HO
CHI MINH CITY - When American veterans, tourists,
businesspeople, and others first visit Vietnam,
they often are struck by a common observation,
"Where's the war?"
Officially, Vietnam
remembers the conflict that ended in 1975 on two
levels: first, for citizens, through textbooks and
holidays that exalt the communists' glorious
victory; and second, for foreigners, through tours
of places like the War Remnants Museum or the Cu
Chi tunnels.
Beyond that, though, many US
visitors feel as though something is missing.
Americans traveling to Vietnam know that more than
three decades have passed since their countries
went to war. But many expect that the violence
that once so ravaged this nation
would have left more
discernible marks on modern daily life.
They find instead that not only do locals
lack hostility toward their former foes, they
generally seem to like Americans. If the discovery
is disarming, it is because most US visitors come
from such different backgrounds, where the Vietnam
War (known to Vietnamese as the "American War") is
associated with only painful memories. Most
Vietnamese appear to have moved on while Americans
are several decades later still haunted by the
war.
That's a crucial distinction as the
US "pivots" towards Asia and bids to convert
former battlefield adversaries into new strategic
allies in a diplomatic gambit to contain China's
regional rise. Vietnam is on the frontline of that
campaign as it looks towards the US in its tussle
with China over contested territories in the South
China Sea. While many would expect grass roots
Vietnamese to reject closer ties to the US, the
reality is that many welcome the budding bilateral
embrace.
To be sure, Vietnamese have their
own painful war memories. But they also claim
something Americans can not: military victory. For
all the costs of the conflict, including an
estimated three million killed citizens and
fighters, Vietnam emerged in 1975 with a unified
and independent country; the US, on the other
hand, had little to show for the 58,000 lives lost
and estimated $111 billion spent.
An
entire generation of US veterans returned home
with guilt, post-traumatic stress disorder, and
the sense that they and their country had fought
without purpose. The guilt was amplified by the
fact a relatively unknown people in a far off land
had dealt one of the world's then two superpowers
an embarrassing defeat. The guilt lingered as many
Americans who encountered post-war Vietnamese
apologized "for what we did to your country."
Justice vs normalization Victory
helped Vietnamese move on, as did a Buddhist
tradition that accepts suffering and conceals
animosity. But they also had more pragmatic
motives to bury the past. By the 1980s, Vietnam
faced food rationing, political isolation and an
economic landscape as devastated as its physical
one.
Part of the solution required
normalizing relations with the US, thereby ending
an embargo and opening the war-torn country to the
first trickles of foreign aid and investment.
Somewhat ironically, Americans had the upper hand
at the bargaining table despite their defeat two
decades earlier.
Leading up to 1995, when
the battlefield adversaries made diplomatic
amends, the US had plenty of domestic push-back
from anti-communist camps. The US had just
triumphed ideologically in the Cold War with the
collapse of the Soviet Union, which had helped to
subsidize Vietnam's post-war command economy. Then
as now, a vocal faction of anti-communist South
Vietnamese refugees were staunchly opposed to any
warming of ties with the Socialist Republic of
Vietnam.
These dynamics led to what Bill
Hayton refers to as "official forgetting" in his
2010 book Vietnam: Rising Dragon. The
former BBC correspondent in Hanoi describes in a
chapter headed "Enemies into Friends" how Hanoi
overlooked Washington's war crimes in order to
improve their relationship and open the country to
the world.
That meant encouraging soldiers
to forget about the atrocities they witnessed.
Later, citizens were discouraged against
criticizing American visitors. It also meant
playing down the US's excessive use of the toxic
defoliant Agent Orange, which resulted in
widespread health complications including severe
birth defects, in the areas where it was used.
"Vietnam had to put aside issues of
justice," says John McAuliff, who founded the New
York-based Fund for Reconciliation and Development
in 1985 to boost bilateral normalization efforts.
"It couldn't have both normalization and justice."
Asymmetric ties For practical or
personal reasons, older Vietnamese had to bury
their bitter war memories. For those born after
the war - now more than 60% of the country's 91
million population - America is perceived quite
differently.
While young Vietnamese learn
in school that the ruling Communist Party drove
out imperialist Americans, outside of school the
spread of US soft power, seen in proliferating KFC
restaurants, Hollywood films, and knock-off
iPhones, has offered a sort of pro-US education.
This younger generation is less likely to
view the US through the lens of history, and more
likely through the prism of desirable cultural
exports. They blare old Backstreet Boys hit songs
from their shop fronts, flock to Batman
premieres at local cinemas, and share with one
another copies of the Twilight book series.
This is sharply contrasted with the US's
still dominant war literature (Dispatches,
The Things They Carried) and films (Full
Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now) that
Americans largely continue to associate with
Vietnam. That, coupled with their exposure to
embittered South Vietnamese who lost the war and
settled in the US, have largely shaped American
perceptions of the country.
That
Americans' awareness is often limited to the war
is thus logical. One cannot expect a symmetric
relationship between a global hegemon with a gross
domestic product of US$15 trillion and a small,
liberalizing Southeast Asian nation slowly
emerging from least developed country status.
Vietnamese might read a half-dozen
articles about the US in their newspapers on any
given day. That's more than Americans probably
will read about Vietnam in one month, and even
then the stories often deal with the return of US
veterans' remains or still ongoing efforts to rid
the country of unexploded ordnance, land mines and
Agent Orange left over from the war.
One
upshot of those divergent information flows is
that your average Vietnamese knows a lot more
about the US than the past conflict. For the US,
media attention is still often drawn to the
visceral memories of war. But even in the US there
will come a time when the majority of the
population has been born after the Vietnam War,
allowing for an easier convergence of interests
and perceptions.
Lien Hoang is a
reporter covering Southeast Asia. Connect with her
at Twitter.com/lienh.
(Copyright 2012
Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact us about sales,
syndication and republishing).
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road,
Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
