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Sunday, November 17, 2013

Why US Veterans Are Returning To Vietnam



  • Courtesy of Bill Ervin
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Nearly 40 years after the war, American vets who live in Vietnam are working to foster reconciliation between the two countries, while other former US soldiers are traveling there to find 'closure.'

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A photo of Greg Kleven, dated April 1967, shows him posing in front of a tin-roofed hooch, wearing an undershirt so stained it matches the sand beneath his feet. In his right hand, he is holding an M-16 rifle. His shaved head is cocked to the left and he's sticking out his tongue in a half smile.
The 18-year-old enlistee is three months into his tour of Vietnam in a Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance company, a special operations unit similar to the Navy SEALs. He looks brash and ready to take on any Viet Cong who cross his path.
"We had all of the difficult missions," Mr. Kleven recalls. "We blew up bridges and parachuted out of planes. Each patrol was like an individual war."
As we talk in his apartment overlooking the Nhieu Loc Canal in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, it's hard to find any trace of that brazen marine in Kleven today. Two decades after leaving Vietnam on a stretcher with a bullet wound to his back, Kleven returned to the country for good in 1991, making him, he says, the first American to live in Ho Chi Minh City after the war.
Today, Kleven's apartment turns into a classroom several times a week when Vietnamese students come to practice their English. Kleven was a trailblazer in Vietnam for English teaching, a field that did not exist when he first returned to the country as a tourist in the 1980s. He and his brother – an Air Force veteran – became the first foreigners granted a government license to teach in Vietnam. His voice can be heard in classrooms across the country on the government's English-language training tapes.
"I wanted to make up for what I had done during the war," Kleven says of his English-teaching career. "I now have a second chance to do things right. I have the chance to be a teacher here instead of a soldier."
Kleven is just one of thousands of American veterans who have returned to Vietnam since the end of one of the most divisive conflicts in American history. In the four decades since the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, which brought America's direct military involvement in the war to an end, many former soldiers have journeyed there out of curiosity to see a land and people they once fought or to seek closure for a war that continues to weigh on their minds.
While no one knows the precise number of returning vets, most experts put the figure in the tens of thousands. Vietnam Battlefield Tours, just one of dozens of groups that organize trips for former soldiers, estimates it has taken more than 1,000 veterans to the country since the group's founding in 2005. The Vietnamese government says that in recent years more than 400,000 Americans – many of them former military – have visited the country annually.
A few hundred other former soldiers, like Kleven, have moved to Vietnam permanently. Some of these veterans are working alongside their former enemies to address the legacies of the war. They remove unexploded bombs and land mines from old battlefields that are now rice paddies.
They raise money for people who have been diagnosed with disabilities or diseases attributed to exposure to Agent Orange or other herbicides that were sprayed by the United States during the war. And they act as unofficial ambassadors, promoting reconciliation between Americans and Vietnamese as teachers and tour guides.
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American veterans have a long tradition of making pilgrimages to their old battlefields. The journeys serve to memorialize the war and to honor those that lost their lives in battle. Vietnam veterans return to the Southeast Asian country for these reasons, too, but also because they have a need to make sense of a war that remains controversial.
"What makes Vietnam veterans different from World War II veterans who go back is that we lost in Vietnam," says Paulette Curtis, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., who has studied the phenomenon of returning vets. "Veterans that go back to Vietnam are reclaiming their place in history, both in a personal and national sense."
While the men who came home from World War II were celebrated as heroes, Vietnam veterans faced an American public that largely did not support the conflict in Southeast Asia. Added to this, American media coverage of Vietnam dropped off almost entirely after the fall of Saigon in 1975, so veterans had a hard time understanding how their role in the war contributed to the country's well-being.
Kleven recalls the confusion he felt after coming home from Vietnam in 1967. "I kept asking myself, why did we go? What was behind it? I never knew the history of it. So I was searching for all of those things."
The quest for answers drove some veterans to return to Vietnam and connect with the Vietnamese in the 1980s. The trips were difficult in those early years.
The US imposed a trade embargo on Vietnam in 1975 and pulled its embassy staff from the country. Before Kleven first returned to Vietnam in 1988 – 15 years after the peace accords – he was warned by the US State Department not to go. Despite these challenges, veterans made up the largest contingent of Americans visiting Vietnam in the 1980s, Ms. Curtis says.
From the beginning, veterans who returned played a role in improving ties between the two countries. In the absence of formal diplomatic ties, Hanoireached out to returning American veterans to discuss outstanding war issues, such as missing soldiers and Vietnamese children fathered by American troops. While the US government discouraged these discussions – and some veterans felt too hardened by the war to have any interest in symbolically shaking hands – well-known veterans such as Bobby Muller, then president of Vietnam Veterans of America, took Hanoi up on the offer.
"We see our role as providing a bridge to Vietnam, a conduit to dialogue," Mr. Muller was quoted by The New York Times as saying after a 1984 meeting with Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach. "Our Government will not talk to them. So we do represent the only channel with which to exchange information."
When President Clinton announced the normalization of diplomatic relations with Vietnam a decade later, he thanked veterans for supporting reconciliation and moving "beyond the haunting and painful past toward finding common ground for the future."
Veterans in Vietnam today are continuing that process and working to address the past on both the grass-roots and diplomatic levels.

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