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The Vietnam anniversary is a time to focus on the future
Sunday, April 30, 2000
The 25th anniversary today of the fall of Saigon is an artificial remembrance in some ways, a media creation. Certainly a quarter of a century is a significant milestone, but 20 years came and went without the same interest and 30 years will as well. The fact that the Vietnam War has come so strongly into focus now is itself revealing.
There is unfinished business in Vietnam.
Psychologically, many Americans have not come to terms with the fact that this nation expended a huge amount of blood and treasure in a fruitless cause. For about a decade beginning in 1965, Vietnam was the nightmare that wouldn't go away. Now the pain has receded to a dull, aching memory, but it has never quite been resolved.
One manifestation of this unsalved pain is the continuing search for servicemen listed as missing in action.
By all accounts, Hanoi is cooperating in the joint efforts to account for the 1,518 Americans still listed as MIA in Vietnam (another 510 were lost elsewhere in Southeast Asia during the same period). Yet as sad as this situation is, the tally of those missing is a relatively small number compared with past wars in which Americans have fought. The Vietnamese don't know the whereabouts of about 300,000 of their own soldiers and don't have the resources necessary to mount a thorough search for them.
Twenty-five years after the end of the war, 27 years after the last American POWs were freed, it is time to put aside the lingering but fundamentally irrational idea that some Americans are still being held captive.
This is not to say the search for remains should be abandoned; rather, it is to suggest that it should be viewed for what it really is - a bridge-building, cooperative effort between two former enemies and not a source of continuing suspicion.
In that spirit, the United States ought to be thinking of other ways that the relationship can be improved.
With 80 million people, Vietnam is the 12th most populous country in the world and a potentially lucrative market for American goods. But the American relationship with the Vietnamese has been a series of missed opportunities ever since Ho Chi Minh quoted the American Declaration of Independence in declaring - prematurely as it turned out - his country's own separation from France in 1945.
One step the United States could take to reap a large amount of good will would be to make a serious effort at addressing the lingering problem associated with Agent Orange, the defoliant sprayed by U.S. planes during the war. To some extent, although the land has healed itself over the years, the hot spots remain around former bases and these are poisoning a new generation.
The United States has held back on making a real effort on the Agent Orange issue, apparently out of a fear of seeming to admit guilt and invoke demands for compensation. Those concerns surely could be finessed if Washington had the will to do the right thing.
It is not just America that must act. Vietnam was reunited under a communist banner and the dead hand of state control has kept its enterprising people from reaching their full potential.
Yet the Hanoi government has loosened its grip in recent years, in terms of commercial activities and individual rights. As a Post-Gazette writer and photographer have found firsthand in recent days, Vietnam is not only the timeless land of water buffaloes and rice paddies, but also one of cellular phones and "Internet cafes." Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi bustle with commercial activity.
With Ho Chi Minh City now swathed in red banners, the government in Hanoi is not about to abandon its socialistic formulas. Nevertheless, it also must deliver a better life to a younger generation with higher expectation of affluence than their parents. It is a difficult challenge, this peace, and that is the real context of this 25th anniversary.
By definition, anniversaries are about looking back, but that underscores the greater truth: The Vietnam War is now something that belongs in museums and history books. Though the United States and Vietnam shared in a mutual tragedy, now the necessity is to look forward.
