After 27 Years, Vietnam Is Almost Fun

Returning to Vietnam after a 27-year absence is a mind-boggling travel adventure, as one can romp freely in provinces that were dangerous or off limits during the war. Who would have thought that the once heavily fortified beaches of Ha Long Bay would now be advertised as Vietnam’s alternative to the French Riviera, with Western tourists on rented Jet Skis patrolling the waters off the infamous Gulf of Tonkin? Or that even the chubbiest visiting businessman feels the need to crawl through the vast network of underground tunnels down south in Cu Chi used by the Viet Cong to win the war?

Vietnam has been a war zone for most of this century, and it is only now that the country is coming to terms with peace as a normal condition. On my last visit to what was then North Vietnam, the effects of the bombing, particularly the human costs, were so maddening that I doubted this land would ever be made whole. But nature is a magnificent healer, and the cascading green of the rice paddies seems to have forgiven all. Vietnam is now the third-largest exporter of rice and coffee in the world, and substantial foreign investment holds the prospect that peace may bring prosperity to this still very poor nation.

Best of all, the majority of the population is under the age that knew firsthand the horrors of war and is optimistic about the future. It may disappoint their elders that they care more about purchasing a moped than absorbing political slogans of the past, but then again, this is one country that has been exhausted by politics. The return as visitors of large numbers of Vietnamese who fled is further confirmation that life goes on.

Finally, the U.S. has given up the ghost on its posture of outraged innocence. It is somewhat ironic to interview U.S. Ambassador Douglas “Pete” Peterson at his temporary quarters near the “Hanoi Hilton,” where he spent 6 1/2 years as a prisoner of war. Peterson, the first U.S. diplomat stationed in Hanoi in almost half a century, has a brick on his desk from the old jail over a caption saying “closure.” Only a small corner of the prison remains, as a huge multinational joint venture skyscraper hotel shoots up into the rapidly changing Hanoi skyline.

Peterson is an impressive man given to a poetic sensibility that complements the stoicism born of his harsh experience. As he told me in an interview for Microsoft’s online magazine, Mungo Park:

“This brick represents a significant part of my life in the past, but I’m going to use that brick as a building block for the future, because that’s what this is all about. I’ve reconciled, certainly for myself, all of the experience that I had here, and I’m very comfortable with that. I feel that it’s a great honor for me to be able to come back here, after having been in a very destructive process, and do something constructive.”

As Peterson reminds, he was a 31-year-old Air Force captain doing his duty unquestioningly and without access to the data available to those who sponsored this war. Others do not have that excuse. Continuing to set the international standard for hubris, Robert McNamara, who sent Peterson into battle and has since written a memoir concluding that the war was a mistake, will be here this weekend to address a conference with his former enemies on “missed opportunities” of the war.

While it is good that everyone can now make nice, common decency compels a moment of silence for the 3 million Vietnamese, 2 million Cambodians and 58,000 Americans who died because the best and the brightest in Washington thought it essential to intrude in a local civil war. The “missed opportunity” of the Vietnam War was the failure of our government leaders and leading pundits to ever acknowledge that they didn’t know what they were talking about.

We fought in Vietnam ostensibly to stop Chinese communism, and the Vietnamese were pictured as mere agents of their nightmare neighbor to the north. McNamara was a fool not to know that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist, and that no Vietnamese nationalist would ever be subservient to China, a nation that occupied Vietnam for 1,000 years. That’s why, when the U.S. lost and Saigon fell, Vietnam and China went to war.

It is unconscionable for McNamara not to have known about the historic tension between China and Vietnam, or the obvious fragmentation of international communism including the Sino-Soviet dispute, long before he sent millions to war. He should stop making a career out of the continual confession of his ignorance.