For Vietnam, Clinton Visit May Bring Closure to War

Three college professors--all veterans of the war against the United States--were talking over lunch, and soon the conversation turned, as all conversations here seem to these days, to President Clinton’s official visit to Vietnam this week.

“I wouldn’t expect him to make an apology for the war,” said Do Duy Truyen, a Russian-language instructor who was an antiaircraft gunner protecting Hanoi three decades ago. In fact, Truyen wouldn’t mind if the war didn’t even come up. “I’d rather he talk about the future, not the past,” he said.

Tong Duy Tinh’s body is still riddled with shrapnel, and Nguyen Ngoc Hung’s brother was--until his remains were located and identified last December--one of Vietnam’s 300,000 MIAs, but they don’t bear a grudge. “The anger is gone,” Tong said. “We’ve made our peace, and now Clinton is turning the last page of the war’s history.”

In many ways, the three professors, and the university itself, symbolize what Clinton will find when he arrives in Vietnam on Thursday--a country and a people carrying few visible scars of a war that killed an estimated 3.2 million people.

This is a nation that has largely forgiven, if not forgotten, past transgressions. Its goal is not the settling of old scores but the pursuit of stability, prosperity and international acceptance, and Clinton’s visit is seen here as playing an integral part in that process.

“Your president’s done a lot to ease the pain both our countries know,” Hung said to an American at the table, set up in a garden at Hanoi University of Foreign Studies. Two-thirds of the school’s 5,000 students are taking English, and few have any interest in Truyen’s Russian classes. A nearby dormitory had been struck in 1967 by U.S. bombers aiming for a Voice of Vietnam relay station a mile away. And a pool in the garden was fashioned from a bomb crater, Hung said.

Clinton is “the one who opened the door between us,” he said. “No other president could have the impact in Vietnam he’ll have. . . .

“We’ve shared so many tears over the years, and now it would be good to share some laughter.”

To the aging old-guard Communist leadership, Clinton’s visit represents a kind of final triumph--an acceptance by Washington of Vietnam’s war-won unification and independence, and an acknowledgment of its regional importance. To ordinary citizens--60% of whom were born after the last U.S. soldiers left Vietnam--it raises hopes that better relations with the United States could lead to increased opportunities for study abroad, economic growth at home and a relaxation of the authorities’ obsession with control.

Although the Clinton administration lifted the trade embargo against Vietnam in 1994 and established diplomatic relations with Hanoi in 1995, the U.S. economic role here is small.

The U.S. ranks 10th on the list of foreign investors, with projects worth $1 billion. Last year, Washington provided Vietnam with $3 million in aid, which represented about a quarter of the interest Hanoi owes the U.S. each year for the $145 million debt it inherited from the Saigon regime.

First Presidential Visit Since ’69

Clinton, who will spend four days in Vietnam, an unusually long stay in a country that is a minor player on the world stage, is the first American president to visit Hanoi and the first in Vietnam since Richard Nixon spent six hours in South Vietnam during the height of the war in July 1969.

Addressing two rifle companies of the 1st Infantry Division 12 miles outside Saigon, Nixon criticized Hanoi’s unwillingness to respond to peace overtures and said, “Out here in this dreary, difficult war, I think history will record that this may have been one of America’s finest hours, because we took a difficult task and succeeded.” He went on to note: “This is the first time in our history when we have had a lack of understanding of why we are here, what the war is all about.”

Helicopters hovering overhead kicked up whirlwinds on the plain, and as Nixon moved among the troops, shaking hands and talking baseball, he stepped backward into a puddle, splattering mud on his shoes and dark suit. “Vietnam,” he said, “is the only place in the world where you can be blinded by a dust storm while sinking in the mud.” The soldiers nodded in agreement.

The Communist nation that emerged from the mud and ashes of that war is still riddled with problems three decades after Nixon’s visit: grinding poverty, with a per capita annual income of $350; a countryside strewn with 3.5 million land mines; a human rights record that has improved significantly but still falls short of international standards; graft that seeps through all levels of society; and an indecisive government that has failed to develop the potential of a bright, industrious, educated populace whose interest in communism ends where dollars and cents begin.

Island of Stability in Region of Turmoil

But Vietnam is also an island of stability in a region adrift in political turmoil, from Indonesia to the Philippines. The improvement in its standard of living over a decade’s time, in the cities at least, is arguably without parallel in the developing world. The literacy rate exceeds 90%, the press has grown a bit freer, and the postwar generation believes its opportunities are great. The National Assembly has become more than a rubber stamp, though all real power remains in the hands of the Politburo--18 mostly elderly men who are accountable to no one but themselves.

Many things about the United States perplex these men. They don’t, for instance, understand why officials from Washington seem to dwell more on Vietnam’s failures than its accomplishments. Or why so many of them arrive to lecture Vietnam on human rights, democracy and the need for an open-market economy, as if their ultimate goal were to create an Asian country in the United States’ image. Such a notion has an unsettling echo of policies from a generation ago.

Albright Remark Angered, Embarrassed

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright angered the Hanoi government, and embarrassed U.S. diplomats here, last year when she asked party Secretary-General Le Kha Phieu when he thought Vietnam would abandon communism--the equivalent of Phieu going to Washington and asking Clinton if he thought democracy had a future. In April, John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona who spent five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, said over and over again that the wrong side had won the war.

“Clinton doesn’t need to dwell on the war while he’s here,” said Chuck Searcy, a Vietnam War veteran who has lived in Hanoi, the capital, for six years working on humanitarian projects. “All he needs to offer is a simple acknowledgment of the suffering the war caused on all sides. In 25 years, no high-level American official has done that. I think the silence has been painful for the Vietnamese.”

In an effort to ensure that Clinton is not placed in any politically compromising situations, Vietnam has closed for “rehabilitation” the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum and museum and the nearby Memorial for Fallen Soldiers, sites that most foreign dignitaries visit.

“The Vietnamese have not made any demands, and they’re trying to make sure Clinton is not embarrassed in any way,” said a senior U.S. official who refused to be named because he is not a spokesman for the embassy. “This has been a partnership with both sides working together. The level of cooperation we’ve had is rather amazing.”