Vietnam Veterans Biking Challenge

At Bride Crossing

Two boys push Artie Guerrero's hand-cycle.

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Adventure travel companies discovered the cycling potential of Vietnam several years ago. The country is still in that relatively unspoiled phase of development, the lull-before-the-tourism-storm. Want exotic touches? Highway One offers mile after mile of raw humanity on parade. Buses belch. Motor scooters beep. Toddlers drive water buffaloes. Leathery men in conical hats chug silently along, hauling impossible loads of sticks or vegetables or ducks on ancient balloon-tire bikes.

At its worse, the commotion swells to the level of barely controlled chaos. Lead fumes foul the air. Dust kicks up so thick that your lungs feel like the bottom half of an egg timer filling with sand. But at its best (which is more often than not) Highway One settles down and opens up, paving the way through a marvelous stop-time landscape. The topography keeps tricks up its sleeve. In the north there are brooding scallop-shaped limestone formations; sort of geology on the half shell. Beaches worthy of the best Mediterranean resorts line the central coast, while desert conditions prevail in parts of the south, complete with prickly-pear cactus and red-rock mesas that could make an Arizonan homesick.

The weapon of choice for the Vietnam Challenge is a Cannondale mountain bike with CAAD 2 frame. A dependable horse. However, with the exception of one nasty stretch of rock-strewn construction, the road conditions are acceptable for street bikes. Indeed, LeMond manages quite well on a pencil-thin racer. The biggest obstacle turns out to be the potholes of protocol. In the finest noble warrior tradition, American soldiers are highly respected by the Vietnamese. Thus, wherever the Vietnam Challenge and its eleven support vans and its police escort goes, ceremony follows. Ribbon cuttings. Flower sprays for all cyclists. Toasts to reconciliation. A speech by the president of the local People's Committee. More flower sprays. More toasts. A speech by (who knows who?) the second cousin of the first undersecretary of the local People's Committee. For the most part the pomp and circumstance is endearing, though awfully time consuming. On a few occasions, say at the end of a killer ride in 90-plus-degree heat, it approaches Death by Hospitality.

The Vietnamese are newly acquainted with the concept of disabled sports. They seem spooked by the idea of hand cycles sharing the road with upright bikes. The first week especially is a muddle by last-minute route changes. Several rides are cut short in favor of van transport. Rory McCarthy, an electrical engineer from Bathe, Maine, who has peraneal muscular atrophy, hand-cycled the world with WTS in 1996. He knows how to read winds like a sailor, how to unweight with the deftness of a downhill skier. But he also realizes the difficulty of blasting through brick walls of stereotype.

"In countries like Russia and Belarus the term for handicapped is invalid, which means invalidated," he explains. "And it's true. We in the United States are well ahead of other countries in terms of attitudes and accessibility, which is tied so closely to self esteem, which is the bottomline for all of us."

Vietnamese officials try to introduce a 60-mile-per-day cap. No dice. Under pressure, they gradually relent. The Challenge team ultimately racks up 910 miles by bike. The gut check is Hai Van Pass, which slices through a mountain range occupying the high ground between Hue and Danang and affords sweeping views of the South China Sea. The road climbs 3,000 feet in a devilish six miles. There are 210 switchbacks and only 25 feet of flats. (Or so it seems.) Tongues flap. Eyes cross. But the majority of riders crank the distance. Artie Guerrero, a paraplegic vet from Colorado, is drenched in sweat and ecstasy after hand-cycling to the top. He points to several concrete battlements nestled in the surrounding hills.

"The only thing that kept me goin' was seeing those damn bunkers. Every time I saw them I knew how many Americans they took out," he says between gulps for air. "Whew! This is what World Team Sports is all about. Able-bodied people can't make it up that hill."

Riding from sunup to sundown has a lot in common with presidential campaigns or final exam week at college. Somewhere in the midst of the 17,000 oranges consumed and the 4,500 bottles of water guzzled, time and space snap their moorings. There is no orderly scrapbook of memories to flip through, just a mind full of almost windblown images: children streaming from a schoolhouse, squealing in angelic delight as weirdos wrapped in form-fitting Lycra fly through their town hooting and hollering; an old woman begging for a Power Bar; a giddy monk in a long cowl taking a spin on a tandem bike.

An endurance ride, even one that passes through the haunted house of Vietnam, probably won't profoundly change anybody's life. At best it sheds light on some dark corners of the soul. Duane Wagner, an ex-Marine who lost both legs in a Viet Cong attack and is now a nationally ranked disabled cyclist, sat on his hotel bed one evening, alternately wrestling with demons and waxing philosophic. He had "major regrets" about ever coming on the Vietnam Challenge. The past was clawing at his throat. He felt agitated, feverish.

"Sometimes I'm 20. Sometimes I'm 50," he suddenly said softly. "When I'm on my bike racing, I'm 20. When I'm here. . ." He paused, gazing down at where his legs used to be. ". . .I'm 50."

Wagner didn't pack his regrets in a suitcase and fly home early. He popped flu pills and rode the sag wagon for a day. Then he got back on his two-wheel time-machine and started pedaling. Hard. He didn't stop till he reached Saigon.