by Joe Roissier

Created on: June 12, 2008   Last Updated: October 03, 2008

I've been teaching and living here in Hanoi for about 3 months now. I frequently touch on the subject of the "American" war here in my classes, and of course, to the generation of young people here it's something they learn about in school and that their parents tell them about over meals. Students have told me that it's often the subject of moralizing lectures that begin with "when I was your age, during the war, I didn't have it as good as you do now." The younger generation rolls their eyes and listens politely but then they've all just moved on with their lives. Mostly it's just something that happened long time ago in a Vietnam that's completely over for them.

So we never go into much detail on the subject and it's almost completely taboo. The younger generation here has been told that the evil, imperialist Americans tried to take over their country, but we all know that it's quite a bit more complex than that.

For us Americans, of all origins, it's still a bit of a wound in the national psyche and for most of the Vietnamese-American community, it's a loss that still causes a lot of suffering. There's a huge perceptual gap between the people I know in southern California, most of the rest of America and the people who stayed here and their descendants.

It's time to consider the needs of both sides and somehow open a dialog toward better understanding, and some sort of reconciliation. Millions of people lost a country that they loved, but at the same time an entire generation of youth was decimated in what they saw as a war of national liberation.

It's the reason for the demographics in Vietnam today where half the population is under 35, accounting for the dynamism and growth we're seeing now. In the United States, there still seems to be a reluctance to put the past behind. Analyzing the Vietnam war has been a cottage industry in the US for the last 30 years and it's biased our foreign policy thinking.

Every time we think about national defense and foreign relations, memories of the VN war are always lurking somewhere in our collective consciousness and its embedded deep in our unconscious thought processes. We seem almost to enjoy punishing ourselves and it seems the process of atonement never ends.

Redemption seems out of the question for the former anti-war faction, while a large number of people believe that we could have won, if the media hadn't blown it for us. For the refugees, the bitterness is still there, and they come out in large numbers to protest

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