We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam Read Online Free PDF Page B

later would be appointed Hanoi’s ambassador to Canada. Bai was a hard man, clearly a veteran soldier and not a career diplomat. He told us he had fought the French and later commanded a prison camp for American and South Vietnamese POWs in the Mekong Delta. Among those in his charge was a U.S. Army major named Nicholas Rowe, who made a spectacular and successful escape from his bamboo prison, only to be killed years later by Communist assassins in the Philippines.
    Bai told us that General Man was “out of town” and unavailable but he could arrange for General Giap to see us. He seemed bemused by our total focus on our war in Vietnam and suggested that we might profit from a visit to the Vietnam Historical Museum nearby. It was good advice, and during some slack time—waiting is a big part of any trip to the Far East—we toured the museum Bai wanted us to see. The high point for us was not the exhibits but finding a huge mural stretched across one long wall that was both a timeline and a map of Vietnam’s unhappy history dating back well over a thousand years. There on the wall we saw thick red arrows dropping down into Vietnam from the north, depicting half a dozen invasions and occupations of Vietnam by neighboring China, and some of those occupations lasted hundreds of years before Vietnamese patriots and rebels drove them out, again and again and again. The Chinese section of the timeline stretched out for fifty feet or so. The section devoted to the French and their 150 years of colonial occupation was depicted in about twelve inches. The minuscule part that marked the U.S. war was only a couple of inches.
    It put everything into a perspective few Westerners seemingly had ever considered before marching their soldiers off into the jungles of a nation full of ardent nationalists who had demonstrated that they were fully prepared to fight for generations until the foreign occupier got tired of war, or choked on his own blood. It was rich food for thought as we contemplated the political decisions that had brought my battalion to the shores of Vietnam and into pitched battle with a people who had no more give in them than the wild Scots-Irish frontier folk of Virginia and Tennessee and Kentucky and Texas who were always ready to shoulder a rifle and fight America’s enemies when the time came.
    We Americans had a strong taste of such warfare in the first century of our history. We, too, began with a revolution, an uprising against a distant and exploitative foreign colonial ruler. Then with the War of 1812 we had to again fight off the British, who invaded to recapture their lost colony. We fought Mexico in 1845 to settle the question of who owned what on our southern borders. Then we fought each other in the bloodiest war in our history to permanently weld a nation together as one people. To me it sounded like we had a lot of shared history with the Vietnamese people—except that their history was a thousand years and more of war and rebellion, while ours was only a couple of centuries or so. Our leaders would have done well to reflect on that before trying to pick up the mantle of the defeated French in Indochina.
    Although we had bulled our way into Vietnam, it was becoming clear that the Vietnamese were going to have things their way: We were not going to get to interview the people we most wanted to interview or go to the one place we had to visit. Instead we were run through the typical round of courtesy calls on top government officials, just as any visiting foreign journalist would. Bai said the Vietnamese agenda was normalization of relations with the United States and a subsequent lifting of U.S. trade sanctions on Vietnam. He stressed that as far as the Vietnamese were concerned the war was over, a part of history, and it was time now to get down to normal business.
    As if to underline the fact that it was their agenda, not ours, which would be pursued, they ran us through meetings with Prime Minister Do