A Reflection on Revisiting Vietnam

Carol and I spent three weeks visiting Vietnam, traveling the length of the country from south to north. We enjoyed an early morning breakfast on a small boat in Can Tho’s Floating Market in the Mekong Delta, met old and new friends, visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, and traveled north by train with stops in Quang Ngai and the My Lai Memorial, Hoi An, Hue and the Peace Bridge in the former DMZ. We stayed in Hanoi’s old quarter near Hoan Kiem Lake, met leaders of Vietnam friendship organizations, visited the Women’s Museum and Temple of Literature, watched a performance by the famed “Water Puppets,” and delighted in an overnight boat trip into hauntingly beautiful Halong Bay. This was my fifth visit to Vietnam.

In July 1970, I led a delegation of student and religious leaders to South Vietnam, investigating repression. Our government finally had been forced to acknowledge 50,000 political prisoners being held by the US-backed Saigon regime. During Christmas week that year, I was one of a three-person Committee of Liaison delegation who carried mail between their families and American POWs in Hanoi. In August 1974, I traveled with an AFSC delegation to visit the Quaker Rehabilitation Center in Quang Ngai, drove from Hanoi south to the DMZ to visit an underground hospital following-up delivery of Quaker medical aid, and took part in discussions that led to Lady Borton going to live in Hanoi.

In 1995, I attended the Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration of the Vietnam-USA Friendship Society in Hanoi with three other middle-aged anti-war activists and octogenarian former OSS (predecessor organization of the CIA) officers who had served with Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnamese forces fighting the Japanese occupation during the closing months of World War II. The American officers supported Ho’s appeal to President Truman urging US support and recognition for Vietnam’s independence. Truman never replied. Instead, the US financed the French military campaign to recolonize Vietnam.

This current trip with Carol was my first visit that focused on seeing and enjoying the beauty of Vietnam, as well as connecting and reconnecting with Vietnamese friends.  Inevitably, given our personal connections with the US war in Vietnam, my reflections are not just about the present, but involve the past, present and future. 

On our next to the last day in Ho Chi Minh City, we met Madame Ton Nu Thi Ninh, a leading intellectual, born in Hue, educated in Vietnam and France, who served as Vietnam’s Ambassador to the European Union. Currently in retirement, she chairs the HCM City Peace and Development Foundation, headed nationally by Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, famous for representing the NLF/PRG delegation in the Paris Peace Talks.

Leaning forward intently in a way that underlined the importance of what she wanted us to understand Madame Ninh said, “Even more terrible than all the bombing and killing was the way America imposed a destructive division on our country and on Vietnamese people.” On one level, geopolitically, Ninh was speaking about the temporary North/South division embodied in the 1954 Geneva Accords, followed by the US-installed Diem regime in Saigon which blocked holding the Accords-mandated elections in 1956 to reunite the country. But she was also speaking about the deeper, divisive political and cultural effects of America imposing its anti-Communist credo on Vietnam.

Given Ho Chi Minh’s success at blending nationalist and communist ideologies in the struggle against French colonialism and Japanese occupation, if elections had been held in1956 the results would almost certainly have been a united, independent Vietnam with Ho as President. Instead, America poured money, arms and eventually half a million soldiers into the country generating horrendous violence and division, including divisions within Vietnamese families.  While Madame Ninh supported the side of the National Liberation Front, her brother became a Captain in the American-backed ARVN military. After the war ended, these divisions made the process of reeducation and reconciliation much more difficult and painful.  While serving in the postwar Vietnamese government, possibly motivated in part by her own family situation, Madame Ninh publicly challenged the severity and length of the compulsory reeducation program. Her work for national reconciliation has included visits to the US where she tried, often without success, to address embittered Vietnamese who fled the country after the war.

Vietnam was not the only country in which America’s “good vs. evil” anti-Communist credo distorted realities with disastrous consequences. The unresolved division since the 1950s from the war in Korea poses dangerous threats today. During the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, struggles for democracy and social justice in many African and Latin American countries were more destructive and deadly as a result of American anti-Communist interventions. Our policies today run similar risks relying on “counter-terrorism” and “anti-radical Islam” as rigid policy guidelines. We should have learned from Vietnam how these simplistic, fear-driven frameworks frequently reveal more about our own ignorance and biases than they help us respond wisely to realities in any other country.

Meeting with Madame Ninh and Ngo Thi Phuong Thien, daughter of Ngo Ba Thanh, prominent attorney and Third Force (not NLF) anti-regime, anti-war activist in Saigon during the war, combined with our visit to the Vietnam Women’s Museum in Hanoi, reminded us of the major roles of women with different political views in the Vietnamese struggle for independence. Some believe Ho Chi Minh’s early advocacy for the role of women was inspired in part by his living briefly in New York and Boston, where he witnessed activities of the Women’s Suffrage Movement.

On April 30 1975,^,the war in Vietnam ended, but not for everyone - not for Vietnamese refugees, not for American, Vietnamese and other veterans, not for families of the “missing in action” from either side, not for political prisoners, and not for future victims of unexploded ordinance or the harmful, multigenerational effects from Agent Orange.

In Ho Chi Minh City we met Cao Nguyen Loi, a former political prisoner whom I had met in July 1970.  Loi had been held in the infamous Tiger Cages on Con Son Island and had provided a detailed map for finding them to a Congressional delegation who took a photograph that was published in Life Magazine. Loi, a successful businessman after the war, and three other former prisoners hosted Carol and I for dinner, presented us with flowers, and thanked us for our work opposing the war. Loi also arranged for us to meet other former prisoners in Quang Ngai and Danang as we traveled north.

In Quang Tri Province, one of the most heavily bombed and sprayed areas of Vietnam, Carol and I toured the Mine Action Center of Project Renew which does community education, especially with children and carries out mine clearing operations.  Since the war ended, in Vietnam alone (not counting Laos or Cambodia), there have been more than 100,000 casualties, including 40,000 deaths from Unexploded Ordinance (UXO). The Vietnamese Red Cross estimates that as many as 4 million Vietnamese may have suffered harmful effects from Agent Orange. A big political issue this year, particularly given President Trump’s priorities, is whether the US will continue to provide some funding for cleaning up highly toxic areas and for assistance to Vietnamese with disabilities most likely resulting from Agent Orange.

After a century of colonization and occupation, in 1975 Vietnam became independent - free from foreign control. However, as with all countries, large and small, Vietnam’s development is partly dependent on foreign trade and investment. This involves priorities and issues of potential benefits versus harmful effects, i.e., who benefits and who gets hurt, as a result of particular trade and investment decisions, including issues related to the effects of enormous investments coming from China and South Korea. Vietnam’s English language newspaper reveals that while there are few public protests and no organized opposition party, there are diverse, contesting views on development and human rights issues that play out on the local, provincial and national level.

Some people may have believed that when “national liberation” was accomplished, everything about Vietnam would change. Of course, that didn’t happen.  There have been many changes, mostly positive but many challenges remain and there are some Vietnamese qualities from before the war that continue to shape lives and society today. 

In July 1970, on my first visit to Vietnam, I met Huynh Tan Mam, who then was President of the Saigon Students Union. Mam invited our delegation of students and religious leaders to join Vietnamese in a march to protest the American War.  The march was attacked and broken up by military police firing “Made in the USA” teargas grenades. Mam was arrested and imprisoned several times by the US-backed regime.

After the war, Mam became a medical doctor, worked with the Vietnam Red Cross and the Association of Poor Patients in Ho Chi Minh City, served as Editor of Thanh Nien newspaper and, motivated by having two autistic sons, organized, raised private funds from Vietnamese friends, and opened two schools for autistic children. On our last day in Vietnam, Mam took me to visit one of the schools.

Whether he was working as a young leader in the national liberation movement or as a private citizen, Mam has been compassionate and critical, consistent and persistent in working for a better Vietnam and world. I feel privileged and inspired knowing him, and very fortunate to have had this opportunity of revisiting Vietnam.