Reaping what we sow

Even during the war, when I had traveled here, I had thought that if Vietnam hadn't been so beautiful we would not have ravished it, nor would the French have bothered to colonize and plunder it.

--Paul Theroux

For the last seven years we have been at war, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. We are still fighting in both countries. Are we "winning"? Are we making the world safe for democracy? If we lose the war in the Middle East, will we forfeit the respect of the rest of the world.

Right now, I'm thinking not of those questions, but of what Afghanistan and Iraq will be like a generation from now. This question comes to mind from my reading of Paul Theroux's Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. I've mentioned before my fascination with his idiosyncratic travelogue, The Great Railway Bazaar. That book was an account of his four months of travel by train, in 1973 at the age of 32, from London to Japan, through India and Southeast Asia, and then back to London through the USSR.

Thirty-three years later, having turned 65, he decided to repeat the trip -- again by rail -- insofar as still possible. Ghost Train, published this year, is the story of that trip -- a study of cities and countries, villages and peoples, many of which have changed considerably since 1973, and others that have changed little. The book is also a mirror in which Theroux finds revealed the changes in himself, the image of a much older and somewhat sadder individual, again reacting, but this time differently, to rough travel and third-world peoples.

In 1973, his earlier visit to South Vietnam came not long before the Americans finally pulled out, leaving that devastated land in the hands of a corrupt South Vietnamese government that quickly collapsed when confronting the North Vietnamese military forces. We had occupied and fought in the country for over ten years. We dropped more tonnage of explosives on the tiny area of North Vietnam than we had on Germany and Japan combined in World War II. We said we wanted to preserve "democracy" in Vietnam, and did so by propping up a military puppet government. We wanted to avoid the "domino effect" that our "experts" hypothesized would result from our defeat -- the theory that, one by one, the countries of Southeast Asia would collapse like dominoes before the forces of godless, anti-Western, Communist materialism.

Vietnam did fall. Out of spite, we embargoed the starving country and silently supported China in its war with Vietnam. We supported Pol Pot and his genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia when Vietnam tried to depose him. Vietnam prevailed in both struggles. There were no dominoes. Cambodia is now a kingdom. Laos (on which we also dropped enormous numbers of bombs and landmines in a war that Nixon and Kissinger never admitted took place) remains a professedly Communist state that nevertheless welcomes Western business and tourism. Other states in the area -- Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore -- have varying forms of government, none of which is even remotely socialist, let alone Communist.

In 1973, Theroux's train from Saigon had run only as far as Hue, which by then was a desolate, bombed-out city, part way up the coast. It had been a dangerous ride, with the constant threat of attack from guerilla forces. Beyond Hue, the track was cut as it entered Communist-held North Vietnam. Travel to Hanoi had then been an impossible dream. Hanoi was just a target for American bombing.

Now, 30 years later, travel to Hue, and then on to Hanoi, and even into China, was as easy as buying the tickets.

He discovered, as all tourists do, that Hanoi is a beautiful city of French architecture and planning -- wide boulevards, cathedral, opera house, government buildings, colonial mansions and villas --surrounded by the normal chaos of an Asian city. He contrasted the French occupation of Vietnam with that of the Americans.

The French had been humiliated in battle ... and driven out; but at least they had left long boulevards of imposing buildings behind. And we had left nothing except a multitude of scars and the trauma of the whole miserable business, ten years of terror and seven million tons of bombs.

Theroux talked to many Vietnamese -- in Saigon, in Hue, and in Hanoi. He was overwhelmed by their friendliness toward him as an American. He heard their stories of horror, including accounts of the Christmas bombing of Hanoi -- a "genocidal act of pure wickedness," in Theroux's opinion -- ordered by President Nixon in 1972. He saw the quiet, unemotional exhibits in the war museums, displaying the artifacts and consequences of the bombings, presented as the historical facts of an unfortunate time, not as an attack on Vietnam's adversaries.

One of the greatest aspects of the new Vietnam was its compassion, its absence of ill will or recrimination. Blaming and complaining and looking for pity are regarded as weak traits in Vietnamese culture; revenge is wasteful. They won the war against us because they were tenacious, united, and resourceful, and that was also how they were rebuilding their economy.

As horribly as the war in Vietnam affected our military personnel, as well as the Vietnamese people, we were unbelievably fortunate in our defeat. We were defeated by a people who look to the future not to the past. While our cultures are different, the Vietnamese share with us an entrepreneurial, hard-working spirit that makes them an easy people for us to work with. When I visited Laos and Cambodia last fall, I learned that the French had strongly favored the Vietnamese over their other two Indochinese colonies because of the Vietnamese traits of ambition and diligence. (The Vietnamese plant rice; the Cambodians watch it grow; the Lao listen to it grow. --French colonial joke.) Like us, the Vietnamese are a forward looking people who do not nurse grievances.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, I fear that our luck has run out. Do we see anything in their culture that suggests they ever let by-gones be by-gones? Do we feel they forgive and forget an injury? Does the culture of the Middle East in general suggest a civilization that is forward looking and optimistic?

I suspect we will be paying a heavy price -- paying for our torture and bombings, for our half-baked plans to impose our own concept of democracy, for our perceived coveting of Iraqi oil, for the humiliations we have forced upon these proud and hyper-sensitive Arab peoples -- for generations to come.