Vietnam of my Past

Written by Amy Lyon

Like so many of my generation I remember our family gathered around the television. We children would sit on the orange shag rug and watch the dire faces of newscasters, choppy black and white footage of grey clouds of explosives and palm trees violently swaying under helicopters hurriedly rising out and away from whatever horrors lurked on the ground below. And, of course, the body bags, the vigil of numbers stringing from night to night. The dominant tandem memory is of protesters, long hair and angry gestures, crowds of yelling youth rushing towards the camera or being chased away by police carrying through tear gas and waving clubs, and the somber talk of AWOL and the Canadian border.

During that time my father picked up a long haired hitchhiker in the center of our town. It was a beautiful autumn day, the world all golden and orange. Miraculously, my father knew this odd looking young man and we drove him a few miles to his parent’s home. My father joked with him. He sat in the back seat next to me and to a ten year old it seemed like the soldiers had two sad choices: die in Vietnam or run away and live.

I said to a friend that I was not going to spend too much time reading on the war that I wanted to read about today’s Vietnam, how the country was emerging from isolation and eager to share in the profits of free market, and to read about its history and culture.

Even as I spoke, specters of vets loomed in my mind and my words felt a travesty. I remembered the sergeant, whose name escapes me, but I wore on a POW bracelet for years as an adolescent. There was Sonny who owned a hotdog shop on Main Street in Hyannis the summer of 1978. He was in his thirties but spent his time hanging around with a gang ten years his junior. And my friend Chuck who to this day valiantly wrestles with his daemons and those of the other vets who feel most at home at a VA hospital, many too far gone to ever have a normal life.

I did spend time over the winter watching the taped 2006 Vietnam Presidential Debates at the Kennedy Center, watching the politicians, historians and journalists from that era, all in varying degrees of comfort, debate and regurgitate the politics and choices of the American presidents, the ones they worked for and counseled. I was struck by Kissinger’s defensiveness, Jack Valenti’s smoothness, and Haig’s pride. Watching these advisers, all who own a degree of culpability, reminded me that this war still wages and shall until all who were touched by it have passed on, including my generation, and ‘Nam becomes part of the annals of history.

Two-thirds of today’s Vietnamese were born after 1975. I’m told that they don’t hold a grudge against the Americans or French and that I’ll be amazed by their friendliness and vitality. The American War (as they call it) is already part of their past. For them, we were the last of a long succession of foreign intruders (to date) over many millenniums, and they are much more interested in building their country, and more concerned about their northern neighbor, the Chinese. And for better or worse, like most citizens around the world, they separate the acts of the politicians from the general population, and they like Americans.

It was as naïve of me to think that I could embark for Vietnam only concerned about the present as much as it was to fear that my entire experience would be colored by the war. Hopefully I go a bit more balanced and my experience will not be filtered through any one lens and instead I will be ready for and embrace with respect the complexity of an ancient culture, its history and its present day reality.