The American War

I am taking a brief break from the “adventure” part of the blogging and the trip notes to spend a few minutes on some thoughts from our time in Vietnam. One cannot spend time here without learning and thinking about the American/Vietnam War. So, for regular readers – be warned…these are random ramblings of the editor so feel free to skip and move onto the travel adventures of the Family of Five.

War it seems is as much about propaganda as what really happened. I remember as a young kid hearing the news about the Vietnam War – I of course did not know where that was at the time but I was aware that Canada was not participating and that people called draft dodgers were flowing north.

Our journey through Vietnam is a stark reminder of the war referred to as the American War here and signs of this war have coloured much of the lore, museums and local stories. I don’t insist on knowing a great deal of the war – just what we are taught, what we read, media and now museums, memorials and local stories.

Our first real encounter with “this side” of the story was at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. It was gruesome, dark and in many ways poignant as you walked through the rooms and looked at the pictures, reviewed the personal accounts and read the speeches from Ho Chi Minh himself, various US Presidents and Generals.

It was quite interesting to read Robert McNamara’s speeches and letters. As you may know he recently died and at the time was a leading advocate of the War. In the years prior to his death, he admitted that the war was wrong – the reasons and the actions which were atrocious to say the least. He even apologized for his actions. This was a war that if there was a war crimes tribunal, the generals that were responsible for the deaths of 3 million Vietnamese through the use of chemical and biological weapons as “experiments” (“let’s bomb them to the dark ages” was one quote from an American general) – may have been tried.

I don’t intend this diatribe to be so much anti-American as it is anti-American foreign policy at the time and to some extent during the recent and to some extent the current administration. The parallels between the justification for war in Vietnam and the invasion of Iraq are quite similar. Protecting regional interests, supporting democracy etc. – sound familiar? In Vietnam it was the spread of communism and today it is the spread of terrorism. “Same same” as the Vietnamese say here with their broad smiles. I could not agree more.

It was only in 1995 that then President Bill Clinton normalised relations with this country. A positive step towards reconciliation – and yet even today, the US has taken no responsibility for the chemical experiments that it dropped on the thousands of local people here. The US is the only nation in the world that has used both nuclear and chemical weapons on innocent people to “spread democracy”. How can a nation that wishes to stand tall among its peers neglect human rights and justify such actions without consequence?

The United States is not alone in its colonialist mentality. I believe most Western nations who have strong economic power (including Canada and Australia) have neglected basic human rights by justifying that it needs to defend it’s “national interest” to stop (in some cases) the progress of nations that would (apparently) threaten these interests.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe there are leaders of less developed nations that could use some guidance (e.g. Zimbabwe) and those that should not be allowed to secure nuclear arms (e.g. North Korea) but threats and in some instances intervention (like Iraq), only seem to alienate and hurt the people that don’t deserve to stuck in the middle between self serving leaders and those that are trying to protect national interests whose nations are thousands of miles away.

What is promising has been the stories that we have heard from the Vietnamese. A young man named Hai was our guide on the Perfume River in Hue as we travelled to visit the tombs of emperors. I asked him if his generation talked about the War. He told me, “I don’t like to talk about it because my grandfather was killed. It is water under the bridge and now we look forward to building a great nation”. He was right – it is water under the bridge. It also needs to be remembered and with some hope not repeated.