Stories

4 June 2014

     Last night in Saigon a baby boy was born. Yeah. So what, you say to yourself, babies are born every day all over the world. But it takes on another significance if you know the father and some of his story. The mother I have yet to meet, but I'm sure I will someday. I'm in and out of Viet Nam a lot. Bruce Luong came to this country like thousands of refugees and quickly adapted to an American way of life. He went back recently to Viet Nam to seek a wife and start a family and resume living in a mountainous portion of Tennessee. I came to know Bruce through bluegrass music and  through a mutual friend in Tennessee. But I had to think about how talking to Bruce or exchanging messages with him forever and again takes me right back to me plodding through the rice paddies of Quang Ngai Province in 1966. Check that year, Bruce - that's practically the Pleistocene Age! Young and stupid, I had no idea what life had in store for me after I got home. That I would meet the woman I've loved for 47 years, have a beautiful son who now has his own family. I hadn't a clue that the overseas deployment to Viet Nam would come back to both haunt me and gift me with a career avocation. I hated the war and what it did to our country. Read that statement again. This is the average American's take on the Viet Nam War. We conveniently push aside the cost to the Vietnamese. And it doesn't matter (except to those who will never change their attitude) which side of the political team the Vietnamese were on when Americans refer to the Vietnamese who fought in the war in Viet Nam. I've spent a life time trying to study the facts of what happened and I've been extremely fortunate to have been able to watch Viet Nam develop, in real time, on the ground, constantly,  since 1988.

     Another part of the story was born last night on a hot, muggy night in Saigon in District Five. You don't know where that is? I do. I could take you right to the main hospital and describe what the main gate looks like. I can envision the hundreds of family members milling about outside waiting for news of their loved ones and I can hear the cacophony of noise from the thousands of motorbikes on the street. Back here in the U.S. a young guy is waiting for news too, and through the modern miracle of communications, he receives news nearly immediately that he's a new father. My father and mother had to wait weeks just to know where I was and if I was still alive. We went three months one time without mail. But there I go again whining about a few discomforts. I came home in one piece, very lucky, and relatively healthy. It was soon after graduating from university that the stories I refused to pay any attention to before or during the war began having an effect on me. I was bombarded with them because of my commercial and business involvement in Viet Nam, my involvement with film makers, academics, and artists, and a whole parade of various interesting characters I met coming back and forth and in and out of Viet Nam and other countries in Asia. For any young person reading this (or any interested person, especially Mr. or Mrs. Average American,) who thinks the Vietnam War is ancient and lost history and therefore not worth a career or academic study, I have a message for you. The stories haven't been told yet. We haven't even grasped the beginning of it; what preceded and proceeded our involvement in, and departure from the country of Viet Nam in 1975. I smiled at the news of the birth and contemplated the Big Picture of what was going on. What a marvelous event. A new Vietnamese citizen gets to inherit the future - whatever that is, and whatever that means.

  Luong and Tran - Beautiful, new Parenthood.  (in Ha Noi.)