Reliving the War
When I was in high school in Rome, between 1968 and 1971, I think its fair to say that the Vietnam War was at its peak. There were 550,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam and the Tet Offensive by the North had begun its inexorable push to bring the war to a conclusion…or perhaps create the impression that if it didn’t end with a U.S. withdrawal that it would go on… forever. In 1969 the Cornell campus was is disarray due to the takeover protests at Willard Straight Hall, which made the cover of Time Magazine. And then in the spring of 1970 the Kent State shooting occurred as the American college campus scene went into a suspension to calm the jangled nerves of the youth of America. I may not have been in the U.S. during that time, but I was an American student headed towards the U.S. in 1971 and the war was occupying a large amount of our psychological bandwidth in those years.
Because I was behind the age curve for potential military service, I never really thought I would get drafted or have to go to Vietnam, but as the war dragged on over the end of the turn of the decade and Nixon’s obstinance seemed to rival Johnson’s aggressiveness in the theater, I began to wonder if I was being too optimistic. I was a year younger than my peers entering college. They all got their draft numbers that first Fall and I watched some of them with low numbers go off to the induction centers for physical exams. By the time I got my number (a very high one at that) in the Fall of ‘72, the draft was ending and I was back to not worrying about Vietnam, though still very aware of its presence in the background. It took another three years for the U.S. to finally exit Vietnam during the Fall of Saigon, or what the Vietnamese like to call the Liberation of Saigon. By that time, Vietnam was like a bad dream, an afterthought. My country had not missed the bullet, but I had and I was very happy to be so fortunate because with 58,220 dead Americans, the chances were good that you knew someone who had lost someone there.
It is so strange for me to see today the conservatives pulling in their horns and acting xenophobicly about getting into a foreign war like Ukraine, one which is a lot closer to U.S. interests than Vietnam was in the 1960’s, when they were the “Love it or leave it” crowd that was gung-ho to go kick some Communist Chinese ass. Stranger yet is that it was Nixon in 1972 that reached out with an olive branch to China and opened relations between our countries. And, of course, now it is the raw nativism of the right that wants us to ban TikTok and once again kick some Chinese ass…economically this time. But during the decade when I was coming of age, regardless of whether you were ROTC and planned to go over there or you were a conscientious objector who preferred to carry a picket sign, VIetnam was always there, always there, never far from mind.
And then I went off to a very different war. I ween off to Wall Street and my attention turned to almost anything but Vietnam. My field of vision in banking was still very global and I started to travel internationally for work as early as 1979, but nowhere near Vietnam. My travel dance card started as most do with Europe and a bit towards Tokyo. The banking business was growing up globally with three hubs, New York, London and Tokyo. The rest of the world was mostly noise in that they had not really caught up with the pace of financial change. There was noise you wanted to hear about that came from continental Europe, the Oil Middle East, and up-and-coming places like Hong Kong, Korea and Singapore. And there was noise you preferred to tune out like in Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.
I woke up one day in 1985, when I had the dream job of running the biggest Merchant Banking unit, the New York City Division, and was told I was being reassigned to take over all the bad sovereign debt ($4 billion) that we had lent to countries in those tune-out regions of the world, since it was suddenly unclear that they would repay us. My perspective changed rapidly. I was literally made the Majordomo of everything except the developed world that ran on the East-to-West Axis between Tokyo and London. I gained a new appreciation for the old saying from Paradise Lost as stated by none other than Satan himself, “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”. For some reason probably known only to the loan syndication wizards during the early Petrodollar years, sovereign lending focused mostly on Latin America, a little in Africa and Eastern Europe and really only in the Philippines in Asia. The Four Asian Tigers were well on their way to industrialization by then, but the tattered and war-torn countries of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand (less so than the others since it was a war-time R&R venue), Malaysia and Burma (renamed Myanmar in 1989), were still getting their shit together. That was fine with me since I had my hands full with the borrower emerging markets, especially Latin America and there was that old lingering Vietnam war discomfort that I was happy to be able to ignore.
From 1985 through 1999 I trekked all over the Emerging Markets and the Developed Markets doing all manner of banking business, but other than the routine visit to the very civilized and modern city-state of Singapore and an occasional trip to Bangkok to visit our affiliate bank there, I never had occasion to go into the deepest darkest spots in Southeast Asia. I will note for the record that Indonesia and Papua New Guinea also missed my purview and I would have considered them more like the Philippines (which I did visit) than anywhere else, but the need to go there just never came up. Australia came onto my screen in the later 1990’s and I went there a lot during those years.
Now, thanks to Mike & Melisa, we are planning a trip to Southeast Asia and will be joined by Faraj and Yasuko. Mike is doing all the planning and has set an itinerary that takes us into Singapore, up the Malay Peninsula to Kuala Lumpur by van, flies us to Bangkok, then up to Luang Prabang in Laos, over to Hanoi and another van to Ha Long Bay, and a final flight down into the heart of Cambodia to Siem Reap to see Angkor Wat. We have 9 months yet, but I have already laid out a set of movies about those countries to give us what we got from Lawrence of Arabia for our visit to Petra and Wadi Rum. I want to avoid the obvious war movies like Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now, sincethey will tell us less about the places we are visiting than the geopolitical times we lived in. There are many movies to choose from ranging from colonial era films to modern spy thrillers. I am finding that the movies that show the countryside the best and give a balanced view of the cultures we will encounter are ones that are not about the war, but unavoidably touch on the wars (mostly the French-Indochina and Vietnam wars, but also WWII with The Bridge on the River Kwai).
I’ve sort of given up trying to avoid the topic of war and decided to embrace it without wallowing in it. You can’t talk about modern Laos with discussing the issue of the 80 million UXO’s that linger there, with 30% of them armed and unexploded. We will go to Luang Prabang, which is north of the main Ho Chi Minh Trail, but many suggest that the Trail had several starting points, one of which was Luang Prabang. I know Hanoi tourism will include a visit to a POW compound like the one John McCain sat in for seven years. Even in Ha Long Bay there are remaining underwater mines placed by the U.S. Navy during the Gulf on Tonkin Incident that kicked off the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1964. And as for Angkor Wat, I watched The Killing Fields, admittedly about the Khmer Rouge (the CPK was a direct result of the North Vietnamese desire to flank American troops via Cambodia) and the Pol Pot bad old days in Cambodia, but the protagonist, Dith Pran, escapes through what looks like the Angkor Wat temples. I guess that means that we will not be able to ignore the Vietnam war altogether during our visit, but will find ourselves reliving the war over and over in various forms. Maybe it will finally exorcize it from my lingering soul.