Vietnam 15 Years Later

By Paul A. Witteman

Twenty-three years after the fact, Denny McClellan's recurring dream is still vivid. Once again he is 18, back on patrol ten miles northwest of Danang in the company of equally wary, heavily armed grunts of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines. His M-16 is loaded for Charlie, and a couple of grenades are within easy reach in his flak jacket. His field pack weighs 40 lbs., and the day is surpassingly hot. The lance corporal his buddies call "Red" is sweating heavily. His squad leader, not much older than McClellan, gives a hand signal, and the patrol moves off the road and down a narrow trail. Just the beginning of another very long day in the Republic of Vietnam. Says McClellan, now a 19- year veteran of the San Francisco police force: "I remember individual days there in perfect sequence like it was yesterday."

If not yesterday, last week. Or was it last month? Certainly it can't be 15 years since the U.S.-supported regime folded like a pup tent and the remaining American Marines executed what the tactical instructors at Quantico euphemistically called a "retrograde movement" from the roof of the fortress-like U.S. embassy annex. Today chickens run helter skelter through the American compound.

But the U.S. has not extracted itself from Vietnam. From The Deer Hunter and Platoon to Born on the Fourth of July, interpretations of the war continue to be big at the movies. Television has China Beach, the award-winning series about a rest and relaxation center in Danang. The London hit show Miss Saigon, a musical about a doomed romance between a Vietnamese bar girl and an American soldier, will be coming to Broadway next year with seats costing as much as $100. Bookstores are filled with memoirs, histories, reprints and novels. This spring Harper & Row even published The Vietnam Guidebook, with advice for travelers to places like Hue and My Lai, although the U.S. State Department places restrictions on such excursions. Courses on Vietnam are staples of college curriculums.

The war festers like a canker in the minds of many of the 2.7 million Vietnam veterans and the 750,000 Vietnamese who live in the U.S. The 3,600 members of National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia still believe there may be loved ones locked in prisons hidden somewhere in the impenetrable Annamese Cordillera. What-might-have-been gnaws at some of the draft dodgers who fled to Canada or into the National Guard. Certainly the war prompted career choices for young men who joined the Peace Corps or enrolled in graduate school to stay out of the Army.

For the families of the 58,022 U.S. servicemen and -women who died in Indochina, the war continues as a dull ache, a pain shared by the kin of the millions of Vietnamese killed on both sides. For most other Americans, Vietnam is as much a mystery as it was 25 years ago, when apprehensive Marines in full battle gear first waded onto the beaches near Danang. But the mystery has long been stripped of its innocence and is shrouded instead in guilt and recrimination.

Some of the bafflement arises from a curious inability to come to terms with a failed policy, with America's greatest military defeat. But it is also due to the continuing attitude of the U.S. Government. Fifteen years after U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin slipped away in the predawn darkness of a collapsing Saigon, the U.S. has yet to establish diplomatic relations with the government of Vietnam. Washington continues to act as if Hanoi had sent its troops to invade Virginia instead of down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Since 1975, the U.S. has imposed a trade embargo against Vietnam that has been more effective than the mining of Haiphong harbor ever was. It has helped keep Vietnam's badly managed economy on its knees, which in turn has encouraged a steady flow of refugees to Hong Kong and Malaysia.

Three Administrations in Washington have insisted that Vietnam meet several conditions before diplomatic or commercial relations can return to normal. All Vietnamese troops must be permanently withdrawn from Cambodia and a peaceful settlement must be reached in that ravaged land. The roughly 15,000 Amerasian children (now young adults, like many of the children of the MIAs) must be allowed to leave Vietnam if they wish, and political prisoners freed from re- education camps. Questions about the remaining POW/MIAs should be resolved. So runs the checklist of U.S.-Vietnamese policy, as it has for much of the past decade. Hanoi insists that it has met the conditions. Although progress has been made on all of these issues, Washington is not yet satisfied.

Either way, a sizable number of Americans are saying the time has come for a different course of action. In a poll for TIME/CNN by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, 48% of those questioned said the U.S. should re-establish relations with Vietnam; 32% are opposed. Vietnam veterans seem to agree: of the 208 vets surveyed for TIME/CNN at the Vietnam memorial, 44% said the U.S. should open an embassy in Hanoi.

"Of course we should establish relations," says Rob Pfeiffer, a high school counselor in Oakland, Me. "We're pretending Vietnam just doesn't exist." An official in the Maine chapter of Veterans for Peace, Pfeiffer says his fellow members support recognition as a means to gain more on-site information about the effects of Agent Orange. "Open it up," says McClellan. "If we established relations with China, why not with Vietnam?" Former antiwar activist Anne Weills, who created a furor in 1968 when she went to Hanoi with a delegation that brought back three American prisoners, comes to the same conclusion from a different perspective. "We owe Vietnam a great debt," says the Berkeley attorney. "Americans have a role to play in the reconstruction of Vietnam because we had such a large role in destroying it."

Weills' view is not widely shared: in the TIME/CNN poll, 80% say the U.S. does not owe Vietnam anything. Nor is the push to establish full diplomatic relations generally embraced by the Vietnamese who escaped in 1975 or have fled in flimsy boats since then. "The U.S. should not normalize until the Vietnamese government guarantees human rights," says Phac X. Nguyen, advertising manager of a Vietnamese-language newspaper in San Jose. "They lowered people to the life of animals."

Antipathy toward the regime in Hanoi is highest in the ranks of South Vietnamese rangers and paratroopers, many of whom have settled in California. In a speech in San Jose early this month, former President Nguyen Van Thieu, now living in London, suggested that if political changes are not forthcoming in Hanoi, the refugees should be prepared to head home, shoulder weapons and seize control again.

The passion in the Vietnamese exile community is a puzzle to many Americans. That is no surprise to Phuong Dai Nguyen, a sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley, whose family fled Saigon in 1975: "The Americans don't know much about the Vietnamese." Yet the same has been true of the Vietnamese government's inability to fathom the importance to the U.S. of the POW/MIA issue. Fully 62% of those polled by TIME/CNN -- and 84% of Vietnam veterans -- believe there are still MIAs alive in Vietnam.

"There is no logic to this," says Douglas Pike, a retired State Department analyst who assiduously read accounts of every reported MIA sighting but was never able to come up with verification by a second source. A resident of northern Vietnam, released after 13 years in re-education camps, is equally incredulous. "Americans? There are no Americans here. I never heard of any." The Vietnamese people long ago gave up looking for their own missing. Bodies decompose quickly in the subtropical climate. Although no U.S. official will say so publicly, the widespread conviction is that there are no more live Americans.

Still, the National League of Families issues regular status reports of sightings on a hundred or so of the 2,303 men listed as missing in action or unaccounted for in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Since a Japanese lieutenant hid on a Philippine island for 30 years after World War II before surfacing, anything is possible. But it is more likely that any Americans still in Vietnam remain there for conjugal reasons and have led retiring lives. Either that or the people sighted were really East Europeans or the now grown Amerasian offspring of former G.I.s.

Because issues surrounding the war are so emotionally charged even now, some people counsel continued caution in dealing with the government of Vietnam. "Any improvement has to be gradual," says Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, who spent 5 1/2 years in a North Vietnamese prison after his Navy attack bomber was shot down over Hanoi in 1967. "Below the surface, there is a very strong anti-Vietnamese feeling. When you get down to the V.F.W. halls, the American Legion halls, these people still have the feeling that the U.S. was damaged and humiliated in that conflict." Nonetheless, says McCain, who in the past has favored legislation for reopening ties to Vietnam, "it is in our interest, over time, to have an improvement in relations."

A similar assessment comes from a senior Bush Administration official who follows Vietnam closely. "I don't think having a society that is armed to the teeth and poor to boot is good for the region," the official says. "Our long-term interest is in the peace and stability of the Southeast Asian peninsula." For its part, the Vietnamese government sees the Soviet presence fading in the region and wants renewed American involvement as a counterweight to growing Chinese influence. Two years ago, Hanoi floated a proposal to let the U.S. military reoccupy its former bases in Cam Ranh Bay and Danang. This month, following reports that the Soviet navy was scaling back its forces in ) Cam Ranh Bay, the Vietnamese repeated the offer. The Vietnamese would benefit from the dollars flowing into their economy from the bases. The U.S. would regain the use of facilities that the Pentagon loudly bemoaned losing and in turn would gain invaluable leverage in the ongoing negotiations with the Philippine government over renewing the leases at Subic Bay and Clark air base. It could be what Pentagon planners call a "win-win" scenario.

Strategy aside, there is a more humane reason for recognition. American involvement in Indochina was more than just an exercise in global strategy. The desire to help people preserve their freedom and improve their lives was an important justification for committing U.S. soldiers to battle. The lingering pain of Vietnam is due, in part, to the realization that the idealism turned sour. For the half-million Vietnam vets suffering from post- traumatic-stress disorder and even for those who have adjusted well, a U.S. return to Vietnam might ameliorate the sense that America left a job unfinished. McClellan puts it this way: "Every time we walked down that road at the beginning of a patrol, we turned off. I've always wondered what was around the next bend. I want to go back before I get too old, and walk around that bend to see what's there. Then maybe I'll be able to put Vietnam to rest."

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CAPTION: VIETNAM YESTERDAY AND TODAY

With reporting by Michael Duffy/Washington