Just this month - fifty years after the fact - my Vietnam memoir has finally been published. (I was a correspondent in that wrong-hearted war for Time magazine in 1970 and 1971.) So perhaps I might be excused for the cascade of pain-filled memory being unleashed in this moment when our nation’s capital is being encircled by barbed wire.
Naturally, when the U.S. invaded Iraq – with spurious claims of “weapons of mass destruction” – I held my breath at the déjà vu of it all. I’d been here before, in Vietnam with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution: imagined excuses for waging war where none was needed. Refusal to reckon with the consequences of that deception.
But that was then.
Now, I am re-living the nightmares of that war – and this time the locale is domestic.
Exactly forty-nine years ago, I arrived in Saigon: age 23, one year out of college, a reporter for a single year at the Annapolis Evening Capital. I was sending myself to cover “the best story around” because, at the time, almost no respectable press outlet was sending a woman to do that job.
My foreign travel to that point had been a comfortable Junior Year in Italy. But if I thought Europe was foreign, my first day in Saigon disabused me of that fiction.
Everything surrounding me in February,1970 was seemingly at odds with my suburban Baltimore, middle class expectations. Let me count the ways.
But more than the unbreathable air, the uncontained, chaotic, motorbike and ton-and-a-half army truck traffic, the poisoned leafless trees along the boulevards, the women in flowing ao dai and the streetboys hawking shoeshine with spittle and rags – I was brought up short by a single sight.
Never in my life had I seen buildings – American and Vietnamese civic buildings surrounded by mammoth spiraling coils of rusted barbed wire. It was utterly alien to my innocent eyes. I reckoned, on that first day, that one entered those buildings (which soon, I would do often) by crawling through the spiraled coils. It remains an innocence I am saddened to have had to abandon.
Because now, in my own nation’s capital, it is – appallingly - the same.
The District of Columbia - that genuinely lovely city (perhaps not lovelier than the French-plotted Saigon, pre-American occupation) is frozen still in my last pre-pandemic memory.
But the alternate unreality – the Saigon déjà vu – blasts through the news accounts at my denial.
Perhaps the coils are not yet rusted. Yet their intention - to prevent violence, to thwart angered, domestic opponents, who wish harm on both the nation and its representatives - are identical.
Those coiled wires are our national declaration of failure. Failure to cohere in a single defining body of citizenry. Failure to adhere to the simplest decency and respect for one another.
In Saigon, that national disunity and disrespect – that coiled, barbed wire - existed because we were there. The schism was birthed and fostered by the occupation by a foreign nation.
In my Washington, with cherry-blossom filled thoughts, the schism is of our own making – this war is internal - and it breaks my heart.