A funny thing happened on the way to the re-unification Palace.

An American university Professor who was unfortunately on the same tour with us around Saigon, started trying to tell me certain things about the Vietnam War didn’t happen.

What he didn’t realise that, despite being around the same age, I had grown up with a heightened knowledge of that conflict, far more than most of my peers. The reason for this interest was that my father served two tours with the Australian Army .

As well as being a career soldier he was one of the first Australians to be sent to Vietnam as an advisor to the South Vietnamese Government troops in 1964. Dad had been a member of the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam, an elite unit  initially made up of 30 officers and warrant officers specialising in Counter-insurgency, Military education and training. The Team, as they became to be known, went on to become the most highly decorated unit in the Australian Army  and were hand-picked in counter-revolutionary warfare with many having previously served in the Malayan Emergency - as had my father. I grew up with the war.

One of my most vivid memories of the ‘60’s is watching the conflict on the B+W television in the corner of the living room  in the hope  I might get to see dad on the news. The first –and last- televised war with so little censorship or interference from the government. The Professors’ s obfuscating comments also piqued my fascination with what I was observing in current day Vietnam. To have someone who should know better, propagating a fallacious view of history got me to thinking about the dilemma Vietnam finds itself in now,

As with so many other countries that have survived bruised and angry after a long conflict, the ruling Vietnamese party is determined to perpetuate its version of history; “heroic” struggle against the “evil” oppressors and to be fair the Vietnamese people endured a horrible war with far too many civilian casualties. But unfortunately for the Communist Party of Vietnam, four decades on the populace for the most part couldn’t care less. They just want to get on with their lives and have a decent standard of living, even to simple aspirations like buying the latest smart phone.

If this itself seems simplistic, it is worth noting that for the month we visited the country we did not once encounter a Vietnamese wanting to talk about the “American War.” On the contrary, the discussion centred on the more mundane problems of everyday life/corruption and bribery endemic in the system. How it’s accepted practice for the traffic cops to take back-handers and the inevitable bureaucratic corruption.

Since tentatively opening up Vietnam to tourism in the late 1980’s the country has blossomed with  wealth and development despite the confusing anachronistic bureaucracy. The place is booming. Every sandy stretch of beach is festooned with multi-storey 5 star hotels in various stages of construction.

Most of the country’s nearly 95 million population were born since the conflict with a median age of just 28.5 years. This means just over 14 percent of the population are 55 years or older.  So most have no memory of the war.

Ironically, given the war was so much about communism, that as much as 95 percent of the Vietnamese people support free-market capitalism. The incongruity in a communist country can be seen everywhere. I found exactly the same ethos and attitude in China and was astounded at the extent of personal wealth and conspicuous flaunting of material excesses. This lends itself to an accusation of hypocrisy with the avowed public face of socialism on one hand and the diametrically opposed personal goal of individual gain and individual wealth on the other.

I had been warned by friends that I would find less tolerance towards westerners above the 49th parallel and a different attitude by the Hanoi locals. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The reality was a warmth and genuine friendliness from the city’s inhabitants. Not that you could blame them for a certain amount of resentment after centuries of occupation by countless countries culminating in the misery that was the Vietnam/American War.

I would’ve liked to have taken my father back to Vietnam before he died so that he could see the changes since he first fell in love with the country. I somehow don’t think he would’ve recognised much apart from the people’s indefatigable spirit and warmth.

A huge part of Vietnam’s future lies in tourism. The communist dogma and state insistence on reminding everyone about the war sits uneasily with this, especially as so much of its income is derived from the losing countries in that war, especially American and Australian visitors.

But if the past is foreign country there are many divergent perspectives on our time there.  America may want to simply forget a colossal disaster in its history, but the official Vietnamese approach also needs to come to terms with the terrible atrocities committed by both sides.There are enough people still around to remember the re-education camps the Viet-Cong subjected millions of South Vietnamese to after the fall of Saigon. 

The victor always gets to write the history of the conflict but that should be no excuse not to investigate and remember what happened and honestly apportion blame. If history is always interpretation then it should not be willful omission and requires some of the discipline of science if it is not to lose its most valuable reward; lessons for the future. And it is the future most of the young population of Vietnam are thinking about.

And as an epitaph to the ill-informed US Professor who was convinced key incidents simply didn’t happen, thanks to the free wi-fi availble everywhere in Vietnam, I was able to immediately bring up the image of the Bell Huey helicopter sitting precariously on a small rooftop with people scrambling to get on board – the last US helicopter out the country. He didn’t believe it had happened and as we gazed over the rooftops, near the Notre Dame Cathedral and I pointed out the building, even with the ladder still in place, he fell silent. I only hope he’s not a professor of history.