I write from Vietnam. It is not my first time here.
A dozen or so years ago, I shot an hourlong documentary in Vietnam. It was about the legacy of Agent Orange, the defoliant the U.S. sprayed along the Ho Chi Minh Trail (and, estimates say, over as much as a tenth of the country) during the war— the war we call the Vietnam War and they call the American War. Our goal with Agent Orange was to deprive the enemy of tree cover and make it easier for our bomber pilots to spot them moving south.
During that war, more than three million people died. Most were civilians. But after the shooting stopped, the casualties continued. The casualties from Agent Orange, because one element of the defoliant is dioxin. Basically, Agent Orange (so named not because of the color of the poison but because of the color of the barrels in which it was shipped) was the same thing we use in our gardens to kill weeds. Here in Vietnam, we used it to kill trees.
But it didn’t just kill the trees. It killed people. It caused not just disproportionately high rates of cancer, but horrific birth defects and severe cases of retardation. Today, although now several generations beyond the war, there are said to be about three million people who awaken each day with damaged bodies and damaged brains. In some cases because they lived in an area that was sprayed during the war. In some because they lived near the airbases from which the U.S. spray planes took off and landed, after which the residue of the poison was washed off the aircraft and allowed to seep into the streams from which people got their water. And in some cases, because they were born to parents who were directly exposed to Agent Orange, and it stayed in the system.
I met many victims during our documentary shoot. There were of all ages but the most heartbreaking were the children. One was a 13-year-old girl whose monstrous head was as wide as her shoulders— it’s a condition called hydrocephalus. Another was a six-year-old who simply had no eyes. Or another, age eight, whose huge eyeballs were clear out of their sockets. I met a five-year-old with smiling eyes but the lower half of his body grotesquely deformed. And a pair of children whose arms were so withered and their legs so twisted that they ate with their feet.
But here’s what’s amazing: on that trip, and on this one right now, we are welcomed with big smiles and open arms. I’m probably missing something but no one seems bitter any more. For that matter, something like two-thirds of Vietnam’s population wasn’t even born when the war was raging. Although this time I’m on a bike trip, not a working trip, I can’t stop looking at older motorists I see on the road and farmers in the fields and pedestrians in the cities and wonder, did the war demolish that man’s house? Or that woman’s father? Or that family’s livelihood?
And yet, at least the people we encounter could not be more friendly, could not be more giving. Or as one of our bike guides said to my group, more “forgiving.” He was born only a few years after the war and told about playing as a child in the craters made by our bombs. And of friends who were killed by unexploded ordnance. But just a few hours later, talking more about the horrors of those years, he hugged me. Amicable kindness toward a one-time enemy is the rule.
They are so forgiving that in a park in the heart of Hanoi, they even have a memorial sculpture to John McCain, whose plane went into a lake in the center of the city and who spent more than five years imprisoned in the nearby torture chamber of a prison that our POWs came to call The Hanoi Hilton. But McCain forgave them and they forgave him.
It’s encouraging. It means that wounds, wounds that destroyed cities and destroyed families and destroyed lives, can heal.
Look at Japan. Look at Germany. After each led unprovoked attacks against sovereign neighbors and sovereign nations, the United States led the way to their mutual defeats in World War II. Yet before long, it was helping them to rebuild and not long after that, they became and remain among our most stalwart allies.
It makes me wonder about the wars today in Ukraine and in Gaza. What will it take for those wounds to heal… or maybe the question is, can those wounds ever heal? There have been tensions between Ukraine and Russia since the Soviet Union fell apart. There have been tensions between the Palestinians and the Jews since the creation of Israel. There can be no rebuilding until there is reconciliation.
The depth of hatred I have seen covering conflicts between hostile nations makes me pessimistic. But the depth of forgiveness I have seen here in Vietnam gives me hope.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Greg, This piece, even though parts horrific, warmed my heart. Maybe there is hope for us in Eastern Europe. John Skalet
Great observations Greg. I grew up there in the 50’s and returned in the 60’s. Such a gorgeous country and people. Ironically Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh were originally nationalists who highly respected the US due to our unilaterally granting the Philippines their independence after WWll.