Falling slowly for the first time over the vast expanse of Vietnam's Red River delta in April feels like landing on the moon. The craters that pockmark its emerald rice fields spoil the delta's beauty and raise questions as to what, on earth, the Americans were bombing there between 1965 and 1968, and again in 1972. Mice could not hide in this flat, triangular patchwork which supports, reluctantly, over 14 million souls.

My anxiety was a case of too much reading, too much television. During the bumpy, zigzagging, one-hour drive to the capital, my complement revealed a people attached to French culture, grateful for the pretty villas built by the colonialists, eager to get out of the Kampuchean imbroglio, stop erecting those Russian-style buildings that, even when finished, look under construction, take their place in the world.

At the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Industry a slight man with bright eyes, born like Ho Chi Minh in that central province of Nghe Tinh which, much as Scotland, grows men if little else, caught my attention: "You go to discos, yes? We have many discos in Saigon!", prodding me with his elbow all the while to get the measure of this incongruously skinny foreigner. Later, at a well-drilling company, I was shown twenty-five years old rigs, treated to a meal that could have fed twenty and informed in passing of how many engineers and workers had been killed during the bombing raids.

The opening lines of a country report, suitably equivocal yet assertive in its implications, flashed in my head: "Attempts to restore the Vietnamese economy, which has suffered severe disruption and one of the most destructive wars of the Twentieth Century, must perforce be viewed within the context of the urgent need to develop the agricultural sector, more specifically food production."

Yes, perhaps. But what disruption? For it is evident in retrospect that much of it, from 1976 onwards, was self-inflicted. By the end of the Vietnam War the West had accepted this country's right to independence and was ready, with a "fair play" that will be judged farcical given the slaughter and the length of the fight, to assist it on the road to development. Why then did Vietnam turn to the Soviet Union, with which it had no historical links, and contest with the People's Republic of China and the United States and Indochinese supremacy that could only be short-lived and, at best fruitless?

Western diplomacy can be blamed but guilt hangs heavy on Vietnamese leadership for making the country politically and economically, if not militarily, dependent on a Soviet Union whose political and ideological challenge to capitalism and democracy was already clearly bankrupt. Vietnam's continuing alienation stems from its late 1978 invasion of Kampuchea, itself conditioned, perhaps, by endless conflict and the resulting war mentality. I met an official who argued, with an understandable if fearful slip of the tongue, that the Ministry of Energy needed foreign aid to build a new workshop to produce more weapons.

Is grief enough for a country at war with itself or others, which has achieved a laudable record in education and health but which cannot provide work for or feed its inhabitants? And what of that bizarre whisper, surely born of despair, that all might have been well had the French never left?

There is a lesson here for our visionaries, for those who manipulate religion and scheme to fabricate an earthly paradise for those of little faith, for those of little faith who believe that manufactured religions will resolve all problems. The Vietnamese, I am told, aspire to live in a French villa, eat Chinese cuisine and marry a dutiful Japanese wife. Quite distinct, so it seems, from the ideals of Socialist Transformation and Socialist Construction. This should remind us of what we are prone to forget, namely, that the only role of human government in peacetime is to try to provide those in whose trust it is held the welfare they hope for.

And as for human government in wartime, well, one does see that Vietnam has had enough of that. Which should remind us of the poem that depicts a young girl holding a bouquet of flowers for the victor expected to return from the front, turning old with the years, waiting still by the road. (1989)

Copyright ©2002 Olivier Serrat
of mice, men, and vietnam