| 17 November 2006 Dominoes The President finally made it to Vietnam. His timing is less than impeccable, what with the elections and the departure of the Defense Secretary, and the continuing spectacular breakdown of order in Iraq. Maybe things are better than is being reported. I pray that is true. Late word from theater is that four Americans are missing in another massive kidnapping, this one of sixteen heavy trucks and security vehicles. What is surprising is that it is not surprising After all, the entire Ministry of Education was taken hostage this week. Of course there were pointed remarks about other wars and this one. But the President had to put a good face on it. Vietnam is about to join the World Trade Organization, and this is important economic conference in a nation of spectacular growth. I had time to think about it, since I was commuting again. The horror of it came to me in the darkness on the Dulles Toll Road. There had been three inches of rain dumped down on the city of power, and bright flashes of light shot from the power rail as the Metro trains rumbled west out of the city. Traffic crept. Commuters dread days like this, trapping in the chaos resulting from the single beat of a butterfly's wing: any dislocation anywhere in the concentric ring of roads around the capital causes the dominoes to begin to fall. The effect of the falling tiles ripple across the entire network. One broken car on one road causes delay; drivers bail out at the first opportunity, everything degrades to gridlock. Everything stops. Consequently, I bailed out at the first opportunity and helped saturate an otherwise peaceful neighborhood. I went to Vietnam, but it was like the President. The peripatetic Congressman I arranged exotic trips for wanted to be in Ho Chi Minh City on the twentieth anniversary of its name change from Saigon. As was appropriate, we flew to the capital of the Socialist Republic first. Ha Noi. Anyone can do that now, and it was just beginning to be true in 1995. Tourism was beginning to pick up, and investors were flocking to the SRV. Not Americans, though, and that was why the Congressman was interested. The Vietnamese were interested, too. We did not have formal relations in those days, and that was one of the items on the agenda. The only American presence was the Joint Casualty Recovery Team, who had laboriously made progress with the host nationals in finding the remains of the American missing. We stayed at the Sofitel Hotel, where Jane Fonda did on her famous visit. We dined with our hosts at the Government Guest House at 12 Ngo Quyen Street. Everyone was most pleasant. A poet-Brigadier sat to my right who had spent a year underground in the tunnel complex of Cu Chi. Everyone wanted the past put behind, and I only saw one flash of contempt and anger from a young official in the Ministry of Development. This trip, the President is getting a lot of questions about Vietnam, and the first war the Americans lost overseas. I imagine he could say, like historian Stanley Karnow, that the wars were completely different. Vietnam began as a guerilla war and ended, once the Americans were gone, as a conventional one. Iraq appears to be precisely the reverse. I don't know about that, since the scale of operations there seems to be getting bigger. But it is funny how things turn out. We had drinks with the foreign press corps back at the Sofitel after the formal dinner. I was told that Ho Chi Minh's Tomb was a good place to meet women, for example, something that would not have occurred to me otherwise. I maintained that the fight in Vietnam, however it turned out, had provided a bulwark against Communist expansion and permitted the economies of the region to burgeon. The Domino theory was valid, and they did not fall. The stringer from the San Jose Mercury News finished her beer and said it would have happened anyway, and gestured in the darkness toward the new construction that was happening all around. I think that if the Vice President had come here when things were hot, he might have understood it a little better. But maybe not. I suppose we all have to line up our own dominoes. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |