Good Morning, Vietnam, 2018

Good Morning, Vietnam, 2018.

50 years ago when I heard the word ‘Vietnam’, it was with anger, dread and fear. Anger that the US was engaged in a ‘conflict’ that made no sense to many of us; certainly not to me. Dread that my high school friends would be forced to go into a country to fight for something they knew nothing of. Fear that if they went they would not come back, as had several friends who had already come home in coffins.

It is two generations since that time and life has gone on. And so I went to Vietnam, both excited and a little ashamed at being a tourist in a place once so filled with the blood of all sides.

The trip (a tour) was into Saigon, which it is still called by most everyone there. It’s a 1.5 hour ride from the port to Saigon, and the pictures we took from the roadway of shops, temples, and rice fields are, of course, greatly different than the pictures shown in America’s first tv war. Our guide was very vocal about the war. He asked if we wanted the script answers to our questions or honesty. The common answer was honesty. There were several nationalities on the tour: German, Aussies, Brits and Americans (with Americans being greatly outnumbered.). So honesty was the rule of the day with regard to questions about the war and the feelings of the Vietnamese of today towards the Americans of today.

Our guide, Tran, had suffered much as a result of what the war in his homeland. He made sure we understood it is very different to have tanks and bombs in your backyard than to sit in the comfort of the living room and watch a tv screen news report. For him the war was very personal. His father was a major in the south Vietnamese army. As a result of that, when the war ended his father was sent to re-education prison for 6 years. Tran was 1 year old at that time and never knew what his father was like before prison. His mother told him his father had been funny and loving…Tran knew him and silent and sad. It was a deeply personal story and his grief was close to the surface.

That being said, when asked (by a German) how the US could have lost the war, Tran said the Vietnamese do not consider that the US lost, but that the US abandoned south Vietnam. A strongly felt and different perspective.

Life has gone on and Vietnam has entered the new age of finance and economics and is very focused on becoming a major market/player in the world. Tourism is becoming the way of wealth for Vietnam and while Americans are visiting more and more and are treated well, the French are hated! Tran spoke with great derision of the French and the way they treated the Vietnamese during their occupation. I would not want to be French and show up in Saigon.

Saigon, though, is a marvelous city. New construction is everywhere – great high rise apartment/commercial buildings and new highways with toll booths are visible on the drive into the city.

Once in the city, the French influence is obvious everywhere. The French colonial architecture is very beautiful and mostly intact or being restored. The streets are laid out with large beautiful parks at every turn. There are many trees and the city feels shaded in many areas. Saigon feels Parisian, but with 2 million mopeds, lol! Everywhere, on every street, in every alley, there are mopeds. Really a great way to get around in a relatively small city with a 4.2 million person population.

We did the normal tour-like things: visited temples, saw the lacquer factory (bought stuff!) the post office (a marvel that made me think of Grand Central Station in NYC) and had a wonderful lunch complete with a cultural dance exhibition by very graceful and poetic young women. We finished off our tour with a stop at the Reunification Palace, where the tv screen showed us the tank rolling through the gates at the end of the war.

It was a quieter trip back and very contemplative as we reconciled the old and new Vietnam and our feelings, past and present.

We will have one more stop in Vietnam after Hong Kong, and I want to step into that Vietnam in the present and let go of the past.