David Lamb - Vietnam, Now: A Reporter Returns

Table of Contents

Sanity is a great attribute, and this book, unlike so many on Vietnam, has it. Neither are sympathy, calm reflection, objectivity or perspective easy to come by in books generated by the war, but Vietnam, Now has those qualities too.... There are stories in this book that you will not forget.Washington Post

What comes through in these pages is the work of an older and wiser reporter, as well as a master storyteller, with a keen eye for detail. [Lamb] offers a vibrant and at times poignant portrait of a country in the midst of change and a peoplethe young for the most partyearning to breathe free.Baltimore Sun

Vietnam, Now offers a tantalizing glimpse of this new kind of relationship between East and West.Los Angeles Times

David Lamb is a master at making nations far away from the United States accessible to stay-at-home readers. As a widely traveled Los Angeles Times reporter, Lamb managed to capture the essences of non-American cultures in The Africans and The Arabs. Now he has done the same for Vietnam.St. Louis Post-Dispatch

An impressive recounting of the complexities of life today in the country whose name has too long been associated only with war in the minds of many Americans.Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Fascinating ... [Lamb] skillfully intertwines stories of the past from all sides of the conflict with a vision of the future.Rocky Mountain News

Such a book offers chances to set history straight; the author does so.Associated Press

A serious, comprehensive, contemporary look at the country about which it seems we cannot speak without some reference to war.... Worthy to be placed in the Vietnam canon.The Asian Reporter

Part memoir, part historical narrative, part travelogue, part journalism, Lambs worthy effort is a personality-driven look at Vietnam today.Publishers Weekly

A truly magnificent book and the first ever to accurately capture Vietnam as it is today.... A must read not just for Vietnam watchers, but also for all those still searching for personal reconciliation or seeking an understanding of our conflict there in the 60s and70s.Ambassador Peter Peterson

Americans discovered Vietnam during the tragic war there more than a generation ago. Now David Lamb rediscovers the country in a vivid, perceptive, elucidating narrative that is bound to rank among the major books on the subject.Stanley Karnow

ALSO BY DAVID LAMB

FOR SANDY

VIETNAM WAS NEVER PART OF THE GAME PLAN. It is one of those places that just crept into my life, like a stranger come to call, and I had no aim of ever making it more than a stop in the road. But Vietnams seasons drifted into years, nearly six of them in all, and one day when a bartender in Thailand saw me with a plane ticket in hand and asked where I was headed, I replied, Home. You mean the United States? he asked. No, I said. Hanoi. That was the moment, I think, I realized Indochina had captured the soul of another unwary suspect. Vietnam was no longer just my mail drop. It was where I thought of home as being, and it seemed odd that I could feel so at peace in a land I once disliked so intensely.

The Vietnam I experienced was really two different countries, and neither had much to do with the other. The first was the Vietnam of the American War, as the Vietnamese call it, which I covered for United Press International in the late 1960s. It was the Vietnam of body counts and illusionary lights at the end of the tunnel. It was a Vietnam that, I now realize, I understood shamefully little about, being largely ignorant of the countrys history, culture, and people. I encountered Vietnamese people but I did not make Vietnamese friends. I joined homesick GIs singing Danny Boy and I Left My Heart in San Francisco over beers in lonely outposts cut from the jungle, but I never read a line of Vietnamese poetry or knew what songs the Vietnamese sang when they were melancholy. I left that Vietnamand the warwithout a shred of remorse and cared not if I ever saw the wretched country again. I got on with my life.

The other Vietnam is the one that wove the spell and teased me with the ghosts of a bygone Indochina, the one that will forever stir memories of quiet nights dripping with humidity, of golden rice paddies stretching to the mountains, and of an industrious people who have survived, and in some cases even prospered, against all odds. This is the postwar Vietnam, where for the first time in more than 100 years a generation has grown into adulthood not knowing foreign domination or the sound of battle. It is a country that, for me, was born in 1997, when I moved to Hanoithe enemy capital as we used to call itto open the Los Angeles Timess first peacetime bureau in Vietnam. I stayed four years, far longer than I had intended, and during all that time I found that nothing was quite as I had expected it to be.

Like most Americans, I let Vietnam fade from my radar screen after the Saigon government fell to Hanois communist troops in April 1975. Vietnam was a war, not a country, and somehow it was comforting to just let the place be, to retain little of it in the minds eye except that black-and-white image of a CH-46 chopper lifting off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy, the U.S. ambassadorwho had insisted to the eleventh hour and beyond that South Vietnam could be saved from communismseat-belted and staring straight ahead, the U.S. flag folded and in his lap, while U.S. Marines fired tear gas to cover the retreat and hold a riotous mob of former allies at bay in the streets below.

So my return to Vietnam was not so much the rediscovery of a country as the discovery of a new landscape. Many of my new friends were former North Vietnamese soldiers. Some of the people who welcomed me into their homes had lost two or three sons fighting the Americansand often, before that, a relative or two fighting the French. Not once was I received with anything less than graciousness. I met writers and teachers and students and laborers and entrepreneurs, and almost everyoneexcept the Old Guard who was scared stiff by the thought of losing its iron-tight grip on powerknew Vietnam was adrift, a communist state floundering in a noncommunist world. Still, exciting changes were transforming the country. Everywhere I went, from Sapa on the Chinese border to Dien Bien Phu on Laoss doorstep to Can Tho in the clutches of the Mekong Delta, the energy and optimism of the postwar generation were palpable.

What I have written in the pages that follow I believe to be true because it is what I saw and heard and felt. But I have my biases, andbeing neither a historian nor an academicI make no apologies. In returning to Vietnam it was not my intent to spend a lot of time rehashing the war. The history, the polemics, and the U.S. role have been ably assessed and reassessed by many others. I was more interested in what had happened to Vietnam and the Vietnamese people in the years since the shooting stopped. And I still am today, though I quickly learned you cannot write about Vietnam without talking about the war any more than you can write about Saudi Arabia without talking about oil. A thousand years of conflictagainst China, France, Japan, the United States, Cambodia, and among one anotheris what made the Vietnamese who they are. It is what shaped their character and steeled their spirit. And the war, of course, is why Vietnam still exerts a hold on the soul of America. Just when we think weve buried all those damn memories, up they pop again, as though that brief chapter of our history was always there, lurking just below the surface. In the end, the war played a larger role in my discovery of Vietnam than I thought it would, as did the question of reconciliation, between North and South Vietnam and between the peoples of Vietnam and the United States.