Not Your Father’s Vietnam
The Vietnam of today is not your father’s battlefield, but a capitalist autocracy forged on the shoals of lost American innocence and ethnocentrism whose economy, in spite of clumsy bureaucratic meddling and official corruption, has soared on the wings of globalization.
For many Americans, Vietnam is an echo from a past, a nation that imposed communism while enabling pot smoking hippies to replace Ozzie and Harriet with free love, Woodstock, and magazine covers that questioned the existence of God. But now that our soldiers are no longer around, Vietnamese-style communism is fading while a free market is on the rise. Go figure. Isn’t that what we wanted all along?
Although Asia is my favorite part of the world, Vietnam has never really been on my vacation short list. Maybe that was because our tragic military involvement made this once obscure Southeast Asian nation seem more like a state of mind rather than a physical state. Vietnam sparked a cultural revolution, campus rioting, and disgorged a sitting President. It cost the lives of more than 58,000 U.S. troops, and America its innocence. By the time the last departing U.S. chopper spirited Ambassador Graham Martin and the folded embassy flag to an awaiting armada in the South China Sea on April 30, 1975, non stop coverage of our "only losing war dominated the airwaves," and ensnared us in bouts of soul searching that continue today.
About three quarters of articles written about Vietnam still refer to the war, and the endless volumes, movies, and even a Broadway musical about it continue to book mark our lives. Every subsequent American military adventure has evoked comparisons, and invoked "Vietnamization," "Vietnam debacle" and other terms that have become part of the public discourse. Old warriors who insist that we didn’t do enough to win in Vietnam seem eager to lock horns with those adamant that we should have never involved ourselves there in the first place. I knew too much about Vietnam that was unpleasant. Enough to make it seem as if I had been there many times. And if I actually wanted to go, all I had to do was pop in my "Platoon" video or google Janis Joplin, Dion or the Doors.
After my flight arrived in Hanoi, I half expected to be greeted by hardboiled former North Vietnamese or VC fighters eyeing me scornfully for my perceived role in trying to bomb them back to the Stone Age. But there were no recriminations whatsoever, either going through immigration or at any point during my nearly month-long trip throughout the country. If anything, the Vietnamese I encountered went out of their way to be warm and friendly. Without exception, they welcomed Americans and American investment. Many expressed surprise that I even brought up the war, because for just about every Vietnamese with whom I spoke, the fighting ended long ago. Most, especially among the 60 percent of the population born after 1975, appeared to know little or nothing about the war or had come to terms with it long ago. Maybe because they may have been too busy trying to tap into what had become one of the region’s most vibrant economies.
Rather than pondering what was or what could have been, Vietnamese I encountered brimmed with infinite possibility and a dream of seeing their country fully developed by 2020. The progress in recent years represents a dramatic turnaround from the abysmal production that immediately followed the war. In 1986, Vietnam’s faltering economy, the collapse of its Soviet sponsors, and both the threat and economic success of archrival China prompted party leaders to adopt Doi Moi (renovation), which encouraged private business, foreign investment and the creation of more than 30,000 private businesses. The economic growth in most years since then has averaged about 7 percent. The signing of the U.S.-Vietnamese Bilateral Trade Agreement in 2000 and acceptance of Vietnam in 2006 by the World Trade Organization drove further expansion, symbolized in part by the ubiquitous motor scooters that barrel down the streets of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Before Doi Moi few could afford them. Now, there are so many of the bikes that their impulsive owners frequently jerk them onto sidewalks in frantic attempts to bypass past chic restaurants, sleek boutiques and gussied up old world hotels, oblivious to occasional communist slogans and party banners, on their way to making money at businesses that collectively now seem just as powerful as the state. Jobs at government companies were once coveted. Nowadays, ambitious youth prefer positions at international firms over membership in the party.
In a sense, even the old guard has moved on. In northern Quang Binh Province near the Ho Chin Minh Trail, stacks of unexploded U.S. ordnance form a gateway to thatched homes, dugouts, trenches, an underground classroom, a surgery center, a meeting hall and a kindergarten equipped with baby cradles and accentuated by prominently displayed photographs of those who survived American wartime bombing runs.
This, however, is no traditional hamlet but a commercial replica of one fashioned into an outdoor war museum by Nguyen Xuan Lien. The 67-year-old former accountant and North Vietnamese loyalist painstakingly and single-handedly built it to commemorate the suffering caused by the relentless American bombardment. Despite losing his father and son-in-law to U.S. strikes in 1972, Nguyen insisted that he likes Americans, but just wants them to understand what their bombs did to his country. As if to emphasize that point, he shook my hand, draped his arm around my shoulder, and offered to pose with me for pictures. Another big difference is that instead of bombs, many rural Vietnamese are fleeing hamlets and the agricultural life associated with them to search for jobs in the cities. Young Vietnamese men commonly sport long fingernails, a sign that they do not work in the fields.
One of the few other repositories of "the American War," as it is known in Vietnam, is the War Remembrance Museum in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). The museum’s entrance is crammed with wide ranging weaponry, ordnance and planes abandoned by American forces, including an A-1 Skyraider, a 155 Howitzer, and a Blu- 82 Seismic bomb, or "Big Blue 82," which when dropped from a C-130 at an altitude of 15,000 feet can destroy everything within a 100 meter radius. One of the exhibits claims that American B-52’s unloaded more bombs on Vietnam than the allies dropped in Europe during all of World War II.
Some American critics argue that our military might would have prevailed if politicians hadn’t interfered. They point to devastating losses incurred by the north during the 1968 TET offensive, which resulted in fatalities thought to be roughly on par with the number of U.S. soldiers who died during the entire war. Proponents of the domino theory likened the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong to a monolithic red tide, homogenous communist automatons without complexity who, if left unchecked, might engulf the entire region, instead of according them respect that might have won their hearts and minds. Such assessments often failed take into account the Sino-soviet rivalry of the time, the animosity between the north and south (exacerbated when Hanoi’s hardliners shipped hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese to re-education camps following the war) and regional and ethnic tensions that have persisted for thousands of years and are far more potent than ideological interests of the moment.
They also didn’t consider the ingrained corruption of southern leaders, the ineffectiveness of the South Vietnamese army, and the traditional animosity between North and South Vietnam, and whether a military victory by the south could have produced a government capable of inspiring confidence, particularly in North Vietnam, where reverence for Ho Chi Minh, who died in 1969, never faltered. "Uncle Ho"("the bringer of light"), worked as a baker from 1912 to 1913 at Boston’s Parker House Hotel before becoming a committed communist in France in 1921. Despite Ho’s purges of party rivals and massive imprisonment of non communists, his ardent nationalism, incorruptibility, and battles with French colonialists and later the Americans, earned him high marks among his followers, along with the will to fight and comparisons to Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln rolled into one. Despite sustaining heavy losses during the TET offensive that decimated communist forces, the north won a morale victor when public opinion in the U.S., fueled by press reports, turned against continuation of the fighting.
Some argue that U.S. intervention in Vietnam weakened the north and undercut its plans to launch attacks elsewhere in the region, perhaps non-communist Thailand. But the only post war Vietnamese attack actually occurred in 1978, when Vietnam forces, reacting to cross-border incursions by the Khmer Rouge, swarmed into Cambodia, another communist country. Domino theorists must have considered this odd; odder, still, when yet another communist nation, China, drove the Vietnamese out of Cambodia; and downright peculiar when Vietnam ended up cozying up to the Americans as a way to defang China and stimulate its own depressed markets.
Helping to lead the economic charge in the new Vietnam are several hundred American businessman such as Rick Smith, a New Yorker who arrived with just $5 in 1992, and with partner Peter Ryder of Boston now heads the $140 million Indochina Capital Corporation, a financial services firm that manages Vietnamese real estate and capital market funds. "We’ve had a slow down in the past year, but overall the Vietnamese economy is still one of the fastest growing in the world," said Smith, who operates out of Ho Chi Minh City. "Doing business here can be frustrating for those of us who’ve lived in more advanced economies, but what’s exciting is that this country still has such a long way to go."
It’s not just the need for American expertise that drives the Vietnamese, but ongoing tensions with China and what is widely perceived as its unspoken quest for regional dominance. "The Chinese are a much greater worry to us than the Americans ever were," Hoang Minh, 37, a businesswoman, told me. "After all, we fought the Chinese for 1000 years, the French for 100 years, and the Americans for just 10 years."
After several weeks of witnessing the changes that are underway, and weighting the empty communist banners and slogans against the growing power of the business community, I found myself wondering how long it would take the free market forces to render Vietnamese communism irrelevant. A few years? A decade? It seemed like only a matter of time.
Which begs the question: Isn’t this what we expected, more or less, from our earlier commitment to Vietnam?
How this ultimately plays out will depend on the U.S., and exactly what role it assumes on the increasingly level global playing field, where American companies can hire engineers in the east for a fraction of what they earn at home. This much is clear: We can no longer afford to build walls around ourselves, and relive old battles in an age where ethnocentric excesses have finally buckled to diplomacy and mutual respect; at a time when what Fareed Zakaria refers to as "the rest of the rest," led by China, are coming on strong, demanding their share of the economic pie and the increasingly scant energy resources capable of putting it within their grasp. We stand at a tipping point, no longer able to blindly unleash our vast military arsenal, yet armed with the weapon of intellectual capital that Vietnam and other hybrid communist capitalists simply cannot match. How we use it will determine whether the time we are living in becomes the Asia century, as so many predict, or an age of American enlightenment and renewal.
