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Copyright 1994 Newsday. Inc
Newsday
October 6, 1994, Thursday, ALL EDITIONS
SECTION: VIEWPOINTS; Pg A41
LENGTH: 765 words
HEADLINE: 20 Years Is Enough: Accept Vietnam
BYLINE: Jim Laurie
"Jim Laurie is an ABC News foreign correspondent based in London who covered the Vietnam War and
has returned there many times since."
BODY:
IT'S ABOUT TIME. Before the end of this year, the Clinton Administration will establish a full
diplomatic liaison office in Hanoi and the government of Vietnam will do the same in the old
South Vietnamese embassy in Washington. This symbolic end to conflict between the United States
and Vietnam comes on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the Communist takeover of Saigon and the
defeat of the American-backed government there.
Twenty years. I remember it as if it were yesterday. I stood on the street in front of the U.S.
embassy on the morning of April 30, 1975, filming the last American Marine helicopter as it lifted
from the roof. The desperate evacuation, mass confusion, the sense of America's humiliation, the
tears of panic on the faces of hundreds of Vietnamese left indelible impressions. Remaining in
Vietnam for the next 26 days, I watched as Communist North Vietnamese troops moved in and ever
so slowly consolidated heir control over the south.
It has taken 20 difficult years to come to grips with the realities of American defeat and the
establishment of a regime that represented much that Americans found repugnant.
For the first 11 years, the government of the unified Vietnam pursued harsh
policies. It stalled on the search of American solider missing in action. It imposed on its people forced
collectivization in industry and agriculture. It carried out arbitrary seizures of property and sent thousands to
re-education camps, precipitating an enormous exodus. It began a military occupation of Cambodia.
When Vietnam began in 1987 to change its ways - to prove more cooperative
on MIA's; adopt a policy
of "Doi Moi," or economic liberalization; accept private property rights; welcome back the "Viet
Kieu" (overseas Vietnamese who had left), and pull back from Cambodia - the United States was slow to
respond. Now it finally has.
In the last 20 years, I have traveled back to Vietnam a dozen times. I have seen Americans and
Vietnamese alike trying to blot our the pain, trying to put the war and its consequences behind
them.
The United States' pre-occupation with the MIA issue prolonged agony for hundreds of American families
and created bizarre behavior among desperate Vietnamese who sought to barter freedom for information
(often false) about U.S. soldiers.
In 1987, while on a visit to Saigon, I was suddenly presented by a Vietnamese I knew with a large sack of
human bones, a U.S. Air Force dog tag and information about a "newly discovered" crash site dating to 1968.
The man wanted passage out of Vietnam, which, of course, I could not provide.
The bones were examined in Honolulu, but nothing could be determined, but nothing could be determined from them.
Imprints of the same "dog tags" had been turned over to U.S. officials two years earlier. The case of the 1968 crash
had been closed years before, all casualties accounted for. I had established nothing except the knowledge that
information about American MIAs was a morbid but valuably traded commodity in Vietnam.
Although the pain of American losses in Vietnam is great, the pain of the much greater losses
among Vietnamese on both the winning and losing sides must be greater. No
one forgets the past, but most Vietnamese I know have put it behind them. They have picked themselves up and built on
new realities with a pragmatic zeal.
When I traveled to Vietnam in 1979 and 1980, old South Vietnamese friends refused to see me,
fearing reprisals. Many later managed to escape.
Yet, in 1991, I accompanied a group of Vietnamese friends from California back to Vietnam to
visit their families. Some had fled only five years earlier. They were surprised to find a more
open society than the one they left.
Being married to a Vietnamese-born woman has allowed me to see Vietnam's pain at close hand. To escape
arrest as a "capitalist war supporter," my father-in-law, a wealthy businessman, went into hiding in the dense
forests of the central highlands for nearly nine years. He lost all his wealth to Communist confiscation.
Still in Vietnam today, he urges his son to set up business in the new Vietnam that now encourages private enterprise.
My wife's sister died a painful death from hunger and malaria on a desolate island in Indonesia after fleeing Vietnam
in 1987. Another sister fled to the Philippines the following year and remained in a refugee camp
there until she was forcibly repatriated in 1993. Today she lives happily in Saigon, has suffered
no reprisals and the family acknowledges that her flight was a mistake.
Although some Vietnamese-Americans oppose normalization with Vietnam, most do not. Thousands of
Vietnamese-Americans travel to Vietnam each year. The end of the U.S. trade embargo has prompted among them a rush to invest. Asked why Vietnamese
seem to put the past behind them more easily than native-born Americans, a Vietnamese friend says "You Americans can't stand defeat. You're used to being winners. We're used to defeat and struggle.
Besides Vietnam was our home."
A practiced Vietnamese diplomat is often asked how he feels to have won a war against
America .It
is a question he carefully dodges. "No one won the war," he says. "We can win only now by building
on peace with Americans and Vietnamese together."
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