During Christmas 2007 I traveled back in time with my family,
to Vietnam, for the first time in thirty-two years. I was feeling a deep
need to see the place once more, a regret at having withdrawn from a
country I had visited four times during the war. I wanted to
understand the long-term lessons and, on a personal basis, track
down the Vietnamese guides and translators, men and women, who
assumed an ideological faith in the American “people” they escorted
through ruins inflicted by the American “enemy.” They would become
important diplomatic bridges between our two countries in the postwar
period. Most were survivors of the French and American wars and would be
in their 80s by now. Were they still alive? How had they suffered? After
the exuberance at their victory and reunification after 1975, how had
they adjusted to a Vietnam without war? Vietnam’s consul in San
Francisco, Chau Do, said many of these old revolutionaries were
alive, excited by my return and inquiring whom I wanted to see. I told
him that my closest Vietnamese friend was a poet, musician and
translator, Do Xuan Oanh, who was perhaps 40 in those days. "I can help
you find him,“Chau replied with a smile.”He’s my dad." My
eyes filled with tears. It would be quite a trip.
Before I would reunite with these old friends and contacts,
however, I plunged into the shocking contrasts between past and present
in Hanoi. Between Christmas 1965 and November 1972, when I made four
unauthorized visits to Hanoi, the wartime city was unlit and ghostly.
Most people had been evacuated to the countryside. Air-raid sirens and
public-safety broadcasts were the only urban sounds. There was no
economic development beyond the construction of pontoon bridges to
replace bridges bombed by the Americans. The only motorized vehicles
were military ones. Most residents rode bicycles or carried their meager
wares on bamboo poles across their shoulders. Water buffalo pulled the
heavier loads. To outward appearances, Gen. Curtis LeMay’s plan to bomb
Vietnam back to the Stone Age was on track.
Finally came the Christmas bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong by 200
B-52s, from December 18 to December 28, 1972. The United States says
that fifteen of the giant Stratofortresses were shot down and
ninety-three American airmen went missing before the bombing
ended (Hanoi says thirty-four B-52s and eighty-one fighter planes were
put out of action). Estimates of civilian deaths range from 1,600 to
2,368 in those eleven days, and Hanoi listed 5,480 buildings destroyed.
In the American narrative, the Christmas bombing forced Hanoi to sign
the Paris peace agreement one month later. But under terms agreed to by
the Nixon Administration, North Vietnamese units remained
positioned in the south, and in 1975 they stormed Saigon. What is beyond
dispute is that crowded Hanoi neighborhoods and the Bach Mai hospital
were reduced to rubble during the Christmas B-52 raids. The last time I
had seen Hanoi was in 1974, when Jane Fonda and I walked through the
hospital debris and interviewed still-furious victims of the
Christmas 1972 bombs.
Now, suddenly for me, it was Christmas 2007 and Vietnam was
ablaze with festive holiday lights, from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City.
Though billboards of Ho Chi Minh were pervasive, the most ubiquitous
bearded one this Christmas season was Santa Claus, beckoning shoppers
from department store doorways, seen incongruously riding motorbikes,
waving to little children. Spectacular strings of red and green lights
were draped over the streets and stores, blinking at thousands of
Vietnamese rolling along on bicycles and motorbikes, parting smoothly
like schools of fish around pedestrians crossing the street.
Restaurant-goers applauded Christmas carols sung by young Vietnamese
women strapped in Heineken Girls sashes. None of this was about
Jesus—Christmas is not a tradition in this Buddhist and secular-Marxist
country—but all about corporate branding. The fancy Diamond department
store next to Independence Palace was filled with shoppers, gawkers and
Santas wandering the aisles of Lego, Calvin Klein, Victoria’s Secret,
Nike, Converse, Estée Lauder, Ferragamo and Bally. The
nearby Saigon Centre bore a billboard proclaiming, More Shops, More
Life.
Far be it from me to question the desire of Vietnamese to share
our globalized consumer culture like everyone else, or to reject their
aspiration to be the next Asian Tiger, or freeze them in memory as icons
of selfless revolutionaries. Gentrification and consumerism, after all,
have destroyed the character of my favorite American haunts, like North
Beach, Berkeley, Venice and Aspen. It seems the way of the world. As I
walked through the busy Christmas streets, however, I was gripped by the
question of why the Vietnam War was necessary in the first place. Why
kill, maim and uproot millions of Vietnamese if the outcome was a
consumer wonderland approved by the country’s still-undefeated Communist
Party? The whole wretched American rationale for the war, that
Vietnam was a dangerous domino, a pawn in the cold war, seemed so
painfully wrong. Was there any connection between destroying so much
life and causing the Vietnamese to go Christmas shopping? Would the same
outcome—a one-party socialist government leading a market
economy—have occurred in any event, without the destruction? Now that
US naval ships were paying peaceful visits to Da Nang, this question
nagged at me: is it possible that Marxism and nationalism won the war
but capitalism and nationalism have won the peace?
Those who still believe Vietnam was a “necessary” war must take
pleasure at seeing that country in the camp of corporate neoliberalism.
A proud new member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Vietnam is
welcoming a $1 billion Intel project to Ho Chi Minh City this year, and
has accepted the wholesale privatization of telecommunications and other
industries.
Some in Hanoi are dismayed by all this. An American expatriate,
Gerry Herman, a former antiwar activist turned businessman and film
distributor who has lived in Vietnam for fifteen years, told me the
Vietnamese were so desperately eager to normalize relations with
the United States that they accepted the most liberal market reforms of
any developing country. Having some internal knowledge of the trade
negotiations, he says bitterly that Vietnam was blackmailed by the US
negotiators. To gain export markets for their textiles, shoes and
seafood, they slashed subsidies and opened markets in banking,
insurance, services and advertising to private corporations. For Herman,
the distressing prospect is that Vietnam will follow the failed model of
the Philippines, not the more successful Asian Tigers whose development
benefited from government subsidies.
China, Herman says, got a better deal than Vietnam, winning
twenty years of protection for its telecommunications industry.
"The American negotiators said to Vietnam that they were beaten by the
Chinese on certain issues and would never do it again, and Vietnam could
take the deal or leave it." The Americans, in deference to domestic
political pressure, even demanded market access for Harley-Davidson,
against the Vietnamese complaint that the larger, faster Harleys would
worsen the high accident rates on their narrow, congested roads. "The
Vietnamese negotiator broke down in tears," Herman said,
over the Harley concession. I suddenly remembered the cynical 1960s
strategy of Harvard’s Samuel Huntington, that forced urbanization would
transform the Vietnamese into a “Honda culture.” It was coming true
before my eyes, with the Honda Dream motorcycle and, sooner or later,
the Harley. As a Vietnamese named Pham Thong Long blogged last July, "I
have only one dream is buy one of brand new Harley-Davidson, now I
waiting for Harley-Davidson deal to open in Saigon. I need a Fatboy."
It is difficult to discern the truth across these cultural
divides. Scholars like Gabriel Kolko have predicted the disintegration
of the Vietnamese Communist Party for decades, but the political
situation by most accounts is stable, even improved. Thao
Griffiths, a 30-year-old who directs the Hanoi office of Vietnam
Veterans of America, reminded me of certain fundamentals on my first day
adjusting to the new Hanoi. "Since thirty years ago when you were first
here, we have motorbikes in addition to bicycles, cellphones more than
land lines, an Internet, and most of our population like myself was born
after the wars. It has been a time to catch up in peace." As for Hanoi’s
accepting the WTO, Thao said, "We knew the mechanism was not fair, but
the strategic reason is that we had to get inside. We didn’t really have
’normal’ economic relations with the US until 2006, for four decades.
Even last year, Bush was saying America should have stayed the course in
Vietnam." Thao herself reflected postwar Vietnam: fluent in English and
a former Fulbright scholar, she spent two years at the Vietnam veterans’
office in Washington, DC, deeply involved in the normalization process.
She has two children with her Australian husband, Patrick, a researcher
for the United Nations. Her little boy, Liem, immediately befriended our
7-year-old Liam on sleepovers and trips to fabled Ha Long Bay.
Vietnam’s annual economic growth of 7-8 percent in recent years
has been remarkable, though it has come at the price of rising
inequalities, a pattern in many other countries under neoliberalism. Per
capita GDP has risen from $200 in 1993 to $835 last year. That’s still
less than $2 per day for most Vietnamese, but it comes close to removing
Vietnam from the World Bank’s category of the poorest nations. The
Vietnamese government estimated foreign direct investment at $13 billion
in 2007, the highest investors being South Korea, the British Virgin
Islands (a conduit for offshore Hong Kong money) and Singapore. Poverty
has fallen from 58 percent to 20 percent, though the majority of ethnic
minorities and rural Vietnamese still live in poverty, and growth has
created catastrophic problems of infrastructure, traffic congestion and
pollution.
The party introduced its drastic doi moi market policies
in 1986, a “renovation” plan that opened doors to private foreign
investment and a Gorbachev-style internal perestroika. An
exhaustive European study concluded in 2006 that a remarkable
result of the doi moi reforms has been "the absence of organized
social opposition among workers, peasants and youth. They are generally
content with their growing economic opportunities."
Of course, Vietnam is a one-party state that closely monitors the
Internet and pockets of dissent among religious and ethnic groups. But
the institutional controls have been steadily relaxed since
the 1970s, with none of the uprisings that accompanied the fall of
Soviet or Eastern European Communism. Nor has there been a
Tiananmen Square in Hanoi. "Democratic debate within the party and
within the National Assembly, as well as personal freedoms, have made
much progress since the war," observes John McAuliffe, a reconstruction
specialist who has made an estimated fifty trips to the country. "It’s
true that it wouldn’t be wise to stand up on a soapbox and advocate the
overthrow of the government," says Lady Borton, a longtime American
expatriate and translator in Hanoi. "But there is widespread
criticism of the party leaders“—whom she describes as”bulldogs“—”on
all levels in private and in the press." In an observation I shared,
Borton described Vietnam as "a place of constant talk, all the
time, and they talk freely."
Kent Wong, the director of UCLA’s labor studies center, discerns
a positive spirit among Vietnam’s working class based on taking several
union delegations to Vietnam. "I’ve seen poverty in many developing
countries, and Vietnam is different. There are no shantytowns," Wong
says. Vietnamese unions, Wong acknowledges, are not constituted as
adversarial bargaining units, but the many members he has
interviewed have high morale. "Four years ago when I was there, they had
a plan to organize 1 million more workers in the public sector, and they
actually met the goal," he says. Wide income disparities prevail in the
private sector, but inequalities in the public sector are less
pronounced. Wong, who wants to turn the AFL-CIO away from its lingering
cold war (and CIA-financed) heritage of anti-Communism toward Vietnam
and China, is working to build direct worker-to-worker relationships to
foster labor solidarity strategies in the age of globalization.
To make sense of the contradictions between Vietnam’s
grinding poverty and rising affluence, between defeating
Americans in war but joining the WTO in peace, one must consider
Vietnam’s history. Perhaps no country in the modern world has suffered
the sorrows of war more heavily and for a longer consecutive period than
Vietnam. Leaving out the century of French colonialism, the Vietnamese
survived, even prevailed, during the Japanese occupation in World War
II, the nine-year war against French reconquest (365,000 battle deaths),
the fifteen-year war with the Americans (2.1 million battle deaths)
and the ten-year war with Pol Pot’s Cambodia and China in the 1980s.
Millions of Vietnamese died of famine as well, or lived with hunger and
deprivation as everyday experiences. After the American war, at least
38,000 more Vietnamese were killed by unexploded bombs and
landmines, and countless numbers continue to live with the deformities
resulting from 20 million gallons of dioxin-laced Agent Orange
and other defoliants. Their sufferings are beyond Western imagination.
All this sacrifice was accepted as either a duty in the war for
independence or a reality to be accepted and survived. It was
accompanied by the deep personalized pain of Vietnamese killing one
another, not simply the French or American invaders. At least 185,000
Saigon soldiers died, for example, dishonored as the losing side.
Here, perhaps, is the explanation for Vietnam’s two-decade quest
to achieve something resembling a normal life, to avoid exclusion from
the world community. This memory is why they believe normalization with
the United States, accession to the WTO and a (nonpermanent) seat on the
UN Security Council are strategic “victories” on a long road to
recovery. It is a matter of great pride that a Vietnamese Bronze Age
drum is placed at the entrance to the UN Security Council today.
“No More War was the lesson after Vietnam for our people,” said
Bao Ninh, author of The Sorrow of War, a 1993 antiwar novel
that ranks in my mind with the classics of Remarque, Heller,
Vonnegut, Mailer, Tim O’Brien and Philip Caputo among war veterans. We
visited Ninh one evening at his Hanoi residence, where he and his wife
received us with tea, fruits and cake. His first floor was a
bright reception room with a couch, chairs and, in one corner, a
motorbike. Ninh’s novel was banned at first for allegedly
undermining the national consensus that the war had been
patriotic, victorious and glorious. But under doi moi the book
gained a huge audience in Vietnamese and other languages, and this year
it is being produced as a film.
When he was 15 in Hanoi, Ninh saw his first American. It was John
McCain, parachuting into Truc Bach Lake from his burning fighter-bomber
after destroying a power plant. Ninh watched as McCain, drowning with
two broken arms, was pulled from the lake by a local fisherman at a spot
marked by a small monument today. Ninh later joined the army to fight in
South Vietnam, was among the soldiers who liberated Saigon in 1975, and
searched for the decomposing bodies of dead soldiers after the war. His
book is more about man’s inhumanity to man than a tale of triumphant
revolution. I was stunned at the jacket’s description of Ninh as one of
only ten survivors of a youth brigade of 500. With a laugh, he surprised
me by saying the numbers were made up by his publisher, Pantheon/Random
House. "Not only governments but soldiers themselves make up war
stories, too," he laughed again, not unlike sardonic American Vietnam
veterans. "I like writing. I write about what I know. I wanted to tell a
soldier’s story, not a political or ideological one."
Ninh visited the United States in 1998 with other Vietnamese
writers, gaining an impression of US diversity, including surprise at
how many Americans were “quite fat.” That aside, even in conservative
towns like Missoula, Montana, he found Vietnam memorials and town
officials who were veterans like himself. Ninh came away impressed that
so many Americans still "remembered, discussed and agonized over
Vietnam,“and formed the opinion that this memory of Vietnam could be”a
tower of strength from the past" on which to build better relations in
the future.
Beneath his friendly bearing, Ninh carries the scars and guilt
that only some war veterans are capable of expressing. The most painful,
perhaps, is his “sorrow at having survived,” the belief that the very
best of his generation died for Vietnam’s present peace:
Look carefully now at the peace we have, painful, bitter, and
sad. And look who won the war. To win, martyrs had sacrificed their
lives in order that others might survive. Not a new phenomenon, true.
But those still living to know that the kindest, most worthy people have
all fallen away, or even been tortured, humiliated before being killed,
or buried and wiped away by the machinery of war, then this beautiful
landscape of calm and peace is an appalling paradox.
Ninh was repelled by Vietnam’s Marxist postwar policies. "In the
war, I had lived like an animal. Now I couldn’t stand this [the peace].
Some Americans may sympathize with Communism but I lived under it and
couldn’t stand it. Everybody was fed up with the hardship. That’s what
led to the doi moi in the ’80s." One of Bao Ninh’s sons is making
millions in the global high-tech industry and travels frequently to the
United States. It’s not the future he fought for at the same age, he
says, but he’s proud and happy for his son. "We Vietnamese are not like
North Korea or China. If Communism doesn’t work, we move on. But North
Korea, for example, has a very tough time because they keep going on
with Communism."
Not many Vietnamese today think of the war with America with Bao
Ninh’s profound cynicism, for that would mean questioning their
country’s very identity, much like questioning the Indian wars or the
Revolution for Americans. Rather, the American war is perceived as
a necessity forced on Vietnam by invading powers, as has happened for
more than a thousand years, beginning with the Chinese.
Vietnamese take pride in having defeated so many great powers
and feel deeply about their losses. There is a suppressed anger that
they were willing to join the search for American MIAs while the United
States and Monsanto refuse to take responsibility for Agent Orange.
The question is whether the future, aside from the obvious
advantages of peace, will be worth the sacrifices of the past. Is the
period of anticolonial revolution—which Vietnam symbolized and so
dominated our thinking in the ’60s and beyond—becoming an obsolete
memory in the era of globalization? Has the promise of those inspiring
revolutions faded with the decline of naked colonialism and the
emergence of so many corrupt authoritarianisms in the Third World? Or
are the supposedly scientific models of history long embraced by the
left being replaced with a kind of chaos theory of unpredictability? Is
this all that was ever possible?
Perhaps this was why I had stayed away so long but had to return
after so many decades. Much as I still opposed war and imperialism, from
Vietnam to Iraq, I no longer expected joyous endings.
I wanted to see my oldest acquaintances in Vietnam for personal
reasons but also as guides in sorting out these troubling questions. I
will call these people, now in their 80s, Vietnam’s old revolutionary
generation. Their roots went back nearly a century, to young Ho Chi
Minh’s odyssey to the West—in particular, France and America—to study
the spirit of republican revolutions for lessons he might bring home.
Ho, then known as Nguyen Ai Quoc, presented a petition to the 1919
Versailles conference asking for Vietnam’s inclusion in the call for
self-determination. There he learned that Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen
Points did not apply to the colonies. In the period of the Russian
Revolution, Ho was waiting tables in Harlem and making diary notes on
lynchings. He embraced Marxism-Leninism because of Lenin’s opposition to
colonialism. Twenty-five years later, Ho collaborated with American
intelligence agents in resisting the Japanese occupation. Then he cited
the US Declaration of Independence in declaring Vietnam’s
freedom in 1945. From long tradition grew the practical, and even
sentimental, belief that the “American people,” in Walt Whitman’s mythic
invocation, could be appealed to against American imperialism.
Thus arose Viet-My (Vietnamese-American) solidarity
committees and cultural exchanges from the very beginnings of the
war with the United States, staffed by bright young Vietnamese who
were asked to host American wartime visitors and in the process learned
more about American culture and politics. Now long retired, many of
these old revolutionaries went on after the war to become diplomats and
ambassadors to European countries. These days in Hanoi many still arise
at 5:30 for morning exercises at the Flying Dragon Club, an old building
with a curved roof, then, with bodies limber and spirits balanced, go
out for tea and conversation.
In general, the old revolutionaries are busy, active in
community affairs, proud and nationalistic, and shared with me the
unanimous sense that Vietnam has become too materialistic and
acquisitive. “The new generation lacks a balanced approach,” said
81-year-old Nguyen Ngoc Dung, who runs shelters for street children in
Ho Chi Minh City. “The situation is out of balance,” said one. "They are
not looking—how do you say?—at the other side of the coin."
Dung is a former deputy to the most well-known of the old
revolutionaries, 81-year-old Nguyen Thi Binh, who presides over the
Peace and Development Foundation in Hanoi. During the war, "Madame
Binh," as she was known, was a striking global icon and nemesis
denounced by Henry Kissinger in the Paris peace negotiations. When she
welcomed me for tea, she seemed smaller than the woman I remembered, but
the energy remained vibrant. The formality of the reunion was derailed
by the arrival of the “two Liams,” arm in arm. They sat on her
grandmotherly lap while Binh held forth on the challenges of healing the
damage of Agent Orange and developing Vietnam past the status of other
poor countries. She showed a keen interest in sponsoring workshops with
critics of globalization. Meanwhile, the two little Liams lobbied to be
taken to the local Lego franchise.
On another morning, the sudden arrival of an older man in a blue
windbreaker surprised me. He walked toward me peering carefully through
wide spectacles. “Do you remember who I am?” he asked with an expectant
look. Then he held before me a black-and-white photo of myself, ten
pounds lighter and thirty-five years younger, staring at Vietnamese
graves, notebook in hand. The man with glasses was Pham Khac Lam, an
interpreter and photographer whom I last saw deep within a cave in rural
North Vietnam, in 1972.
Lam, now 77, was the top assistant to Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap in
preparing the battle plan for Dien Bien Phu in 1954. His father was a
mandarin adviser to Emperor Bao Dai, the last Vietnamese king. Lam’s
father is said to have written Bao Dai’s abdication speech in 1945. Lam,
in other words, grew up in the absolute center of Vietnamese
anticolonialism, joined the solidarity committees during the American
war and participated in the postwar process as director of the
country’s first television network. He was part of the Rose Garden
ceremonies when Vietnam’s leaders met Presidents Clinton and Bush. He
takes modest credit for the idea of flying both Vietnamese and US
flags on the stretch limousine that carried Hanoi officials to the White
House door. And he once told Civil War buff Ted Turner, who opened media
relations between CNN and Hanoi, that "it was important to let the past
be ’gone with the wind.’ " Turner generously sold Lam the rights to
broadcast CNN for a nickel.
Lam edits Viet-My, a glossy magazine that seems devoted to
promotional reports on commercial and diplomatic ties with the United
States, including critical commentary on issues like Agent Orange.
Occasionally Lam inserts a strategic analysis of the US quandary in
Iraq, buried amid advertisements beckoning tourists to such
attractions as health clubs at the beach. How did he really feel, I
wondered, about the world he had done so much to shape?
Lam seemed relaxed and diplomatic. His duties have
included welcoming former Saigon dictator Nguyen Cao Ky, who
has visited Hanoi frequently in recent years, against vociferous
complaints from Vietnamese exiles in America. "Ky said that he always
wanted to unify Vietnam, so I have to salute him," Lam says wryly. On
the question of his country’s deepening inequalities, however,
Lam parted from the optimistic party line. "The government is trying to
reduce poverty, but it’s already a reality. The rich are getting richer
because they have the means. And the poor don’t. We are better off
materially, but not mentally, ethically," he said, brushing his
forehead.
The world had changed all around him, from the caves of
resistance to welcomes in the Rose Garden, from Dien Bien Phu
to the global media stage. The geopolitical balance was altered forever
with no more Soviet Union or “socialist camp” and tensions simmering
beneath the “fraternal relations” with China. "We and the Chinese used
to call each other comrade; now it’s mister," he reflected wryly. The
most ironic piece of the puzzle before me was falling into place. While
it could not be said explicitly—and while Vietnam inevitably would
strive to maintain close relations with China, its giant northern
neighbor—the United States could serve as a strategic balance in Asia
for Hanoi, while Vietnam serves as a silent check on the expanding
Chinese power Washington fears most. Ironically, it’s becoming
the domino theory in reverse.
Finally, there was a visit to my oldest friend, Do Xuan Oanh, who
first greeted me at Hanoi’s airport on a December day
forty-two years before. He went through a “bitter period” after
retirement, someone told me, but was feeling better, having recently
translated into English an edition of Vietnamese women’s poetry. He
lived alone, his wife having died after many years of illness, his three
sons all abroad. As I remembered him, Oanh loved America in unique ways.
For example, after learning English from the BBC, he translated
Huckleberry Finn into Vietnamese, a massive challenge. A
musician, he could sing many American protest songs. A romantic, he wept
easily and became close to many Americans.
Now, in a carload of old revolutionaries, I traveled along a
narrow cement path past houses, until we came to the gate of Oanh’s home
of fifty years. He was standing in the door, a thin shadow of the Oanh I
remembered. Taking my hand, he led me into a windowless room where a
couch and piano were the most prominent fixtures. There were alcoves for
painting and a kitchen. We sat and looked at each other. He held my hand
on his knee, while the others sat in a quiet circle. It was more a last
visit than a time to renew an old conversation.
“Do you want some booze?” Oanh asked with a low chuckle, pointing
to a half-bottle of Jim Beam. I deferred, worried what might happen
after a few drinks. My wife said Oanh seemed fit and energetic for an
85-year-old. She asked if he would play the piano, and he performed an
original piece in a classic European style. He gave me a copy of the
song, signed to his “precious friend,” and a small carving of a
beautiful Vietnamese woman carrying a student briefcase, which he said
reminded him of his wife “before the revolution.” He repeated the
phrase, then relaxed. Gradually, the others began to reminisce
about the old days. I wondered if we would ever meet again. I remembered
an e-mail from Oanh’s son in San Francisco: "I believe God assigned my
father and myself to serve the American people." His son would come for
a visit in the summer, Oanh said.
We walked back along the dark path to the street filled with
motorbikes and strolling couples out for a coffee. Oanh looked at me
intently, pointing a finger for emphasis. “Nothing can be predicted,”
were his last words before we said goodbye.