A Former POW Tours Vietnam as an Envoy of Reconciliation

Do Muoi, Vietnam’s Communist Party chief, leaned across the dinner table and asked his guest, former prisoner of war Douglas “Pete” Peterson, “Were you tortured?” Peterson dodged the query, saying something about not wanting to dwell on the past, but Do Muoi persisted. “No,” he said. “I want to know. Were you tortured?”

So Peterson answered: Yes, during six years in Hoa Lo Prison--or the Hanoi Hilton, as Americans called it--he had been tortured constantly, often until he passed out. He rolled back his shirt sleeves to reveal rope burns on his elbows; he held up his hand that at times still goes numb.

Muoi responded by pulling up one trouser leg and displaying his own ugly scar.

“I was tortured in Hoa Lo too,” the old man said. “By the French, a good many years before you got there.”

The exchange occurred in 1991, when Peterson came back to Vietnam for the first time since his release from Hoa Lo. He had by then banished his wartime demons and buried the festering hatred for his captors--had these feelings lived on, he says, “I would not have been able to function.” He returned as a freshman congressman from Florida to grapple with a bigger question: Was it time for the United States and Vietnam to exorcise the past and reconcile their differences?

“I found the answer in the streets, and it was a resounding yes,” recalled Peterson, 63, the first U.S. ambassador to Vietnam since American withdrawal in 1975.

“Only a small percentage of the people I saw had had any involvement with the war. Most were born after we’d left. And I said to myself, ‘Why should we disallow them the better life they want, why should we disallow them the well-being of Vietnam?’ ”

The former Air Force POW never forgot that recognition. Despite obstacles erected by the anti-Vietnam lobby in the United States and suspicious old guard Communists in Hanoi, Peterson has been a walking billboard for reconciliation during his 18 months as ambassador. He has traipsed through 40 of Vietnam’s 61 provinces to deliver his message with the zeal of a warrior-turned-missionary and delighted Hanoians with a style that is earthy, forthright and decidedly unpretentious.

On weekends he rides his Honda Dream motor scooter unescorted through Hanoi. He gets his hair cut for $1 on the street, enjoys lunches of noodle broth served in tiny street stalls and strikes up conversations with shoeshine boys. Of the two worlds he straddles--the dark-suited world of celebrity diplomacy and the anonymous jeans-and-sneakers one of mixing with common people--he prefers the latter.

Although Peterson has had to settle for little victories on the rocky road to reconciliation, it is all but impossible to find anyone--in his own embassy, in the U.S. business community, in Hanoi’s officialdom--who disagrees with the assessment of Vietnam veteran Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.): “If you made a list of all the ingredients you’d want an ambassador to Vietnam to have, the name you’d come up with is that of Pete Peterson.”

Perhaps what is most noteworthy is not how far Peterson has brought the two nations toward reconciliation but how long it took to get there. The U.S. restored normal diplomatic relations with Germany and Japan in 1951, six years after the end of World War II. It took 20 years for Washington and Hanoi to shed enough psychological baggage to take the same step.

Peterson still dislikes pumpkin, which he had to eat for months in prison--”Just a little hang-up I still have,” he says--but he now drives by what is left of the Hanoi Hilton several times a day and gives it not a second glance. He has heard that one of his prison torturers is a local real-estate agent, but he has no interest in knowing more about him. He speaks of his “other life” in Hanoi so unemotionally it is as if that nightmare belonged to another man.

“I just don’t pay it any attention, and in some ways I’ve had more painful experiences,” said Peterson, who lost his first wife, Carlotta, to cancer in 1995 and his teenage son in 1983 in a car crash. “I look at that time like a lot of other things I’ve had to endure, and I had to go on.”

Undeniably, though, Peterson’s wartime experiences have given him credibility with the Vietnamese, who extend a gracious welcome to all Americans--and particularly, ironically enough, to those who fought in the war. “The veterans understand what we suffered because they suffered too,” says one government official.

Unlike many returning veterans who wear their guilt like a badge of shame, Peterson, a conservative Democrat who voted for George Bush in 1988 and against the Persian Gulf War in 1991, does not apologize for the Vietnam War--or his role in it. Nor do the Vietnamese ask him to. He was shot down when a missile struck his F-4 Phantom near Hanoi in 1967, on his 67th mission, and saved from the wrath of angry villagers only because of North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh’s orders that prisoners be turned over to authorities.

Thirty years later, on Vietnam’s National Day in September 1997, Peterson walked in ceremonial procession up the carpeted stairs of Ho’s mausoleum with other members of the diplomatic corps. At the open coffin, in which rests the waxen Communist leader, who died in 1969 at the age of 79, each ambassador was to execute a left-face and make a respectful bow.

Every eye was on Peterson. Would the former POW bow as he once had to do, in a sign of forced respect, before his sadistic prison torturers? Peterson, a 26-year Air Force veteran, did a smart left-face, paused and bent forward slightly from the waist.

“I really had no trouble doing it,” he said, “especially when I remembered if it wasn’t for Ho’s policy that prisoners not be killed on the spot, I might not be here today.”