Journalism: David Lamb's Vietnam, Now: A Reporter Returns may provide answers to the many questions which may have hindered attempts to reach a final understanding of the Vietnam War and may indeed find a sort of closure which also leaves room for hope writes Joe Culley.
It has been that long. Twenty-seven years ago, the last choppers struggled to lift off from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon, overloaded with passengers and locked in the desperate grip of the abandoned. In a chopper's door, a burly, middle-aged embassy official with a blacksmith's forearms crashes his fist into the face of a young Vietnamese clinging to the craft's landing skids. The young man slips, the chopper lists and then pulls above the chaos and away to the sanctuary of a carrier in the South China Sea. And that, for most of us, was that: the end of Vietnam.
Khe Sahn, Da Nang, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Hue (or, as it invariably appeared in wire copy, "the ancient walled city of Hue"): these are the familiar places of the war. But for those of a certain age, say late 40s to early 60s, "Vietnam" defines more than a war, more than a country: it is an era. It is a coming of age - particularly in the US, but also in much of the Western world - which encompasses everything from civil rights activism (blacks in America, Catholics in the North, the people of Czechoslovakia), to free love, political assassination, women's lib, lots of dope, the moonwalk, Janis Joplin and Watergate. It changed the relationship between the media and government, between the people and their politicians.
David Lamb, a respected Los Angeles Times correspondent, first went to Vietnam in 1968 to cover the war for UPI. He lasted two years, and was glad to see the back of the place. But in 1997, he moved with his wife to Hanoi to establish a bureau for the Times. Vietnam, Now is a concise, understated distillation of what Lamb learned during his four-year sojourn in a country he quickly came to consider home. It is like a book Conor O'Clery might have written, though Lamb's prose, his voice, are more subdued, less energised than O'Clery's. That's not to suggest it is dull - far from it. Just low-key.
The first phenomenon he encountered, and which he struggled to understand, is just how welcome he - and all Americans - are. He offers many explanations: history - the "American War" was just a blip in a 2,000-year history consumed with conflict; economics - Vietnam needs foreign investment; victory - the Vietnamese weren't haunted by the war because they had won it ("Perhaps humility belongs to the victors"); common bond - "rooted in the realisation that the war changed the US as much as it did Vietnam".
After the fall of Saigon, the government in Hanoi imposed a fiercely ideological and totalitarian regime. There was no genocide, as Pol Pot would institute a few years later in Cambodia. But intellectuals and many others thought to have been either collaborating with or contaminated by Western and capitalist evils were sent to "re-education" farms for years.
There followed more conflict - against China, an incursion into Cambodia. The decade or so following 1975 is referred to as the Dark Years. Indeed, "to this day Vietnamese in the South speak of the fall of Saigon as a milestone that divides everything in life into two eras, 'before '75' and 'after 75'."
In 1986, following in the footsteps of their sponsors the Soviet Union, the elderly politburo of Saigon experimented with their own form of perestroika, doi moi, or "economic renovation". Private enterprise was permitted, if not particularly encouraged, and foreign investment began to trickle in. Conditions for the populace improved remarkably, and by the mid-1990s, at the height of the Asian Tiger economic boom, Vietnam, North and South, was overrun by foreign entrepreneurs.
Of course, as quickly as they came, the investors abandoned their most grandiose projects when the Asian market crashed. But the Vietnamese have got a taste of the entrepreneurial ethic, and although the politburo has made some effort to shut off the tap of capitalism, it seems the current generation is determined not to return to the Dark Years.
There is much more to savour here, not least as Lamb always makes his point through the story of an individual. For those of a certain age, Lamb's work will provide answers to many questions which may have hindered attempts to reach a final understanding of the conflict, to find a sort of closure which also leaves room for hope.
Joe Culley is an Irish Times journalist
Vietnam, Now: A Reporter Returns. By David Lamb. Public
Affairs, 274pp. £18.99
Joe Culley