Cover
story Vietnam after 25 years
By THOMAS C. FOX
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Nearly three decades had passed
since our last visit to my wifes family in the Mekong Delta when we
arrived at Tan Son Nhut airport on a morning flight from Bangkok, Thailand.
Rows of old hangers that once protected U.S. planes from 122-mm rockets served
as ghostly reminders of another time.
Once the busiest airport in the world, Tan Son Nhut was almost
sleepy when we stepped off the plane in January into the heat of the day.
Inside the terminal, we were directed to customs officials dressed in those
familiar olive uniforms and caps with red stars. These were serious people,
scrutinizing papers before stamping visas with red ink. They never looked up
and were the only Vietnamese during a two-week stay that were less than warm
and friendly.
Twenty-five years after the U.S. defeat on April 30, 1975, when
U.S. Marines scooped the last escaping Vietnamese from the roof of the U.S.
embassy, Vietnam does not go away. It shaped the lives of my generation and
continues to haunt our nation in subtle ways. For some of us it remains an
explosive and dangerous force. Memories, sometimes buried deeply, are
approached gingerly, with trepidation and respect.
Vietnam was always complex, always personal. During the war I
found it easier to live in Vietnam, close to the victims of our war, than in my
homeland, where too often people seemed not to care.
Setting out for Vietnam this year, I sensed it could be an
explosive experience, but also had the potential to offer healing. I wondered
what we would find. So large a story. No event had a greater impact on our
nation in the second half of the 20th century. The war seems almost mythical, a
10-year morality play with lasting lessons. At the same time, it is so simple.
It is about what happens to the lives of people who have essentially the same
fears and dreams as the rest of us. It is a kaleidoscope. Each time you look
through it you see something new.
The last time my wife, Hoa (pronounced Wa), and I returned to
Vietnam was in 1989 when Hanoi was just beginning to peek out from behind its
postwar isolationist shell. Everything seemed uncertain then. People went out
of their way to receive us, but there seemed to be a guardedness to each step
forward. This time that hesitancy had all but disappeared.
Once outside the terminal, I was relieved to find that taxi
drivers no longer grab at arms and hustle luggage as they once did, vying for
passengers. The government has imposed new order. The National Tourist
Association has taken charge, setting the fare into the city at $10 a person.
Rows of clean, white, air-conditioned Japanese autos sit ready to whisk new
arrivals to their destinations.
The young man we were directed toward took our luggage, smiled and
soon set out on a newly paved, wide showcase road that approaches the airport.
He was supposed to direct us to one of the more expensive hotels, but he knew
this woman who ran a less expensive hotel, he said, and quarters there would be
adequate. He eventually confided that he would take a cut in pay for diverting
us.
Welcome to Vietnams new economics, a mixture of formal
government planning and renegade entrepreneurism. The residents of Ho Chi Minh
City, the former Saigon, have long held a do-what-you-need-to
approach to work. Sometimes it drives the communists crazy. Especially in the
South, people prize their sense of self-reliance.
Hoa and I were among the 530,000 foreigners, many of them Viet
kieu, (returning Vietnamese), to travel to Vietnam during the first three
months of the year, a 14 percent increase over the same period last
year, boasted a report in the Vietnam Economic Times, one of many new
business journals that push trade and foreign investment. The publication would
have been a target of the communists a decade or so back. Today they are among
its sponsors.
A lead story in the Times April 7 issue, available on
the expanding Vietnamese Internet, features news of the creation of a pilot MBA
program, to be taught in English, at the Hanoi National Economics
University beginning later this year. It appears there will be no shortage of
candidates. There is no shortage of irony in Vietnam today.
Lessons that haunt
Visitors who set foot in Vietnam and open themselves to these
graceful and enduring people eventually learn about ghosts. The Vietnamese
believe their deceased live among them, require food and prayers and, if
disrupted, can haunt them for years. I wonder if our own nation might be
haunted?
War veterans are tortured by post-Vietnam stress syndrome. Many
have returned to Vietnam to reconcile their souls. Vietnam grips the thinking
of U.S. policy-makers who seem to cite the lessons of the war, however skewed
they consider those to be, when explaining the pros and cons of some new
adventure. The American people remember the images of the body bags -- and have
developed a healthy aversion to combat. Unfortunately, the antidote has been
cleaner and safer air wars. The old warriors who first brought us
Vietnam seem unable to purge their sins. Not long ago Robert McNamara,
Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, felt the need
to write a book about the subject -- and then visit Hanoi. The Vietnamese,
always gracious, received him cordially. The graciousness of most Vietnamese
can unsettle visitors. Years ago, the French talked about la malaise de
lIndochine, a post-colonial melancholy that trapped their psyches. They
understood Vietnams lure.
Refugees chart a new course
I was fresh out of Stanford and filled with 60s idealism in
June 1966, when I volunteered for Vietnam. I would not go as a soldier for I
was already opposed to the war. I would, however, go as a civilian volunteer to
live and work with war refugees. At age 22, I found Vietnam both frightening
and fascinating. After days in the country, I flew to Nha Trang in central
Vietnam for a month of intensive language training. I then flew to Tuy Hoa,
which would be my new home, in a small passenger plane that I later learned was
operated by the CIA. I struggled at first to communicate but eventually learned
simple Vietnamese. Language became the means of crossing into a new and exotic
culture. Many times I would think: There are only two types of Americans in
Vietnam, those who speak the language and those who dont. The former knew
the Vietnamese better -- and almost always opposed the war, or at least, the
way it was being conducted.
I was assigned to work with refugees in two camps, Dong Tac and
Ninh Tinh. These farmer families had been re-settled on land where almost
nothing grew. Hunger, disease and death were pervasive. The refugees had been
forbidden by the American and South Vietnamese governments from returning to
their villages, but some refused to listen, preferring to return and die close
to their ancestors. Their villages had almost all been destroyed by bombs. The
areas had been designated by the military as free fire zones,
meaning anything seen to move was fair game. Young soldiers began to see
people, alleged Viet Cong, as game. U.S. helicopter gunships set out each day
to hunt the area.
The idea of hunting people is almost inconceivable. It made sense,
however, to war proponents, using the logic of war. Sometimes pilots chased
water buffalo for fun; sometimes they would go after Viet Cong in black
pajamas, not realizing that most ordinary peasants wore black pajamas. The
cultural gulf was wide and often impenetrable.
I lived in a small house on the edge of the city, resisting the
American compound on the beach, secured behind barbed wire. The nights were
long and frightening. The Viet Cong controlled the countryside and occasionally
would attack the city, usually between midnight and 4 a.m. When firefights
erupted and mortar fire began to fall on the town, I would hide beneath my bed,
hoping the town would not be overrun. I was, after all, just one more
American.
Those years led to several more in which I variously studied
Southeast Asia in graduate school and returned to Vietnam as a journalist. I
traveled the country and saw more of the war than I ever imagined I would. I
never remember myself being brave. I feared every battlefield I was forced to
encounter.
Sometimes I would assist Congressional fact-finding teams,
introducing them to Saigon opposition forces. Officials at the U.S. Embassy
thought I was soft on communism. I would make sure
fact-finders got to meet people not on the official lists: Catholic
intellectuals, Buddhist monks, students and former political prisoners. During
one visit I flew to Con Son Island off the coast of Vietnam with
then-Congressman Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest, where we entered a large
prison complex and talked to old men who had been locked up for decades.
It was during that time that I met my future wife. Hoa was born
into a Buddhist family, which converted to Catholicism when she was a young
girl. She went to Catholics schools, was taught by French nuns and eventually
became a social worker. When we met in 1970, she was working in a halfway
house, mothering war-injured children, mostly paraplegics, the victims of U.S.
explosives. During the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972, we left
the country. We constructed a smaller world in the United States and raised
three children.
A war nobody owns
Hanoi has opened to the West. The diplomacy has been complex and
characterized by understandable ambivalence. Analysts reason that Vietnam may
view China as the greater threat. What is clear is that Vietnam is poor and
desperately needs foreign assistance. While Hanoi has warmed to America, it has
not forgotten the war. During our two-week stay, Hanoi visibly prepared to
celebrate the defeat of the American imperialism. Vietnam sees no
contradiction in this.
It has long been communist dogma to distinguish between policy and
people. The Vietnamese government sees the old Washington policymakers and
their supporting forces as the former enemy. They see the American people, true
or not, as simply victims of the war. In part they are victims of their own
propaganda. During the war, they inflated the breadth of the antiwar movement
and eventually came to believe most Americas were against the war all along.
At times, speaking to friends and other associates in Vietnam, I
am tempted to set the record straight, but usually just let it be. Most
Vietnamese like Americans, whom they view as friendly, if not a little
naïve.
Neither Vietnam nor America has ever claimed ownership of the war.
Americans always speak of the Vietnam war. In Vietnam it is always
called the American war. Scars among the Vietnamese linger, even
though time has swallowed much of the bitterness. A generation of Vietnamese
passed from sight. Memories are fading.
Many Americans dont give Vietnam much thought. When they do
they often pick up the story where they left off -- at the end of chapter
titled War. They fail to recognize, however, that Vietnam has lived
through several more chapters of its history. So now, when Americans and
Vietnamese approach the subject of Vietnam, each does so from different points
in the story. This can lead to misunderstandings. The Vietnamese sometimes
think Americans are fixated on the past; Americans who return to Vietnam often
have a hard time understanding how Vietnamese could have left the war so far
behind them.
Simple demographics help explain. Vietnams population, with
a galloping 3.3 percent growth rate, has nearly doubled, to 79 million, since
the wars end. Half the nation is under 20. Life spans in Vietnam are
shorter. Only one in three Vietnamese today has living memory of the
tragedy.
From revolution to lattés,
Nikes
A generation ago, Vietnamese generals planned battles; today, they
see to it their battalions get a slice of lucrative economic deals.
Revolutionaries set policy during the war. Their children now hold key
government posts. But instead of developing five-year economic plans, they are
out courting capital. The children of this generation, meanwhile, ride to
school on some of the 1.5 million Hondas that pack Ho Chi Minh City streets.
They walk around in Nikes shoes and wear designer labels. They sip
lattés in local cafes and arrange weekend dates on their cell
phones.
Trinh Cong Son was Vietnams most popular antiwar singer
during the war, a Vietnamese Bob Dylan. He was a massive headache for the
Saigon government, which could not decide whether letting him sing or arresting
him would do more damage to the anticommunist cause.
Twenty-five years ago, when communist troops were knocking on the
doors of the city, Trinh Cong Son chose not to flee with thousands of his
countrymen, although most of his family did. After the war he spent four years
planting rice and manioc amid old American and Viet Cong minefields along the
Laotian border. Now a gaunt and frail 61, he said recently that the communist
government tolerates him and leaves him alone. There is no censorship, he told
a reporter, but added that artists in Vietnam have learned a sort of
self-censorship. It is like children in a family. You tell them they are
free to do what they want to do, but that they must be responsible for their
actions. Asked about life in Vietnam today, he answered: Now people
are in pursuit of the good life, everyone is chasing money.
New life, exuberance, prosperity
Gone is the solemn wartime mood of Ho Chi Minh City, with its
midnight curfews and late night flares illuminating battlefields on the
citys edge. Life has exploded onto the streets. There seems to be an
intensity to the new moment. Buildings are being constructed. Internet
cafés are popping up everywhere. Despite some recent financial setbacks,
the country appears vibrant. The young, especially, have little time to think
of the past. They also have little patience for inept leaders. Hanoi allows as
many as 1,300 students to study in the United States each year, but appears to
remain suspicious of their thinking when they return.
Despite a new sense of optimism in Vietnam today, society remains
broken. It is hard to find a family that has not been fragmented by the war.
Not like in the past when the young went off to battle leaving parents and
siblings behind. The brokenness today is the result of the great post-war
diasporas. Some 2.5 million have fled the country for political reasons, most
to the United States, Canada, France, Australia; some even to the northern tip
of Norway. In the past three or four years these refugees have felt that
conditions have changed enough to allow them to return to see family. They come
in increasing numbers, many bringing much-appreciated revenue. Connections have
recently been enhanced by new telephones, faxes and e-mail addresses.
The streets of Vietnams cities are lined with all sorts of
consumer goods, from sinks to womens apparel, from Hondas to plastic
toys, from sandals to one-hour photo shops. Merchants everywhere hawk their
wares. A glistening new foreign trade center towers over the Ho Chi Minh City
landscape.
It is commonly said here, sometimes in sadness, other times in
jest, that Vietnam won the war, but lost the revolution. Thinking back to the 3
million Vietnamese war deaths and 58,209 names etched on the Vietnam War
Memorial wall, I found myself thinking, If only we could have lost the
war sooner
History lessons lost forever
It was on April 30, 1975, that North Vietnamese troops marched
victoriously into Saigon. They stormed the presidential palace with tanks and
Viet Cong flags. One Russian tank still sits on the grounds of the old palace
today, a reminder of that glorious day, which gets explained now as having been
about nationalism and independence and driving out foreign aggressors.
Part of the tragedy was that those U.S. policymakers who dogged
the war, sent the poor and young into battle, never took the time to understand
what it was all about. Five minutes of Vietnamese history could have taught
lessons which, if learned, could have saved millions of lives.
Vietnam means people from the south. Many centuries
ago the region was part of the Chinese empire. It broke away, but not before
centuries of Vietnamese battles exhausted their enemy. Vietnamese national
heroes were those who led the country in battle. When the French colonialists
arrived they fell into the Chinese template. It took Vietnamese nationalists
100 years to drive them out. Would America fare better?
Ho Chi Minh, the young anti-French nationalist who as a young man
washed dishes in a New York hotel, drew up the Vietnamese constitution. He
patterned it after the U.S. Constitution, which he had grown to admire. When
the Japanese lost World War II and were forced out of Indochina, Ho Chi Minh
begged the United States to persuade the French not to return. President Truman
lacked the experience and insight of Roosevelt and gave the nod to the
returning colonialists. A new phase of Vietnamese resistance had begun. In
lasted until the Vietnamese defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
The Geneva Peace Accords that followed called for a two-year
division of Vietnam, into North and South. Communists went north;
anticommunists, many encouraged by the CIA, which invoked the name of the
Blessed Virgin, went south.
The United States chose Ngo Dinh Diem to head the new Saigon
regime. They found him in a New York seminary. Catholic anticommunism became a
central ingredient in the master plan.
Step by step, U.S. officials, blind to history, guided by rabid
anticommunism, edged America into the Vietnam quagmire.
Once in the war, U.S. ignorance and arrogance sealed the looming
defeat, which took 10 years and massive disruption to achieve. Le Duan, the
chief of communist dogma during the war, wrote with confidence at the time that
victory was certain. He explained that Americans were fighting the wrong war.
Theirs, he said, was a military war. The real war was political. Years later,
CIA analysts said they knew it all along but did not have the clout to change
the course of events. No one, however, that I know resigned in protest of the
policy. So much for patriotism.
It was not the policymakers who paid the price. The average age of
the 58,209 dead whose names are etched onto the Vietnam War Memorial wall in
Washington is just over 23 years.
MIA searches baffle Vietnamese
Americans opened their parishes and homes in 1975 to some 180,000
fleeing boat people. They were the first of several waves. Most of those who
came to American are model citizens today, high achievers. They believe in and
are living out the American dream.
From the end of the war, however, Washington refused steadfastly
to recognize any obligation to Vietnam. There would be absolutely no
reparations. To the contrary, well after the last POWs had been released and
were back on American soil, Washington was demanding accountability for its
MIAs. There is more irony here.
Hundreds of thousands of young Viet Cong and North Vietnamese
soldiers disappeared during the war. Few of their bodies were ever recovered.
Little has been said about their gravesites or returning their bodies to their
families. This is primarily because Vietnam lacks the money and technical
ability to even approach the problem. Yet Washington has made the price of
normalization with Vietnam the full discovery of all missing MIAs.
One evening, over beer, I talked to a group of Vietnamese
journalists, who expressed their frustration and incredulity over U.S. demands
that Vietnam step up efforts to recover American remains. Washington has
pressed for new excavations by joint U.S.-Vietnamese teams to dig through mud
for bone fragments, aimed at solving MIA questions through the use of DNA. The
Vietnamese see a disturbing double standard -- and find it hard to swallow.
Last month Vietnam laid out a red-carpet welcome for William
Cohen. He was in the country only for hours but visited an excavation site
where Vietnamese cut through layers of mud in search for missing bone
fragments.
In a interview earlier this month, Vietnamese general, Vo Nguyen
Giap, 88, who designed and led the campaigns against the French and the
Americans, said of the matter: We can put the past behind, but we cannot
completely forget it. As we help in finding missing U.S. soldiers, the United
States should also help Vietnam overcome the extremely enormous consequences of
the war.
Poverty in Vietnam remains the norm
Despite progress, Vietnam remains a poor nation where the average
person earns only one dollar a day. It is a country that has been forced to
recover from war virtually on its own. Its prime patron, the Soviet Union,
dissolved almost overnight a decade back. Yet during the past 10 years Vietnam
has struggled to come back. It has reduced poverty more dramatically than
almost any other country in the world -- from 58 percent of the populace in
1993 to 37 percent in 1998, according to the World Bank. More than 90 percent
of the population can read. In most countries with a comparable level of
development, the infant mortality rate stands between 60 and 90 per 1,000 live
births. Vietnams rate is 34.
The gap between rich and poor remains and is growing. Yet more
Vietnamese have access to money today than ever in recent memory. One reason is
that the quarter million Viet kieu who live overseas send significant
sums of money back home, now well over a billion dollars a year. Since most of
those who fled Vietnam once lived in the South, the region has done better in
the postwar era than has the North, much to the chagrin of those Northerners
who generally run the country.
Communism loses its luster
Communism seems to have lost whatever luster it might once have
had. Everywhere there is talk about government corruption. Most place the blame
at the feet of the inbred Communist Party. Magazines and newspapers routinely
criticize government officials though, at times, obliquely.
A prominent retired general, Tran Do, in the first installment of
his memoirs, written in September 1998, went so far as to question the notions
of class struggle and a centralized government. Coming from the onetime
ideology chief of the party, his views have had considerable influence. The
current leadership, meanwhile, lacks the illustrious revolutionary credentials
of its predecessors. Men in their 60s, they played only a small role in the
struggle for independence against the French and were only mid-level cadre
during the war against the Americans.
Perhaps as a defensive move, Hanoi recently tried and sentenced
three communist party members to prison terms. Some say it is the system,
riddled with bribery and payoffs, that is corrupt.
Vietnam is no Stalinist state. People here speak their minds
freely, even to strangers. Local communist cadre are often the objects of
ridicule. Beneath politics and ideology, people have an optimism I had not seen
here before. Life is better today than it was 10 years ago, a cab
driver told me. Though poor, he says things will be better for his young son.
The driver works up to 18 hours a day and often sleeps in the car to earn
enough to feed his wife and small child.
People like to say that many of Vietnams 2 million Communist
Party members are opportunists, that they dont believe much in communism.
This seems quite plausible.
Brothers, once foes, put past behind
My mother-in-law grew up in the village of O Mon in the Mekong
Delta. Years after the war had ended, she had come to live with us. Wracked by
Alzheimers, she would talk to herself and to our children, often
incoherently, about the good life in O Mon. Actually O Mon is a Khmer word,
reminding anyone who cares to ponder the past, that 150 years ago
Vietnams southern delta belonged to Cambodia. My wife has early childhood
memories of being hidden in a rice field to be protected from marauding
Cambodians. Lesson: Vietnam has its own imperialist history.
We wanted to see O Mon. One morning we set off from Ho Chi Minh
City on a Russian hydro boat to the delta city of Can Tho, the largest city in
the South. Only wealthy Vietnamese can afford the $15 fare for the four-hour
ride. The cabin is air-conditioned and the ride more expansive, though not much
faster, than taking a crowded van or bus south on Highway One. On board were a
mix of Vietnamese businessmen and Viet kieu coming back to visit
families. When river growth clogged the turbines and forced the boats
engines to shut down for the fifth time, one snide comment I overheard was,
What can you expect? Its Russian-made.
The Russians never came in large numbers to Vietnam following the
war. Russians who lived in Vietnam in the 70s and 80s did not spend
money as Americans once did. Vietnamese like to refer to Russians as poor
Americans. Most young Vietnamese, when choosing a foreign language,
decide on English.
When we arrived in Can Tho, more than a dozen members of my
wifes family were waiting for us, all smiles, at the docks. While we
visited in homes in Can Tho, talk centered on family and each meal ended with
dishes of fresh mango, papaya, tangerines and bananas.
The drive to O Mon from Can Tho is about 30 kilometers by taxi, up
the highway and then over a dirt road that leads to small market that rests at
a river crossing. Small boats capable of holding four to six passengers at the
cost of five cents a ride (children and communist cadre travel free) carry
locals from bank to bank, a 30 meter trip.
It is fairly safe to travel in Vietnam today. Young backpackers
are free to wander the country. Some local authorities, however, can be
suspicious of foreigners. That apparently was why my wifes family thought
it wise that we be greeted just off the main road, some five miles from O Mon,
by a cousin named Anh Nam. The last time I was in Vietnam, he was still a
guerrilla, fighting in the ranks of the Viet Cong. Now retired and respected
locally, he would answer whatever questions might arise.
We were greeted in O Mon by uncles and aunts and cousins and young
offspring. Hot tea was served as we sat near a grove of banana trees. It was
not long, however, before Anh Nam signaled to me that he wanted to talk,
inviting me to walk with him to a nearby soup stand for noodles and coffee.
He was eager to tell me his story. We were family and family in
Vietnam transcends politics, even war. We were soon talking about the hardships
the family faced during the war and he told me he had never spoken to an
American so frankly before. We seemed eager to show each other that the war had
never really separated us. He said he had heard that I had opposed the war.
This made me even more of a friend of Vietnam, he said.
Anh Nam said he left the family like other idealistic Vietnamese,
going north in 1954. It was an act of patriotism, he said. He returned south to
join the resistance in the early 1960s and settled in Tay Ninh province,
northwest of Saigon. He explained he had been a young lieutenant in the Viet
Cong. He lived in the jungles, he said. I remembered the area as one that had
been heavily bombed by B-52s. Of all the bombs that fell on Vietnam, none were
more terrifying than those from the B-52s. They flew silently at 30,000 feet
and let loose a rain of destruction, carpeting huge swaths of land with
5,000-pound bombs. The rumblings could be heard up to 30 miles. I asked Anh Nam
how he survived those bombings.
He told me he slept underground in tunnels but moved about freely
in the underbrush during the day. He did not fear the bombs, he said to my
surprise. Each time the B-52s took off from Guam and Thailand, he said, his
forces would be tipped to the location of the drop. They would then have an
hour or more to vacate the area. With a broad smile, he explained that the very
Vietnamese who chose the targets for the U.S. Air Force were also feeding
information to the targeted North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong troops.
The main difference between the Americans and the Vietnamese
is that we believed in what we were fighting for, freedom and
independence, he told me.
Anh Nam is proud but worried too. He feels his life of sacrifices
helped win the war. He is concerned, though, for the country. The young
are not as idealistic, he said. They want all the new things.
He sees little or no revolutionary zeal in the younger generation, which, he
says he has difficulty understanding. Material things can make people
selfish, he said, and turn them from the needs of the whole
society.
I spoke with other aging revolutionaries and each eventually
shared the same worry about the future of Vietnam: The young dont think
as they once did.
Some hours later, I sat at a table with Anh Nam and his older
brother, who had also been a lieutenant during the war -- but for the South
Vietnamese army, not the Viet Cong. To stress to me the importance of family
and that reconciliation had long ago occurred in Vietnam, the men shook hands
and asked me to snap their picture.
From Viet Cong tunnels to Happy Meals
Gone in Vietnam today are the fierce ideological divisions that
once divided the country and allowed it to become a pawn in the Cold War. Gone
also is the postwar isolationism that characterized the hard-line communists
from 1975 to 1986. It was the ascension to the top party leadership post of an
open-minded former Ho Chi Minh City mayor in the mid-1980s and doi moi
(new life), the new pragmatism that began to move Vietnam forward.
After decades of rural collectives and meager Soviet imports, the
Vietnamese, North and South, were hungry for foreign goods. Old style communist
collectives had failed miserably. Much of the country needed infrastructure --
new telephone networks, power grids, banks, roads, dams, hotels -- and foreign
investors were eager to meet the needs. The Vietnamese government began to open
to foreign investment as the United States lifted its two decade-old trade
embargo in 1994 and established full diplomatic relations the following year.
By 1996, with more than 400 U.S. firms doing business with Vietnam, the economy
was growing by 9 percent a year. However that first wave of exuberance faded as
businessmen confronted the Vietnamese bureaucracy, a slippery legal system, and
as Hanoi insisted on maintaining some central government control.
Vietnam last year initialed a free-trade agreement with the United
States that would significantly accelerate foreign investment. However, top
government officials here continue to be ambivalent and are seemingly unable to
agree on whether Vietnam should embrace tree trade and global capitalism.
Still Vietnams 1999 growth rate of 4.5 percent was among the
highest in East Asia and, unlike other developing nations, Vietnams
external debt is minuscule. At the moment, change seems to be taking an
inexorable course. Not far from the place in Southern Vietnam where guerrillas
lived for months in underground tunnels, in the village of Cu Chi, a factory
makes Nike tennis shoes and another company makes toys for McDonalds
Happy Meals. The spirit of innovation seems omnipresent. During a two-week stay
I was approached by no fewer than five young entrepreneurs who, handing me
their business cards, asked if I might be interested in joining an Internet or
computer partnership.
Joining the new global economy presents Vietnam with enormous
challenges. In interview after interview I heard Vietnamese ask aloud: How are
we to access needed foreign capital, necessary for development, without turning
over to foreigners our natural resources and national sovereignty?
Limits of religious expression
On the eve of U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albrights
visit to Vietnam in September 1999, leaders of the four major Vietnamese
religions issued a joint appeal on behalf of freedom of religion. They charged
Hanoi of abusing government-declared religious rights. One of those who signed
the document was an old friend, Redemptorist Fr. Chan Tin. Years ago, during
the war, he documented the human rights abuses of the Saigon regime, working on
behalf of students and political prisoners. Since the war, he has continued his
human rights efforts, but has directed them at the communist government.
Vietnam limits religious activities. Religious instruction, for
example, can only take place on church property. Hanoi does not allow private
schools and for years has been suspicious of church intentions. At the same
time, many Catholics say there is more breathing room for religion in
todays more relaxed Vietnam. In recent years some Catholic leaders,
including Archbishop Pham Minh Man of Ho Chi Minh City, have cooperated with
government officials, attempting to chart areas of common concern. Vietnamese
Catholic nuns, forbidden to openly proselytize, have been increasingly allowed
to engage in social work and now staff orphanages and day care centers.
In addition to Tin, the 1999 document was signed by Venerable
Thich Quang Do for the Buddhists, the Rev. Le Quang Liem for the Hoa Hao
Buddhists and the Rev. Tran Quang Chau for the Cao Dai church. Fr. Tin, in a
January letter to overseas Vietnamese, complained bitterly that the Hanoi
government was pressuring the men to renounce their accusations.
South Vietnam was forced in 1975 to adjust to the realities of
life under the communists. Throughout the war, U.S. propagandists waged a
multi-million dollar campaign to convince the South Vietnamese a
bloodbath would follow a communist victory. The campaign fueled
fear and anticommunism and deepened an already serious political division.
Communists killed senselessly during the war, but afterwards, nearly every
analyst agrees, there was no bloodbath.
Instead, former Saigon government officials and their supporters
were carted off to re-education camps where life was harsh, to say
the least. The South, meanwhile, never adjusted to the communist farming
collectives. Unlike the North, it had no history of extended social
cooperation. By all accounts, life was hellish -- the stories of relatives
attest to those desperate times -- in much of Vietnam from 1975 to the
mid-1980s.
The legacy of Agent Orange
From 1962 to 1971 the United States sprayed 12 million gallons of
the Agent Orange defoliant over more than 10 percent of then South Vietnam.
Some 14 percent of the areas forests were destroyed, according to United
States figures. Broad stretches of the landscape are still bare of trees.
Dubbed Operation Ranch Hand, U.S. military C-123 cargo planes
blanketed the South Vietnamese countryside with Agent Orange. The 12 million
gallons included in its chemical mix 375 pounds of dioxin, a mere trace of
which has been found to cause cancer. Agent Orange, named after the orange
bands around the 55-gallon drums that contained the chemical, was banned in the
United States after it was linked to deformed fetuses.
Vietnamese say that millions were exposed to Agent Orange and that
hundreds of thousands have since suffered from cancers, other illnesses and
birth defects.
One morning I drove to an orphanage on the outskirts of Ho Chi
Minh City with a Catholic priest, Fr. Phan Khac Tu. Several nuns worked at the
Phu My orphanage, which is filled with physically and mentally disabled
children, rejects from society and families who simply cannot afford their
care.
No one knows how many, if any, of the children of Phu My are
victims of environmental pollution. Even if money were available for studies,
finding precise causes for deformities might prove elusive. Many Vietnamese,
however, say the country has been forced to attend to a disproportionately high
number of disfigurations -- and some blame the U.S. chemical warfare campaign.
I cannot say the rows and rows of anguished children I saw at Phu
My are the latest U.S. victims. I can say we must not walk away from these
children.
The strongest evidence so far that some areas of Vietnam remain
contaminated by Agent Orange became public last year in a report by a Canadian
environmental research group Hatfield Consultants. Its five-year study in Quang
Tri province in central Vietnam found high levels of dioxin in the soil, in
fish, in animal tissue and in the blood of people born after the war.
If such data were collected in most Western jurisdictions,
based on similar sampling levels, major environmental cleanup and more
extensive studies would be implemented, the report said. As
Western-based scientists, we can hardly recommend less be done in
Vietnam.
The Vietnamese have conducted their own limited surveys, finding
higher cancer and birth defect rates among Vietnamese who lived near former
U.S. military bases and higher birth defect rates among families of exposed
veterans. Vietnamese scientists have long argued that serious studies are
needed, but they do not have the money to conduct these studies.
A U.S. Air Force investigation into the effects of Agent Orange
began in 1982 and is scheduled to conclude in 2006. A General Accounting Office
report charged last year that the Air Force waited eight years before releasing
data it obtained in 1984 on the linkage of Agent Orange to birth defects in
veterans children, that the military deliberately withheld information
from interested scientists and veterans and that scientists asked by
veterans groups to take part in the study werent allowed to do so
until 1990.
The effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam are complicated by efforts
to rid the countryside of unexploded bombs and land mines. Scientists are
beginning to worry that exploding these ordinances are further unsettling
dioxin contaminants. Old bombs, artillery shells and land mines litter the
wasteland just south of what was once the demilitarized zone and continue to
kill innocents a quarter century after the last mine was planted. Since the
wars end it has been reported that close to 3,000 people in the region
and 2,000 elsewhere have been killed by land mines, unexploded artillery shells
and cluster bomblets. Several years ago the United States offered a $750,000
mine-clearing and training program, but Hanoi refused saying they did not want
uniformed American soldiers based again on Vietnamese soil.
Tom Fox is publisher of the National Catholic Reporter
Publishing Company.
National Catholic Reporter, April 28,
2000
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