A second look at Vietnam

Drawn here by memories of the war, the veterans who visited last week were glad to see the country prospering.

Anthony Cantone, a logistics soldier based in central Vietnam in 1968-69, was taken aback.

“[There are] so many American stores and businesses all over the country,” he said. “It’s unbelievable.”

Cantone and a group of American war veterans and their families spent 10 days touring the country on an annual trip organized by the US-based Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF).

The group, led by former US envoy to Vietnam, Michael Marine, wrapped up its tour last Saturday at the Cu Chi tunnels, the amazing network right beneath the enemy in Ho Chi Minh City used by “Viet Cong” (VC) forces to hide and move supplies.

For many veterans in the group, this was their first trip back after almost four decades.

The tour includes meetings with government officials and a visit to the VVMF’s project site in the central province of Quang Tri where landmines are being cleared.

Some, like retired marine lieutenant John Schwartz, never thought coming back would be so easy.

“It feels funny when I see the [Vietnamese national] flag,” said Schwartz, who served as an advisor to the First Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) Division in Hue in 1965-66.

“That was the reason we were here — to stop that, but we didn’t. So why were we here?”

But Schwartz saw and heard things on his return that made him question what the war meant.

During the field trip to Quang Tri, he met a former “Viet Cong” commander, Le Huy Vu.

They took pictures, exchanged emails, talked war, and became “friends.”

Schwartz said he had learnt a very important lesson from his new friend.

“[To] the American government back then, it was more a question of stopping communism,” he said.

“To the Vietnamese, it was a matter of independence, Vietnam’s independence.”

Growing up in Quang Tri during the war, Vu told Schwartz, he had only two choices: to fight for either the Saigon government or VC.

Vu chose the latter and spent the next 15 years “in the jungles” like other VC guerillas.

Schwartz remembers the guerillas were very difficult to catch.

“We all wanted to be advisors to the VC because we had such respect for them,” he said.

Other members in the VVMF group ended their trip with less unsettled feelings.

Ralph Swain, who was a clerk in Saigon in 1969-70 and is now head of the humanities department at Western Iowa Tech Community College, said during the tour he was able to collect valuable materials for an online course about the war.

Until now, whenever he has taught about Cu Chi, he shows students photos of the tunnels taken by VC fighters and a memoir written by an American soldier who went down there to search for the guerillas.

But Swain can now show his own pictures of the tunnels.

Dorothy Woods, whose husband fought in Vietnam and later died of cancer, didn’t enjoy crawling down the tunnels though she gathered enough courage to do so for the sake of experience.

“In the tunnels, it stopped all of a sudden because somebody in the front of the line was taking pictures,” Woods said after her underground tour.

“I grabbed the belt of the guy in front of me because it was total darkness and I wasn’t moving.”

Even now, to Americans, Vietnam is not a country but a “war,” she said.

Yet, having seen Vietnam’s natural beauty, she now thought about it as a “country.”

“It does help to remove the stigma of the war,” she said.

“The veterans who came back — I don’t know if they can relate to it, but I can. I can’t see there was a war in this country.”

The veterans’ memories of Vietnam aren’t all bloodshed.

Cantone said during his one-year term building an airbase in the Tuy Hoa area, 350 miles from Saigon he didn’t see any major battle or casualties.

Every morning he woke up and saw the ocean because his unit was stationed on a beach.

Swain remembered taking orphans to the Saigon zoo.

There were around 300,000 orphans and 35 or 36 orphanages in Saigon at the time.

Swain still keeps pictures of some of the orphans and a tape recording of an eight-year-old orphan girl singing.

The Saigon he knew has changed.

The Notre Dame Cathedral remains the same but the old streets, vendors and smells are gone.

But the sight of progress in Vietnam is a welcome one for them.

Cantone likes the improved roads and Schwartz saw a country that is “doing just fine.”

“Everybody seems so nice that it makes you almost feel ashamed,” Schwartz said.

“Because, in our country, people have anger. But in this country, you have yin and yang and the Buddha and everything is more in balance.”

Schwartz said his friend Vu didn’t think about the war now though he had fought so long in it and had more cause to remember it than he did.

Vu, who married late and now works as a tour guide, has a son and a daughter and his main goal is to provide them a good education.

Woods has taken pictures with some Vietnamese people to show a seven-year-old Vietnamese boy back home.

Her friend adopted him when he was five months old.

“When he learned I was coming here, he said to his mother, ‘Mommy, when [she] goes to Vietnam, is she going to see my people?” Woods said.

“So I’m going back to say, ‘Jackson, I’ve met your people:”

DELEGATION GETS UP CLOSE AT LANDMINE SITE

The veterans visited the site of Project Renew (or Restoring the Environment and Neutralizing the Effects of the War), a joint project between WMF and Quang Tri Province to remove landmines and unexploded ordinance left from the war.

Quang Tri, among the fiercest theaters of the war, has the most landmines and unexploded ordinance in Vietnam.

Over 92 percent of its land area remains to be cleared of ordinance compared to 20 percent for the whole country.

Since 1975, over 2,600 people have been killed here, and 4,400 injured or disabled by ordinance.

A third of them were children.

In eight years, Project Renew has removed over 7,000 pieces of ordinance, cleared a large area of land, and provided vocational training and loans to 1,000 poor victims.

The project now needs more funding to clear five priority sites identified by local authorities.

For more information on Project Renew, visit www.landmines.org.vn.