In Vietnam, war history through a political lens

In the rewriting of history, though, it is the pattern of what the Vietnamese call "the American war" that is most skewed. The siege of Khe Sanh, broken after troops from the US First Air Cavalry Division punched through on Route 9, goes down as an unqualified victory for the North. That's because the Americans pulled out of Khe Sanh several months later, realizing the base was exposed, isolated, and extremely costly to defend.

The official Vietnamese history, however, fails to note that American and South Vietnamese forces returned regularly to Khe Sanh, using it as a base and not giving it up until the 1972 offensive.

The history grew hazier still as we descended through the Ashau Valley, past Hamburger Hill, the scene of one of the war's bloodiest battles in May 1969. At a restaurant in Ah Loui, a district center in the valley, we dined on fox and anteater steak dished up by a cook who said he had been there for 10 years. He believed the modern highway down the valley was built with foreign aid but professed to know nothing of the fighting years before.

It was after slipping down a network of trails and streams that lace the valley and hills that thousands of North Vietnamese infiltrated Hue, from which Vietnamese emperors had once ruled. The invaders slaughtered several thousand people on the first night of the 1968 Tet offensive, burying them in mass graves while taking over the multiwalled Citadel, the center of imperial power before the French era.

I had flown into Hue early in the battle, landing in the rear of the Citadel beside a US Marine command post. Bodies of dead marines were piled by the door. I grabbed an abandoned helmet and flak jacket, in a stack beside the bodies, and joined marines fighting block by block.

This time, I went with a veteran Canadian TV correspondent, Bill Cunningham, and his legendary cameraman, Phil Pendry, comrades on the tour, interviewing me as I reminisced on the battle, looking over those same walls behind which I had crouched with young marines.

A brochure told us revolutionary forces had scored a tremendous victory, killing "bad people" and driving out the Americans, but the truth was the marines, in four weeks of some of the toughest fighting of the war, retook the Citadel while the US command held off on airstrikes that would have destroyed ancient palaces and walls. It was not until early 1975, two years after the last American troops had left, that Hue fell for the last time to the army from the north.

Outside the Citadel, on a street lined with souvenir shops, a sign beckons foreign tourists, "We're sure you'll welcome our delicious meals and friendly service." I asked the man in charge what he remembered of the war.

Like the majority of his countrymen, he was, he told me, born after 1975. Nor did he dwell on the history with parents or older people who might know. "We don't think about it," he told me, smiling genially. "It was a long time ago."

Page: 1 | 2