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Understanding Viet Nam: The Unexpected Gift
One of the reasons I love the hilltowns of West
County is the sense of history embedded in this landscape: the old barns, clustered
town centers, and land use patterns that reflect life lived close to the land. The longer I live here, the more I learn
about lives past and the impact they’ve had on the land. It makes me feel more connected to the land I
live on to know something of the past lives it has supported.
A few years ago, I coordinated a study of
agricultural lands in Ipswich; some of the homes still standing and in use had
been built in the 1600s. In this
relatively new country, that seems pretty old, especially to this native
Midwesterner. But now I understand how
young this country is.
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| Floating villages at Ha Long Bay have been there for generations. |
Earlier this month, I traveled to Viet Nam with
my sister and cousin on a tour sponsored by our shared alumnae
association. The 16-day trip, which took
us from Hanoi in the north to the Mekong Delta a thousand miles to the south, was
profound. It affected me in more ways
than I can recount in one column, but seeing Viet Nam’s rich and complex
history reflected on the landscape continues to shift my perceptions of that
country and its people. More
specifically, my understanding of Viet Nam’s multi-millennial history of
conquest, expansion, subjugation, division and reunification changed my emotional
connection to the U.S. involvement in the war in Viet Nam.
A bit of disclosure here: I was quite active
against the war. In the early 1970s, I worked full-time with an anti-war
organization, and the images of the carnage documented in newspaper and
television photos remain vivid for me, as they do for many in my generation. Just
being in Hanoi brought back all the emotions I felt during Johnson- and Nixon-era
U.S. involvement—all those feelings of guilt, sorrow, rage, and deeply held
grief. During the first few days, I found myself brimming
with tears, incredulous at the generosity and friendliness of the people, and
struck with the beauty of the country and its rich history.
Before the trip, I had read several books about
Viet Nam, including The Sacred Willow, in
which Duong Van Mai Elliot tells the story of four generations of her family,
including a generation dramatically divided by the war against U.S.
forces. Her detailed and balanced
account began to shift something within me.
What had been a fairly black and white understanding of the war, framed
when I was in my twenties and more sure of my convictions, evolved into many
shades of grey.
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| Roadside mural in Hanoi celebrating the city's 1000th anniversary. |
Our trip began in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi,
which in 2010 celebrated its 1000th anniversary—a thousand years
since, according to legend, emperor Ly Thai To saw a dragon rising from one of
the lakes and flying into the sky, and was given a sword to drive the Chinese
out of Viet Nam after a thousand years of domination. A
mosaic wall along one road celebrates the resulting establishment of Hanoi as
the capital of Viet Nam.
More than anywhere else in Viet Nam, Hanoi
reflects the French colonial influence, its old government buildings still boasting
the mustard yellow color of French Indochina. Adjacent to the grand
Presidential Palace were the more modest accommodations where Ho Chi Minh lived
between 1954, when the French withdrew from Viet Nam, until 1969 when he
died.
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| Ho Chi Minh's residence from 1954-1969 in Hanoi. |
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| The massive mausoleum to Ho Chi Minh. |
Ho was revered for his success (supported
by the U.S.) in driving Japan out of Viet Nam in 1945, but Viet Nam’s
independence was short-lived; the French (whom, in a self-serving reversal, the
U.S. now backed against the Vietnamese) returned in 1946 and remained until
1954. When the French left, the Geneva
Conference drew a geographic line—the DMZ—that divided Viet Nam into North and South
for two decades.
We walked through the Temple of Literatures,
founded in 1070, where massive stone tablets, seated on the backs of turtles,
record the names of those who passed the highest academic exams. The oldest of these tablets dates to
1442. Despite a continuing distrust of
the Chinese, this temple—dedicated to the civil law established by
Confucius—remains a testament to the importance of education in Vietnamese
society today.
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| Tablets in the Temple of Literatures. |
We visited the Hoi Lo, the notorious prison dubbed
the “Hanoi Hilton” in which many US pilots were held, including John McCain and
Douglas “Pete” Peterson who later became the first U.S. ambassador to Viet Nam.
The arched stone lintel over the door reads “Maison Centrale” reveals its
French origin: it was built in the late 19th century to imprison
Vietnamese freedom fighters who were resisting French domination.
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| A bronze mural in the Hoi Lo museum (aka Hanoi Hilton) commemorates the Vietnamese imprisoned and tortured by the French. |
There was an album of photographs of those young
U.S. pilots which reminded me of the poor reception they had upon return, but
the displays of the torture Vietnamese prisoners had at the hand of the French
were equally disturbing. Most remarkable to me was the love of Vietnam that
made former prisoner Peterson return as ambassador.
We flew from Hanoi into Da Nang, landing at the
airport that had been a major U. S. military base from 1959 to 1975, and stayed
in a very posh resort on China Beach, where the first US marines landed in
1965. The contrast in appearance is
striking.
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| If you look closely, you can see bullet holes in this ancient urn. |
In Hue, where the famed Imperial Citadel of the
Nguyen Dynasty was all but destroyed in the conflict following the Tet
Offensive of 1968, great bronze urns show the impact of bullets from the weeks
of intensive street-to-street fighting. Behind the impressively restored
sections we could see ruined walls and mounds covered by tropical vegetation
hiding what remains to be restored.
The Cu Chi tunnels in the Mekong Delta have also
become a museum of sorts. This is where
Viet Cong insurgents, as well as Viet Minh who followed the Ho Chi Minh trail
from the north, traveled through and hid within the 150 miles of hand-carved
tunnels to challenge the much better armed South Vietnamese Army and U.S.
forces. Again, the history of these
tunnels precedes U.S. involvement; they were originally excavated by Vietnamese
farmers trying to escape French forces decades earlier.
In each of these sites, the history of
occupation and resistance is told in unemotional terms. The long history of the country—from Chinese
domination to imperial dynasties to communist insurgence—reflects an on-going
effort to be independent and unified.
And despite changing politics and economies, there appears to be a quiet
pride that is grounded in this history.
However, my impression is that the industry,
generosity, and determination of the Vietnamese people is focused on the future
rather than dwelling in the past. In the
37 years since the fall of Saigon and the reunification of north and south, the
country has reinvigorated itself. After
eleven dark years (1975-1986) of rigid control and “reeducation” of more than a
100,000 South Vietnamese sympathetic with the Americans, the Communist
government realized the failing economy signaled they were on the wrong track,
and changed courses. In 1986, Viet Nam
opened its doors to the west.
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| The thriving floating market on the Mekong delighted us. |
Private enterprise, previously outlawed, is now
encouraged. Family farms have replaced
the communal farms of the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Boats along the Mekong are loaded with rice,
building materials, fruits and vegetables in a veritable floating market of
free enterprise. And thousands of
motorcycles and scooters, carrying everything from porcelain to goldfish to
refrigerators, careen through the cities, defying any sense of order yet
somehow avoiding death.
The thriving agricultural economy is largely
non-industrial, relying instead on the efforts of individuals. Irrigation, plowing, planting, harvesting of
rice is done by hand. Most industries—with the notable exception of oil
production and export—are now privatized. While the political system is still
communist, the economy is becoming more capitalist.
Our remarkable guide, Nguyen Tuan Huy, took us
through a farming village, a brick factory, an island nursery of fruiting trees
that is an eco-tourism destination, a rice-polishing factory, a UNESCO World
Heritage site that was a trading metropolis in the 16th century, and
several pagodas, tombs and museums. His
candor about life in Viet Nam, his balanced narrative of the war (which he
described as not a regional north vs. south conflict, but a conflict of
philosophies), his humorous description of the “Vietnamizing” of colonial
influences (“We kicked out the French, but kept the croissants”), provided a
remarkable perspective about this resilient country.
At the Cu Chi tunnels, Huy spoke of the enormous
discrepancy in power between those fighting for reunification of Vietnam, and
the American-supplied and –backed South Vietnamese Army. “We had to change the terms of the battle,”
he said. “We had to let the Americans
know they did not belong here.” Which is
what the Vietnamese did to defeat the Chinese a millennium ago, and again with
the French half a century ago. I believed
him when he said Ho Chi Minh was not so much a communist as a nationalist; the
desire of Viet Nam to be one country has been the driving force behind their
eventual victories over colonial occupation.
When I think of Viet Nam now, I recall the breathtaking
beauty of the vertical cliffs standing in Ha Long Bay, the pastoral industry of
those harvesting rice, the lively markets in the old quarter of Hanoi and
floating on the Mekong River, the cacophony of all those motorcycles pulsing
the cultural lifeblood through the paved arteries of Saigon. I especially
embrace the generosity and kindness of the people we met. The whole experience shifted
something in me.
I better understand the United States as an adolescent
country, somewhat impetuous, not anchored by the longer history of place, not
tempered by the experience of occupation.
And, like adolescents I have known and loved, unwilling to admit when we
are wrong, unwilling to accept that our perspective might be short-sighted,
unable to learn from past mistakes. On the other hand, my personal angst over the
war has been ameliorated somewhat. My
tears seem self-indulgent in the face of the Vietnamese choice to focus on the
future.
As we
prepared to leave the country, Huy expressed his hope that, if nothing else, we
would now think of Viet Nam as a country, not as a war. That has been the unexpected gift from this
remarkable trip.
