The Long Reckoning by George Black

Author:George Black [Black, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

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It became a cliché to say that for the veterans—and indeed for most foreign visitors—“Vietnam” was a war, and it was a country. It was “Indochine”; it was “The ’Nam.” It was a state of mind, a brand name, a shorthand for trauma. For Campbell, and for all those who returned, the heart of the matter was to find a way to reconcile the boys they had been in wartime with the men they had become in its aftermath.

It wasn’t always easy to make sense of the country they went back to, especially in an area imprinted as deeply by war as the northern provinces of I Corps. Vietnam had become a complicated and mesmerizing place, riddled with paradoxes, a demographically young country where most people had no active memory of the conflict and little apparent interest in it. It was a tightly controlled and often corrupt one-party state, yet there were few signs of that in the energetic rhythms and traditional rituals of daily life. By the time Campbell came back, Vietnam was a fully paid-up member of the World Trade Organization, on course to becoming one of the great economic success stories of the developing world. Freewheeling boom towns, UNESCO World Heritage Sites, ravishing landscapes, and miles of golden beaches—all this existed side by side with rural backwaters where stooped figures in conical hats labored beside their water buffalo in the complex green geometry of the rice fields, as if nothing had changed in half a century. As Campbell’s fellow ex-Marine Suel Jones liked to ask, had the United States bombed Vietnam back into the Stone Age or forward into the twenty-first century? Here in I Corps it could often feel like both.

Invariably the vets encountered the same open welcome that Vietnamese extended to almost all visiting Americans, whatever their age or purpose. This often startled them, and it moved them to find ways of reciprocating. “In so many ways the Vietnamese hold us in high esteem,” Searcy said one day. “They assume that we are decent and honorable people, and in a lot of ways it makes those of us who live here want to be as good as we can be as Americans.” It was about making yourself worthy of the forgiveness that the Vietnamese seemed so ready to offer.

It was rare for a veteran to travel to Hanoi without crossing paths with Searcy, and Campbell met him there soon after he arrived in Vietnam, introduced by mutual friends who had adopted a Vietnamese child. Dissimilar as the two men were in many ways, they quickly warmed to each other, and Campbell joined the new chapter of Veterans for Peace that Searcy and others had just founded, an organization started in the early 1980s by a group of vets who saw U.S. involvement in Central America as the slippery slope to a new Vietnam. Searcy began to put together an annual veterans’ tour, which included a stop at George Mizo’s Friendship Village outside Hanoi,

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