of the jungles and building bridges over rivers and streams to get their vehicles across,” recalled Flanagan.
Even as war clouds gathered, Flanagan recalled a Vietnam that was mostly still peaceful, if poor. As an ICC member, he travelled from Saigon to Hanoi, as well as Vientiane, the capital of Laos. People in the south felt somewhat freer to speak their minds, whereas Flanagan noticed a more regimented society under the North Vietnamese dictatorship.
Saigon itself was a bustling city of street hawkers and marketplaces, with a backdrop of French colonial architecture. When off duty, Flanagan and his colleagues enjoyed dining at a restaurant called the Arc and Sea Owl in Cholon, Saigon’s Chinatown.
One memory that stuck with Flanagan even after 60 years was the children of Saigon, who were simply left behind as their parents in poorer neighbourhoods went to work.
“What they had was essentially a penned-in area and they left the children there, and the children were begging on the streets,” said Flanagan.
He recalls the number of Americans already in Saigon. The Vietnam War was not yet in full swing, but the United States had thousands of military and economic advisors in South Vietnam, as well as diplomats.
Flanagan finished his Vietnam tour in 1957. At the time, he served with an artillery unit in the Canadian Army, but later qualified as a paratrooper and became a jump master after successfully completing more than 100 airborne jumps.
He spent 36 years and 91 days in the military from 1952 to 1989, a career that also took him to the United States, where he spent time with the 82nd Airborne Division. He served more tours in Britain and across Canada.
