The Pearl Harbor anniversary itself was marked by a Washington Post editorial noting that although Vietnam had made progress, "some MIA advocates" allege that it "is holding back remains." "It will take considerable openness on Hanoi's part and diligent investigation on Washington's to clear up this question," the editors sternly conclude. If the Vietnamese are willing to cooperate fully, we may allow them to join the world community, though we will never forgive them for the harm and pain they have inflicted upon us for over 40 years, any more than we can forget the Japanese infamy of just a few years earlier.³²

Turning again to the real world, it is largely US business interests that are complaining over the fanatical commitment to "bleed Vietnam"; they fear that they may be cut out of opportunities for profit by competitors abroad, that they may not get their "fair share of trade in Vietnam," as one executive puts it. These considerations do provide some reason to rethink our stand. We might relent, the press reports, if Vietnam agrees to two years of excavations, takes steps to open our way to Laos and Cambodia, promises to turn over any remains that may ever be found, and grants us "immediate access to the Vietnamese countryside" and to military archives; as the aggrieved party, we meanwhile confine Vietnamese diplomats at the UN to the immediate vicinity, and as for military archives, ...³³

"There are Vietnamese like Deputy Foreign Minister Le Mai, who `says he understands the need of the American government to convince the American people on the MIAs'," Greenway writes. "The Vietnamese also understand that the issue of missing Americans is the single greatest barrier to lifting the American-imposed trade embargo, establishing diplomatic relations with the US, and rejoining the world community." But, Greenway adds, "there are also Vietnamese who speak with great bitterness against what they see as America making a political issue of its own loss with a country that has 200,000 to 300,000 of its soldiers missing and unaccounted for." One Vietnamese war veteran suggests that Americans "come back and tell us where Vietnamese are buried." "What a task," Greenway writes from ample direct experience as a war correspondent, "recalling long-suppressed memories of bulldozers shoveling Vietnamese corpses into pits and helicopter sling loads, with arms and legs protruding from the mesh, being carted off to some unmarked grave."³⁴

Greenway deserves credit for this rare departure from the ranks, though we might take note of a few other problems that some might attribute to an agent who remains unnamed.

None of this, hardly a secret, stands in the way of allowing the US to "rejoin the world community," or calls for hansei -- whether "remorse" or even "self-reflection" -- not to speak of reparations for ghastly crimes.

Other voices are too faint to penetrate our orgy of self-pity over the abuse we suffer; for example, the surgeon who carried out a delicate operation in February 1990 to remove a US-made shell from the arm of one of the many victims killed or maimed by unexploded ordnance after the fighting ended. The miserable Commies were berated with much scorn when they released maps of mines in Afghanistan so that civilians could be protected from the deadly legacy of their aggression. There were no such denunciations of the United States, for a simple reason: Washington refused to provide mine maps to civilian mine-deactivation teams in Indochina. As a Pentagon spokesman explained, "people should not live in those areas. They know the problem." What is more, as a matter of elementary logic, no condemnation could be in order for seeding the countryside with mines or anti-personnel bomblets in "our excess of righteousness and disinterested benevolence."³⁵

Readers of the foreign press can hear the voice of 11-year-old Tran Viet Cuong in the city of Vinh -- which had the misfortune of being "cursed by location," as the Times thoughtfully explained (p. 242). His parents desperately want him to obtain an education, and since the town cannot afford schoolbooks, Tran must go without breakfast so that his parents can buy them (if he's lucky, his teacher will buy chalk out of a salary eked from two or three jobs). The local government also "cannot afford to repair many of the roads, hospitals and sewage drains destroyed 20 years ago by U.S. bombers," John Stackhouse reports from the shattered city. In 1991, the children's hospital was forced to close 50 of 250 beds and to ask patients to provide medicines. Doctors perform surgical operations on a table donated by Poland, largely without equipment. At the Vinh Medical Center, where the hospital's pharmacy remains "a pile of rubble," a doctor states the obvious: "the problems here are a consequence of the American war, and the embargo has made it worse."

The embargo, Stackhouse notes, has "isolated Vietnam internationally, cutting it off from trade and aid flows," blocking aid from development organizations where the US has "an effective veto," including the Manila-based Asian Development Bank, which is prepared to lend $300 million, including funds for an irrigation project that could increase farm yields by one-third. Though Vietnam undertook the structural adjustment programs required by the official lenders well before Eastern Europe, it cannot receive any of the low-cost World Bank funds designed to ease the severe impact, thanks to the stern US veto. The result is that child deaths are two to three times higher than in Bangladesh, and the education system, "which once produced an overwhelmingly literate population," has collapsed. Commercial banks and other donors and investors will not move until the US permits it, and foreign markets are largely closed, so there is no prospect for private sector jobs. Even a UNICEF appeal failed, because "No one wants to offend the U.S.," the director of UNICEF's Ho Chi Minh city office observes.³⁶

³² Editorial, WP weekly, Dec. 2-8, 1991.

³³ Barbara Crossette, NYT, March 31, 1992.

³⁴ Greenway, BG, Dec. 20, 1991.

³⁵ AP, March 14, 1990; NI, 35.

³⁶ John Stockhouse, G&M, June 12, 1992.