30 Years Later: The New Body Count and Unlearned Lessons
April 29, 2005
An ex-U.S. Marine spit in Jane Fonda’s face last week during the actress’s book tour through the heartland of America last week.
But would a Vietnamese person do the same thing?
Wouldn’t they want to embrace her for protecting the rights of an autonomous Vietnamese people free to choose their destiny?
And then spit on her as a capitalist.
Or would it be more typical to find a young fawning fan of Vietnamese descent waiting an hour or more in line to greet Fonda, and ask her to autograph a copy of that new book and the complete Fonda DVD collection including Barbarella and Klute because the fan has them all and has adored Fonda for as long as he/she can remember (less than 30 years).
No spit. Just gush, gush, gush.
Such are the conflicting emotions that come out of Vietnam 30 years after the fall of Saigon, the end of the war and the beginning of what people call “the diaspora” of the Vietnamese.
Only those who were there as fighting men or innocent victims know the real trauma of the war. And I pray that on this anniversary they have come to terms with the demons of a misguided American foreign policy.
For the rest of us too young to have experienced that, we have the aftermath, starting with the sounds of retreat/freedom — helicopters lifting people away from Saigon, military planes taking off with South Vietnam’s elite, or the sound of water lapping onto makeshift boats taking nearly 200,000 to freedom.
It’s the only Vietnam most of us really know. It’s the refugee presence in America.
For some that’s the only positive outcome of war. A country is destroyed, but its people get to live — in AMERICA!
That didn’t happen to the Japanese after WWII.
Now after 30 years, we have a generation of Asian Americans of Vietnamese descent.
There are 1.2 million Vietnamese in America, the third largest community in the U.S. after Chinese and Filipino, with over half the Vietnamese living in California, Texas, Louisiana and Maryland.
The war gave us a whole new Asian American community, with hopes and dreams, struggles and success stories.
There are football stars, poker champs, politicians, scholars, businessmen, small and large.
The success part is not without a touch of irony. Vietnamese Americans contribute an estimated $5-8 billion a year to the Vietnamese economy, transferring money on pay day to loved ones in the homeland.
Their money goes back. But they do not. Maybe to visit. But not for good. Vietnam hasn’t quite risen to the level of contradiction of China — the epitome of the modern communist-capitalist state, free but not free.
Vietnam is getting there. But a tad slower.
At least the government there no longer views Vietnamese Americans as traitors, but as “far away brother and sister,” and even “patriots.” For the billions in remittances? They may be communists, but they’re not dummies.
Only a Vietnamese American under 30 truly knows how strange a world it’s been since the fall of Saigon. Their memories are all American. They don’t have the same attachments to Saigon or the South Vietnamese Army like their parents and grandparents. The young Vietnamese American knows TV, DVDs, and cyberspace, dreams of a modern world.
They want to emulate Usher and Britney. Not Ho Chi Minh.
They aren’t living the memory of Saigon. They aren’t looking back on this 30th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.
Some are, however, serving in Iraq — today’s Vietnam.
And that’s worth pondering more than just every 30 years.
It’s become the easy analysis of any misguided U.S. policy to say that “X” has “become another Vietnam.”
Well, Iraq has. But no one has to say it anymore. We just know.
Quagmire anyone?
We feel that we’re in one every time a body comes back from Iraq, a body the government doesn’t really want us to see.
There have been Asian Americans like Thai Vue, 22, of the 127th Military Police Company, 709th Military Police Battalion, 18th Military Police Brigade, killed when a mortar round hit his motor pool in Baghdad, June 18, 2004.
Just this month, the body of Garry Wesley Rimes, 30, a marine corporal who was born in the Philippines, came back.
Rimes died on April 1 from enemy fire in Ramadi, Iraq.
Rimes immigrated to America in 1996 and wasn’t a citizen. But he lost his life for the only country that he called home. But his home wasn’t in the central coast of California where his family lived. It was with the Marines. When his tour ended in 2001, he re-enlisted.
He died on April Fool’s Day.
Vietnam lost billions of dollars, and more than 50,000 lives.
This month, the Defense Department reported more than 1,500 U.S. deaths from Operation Iraqi Freedom and nearly 11,700 military members wounded in action.
Thirty years later, we are still learning the real lessons of Vietnam.
Reach Emil at emil@amok.com.
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