I had the pleasure and privilege of visiting Vietnam last week with my wife, Amy, and some fiends from Chicago. It was part of a two week cruise from Singapore to Hong Kong called a “Southeast Asia Immersion”, and indeed it was just that. We learned a great deal about Asian culture from visits to Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Hong Kong.
In this post, I want to focus on my impressions of Vietnam.
To begin with, I must say how impressed I was that the people of Vietnam have not forgotten “the American war” which ended 42 years ago—on April 30, 1975–but at the same time they are not stuck in their the past and are engaged in rebuilding their country and moving forward towards a better future. I had been vehemently opposed to that war in the late 1960s and early 1970s in my student days in the USA, a very formative period in my life, during which—and ever since then-- images of the Vietnam War remained etched in my mind. As a result, I was very curious to see Vietnam for myself for the first time and to encounter its people as well as its beautiful landscapes and cities.
We visited both Saigon—now renamed Ho Chi Minh City—and Hanoi, the capital of reunified Vietnam. Both cities are thriving metropolitan centers, with huge numbers of tourists, mostly Chinese, but also some Americans, and of course lots of Israelis! (There were several groups of Israelis on our cruise—almost everywhere we went we heard some Hebrew spoken!).
But by far the most meaningful part of my visit to Vietnam was the opportunity to learn about the amazing process of reconciliation that has been going on now for more than 20 years between the USA and Vietnam, between American business and Vietnam entrepreneurship, and most importantly by the people who were bitter enemies and hated each other deeply for a long period of time (Diplomatic relations were established between Vietnam and the USA in 1995). During all those years of the war, they heaped enormous amounts of killing and destruction on each other in a protracted and senseless war which went on for far too long.
In particular, I was moved by the very positive stories I heard about American veterans of the Vietnam War who come to Vietnam—sometimes over and over again—to meet with their counterparts, and to help with NGO’s all over the country, especially for Vietnamese people who were maimed physically and/or mentally, by agent orange or napalm bombs, and have been in need of special care for such a long time. One of the projects that I learned about in Vietnam was called “Building Bridges”, and it was doing exactly that—building bridges of understanding and cooperation between former enemies.
According an article in the New York Times about a year and a half ago, "Over the past several years, Vietnam and the United States have come together so quickly that even the architects of the reconciliation call it breathtaking" ("War Veterans Lead the Way in Reconciling Former Enemies" by Thomas Fuller, The New York Times, July 5, 2015). Undoubtedly the most famous veteran to return to Vietnam is Pete Peterson, who was appointed by President Clinton as the first U.S. ambassador after the normalization of ties in 1995. Mr. Peterson, a former Air Force Pilot, was shot down over Hanoi and spent six and a half years in the prison that Americans know as the "Hanoi Hilton". (I saw this place –which is actually an infamous prison, first for Vietnamese people who resisted the French colonialists and later for American pilots who were shot down during the Vietnam War—with my own eyes last week). According to this article, when Mr. Peterson thinks of the war and the devastation and destruction that it brought, he feels disappointment. He was quoted as saying; "If the United States and Vietnam are such natural allies, why did they have to fight in the first place?" And he added: "I have thought about this for a long time. I'm convinced that the war could have been averted had we made the effort to understand the politics of the place." What an amazing statement by an amazing man who has genuinely embarked on the path of reconciliation and genuine understanding of another people!
Amb Pete Peterson reconciles with Vietnamese
Our wonderful young guide in Halong Bay and Hanoi —who had studied English and international relations at a university in Hanoi—told us that he had been involved as a guide and a translator for several encounters between American and Vietnam veterans of that horrible war, and he found them to be very powerful and meaningful events in his life. He has grown up in Vietnam since the reunification of the country and sees the war mostly as history. As such, he is very much part of the new generation that wants to move on to a new life, one with more prosperity and promise for all of the 94 million people of Vietnam, one in which the war that ended more than 40 years ago will become more and more of a distant memory and a peaceful future will become the norm.
Imagine a similar scenario for Israelis and Palestinians, with all the differences in cultural and political contexts.
Close your eyes and imagine that the war between Israelis and Palestinians comes to an end one day. If it can happen in other parts of the world, it can happen here too! In contrast to the vision of Israel’s current Prime minister—who says repeatedly that we will live by the sword here forever—consider the possibility that our war will end. It is not divinely or politically ordained that it will go on to the end of time!
Other conflicts have ended—in Vietnam and Cambodia, not to mention Northern Ireland and South Africa—even when they had dragged on for a long time and seemed interminable at the time. Our conflict—which is often senseless and tragic—can and should end too, the sooner the better, even if it does not look possible right now.
And then former combatants will become cooperators for peace. Veterans will meet each other regularly –as they do in Vietnam—and engage together in projects of mutual benefit. A process of reconciliation will finally be allowed to move forward in a major way, which will enable both sides to heal the wounds of the past and to pave the way for a better future for their children and grandchildren.
These were the dreamy thoughts that I was thinking as I listened to powerful stories of reconciliation between former enemies in Vietnam, as I walked around downtown Hanoi last week.