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Vietnam Revisited

By Graham Bell

(The following is an excerpt from a letter of Graham Bell, Australian Vietnam vet and longtime friend of VVAW).

Before I tell you about our Vietnam trip I had better put it in perspective by telling you something about myself: I come from a working class family. Half of my upbringing was in the bush so I am no stranger to homes with dirt floors, no electricity or running water, and no education opportunities beyond primary school. Aborigines are for me real people and not toys to be played with by middle-class supporters of land rights, who take damned fine care that they don't let any Murri sleep under their roofs.

I was brought up to take people for what they are, and that helped me to survive during the Vietnam War.

I went to Vietnam with the Australian Army Long Range Reconnaissance and Counter Revolutionary Warfare Specialist Unit, S.A.S., then after my discharge from the Army I studied comparative revolution and change as part of my degree course at Griffith University's School of Modern Asian Studies; the course covered in depth the economics of developing Asian countries. My wife and I have lived and travelled widely in Asia; we usually go travelling at ground level rather than jetting from one American-style luxury hotel to another. June was an Army nurse and I did my nursing training in the years when I was forced out of the University by the Fraser government's anti-veteran discrimination. I still speak a bit of Vietnamese, too.

Travel to and within Vietnam is controlled by a state-run tourism company, which is a hell of a lot better organized than most corporate bodies in developing countries. The trouble is that travel in Vietnam is a bloody rip-off: the Vietnamese seem to have the idea that all western visitors are there solely to pay off their national debt.

We found quite unrealistic illogical and sometimes self-contradictory differences between costs and prices. What's a Yankee imperialist dollar worth? 11 Dong at the official rate; 40 Dong at the general commercial rate and 120-160 on the black market, but really, foreign exchange rates don't tell you all that much about an economy; the prices people pay for things are a better guide. Pushbike: 3700D; matches, 5D; a newspaper, 20D if you are Russian and half that when they find out you are not Russian; a pencil, 1D, 50x.

Our travel program was surprisingly flexible; some of my requests were met and others were not, but you have to expect that sort of thing. There was never any obvious moves to prevent me wandering around talking with whomever I liked.

The war we fought in is now something in the distant past for young Vietnamese; they were curious about me because I was a non-Russian foreigner but there was no hostility at all; nowadays, Pol Pot and Deng Xiaoping are the devils.

Prior to going to Vietnam we read several articles about the present situation there. Most of what we read was complete and utter bullshit—the writers had either dreamed up some socialist peasant Utopia and given it a Southeast Asian setting, or, at the other extreme, taken lurid descriptions of life in Bolshevik Russia and inserted Vietnamese names in place of Russian ones. The real world Vietnam War far more interesting. Take pop music, for instance: "Abba", and "Kiss" were still popular but "Duran-Duran" and "Men-at-work" were as yet unknown; so much for stories that Western music was banned.

Make no mistake. Things are pretty tough in Vietnam now—there is poverty, there are desperate shortages of both industrial and consumer goods, and there is a lot bureaucratic disorganization. What else would you expect to find after years of warfare, natural disasters, and economic blockade? These problems can be cured and they will not themselves cause the collapse of the present regime. What did astonish me was to find that the Vietnamese are still rushing headlong down the same suicidal path to economic disaster that almost wrecked China: the path of "better-to-be-red-than-expert." I can understand the need to have politically reliable people running things but the Vietnamese have gone completely overboard. Given their problems and their available resources, why the hell they don't go all out for a strategy of developing technical expertise and individual initiative as well as political reliability is completely beyond me. To make matters worse, there is still smoldering resentment in the South against Northerners; reunification seemed like a terrific idea at the time—until the smart-arced kids came down from Hanoi to kick the guerrilla fighters out of the good jobs and back to the paddy fields. Nobody wants the old regime back. If you want a lesson on how to blow a successful revolution, then look at Vietnam today.

Unlike a lot of my fellow Australians who learned to hat the Slopes, I have always liked the ordinary Vietnamese people (except when they were trying to kill me) and it is the ordinary people I feel sorry for now—

One thing, though: the Vietnamese still have their sense of humor, so there is hope for the future.

Just in case anyone has any delusions of forcing change on the Vietnamese from outside their country, let me tell you in the strongest possible terms that although Vietnam needs a radical improvement in its domestic economic methods, especially in management, if it is to gain prosperity and to avoid driving the people into rebellion, any such change must come from the Vietnamese themselves—they have the talent, they can easily gain the expertise, and, surprisingly, the do have all the material they need to launch their own recovery. Forget about owing the Russians money until into the 22 Century, forget about the Americans double-crossing them after the war (in the long run that was America's loss), the Vietnamese themselves have the power now to make themselves prosperous—or to destroy everything they worked for.

It is highly unlikely that the Vietnamese will even issue me with another visa.

—Graham Bell
Australia