Mary's Story

[Forthcoming in the Miamian]

Nothing could have prepared us.

On March 6, 2003, 15 students, two course instructors, and me, a tag-along faculty member, left for Hanoi. We were a senior capstone class on “Vietnam: War and Society,” taught by Distinguished Professor of History Allan Winkler and English Professor Richard Erlich. Before we returned to Oxford 10 days later, we would visit Danang, Hoi An, Hue, My Lai, Cu Chi, and Ho Chi Minh City.

Class members comprised a varied group. Both instructors had spent the Vietnam War protesting it. One student was an active Marine, two others veterans of military service. Three had fathers who fought in Vietnam.

And me? I’ve been at Miami for more than 20 years as a faculty member and administrator – and found it a joy during a semester on leave to be in the classroom on the student side of the desk.

The seminar was Allan Winkler’s brainchild. He has traveled extensively and has lived abroad – in the Philippines as a Peace Corps volunteer and in Finland, the Netherlands, and Kenya as a Fulbright Scholar. But he had never visited Vietnam until last summer. He explained, “I spent much of my time in the 1960s and 1970s trying to avoid that faraway Southeast Asian land.” The land and its people overwhelmed him with vitality and energy. “While I saw cemeteries of wartime dead everywhere, the war had receded into the background. Fully 60 percent of the current Vietnamese population was born since the end of the conflict and has no firsthand recollection of it.”

Wanting to share his eye-opening experience with students, Allan sought out University funding. Then he and Rich put together an interdisciplinary syllabus and an itinerary.

To prepare, we read history and literature, watched films and listened to music. We were immunized, took our anti-malaria drugs, studied cultural etiquette, and even interviewed a former Green Beret. By the beginning of March we were ready to go – Cincinnati to LAX to Hong Kong to Hanoi – a 36-hour journey.

We arrived bleary-eyed and jet-lagged to meet our guides. Davies Stamm, an American, has been leading tours in Southeast Asia for more than a decade. Vo Le Truc originally hailed from the South, where his father was an air traffic controller for the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam. After the fall of Saigon, his father was sent to a re-education camp for five years and his mother to prison for two. He and his younger brother joined their grandparents on a collective farm. An avid student, he attended college and studied economics. Several years ago, he quit banking to become a guide.

As we exited the airport, we caught our first glimpse of an incredibly beautiful, lush countryside. Vietnam is full of meandering rivers, vivid green rice paddies, broad and clean beaches, and mist-shrouded mountains. It is a land of bicycles and conical hats, of Buddhist shrines and ao dai s (the traditional silk costume for women, consisting of a long tunic split at the sides with flowing pants). Bikes and motor scooters crowd streets busier than those of New York. We learned from Truc how to cross the street. Look left and right five times. Make eye contact with oncoming traffic and then walk slowly across. Whatever you do, don’t stop or turn back. It is their job to miss you. Amazingly, they do.

Like most tourists, we gave in to the allure of the exotic. Vietnam was a theme park, a giant outdoor outlet mall, a splendid curiosity. But only for awhile. After the shock and delight of the new wore off, we tried to see what lay underneath.

Between 1962 and 1975, some 58,000 Americans died in a war we named after the country. (The Vietnamese call it the American War.) It has haunted us since the last U.S. helicopter left Saigon in 1975.

With little direct knowledge of Vietnam in the past 30 years, we approached the country as a kind of dark and bloody ground. How menacing would the communist regime seem? How grim the people in a land where dissent was squelched? Would they see us as representatives of a country that caused much suffering and death?

None of our fears were realized.

The first thing we noticed was a palpable sense of happiness, a spirit of vibrancy, and a can-do optimism. Not everywhere and in everybody, of course. But in many of those we met, particularly the young: in street vendors and students, artists and entrepreneurs. “The Vietnamese appear to have a sense of possibility about their future,” remarked senior journalism major Chris Knight, not at all the dour fatalism he anticipated of a nation among the poorest 25 percent in the world. Senior history major Brandon Keeton, who is an active Marine, observed, “A lot of people appear to be in a hopeless situation, but they appear to have hope.”

Why? Students differed. Some, such as junior Susan Schroer, English literature and music double major, wondered whether it had something to do with the cash we brought with us, in an economy based on both the dollar and the dong (the Vietnamese unit of currency). Her course project, a study of Vietnam’s tourist industry, was tellingly titled “We Hope They Spend Lots of Money.”

Others supposed that the preservation of core cultural values had made a difference. The majority of people we met had little in a material sense – sometimes only a small shop with a bedroom in the back. But as senior Craig Divis, a social studies education major, commented, “They care for their parents, they love their children. … Being a capitalist society, we’re really materialistic. We don’t need the things we have. Those people don’t have them, and they’re very happy.” Or as senior Colleen Treacy, a history and political science major, put it, “People are more content with what they’re doing, where in the United States we’re always looking for bigger and better.”

Maybe. But when we met students from the Institute for International Relations in the Hanoi home of U.S. cultural affairs officer Jean Vander Woude, we found them lively, effervescent, smart, funny – and wanting more of the material goods and opportunities we had. In return, many of us envied their warmth, friendliness, straightforwardness, and lack of self-consciousness or cynicism.

We learned from each other. No, not all Americans drive limousines and shop in designer boutiques as in the movie Pretty Woman. And Vietnamese young people no longer have to ask their parents’ permission before marriage. They wanted to know about romantic love. We wanted to know about strong family ties. They asked about the looming war with Iraq. We asked whether they felt they could voice their opinions about things they didn’t like.

Vietnam is slowly moving toward an open-market economy in an effort to attract investment. After the war, Vietnam’s economy was in a shambles. Somewhere between 3 and 5 million had died. Many had relocated, either voluntarily or forcibly, and the disastrous collectivization of agriculture led to hardship and starvation.

What has allowed them to survive such devastation? We left wondering. Whatever it was, we wished we could bring it home with us. Instead we contented ourselves with lacquered toy frogs and silk pajamas – as if by buying these things, we could bring some of Vietnam back with us. Their sense of connectedness as humans was what we really wanted. Of course we romanticized them – but there was something different.

Nobody was rude or hateful toward us. Nobody stared at us, made us feel uncomfortable, insulted us, or put restrictions on who we could talk to or what we could photograph. Pictures of Ho Chi Minh (affectionately called “Uncle Ho”) smiled down paternalistically from every street corner, and the hammer and sickle were omnipresent. Yet we felt welcome. As one student remarked, “The Vietnamese treated us better than some Americans did soldiers returning from the Vietnam War.” In some ways, the Vietnamese appear to have moved on better than we have. At least it looks that way on the surface.

One dramatic tour took us to the site of the My Lai massacre. On March 16, 1968, at the height of the Tet offensive, relatively inexperienced U.S. soldiers who had been under intense fire for about two months arrived at the hamlet of rice farmers. That day more than 500 from the village – mostly old men, women, children, and infants – were herded into an irrigation ditch and shot in the back by the American soldiers.

My Lai no longer exists. In 1969, the United States bombed the remains of the hamlet to eliminate any signs of the massacre. A peace park, paid for largely by Americans, stands on the site. We touched bullet holes in the trees. We saw pictures of villagers in their last moments, trembling in horror. Our guide, whose mother and aunt had survived the massacre, told us the story. Then she served us tea.

We spent our hour and a half at My Lai in stunned silence. Rich Erlich came to My Lai trying to find closure. He brought a stone from Kent State, where in 1970 members of the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four college students protesting the war. He left the stone near the ditch. There he said Kaddish, and, thinking to himself, “I ought to do it their way as well,” he also burned a joss stick. Wendy Cappelano, an Air Force veteran and senior history major, spent time at My Lai talking mentally to the people who had been killed. A crack markswoman, Wendy thought about her own military background and how she could have been the one firing the M-16. We began to rethink what we knew about our own history.

Did our trip change our opinions entirely? I think not. People who felt the war had been a big mistake by and large still feel so. Those who thought communism an intrinsically bad form of government and the effort in Vietnam well-intentioned if badly executed, pretty much still believe that way. The difference is that we have seen firsthand the lives of a people our nation opposed. We saw life under a communist government and now know something of what that means. Whatever we had thought about who the good guys and the bad guys may have been, we now admire the tenacity, ingenuity, and persistence of a people determined to be free of outside domination, whatever the cost.

And what do I remember most? Children. Laughing and playing in Hanoi without fear of strangers or violence. Selling trinkets on the streets for a meager living and as hungry for information about the outside world as for food. Visiting the massive mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh and trying to make sense of their own past. Navigating busy sidewalks without arms or legs, because of birth defects associated with the defoliant Agent Orange used more than 30 years ago.

They are part of the 12th most populous nation in the world, a place where more than half the population is under 20. We did not know them before, and it was our loss.

Graham Greene in his novel about Vietnam, The Quiet American, names the protagonist’s enchanting and beautiful Vietnamese lover “Phuong.” The name means Phoenix, he explains, “but nothing nowadays is fabulous and nothing rises from its ashes.”

Except perhaps Vietnam itself.

Mary Kupiec Cayton, professor of history and American studies at Miami, is working on bringing digital applications to her humanities courses.