The worst vice my wife and I have is traveling, but it is a good vice. There is the simple fun of sightseeing, trying new food and drinks, and shopping for handicrafts or additions to our kitchen provisions that we can’t find here at home.
More importantly, we have been lucky in that our trips have been intense opportunities to learn about history and the state of the world.
We have just returned from a tour in Southeast Asia which took us to Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Though Thailand is a popular destination for tourists going to Asia, the other three countries are far less traveled. As Americans of the baby-boomer generation, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam are a Communist trio tightly woven in our minds with the Vietnam War of the 1960s and early ‘70s. We brought with us a concept of the region frozen from that time.
We were able to see old Asia co-existing with the new Asia. We visited many small villages of diverse ethnic groups, with wood and thatched roofed homes and dirt floors, where these industrious people sent their children to regional schools and pursued home-based enterprises such as extraordinary weaving and silk production in Laos, wood carving in Cambodia, or the production of rice noodles, cooked foods, or agricultural products.
We had the good fortune to travel on ox-carts through rice paddies and visit with the inhabitants of floating villages on the central lake of Cambodia. We visited the great ancient ruins of the Khmer civilization including Angkor Wat, with structures of remarkable magnificence and detailed carvings which far predate those of the Europeans, Mayans and Aztecs.
Buddhism permeates these societies, clearly influencing assumptions and attitudes. The temples are numerous, and ornately impressive. Buddhist monks were a common sight most everywhere except Vietnam, the most secular of these countries. Spotting monks dressed in their saffron-colored robes taking selfies with fellow monks was not so unusual.
Then there is modern Asia. Bangkok is a New York-scaled sprawling city of skyscrapers and traffic jams, but carries an Asian quality with its sidewalks full of vendors selling any and all products and an unending array of street food. Surprisingly, Saigon and Phnom Penh, though less imposing than Bangkok, were bustling with commercialism and with ubiquitous new building activity.
In Phnom Penh, we walked through a shopping mall as large and contemporary as any you would find in the U.S., with many of the stores the same as ours. Mixed in were Japanese, Korean and Chinese brands not familiar to us. In the middle of the food court was a Krispy Kreme, and the doughnuts were very, very good.
Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia remain under Communist governments, but this is in name only. These nations are aggressively and energetically capitalist economies, with the governments fully behind free enterprise. Like in China, these three Communist nations use the term to refer to the ruling parties. Thailand recently lost its democratically elected government to a military coup. Now, all four governments are happy to keep their hands off of economic activity as long as there is no expression of criticism of the government.
Some 40 years later, the legacy of the Vietnam War continues to resonate throughout these countries but in very different ways.
Thailand is perpetually wary of China, and remains a staunch U.S. ally. The American activity in the Vietnam War allowed Thailand to crush the communist insurgency of the time in its northeast region.
Laos is the poorest nation in Southeast Asia, and though it did not see direct fighting during the war, one third of the nation’s territory remains littered with unexploded bombs. In southern Laos, Americans dropped bombs on the Ho Chi Minh Trail which ran through this area. In a large region in northern Laos, American bombers returning from sorties over North Vietnam carrying undelivered ordnance would drop those bombs on these remote forests in Laos, as it was dangerous to try and land with ordnance on board. The Laotians lose 200 to 300 people per year to this, with many more maimed, and the development of roads and agriculture is badly hampered in these regions.
Cambodia carries the ghost of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. This communist insurgency took power in Cambodia at the end of the Vietnam War, and their atrocities during a four-year reign led to the death of 1.5 million to 2 million out of a total population of 7 million to 8 million Cambodians. We were able to talk with one of two remaining survivors of Pol Pot’s most notorious prisons, who told his story that reflected how such terrible evil can be brought about by people of seeming banality.
In Vietnam, the war is referred to as the American War. It is very apparent that in a real sense, the Americans and the Vietnamese were fighting different wars. The Vietnamese were still bitter about a French occupation of almost 100 years that was brutal, and they were fighting a war to end colonization. To us, we were in a life-and-death struggle with global communism that had to be contained.
We were only in South Vietnam, and encountered little bitterness as Americans during our visit. It is unclear if we would have had the same reaction if we had gone into the north.
Americans consider the war as one we lost, but I am not so certain it was a total failure. The war effort hampered the communists of North Vietnam who were supported by an expansionist Soviet Union. If the Vietnamese communist effort had the availability of full resources, it very well may be that Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines would not have been able to fight off the communist insurgencies that were attempting takeovers in their countries.
Even though these communist nations remain dictatorships, they are now fully engaged in capitalism, or economic democracy. They openly interact with the West and other Asian democracies.
We have this belief that we lost the Vietnam War and that our engagement was unjustified bordering on the criminal.
It now looks like we are winning the peace. Perhaps we should recognize as Americans that our relationship to this part of the world overall has been successful.
Jay Fleitman, MD, of Northampton, writes a column published the first Tuesday of the month. He can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.