PSU Magazine Summer 1987

• • --·VIEWPOINT·----- ....&&e-e - I Facing the Enem~ A return to Vietnam . ~ ............... LastJ anuary, PSU education professor David Berman was one of twelve educators selected nationally to travel to Southeast Asia as part of the U. S.-Indochina Reconciliation Project 's second educators ' tour. The group spent a month meeting with education officials, foreign ministers, Western diplomats and aid workers in Vietnam, Laos and Kampuchea. It was a profound experience for Berman, who had served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam twenty years earlier. He shares with PSU Magazine readers some of his observations about the changes he found in Vietnam and the importance of normalizing relations between our two countries. by David M. Berman W hat American soldier would have imagined during his tour of du.ty in Vi~tnam that one day he would have dmner with a former commander in the National Liberation Front, walk across the bridge marking the DMZ between what had been North and South Vietnam, and wander freely through the streets of Hanoi? These were opportunities I had as one of twelve participants on the second Educators' Trip of the U.S.-Indochina Reconciliation Project. One of two Vietnam War veterans on the trip, I was reintroduced to a land I had known years before as a civil affairs team chief in the central highlands and the coastal lowlands. Upon arrival at Tan Son Nhat Airport (once headquarters of the United States Military Assistance Command Vietnam), the heat and the humidity brought back faded memories of life as a soldier. Proceeding through customs under the watchful eyes of soldiers and security personnel and the blank stares of Vietnamese civilians, I experienced again the fear of being captured by the enemy and the scenes of American prisoners paraded through the streets of Hanoi. Propelled back through time into the war zone, I found myself wondering again how long the nightmare would last and whether the war would ever end. In Ho Chi Minh City - once known as Saigon or "the Paris of the East" - the war was clearly over. Our delegation had rooms in the old Rex BOQ (Bachelor Officer Quarters), and we could still drink "33" beer on the rooftop patio. But instead of watching firefights and tracers across the Saigon River, we looked out at a quiet city. The Rex had been renamed the Ben Thanh Hotel and was now frequented primarily by guests from Eastern Bloc countries. Cyclo drivers, still available in front of the hotel, continually welcomed us as "Lien Xo," or Soviets. Vietnamese on the streets offered greetings in the Russian language. The only reminder of the once highly visible American presence were Amer-Asian children begging in the streets, seemingly abandoned. Many Saigon landmarks now appeared in altered states. The large Statue of the Unknown Soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARYN) which stood in the square in front of the National Assembly had been pulled down after liberation and only an empty pedestal remained. The old U.S. Embassy several blocks away was marked by sprawling weeds and chickens running across the unkempt grounds. A solitary plaque on the front wall of the building, which is now headquarters for the national petroleum company, noted that the "Pentagon of Asia" h ad been constructed after an attack on the previous embassy in which 100 American soldiers were "paid back" for coming to Vietnam. In the War Crimes Museum were displays of French, American and South Vietnamese atrocities, including a graphic representation of the Son My (My Lai) massacre, a French guillotine used to execute political dissidents, and a build ing devoted to th e continuing biological effects of dioxin poisoning upon the people and the countryside. War's devastation was apparent in the Cu Chi area, famous for its labyrinth of underground tunnels even– tually destroyed by B-52 strikes. Th ere remain miles and miles of denuded landscape, pockmarked with PSU MAGAZINE PAGE 17