Well thank goodness that’s over. The assault on my senses has ended.

In September PBS screened the latest Ken Burns documentary – Vietnam. Eighteen hours of it, aired on consecutive nights. However it took me several weeks to get through the whole thing. Every episode was a nightmare – and gave me nightmares. I needed to recover from each before I could get up the nerve to keep watching. Between episodes I would rant and curse him – “Couldn’t you have told this story in less time?” “Did you have to put in every historical film clip you could find?”

“So why did you watch it?” Well you might ask. Even as I struggled through it, I still wanted everyone to see it. I have a library of southeast Asian history books including many on the Vietnam war but the visual experience of watching hour after hour of non-stop still and film images is quite another thing from reading about it.  I learned a lot that was new to me, and telling that story visually, to reach an audience more comfortable with film than books, was quite an accomplishment although I do have to wonder how many people made it through the whole thing.

It shows what happens when American politicians, informed by their American superiority complex, feel compelled to stay the course no matter how much they know that their cause is futile, lie continuously to the people who chose them as their leaders and in doing so, directly caused the deaths of thousands and thousands of their own young men (and some women), over 50,000 of them, as well as turning on their own young people at home who were protesting their actions, killing some of them as well.

Ken Burns at some point suggests the whole tragedy was a result of misunderstanding. I don’t read it that way at all. Entering the war in the first place was completely deliberate and escalating it over all those years was all about politicians intentionally trying to save face and refusing to relinquish a vision of themselves as invincible, the greatest country on the planet and the defender of the “free” world.

Despite the 18 endless hours, the documentary still was, intentionally so, focused on the American experience of that war. What is missing are the stories of the consequences of that war on the people of Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia both during the hostilities and after the Americans finally left them to their fate. In addition to the American casualties, two million Vietnamese civilians died, over a million North Vietnamese army and Viet Cong fighters and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed. After the North Vietnamese takeover 200,000 people from the south fled their homes, many to became “boat people”, desperate to escape.

It got me thinking and remembering my own brief glimpses of the aftermath of that war that were still evident on my travels decades after the fighting ended.

VIET NAM

“I hate the Americans…but I love their money”

On my first visit to Hanoi I was wandering around the city by myself getting the lay of the land, when I ended up in a park on the edge of a lake. It wasn’t the slightest surprise to me when I was accosted by a personable young entrepreneur who did his very best to sell me a guidebook I had zero need of. I told him he was wasting his time and should move on to someone he could make some money from but he didn’t. So we had a chat. He told me about the education system in Viet Nam (he was a student) and towards the end of our conversation he dropped the facade a bit. We talked about tourism in Hanoi. He knew I was Canadian and said that he actually hated the Americans, this from a young man born well after the war ended. But he said he liked their money.

I couldn’t help but wonder if that was how I was being viewed because after all, short of sewing a Canadian flag on my sleeve, how would anyone know what North American country I came from and would that even matter. I found an edge to the Vietnamese I met during my travels that I didn’t see in neighbouring Laos or Cambodia.

It is possible in Hanoi to do the “American War” circuit. You can visit dedicated war museums and see the wreckage of shot down U.S. fighter planes. Elsewhere in the country you can climb into underground Viet Cong tunnels, find a guide to traipse around old battlegrounds with and visit memorials to the fallen. I did none of that. Other than stopping in front of what remains of the “Hanoi Hilton”, the POW prison that McCain and others were held in, just down the road from the hotel, I didn’t spend my time doing that circuit but where I did find the war was from hanging out at the National Art Gallery on several occasions. It was from the artists where I began to glimpse the lives of the Vietnamese and understand the impact that so many decades of continuous war, first with the French and then with the Americans and South Vietnamese army, had had on the Vietnamese people. Artists painting their lives showed the continuous thread of war and soldiers and I spent hours peering at those images. Look closely at a forest landscape and you’ll find a hidden army field hospital in the bush, or soldiers walking single file through a jungle pathway. Images of village life show a visiting soldier, on leave with his family or about to head out.

 

 

 

The art museum is in an old French colonial building, with large open windows and a sleepy atmosphere. Most of the time I had the place to myself. Posted signs said photography was forbidden and closed circuit video cameras were in place. I looked around. The guard was sitting at an old steel desk just outside the gallery room, knitting, and I found it very hard to believe that someone was actually watching me through some kind of CCTV set up I could see no evidence of. I pulled out my camera and went for it. I did not get arrested.

LAOS – THE SECRET WAR

Ken Burns doesn’t explore this at all, other than a few brief mentions, but during the Vietnam War the Americans engaged in a “secret” war in neighbouring Laos (and Cambodia) in part to try to get at the supply roads and trails, but also to directly support one side of the Lao civil war going on at the time. The term “secret” is an interesting one. It meant that the U.S. President was lying to the American people, trying to keep from them the fact that the military had crossed the borders and expanded the war. It was certainly no secret from the Lao people as they were definitely aware that they were being bombed every single day for years. Two million tons of bombs were dropped on Laos during all this “secrecy”, 30% of which did not immediately explode, leaving the area with an estimated 78 million pieces of unexploded ordinance – bombs just waiting to detonate, which has seriously impacted the Lao people all these many decades later.

On one of my trips to Laos, Kelly and I flew up to the north to visit the Plain of Jars, a place of ancient huge carved stone jars that no one knows who made them or for what purpose. This area was ground zero during this ‘secret’ war.  Looking out the window of the plane as we approached the Xieng Zhuang airport, still visible are a great many large circular depressions in the earth below. Forty years later, the land still bears the scars. Swimming pools, joked our young guide.

Remnants of that war are everywhere. Scrap metal bombs were piled in town yards, are used as building materials to prop up houses, and even herb gardens can be seen planted in bomb casings. All these years later dozens of people, many of them children, are still injured and killed every year. Clearing the land of the unexploded ordinance is ongoing and we saw the UXO clearing vehicles parked along the road, working in fields just meters from the road. At the Jars sites, we were warned to stay on the marked paths and not to wander.

The bombing of Xieng Khuong province wiped out just about every town and village in the area, leaving many of the people to seek refuge in caves where some lived for years. We visited a site called Tham Piu where a memorial has been erected to honor the 400 people who were wiped out one day by a single rocket fired directly into the mouth of the cave by a U.S. fighter plane.

 

Winston Churchill (quoting George Santayana) said “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. There’s very little evidence that we ever learn from history. Just look around at what’s going on now.