The Tommy gun roars into life in my grip, spitting bullets at a paper gangster pinned to a wall of sandbags 50 metres in front of where I sit, hunched over a desk, cold metal cradled against my cheek. It will be 24 hours before my hearing fully returns.
Billed as the ultimate anti-bandit gun in Prohibition-era America, ‘the gun that made the ‘20s roar’ was also the weapon of choice for Chicago mob boss Al Capone, whose first use of the Thompson in 1926 killed a bootlegger, a politician and an assistant state attorney. Today, however, it is mine.
In the first of a series of columns designed to give a deeper insight into Vietnam, Vu Ha Kim Vy explains why the travelling habits of Vietnamese and overseas tourists often clash.
When the Vietnamese travel they are noisy, overly active, jump queues and have no respect for other tourists. It’s an observation I often hear from foreign friends and colleagues, usually with the word ‘Why?’ attached at the end.