Conference on Vietnam War turns to decision to normalize relations
BY CHRIS VAUGHN
Knight Ridder Newspapers
LUBBOCK, Texas - (KRT) - On the opening day of an international conference dedicated to the study of the Vietnam War, one topic curiously almost never came up: the war itself.
Instead of focusing on next month's 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the ignominious end to the conflict for the United States, the focus of the conference turned for material to a different notable anniversary, that of the 1995 decision by President Clinton to normalize relations with one of this country's most bitter enemies and the symbol of one of its worst failures.
Several speakers, including the current and former U.S. ambassadors to the country of 82 million people, spoke of a new and unprecedented level of diplomatic and economic cooperation that was all but unimaginable a decade ago.
"The past permeates the present," said Raymond Burghardt, ambassador to Vietnam from 2001 to 2004. "You never escape the past; you shouldn't. But you move on. ... While we continue to deal with the legacy of the war, we also deal with Vietnam as a regular country."
The conference, hosted every three years by the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University, is much more than a dry historical recounting of the war and its aftereffects by academicians. Just as prevalent are U.S. combat veterans, Vietnamese-Americans who escaped the country after the fall, current and former diplomats, and doctoral students from around the world, making for an interesting concoction in which people routinely debate and argue.
This year, the conference has brought in a former special operations officer, Army Maj. Gen. Ken Bowra, several veterans who campaigned against U.S. Sen. John Kerry, former members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, as well as dozens of academics from Ohio State, Cornell, California-Berkeley, Wake Forest and other universities.
The mix is the design of the Vietnam Center's founder and director, James Reckner, a late-in-life academic and a retiree from the Navy. He believes that those who know the war firsthand provide a "reality check" to professors and that those who know the history can help veterans understand the larger picture.
It is also why Reckner starts every conference with a stern warning.
"We must have a civil tone," he says. "We will not have shouting. Some of these issues, after 30 years, remain intensely emotional. But we do not gain anything by shouting."
High-level diplomats from Vietnam, including the deputy foreign minister, canceled their appearances a few days ago, a disappointment to many of the conference participants.
What participants got on the first day was the view of the last 10 years from the American side, including from Burghardt, current Ambassador Michael Marine and four Pentagon officials who work to find and identify the 1,836 servicemen still listed as missing in action from the war.
Relations between the two countries, while initially driven only by the POW/MIA issue, now encompass a growing trade partnership, defense ties, U.S. corporate investment, humanitarian aid for HIV prevention and law enforcement cooperation. The Navy, as of last year, even docks warships in Vietnam.
Although the U.S. government has concerns about human-rights violations and bureaucratic corruption, Marine said, "the U.S.-Vietnam relationship has developed in ways that many pundits considered highly unlikely, perhaps impossible."
The impetus for the radical change in the attitudes of Vietnamese officials, Burghardt said, is their recent concern over the growing power of China.
"There's still a lot of fear of the outside world by the Vietnamese leadership, but they realized the only way they were going to hold on to power was to open up economically," he said.
Han Nguyen, a legal assistant in Dallas who spent seven years in a communist prison camp, said emotions run high among Vietnamese-Americans for whom "the war hasn't ended yet in their minds."
"But we believe the best benefit for the Vietnamese people is for Vietnam to have a relationship with the United States," he said.
Reckner, 64, a Vietnam veteran who served in the same kind of riverboat unit that Kerry did, founded the Vietnam Center in 1989, motivated by frustration that college students seemed to know so little about a pivotal time in U.S. history.
The center houses the largest archive of Vietnam War-related material outside the U.S. government and has established the Virtual Vietnam Archive, an online database with more than 2 million pages of documents, photographs, maps and oral histories.
© 2005, Fort Worth Star-Telegram