Vietnam and Cambodia: Why did we choose to go there?

We are starting 2015 with a BANG: A discovery trip to Vietnam, with some time in Cambodia and passing thru Seoul, South Korea. While Vietnam was on our list of places to visit, it was not near the top. Placing it on the list was driven by reports of its beauty and more importantly the impact the war had on our lives. It popped to the top of our list when our friend Sue Lukrich, proposed a small private tour that would include some of our friends with similar interests.

I will not go into a history of Vietnam, which you can find on the Internet, but note that the country has been a dependency of or governed by other countries for more than four thousand years.  Chief among them was China, with periods of attachment to France, Japan, and the United States. Today it is a unified country of about 75 million people, communist in government, with a strong market driven economy. Vietnam’s largest trading partner is the USA. Conflict with China is beginning to heat up yet again over the ownership of the oil rich islands of Paracel and Spratly. Recent encounters of naval ships from both countries signal a continuing escalation.

Our enthusiasm for this trip was enhanced by our need for perspective and closure.  This war had a great impact on our lives. Roselie taught at a school for US military personnel in Okinawa during the war. Military missions against Vietnam were launched from there. There were many casualties. But in our government’s quest to mask what was going on in Vietnam,  casualties were never included in the ‘Vietnam Casualty’ count, since the pilots or soldiers were based in Okinawa and not Vietnam. When a pilot or service person went missing, his/her children were pulled from class within hours and the family sent back to the US – as if they were never there, never existed.

As the war heated up in 60’s, I was a candidate to be drafted. I had two physicals as precursors to being drafted. Our presence in Vietnam made no sense to me. I understand our reason: to stop the spread of communism, but a war was not the only path. The rules for the draft or deferment were changing frequently, to meet the need for people for the war: school deferments, marriage deferments, dependent-children deferments, and defense work deferments, all came and went. Ultimately I was exempt because I was working on several electronic and counter-electronic warfare systems for the Vietnam theatre. One of these systems involved the deployment of sensors and signal processors to detect movement and location of movement along the Ho Chi Min trail and the miles of tunnels used by the Viet Cong to move personnel and supplies. So I want to see the Ho Chi Min trail and these tunnels to attach some reality to these ‘ghosts’. Warfare using drones is today’s equivalent.

Reflecting on those times, I was more focused on getting my college degree and applying what I learned, than the war, or the civil rights, or the Great Society.  I was one of the ‘silent’ protestors who was  against the war, but did not take any ‘physical’ action against it.  I believe that our service people’s performance is beyond question.  I believe that our civilian governments performance is reprehensible. Who can forget  S.I. Hayakawa at the University of San Francisco, and how he handled protests, or his completely inept performance as our California Senator in Washington?  I met and talked to the guy in Washington. I was discouraged. How we could send this guy to represent the great state of California?

This war took a heavy toll on our people. Visit the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington, DC if you need a reminder. It touches your soul. Multiply that number by ten to get a sense of the number injured either physically or psychologically and that count doesn’t include their families.  Compounding all of that, the country was going through a civil rights revolution, and was aspiring to implement The Great Society. Not a good time for our people.

As so often happens, once you decide on a direction, things around it seem to align and enhance the path. In that light, once we made the decision to visit Vietnam, we saw a world premier performance of a play relevant to the Vietnam war, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland: The Great Society. It is an engaging play exploring the interplay of the three drivers: the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, and the Great Society.  It evoked strong, conflicting emotions of anger, hatred, pride, and sorrow. Our Vietnam War involvement can best be described by the anecdote on how to cook a frog –  by slowly raising the temperature so the frog doesn’t know it’s happening. It serves as a metaphor with McNamara increasing the ‘heat’ so gradually that LBJ and our government was unwilling to change direction, as the war boiled to full force – note the negative consequence of small incremental changes and decisions that have you arrive at results never intended.   Looking at today, it seems that we don’t learn, so we keep repeating the same errors in judgment. Hi, let me introduce our pot of climate change, as we’re cooking life on earth.

We are preparing for this trip by immersing  in ‘Vietnam’-ness. Reading travel books and watching videos, watching movies about that era, and of course familiarizing ourselves with their food.  Take off is February 1!

January 24, 2015