In my first couple of months at the University of Missouri, I was quickly indoctrinated into the Missouri/Kansas rivalry. Although most of the rivalry is now just good-hearted sports competition, when I set foot in Lawrence for the yearly football game, I was reminded that there’s far more history between the schools than just football and basketball. Making my way into kU’s Memorial Stadium, we were accosted by little blue and red brats who snatched every piece of MU gear from us that they could…but they were nothing compared to the woman I met moments later. This 90ish-year-old woman (I’m not exaggerating) started yelling at us in the worst profanities possible, and she definitely wasn’t just talking smack about our quarterback. I couldn’t believe this woman, who was older than my grandma, could have such a foul vocabulary and such hatred for us Missourians. But she did.
When I later reflected on that experience, I realized that this woman grew up back when the rivalry was fresh. Although she had missed being born during the Civil War, she likely would’ve heard about the pre-war border battles throughout her childhood. (The MU/kU rivalry is rooted in the fact that Missouri was a slave state and Kansas was a free state and there were many attacks on each others’ soil — including the university cities…both universities’ mascots are named from their city’s actions before the Civil War — Columbians defending themselves from the free-state attacks called themselves Tigers, and the attackers from Lawrence were called Jayhawks because they were thieves, looters, and general ruffians) And so, although my first trip to Kansas in 1999 was more than 100 years after the end of the Civil War (in which both states had been in the Union), it seems it was a war that not all have forgotten.
Although this was a rare incidence in the Midwest, there are other Civil War memories living on in other parts of the States. Head up into any of the large northern cities, and you’d best never be wearing a Confederate flag…even as a “souvenir.” Or just try roaming through Georgia and the Carolinas spouting off how brilliant a man William Tecumseh Sherman was. Not wise, my friend.
So what does this have to do with my travels? Well, as I made my way through Vietnam, the locals all tried to reassure me that the war was over. It was history. All’s well. “We’re friendly now,” said Binh, the guide I had for the Cu Chi Tunnels. They all seem to want to forget the war (except to make money from it). But as I saw reminder after reminder of the war, I can’t believe it’s becoming a foggy memory. The accounts of the violence of the 60s and 70s aren’t hiding themselves anywhere, and there is still so much evidence of the north/south division in mindset.
The pictures throughout this post are photos I took in the north to send back to an ex-coworker who wanted to see what I’d see in his home country. This Vietnamese man had grown up in his country’s south and had never seen the north. I don’t know if he ever will, either. As with many southerners, a trip to Hanoi is still a political statement they aren’t eager to make. So seeing Hoan Kiem Lake or Ha Long Bay, isn’t something that they’re going to do.
Because try as we might, people don’t forget.
For me, that was why I felt I had to go to Vietnam. It was a place that my father had been, years ago…more than a decade before my birth and adoption, but it was a place that I can’t help but believe was a huge part in shaping the man I love and admire today. And it is his reluctance to remember that made me want to know. It was his avoidance of ever talking about the War that made me not talk to my parents for weeks, just so I wouldn’t have to tell them where I was. And it was my sadness for what he involuntarily saw and endured there that left me blinking back tears for the two hours I sat in the airport waiting to fly into Hanoi. And although I know I was probably more emotional than others, I know I’m not alone in wanting to remember. In Hanoi, I met an American guy whose grandfather was killed here; in Saigon, my American roommate’s father too was in the war and refused to talk about it. And at the Tunnels, an American veteran joined our tour as well. We were all there to remember or try to know why someone doesn’t want to remember.
And so, I don’t think we humans ever forget. We try. But sometimes that only makes the memories linger on beyond ourselves.
And try as Binh does, he can’t forget either. With the war 30 years in his past, he still drinks himself to sleep every night. He tries to erase the memories of the dead American soldiers whose first dog tag he slipped into their mouthes and the second he pocketed to send back to their families in the USA. But still he sees them. Alcohol only lasts for a while. When he’s awake the memories are there, and so fresh he can still sing along to the words of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” listened to by the American soldiers during the war.
And will his son, who never lived through the war, forget? Can he forget that his father saw more violence at age 18 than we will ever see in our lifetime? Can he forget that his father was sent away to a re-unification/re-education camp and used as a human land-mine clearing tool for years, only to return to his now-motherless family? Can he forget that, because of his southern ties, the only job his father could later get was as a tour guide…and was therefore daily forced to relive the horrors of war while laughing tourists pay a few dong to shoot machine guns off into the forest? I doubt it. And even though Binh tells me he never has talked to his son about the war, I’m sure his son will still remember it. And like some generations of Americans have carried scars from the 1800s, I’m sure many Vietnamese (and Americans) will bear these for years, too.
So it was for Binh, his son, my father, and everyone else who bears this history that I couldn’t forget or blink back my sadness anymore but wiped away tear after tear as I rode a bus out of Vietnam.
