17 November 2003

War Stories

There are Black Hawks down in the current theater of war, and in retaliation there are precison munitions being lobbed around the city of Tikrit. The situation is still hot. This is going to take a while to resolve, but the full scope of jsut how long it takes ot bring peace is quite aswtonishing. I was involved with a peace process from another war, one we lost. That process is still going on.

My advice is to not lose wars. It takes longer to clean up the debris.

I can't take credit for normalizing relations with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. But I was directly responsible for getting the airline tickets that did. I'll get to that in a minute. It has been quite a week in Vietnam, with a lot of interaction between the former adversaries. Vietnam's exports to America in 2002 surged 128 percent over 2001 to $2.39 billion, and imports from the US market rose 26 percent.

With prosperity comes opportunity. Two former ministers of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam were busted last Friday, accused with eight others in peddling their influence in the Ministries of Agriculture and and Rural Development to siphon around $7.5 million from the burgeoning socialist economy. Nguyen Quang Ha and Nguyen Thien Luan, led a ring which included La Thi Kim Oanh, a lithe woman who directed an investment company affiliated with the agriculture ministry.

Oanh and her associates reportedly sought loans authorized by the former vice ministers from 1995, the year we visited, to June 2001. I don't make any assertion that there is a connection. I don't think I ever met Oanh, but I see her in a traditional au dai dress with her hair up. The Communist Party has made fighting corruption one of its top priorities, along with the continuation of the normalization process with the United States.

Which is why Vietnamese Defense Minister Pham Van Tra traveled to the United States to hold talks with U.S. officials. He was in town the same week that the senior ministers were arrested. There are no coincidences in life. Tra met with Donald Rumsfeld and other officials at the Pentagon. I happened to be over at the Building, walking out the River Entrance last Thursday and the ceremonial door was open to the elements. I looked around but didn't see Mr. Rumsfeld, or any of the ceremonial appurtenances of the visit and walked away quickly. I am confident the SECDEF doesn't know who I am and that is the way I want to keep it.

Tra's visit was the first time a Vietnamese defense chief came to town, and of course the last time it was the chief of an entity called the Republic of Vietnam, which ceased to exist in June of 1975. Tra announced that we are also going to have a port visit to Saigon. It has been in the works for some time, but Tra announced that the USS Vandegrift will call at Saigon between November 19-22, a good solid port visit. It will be the first visit by a US warship to the country since our somewhat ignominious exit in the last U.S. military operation of the war, the evacuation called FREQUENT WIND. That began when the tanks had Saigon surrounded and Armed Forces Radio began broadcasting Bing Crosby's "White Christmas," which was the signal for those in the know to head on down to the Embassy and get the hell out of town ahead of the North Vietnamese Regulars.

Vandegrift is an Oliver Hazard Perry Class guided missile frigate, a trim little ship whose class consists of 51 units, the largest single class of warships built by a Western Navy since World War Two. She is commanded by a hard-charging young Commander named Richard Rogers. He is an interesting guy, a nuclear power officer commanding a conventional ship with a policy background on the Joint Staff in the Middle East. Vindegrift is named for General Alexander Archer Vandegrift, eighteenth Commandant of the Marine Corps and Medal of Honor winner in WW II. He commanded the First Marine Division, Reinforced, in the battle for Guadalcanal when the string of defeats in the Pacific ended and the long road to Tokyo began.

Commander Rogers won't be worrying about nuclear physics. He will concerned about silting in the Saigon River and the prospect of the crew having liberty incidents ashore. I could tell him that the girls will be out to meet the sailors if they can. I saw them at the Club Apocalypse Now, bending over pool tables with practiced insouciance that made it seem the war had never ended and that these women had not worn the scarves of young party cadre growing up. Ceiling fans designed to mimic the blades of helicopters rotated slowly on the street that had been known as Tu Do.

Tra said the port visit was in the spirit of humanitarian issues. He was willing to continue to cooperate with the Americans because he understood the pains of the people "whose remains of their fathers or children during the war have not been found."

That was the quid pro quo for the visit, and it echoed from the meetings we had with officials back in 1995. This is an iterative process, after all. We would bring up the MIA's and they would counter with the missing millions. He asked the U.S. to play a bigger role in helping those suffering from exposure to Agent Orange, a toxic defoliant we sprayed along the rivers to deny the enemy cover from which to ambush. Exposure to Agent Orange is recognized as a cancer causing agent by the Veterans Administration, and has been linked to cancer, diabetes and spina bifida in children.

Tra says that two million Vietnamese were affected by exposure to the defoliant, including 1.2 million kids born after the war was over. He was also looking for help in disposing of land mines and other unexploded ordnance. A gift of the war that keeps on giving. The numbers are staggering on their side. A million missing. Millions still suffering the consequences on remaining what had been free fire zones.

For our part, we were going to address the MIA issue. There had already been enormous progress made in relations, notably through the good offices of USCINCPAC's Joint Task Force Full Accounting, which served as the de facto diplomatic presence. Lt Col Mel Richmond was our man in Hanoi, and his little team of specialists were combing the countryside, visiting and excavating crash sites looking for our dead. The Congressman was also going to raise Vietnam's human rights record. When we made the trip they had an American passport-holder in the hoosegow. The guy had rented a plane and dropped leaflets opposing the Government. He was detained and the Communists were prepared to throw away the key.

So there were a lot of issues swirling. The Trade Council had a laundry list. The Congressman did, too. Even I did. Mine was that the connections were made smoothly, the hotel was habitable, and the luggage arrived with the airplane.

You have to keep your priorities straight. What I didn't know was that my luggage was soon to contain a good chunk of a brick wall. But it is late and I have to go to work. I will have to tell you about that later.