Curing America’s Amnesia

Eve Pryce, a ten-year-member of Eight is Enough book discussion club, graduated from the University of Washington in 1970 and has lived in Whatcom County ever since. Her interests besides reading include chemical-free gardening and healthy cooking.

Vietnam, Now
A Reporter Returns

David Lamb, author of the book titled “Vietnam, Now,” started his tours of Vietnam thirty years ago as a combat reporter for United Press International. He returned to peacetime Vietnam and moved to the center of Hanoi in 1997 as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

This book takes you throughout Vietnam, crisscrossing the country and listening in as he interviews a broad spectrum of Vietnamese people. He sought the views of students too young to remember the “American War,” as they call their ten-year war with America.

Some Communist Party members were willing to talk with him as well. However, the Communist elite refused any communication with him. He also spoke to many American veterans who have returned to Vietnam not only to make peace with their own souls, but also to contribute to the country’s needs. Returning boat people had their stories as well.

Interacting with former enemies brought Lamb kindness, forgiveness, and friendship. His personal story sheds light on what was one of the world’s political hot spots, in an area that only recently opened its doors to the outside world.

The reader travels through the past and present with Lamb’s unfailing eye as he weaves a tapestry that presents a more complete picture of Vietnam. For example, he points out that within two years of the French departure in 1954, North Vietnam started preparing to invade South Vietnam. Their civil war was interrupted by the American War.

Once the Americans pulled out, as depicted in living color on television, the North continued in its successful efforts to dominate the country. The South Vietnamese people, those who did not escape to refuge camps or escape with American help, were forced into reeducation camps.

As many as a million of their fellow countrymen and women lost their freedom and were subjected to harsh treatment. The communist leaders in the North had an opportunity to embrace their countrymen but they declined. Lamb makes it clear that this failure set the country back in a big way.

By contrast, at the end of America’s Civil War, General Grant accepted General Lee’s surrender, returned his sword and horse, and sent him on his way. At the same time General Lee subverted an attempt by some southerners to commence a guerilla war against their northern brothers. Unlike the communist leaders, these two American generals saw an opportunity to create a unified country.

The consequences of the opposite policy carried out by the Northern Vietnamese leaders are abject poverty and a lack of the freedoms that Americans take for granted today.

Still, David Lamb sees a crack in the door. In the four years he recently lived in Hanoi and traveled throughout the country, he found the people he met were open to visiting Americans. The Vietnamese with whom he spoke forgive us for the devastation caused by our superior weapons.

One in five Vietnamese people was killed or injured during the ten-year American War. That percentage in the United States would translate to twenty-seven million people killed or injured. Land mines and other unexploded weapons have killed or maimed approximately 38,000 people since the end of the war.

The writer holds up a lens for Americans who seem unable to see the Vietnamese people as anything but communists. But he heard over and over again that the Vietnamese felt animosity only for the American government, not for the American people.

Lamb met Mai Van On, one of the men who saved Senator McCain’s life when he was shot down in front of On’s village. He explained his logic in having saved the pilot’s life by saying, “Senator McCain became a famous man and leads the way for America and Vietnam to become friends. What’s done is done. I never hated Americans, only the American government. But the war’s past now. It belonged to my generation, not my sons’. I never regretted saving Mr. McCain, though a lot of people wanted to kill your pilot that day.”

Lamb asks, “What are we to think when an architect of the war, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, told us in his 1995 memoir, ‘Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why (we engaged in that war).’ There isn’t much to do but grieve.”

McNamara was a guiding light for President Johnson during the war. He was one of the architects of the policy to send over half a million men to fight.

The Vietnamese are a people who have learned from the past. They moved on with their lives as best they could with understanding and forgiveness. They felt consolation in the fact that many people in America demonstrated against the war, and thus shortened it.

Amnesia is an American disease. The cure for this devastating problem is to avoid ever going to war with people about whom we know so little. This seems to be Lamb’s main message in “Vietnam, Now.”

Because the United States was so preoccupied with the threat of Communism, our leaders did not see the goal of Ho Chi Minh and his followers. After the French finally left, both North and South Vietnam wanted to be independent.

One hundred years of occupation and a thousand years of conflict against China, France, Japan, and Cambodia among others did not sway them from this goal. They were interested in deciding their own destiny just as our patriots in 1776 began their seven-year fight against Great Britain for America’s freedom.

We had an opportunity in the 1940s when Ho Chi Minh contacted Harry Truman imploring him to support his country in their effort to oust the French who had occupied his country for 100 years. Instead, America endorsed colonization.

Lamb quotes Ho Chi Minh as saying in the 1960s, “We will spread a red carpet for you to leave Vietnam. And when the war is over, you are welcome to come back because you have technology and we will need your help.” Ho Chi Minh did not live to see his country reunified.

Had the United States not been so tied up with the threat of Communism and if, as Lamb suggested, Ho Chi Minh had called himself a Buddhist or a dictator, he might well have received our support instead of our bombs.

It is time for Americans to support the idea, just as the majority of Vietnamese have apparently done, to turn away from the past and realize the potential in this country. It has taken twenty-five years, but it is beginning to happen.

I came away from reading this book with a new hope for the area. Certainly Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and other countries in Southeast Asia have turned economic backwaters into developed nations. We learned that the Vietnamese have staying power. With our help, they may just succeed as other countries in the area have done.

I recommend reading this book if the reader is interested in hearing the Vietnam story from a man who lived the war and experienced the peace.