Raised to Drumbeat of War, Envoy Strikes Right Chord in Peacetime

WASHINGTON — The French burned his Vietnamese village in 1951. The Americans bombed his Hanoi neighborhood in 1972. But Le Van Bang has spent his career shedding the burden of his wartime memories and helping his country carve out its place in the world.

And now, as Vietnam’s first ambassador to the United States, he is an influential player as the two former enemies seek to normalize their relationship.

It is a logical posting for Bang, who introduced the phrase “Vietnam is a country, not a war” to Washington. He is the one who greeted then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the airport in Hanoi after the Paris peace accords between the two countries were signed in 1973. And he is the official who facilitated the first trips of U.S. veterans back to Vietnam in the 1980s.

“In many ways, I think Vietnam has done better than the United States in putting the war in the past,” Bang said recently as he worked with U.S. officials on the final details of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s trip to Vietnam, Cambodia and Hong Kong, which begins Tuesday.

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Bang sees Albright’s Vietnam visit as a significant symbol of improving relations between Hanoi and Washington. He said he hopes that it will lead to quick progress on a trade agreement and the granting of most-favored-nation trade status, which the United States gives most countries not considered its enemies.

In speeches throughout the United States, Bang stresses the importance to both sides of good relations. Vietnam wants technology, management skills and foreign investment from the United States. For the U.S., Vietnam offers a key to stability and security in Asia, as well as a potentially profitable marketplace. Trade between the two countries reached $1 billion last year.

State Department officials consider Bang, 50, a consummate diplomat. He is polished, articulate and has friends in Congress. Although he is a member of his country’s ruling Communist Party, he does not let ideology get in the way of pragmatism. He is viewed as a reformer, helping nudge Vietnam toward the economic and political mainstream.

Having been in the United States since 1991--first at Vietnam’s U.N. mission in New York--Bang understands American emotionalism about the 2,000-plus U.S. service personnel unaccounted for in Southeast Asia. He admits that this issue is often difficult to convey to Hanoi.

“They ask: ‘Why are the Americans focusing on this issue? We had a war with France, a war with China. We exchanged prisoners at the end. The issue of unaccounted for wasn’t even raised. And what about the 300,000 Vietnamese who are unaccounted for?’

“It wasn’t until I met some of your veteran groups and the families of the missing that I understood the depth of this issue, and I know it is something we have to resolve for better relations between our countries.”

He added: “For our two countries to enjoy real friendship, we have to concentrate on the legacies of the war. For you, that is the MIA issue. For us, it is issues like orphaned children, Agent Orange [the chemical defoliant U.S. forces used in Vietnam], unexploded ordnance, the pain of our own mothers and fathers whose children are still unaccounted for in combat.”

Like most Vietnamese of his generation, Bang was raised to the drumbeat of warfare. At age 4, he fled barefoot into the hills with his mother when French soldiers burned his village to the ground--including his family’s bamboo home. His father, a farmer and later a doctor, was a soldier in the resistance movement that overthrew French colonial rule, participating in the climactic Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

During the war with the United States, Bang was a member of the Volunteer Youth Brigade, a quasi-military unit that repaired bombed roads. Later, he went to Cuba to study, and in 1972--while Douglas “Pete” Peterson, now the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, was a prisoner of war in Hanoi--he earned a degree in English from the University of Havana. Back home, he began his career at the Foreign Affairs Ministry that year as an interpreter.

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Like Peterson, Bang neither dwells on nor speaks often of the war. When pressed, he recalls the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972 that was an effort to demoralize the North Vietnamese. Pausing occasionally to shake his head, he said, “It was so terrible, really a campaign to terrorize the people, but I don’t think I heard anyone say we shouldn’t go on with the war.”

Bang said he was frequently greeted by demonstrators and shouts of “Communist!” and “Liar!” during his early days in the United States. That hostility, he said, is diminishing.

“One day, I hope it will disappear and we can be total friends,” he said. “I believe that can happen.”