Posted on 08/17/2006 7:14:28 PM PDT by PghBaldy
A LARGE contingent of Vietnam veterans, some cheery, some gruff, some wary, many by turns all three, and all grieving to a degree, has returned today to mark the 40th anniversary of the battle of Long Tan, where 18 men of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment died in defeating a much larger Vietnamese force.
This is the event that, like Gallipoli and Kokoda, has become the symbol, the emotional touchstone, of a wretchedly long war.
Singer John Schumann, who wrote his song, I was only 19 - the unofficial anthem for veterans, who are mostly aged about 60 now - for his band Redgum in 1982, is in Vietnam for the first time this week.
He was due to sing it last night, and again tonight, to another warm but teary reception, in Vung Tau. This is the town nearest Long Tan, where many veterans have gathered, preparing themselves for a tough, sombre drive out today to the cross in the rubber plantation battlefield that marks holy ground to Australians.
Among them is Mick Storen, Schumann's brother-in-law, whose personal story the song tells: And there's me in my slouch hat with my SLR and greens, God help me ... He has this week returned for the first time to Vietnam.
Schumann, who opposed the war, and who almost defeated Foreign Minister Alexander Downer for the parliamentary seat of Mayo, when he stood as a Democrat in 1998, has stressed how wrong he feels it is to blame the soldiers sent by governments to fight for contentious causes.
That is the main message today, one around which all points of view appear to have finally coalesced. The federal Government, reinforcing this greater sense of acceptance, growing towards admiration, for Vietnam veterans, has deployed $4.5 million for commemorations of Long Tan day around the country, and at the site itself.
The ambassador to Vietnam, Bill Tweddell, has flown from Hanoi to participate in the ceremony today. He too will be meditating on the meaning of war and peace and loss. A schoolmate from Townsville Grammar, Malcolm McConachy, died in Vietnam. He was 21 years old.
Tweddell says: "The co-operation of the Vietnamese authorities in staging (today's) modest, but we hope evocative, service is part of the process of healing and reconstruction, and development of a relationship of trust and mutual respect."
The respect from their fellow Australians may have come too late for some, who for decades have suffered stress disorders exacerbated by the enmity with which they were greeted when they returned from their Vietnam tours of duty.
But most of those who fought at Long Tan and survived are finding themselves, at last, being feted at their nearest commemorations around Australia.
A steadily growing number of veterans are finding unexpected peace and self-respect back in Vietnam. Sixteen such Australians, who are mostly living within new extended Vietnamese families, now call Vung Tau home.
The town, developed by the French colonists as a Riviera-style beach resort, is popular for holidays for the burgeoning middle class of Ho Chi Minh City - which most Vietnamese still call Saigon - only two hours' drive away, or just over an hour's hydrofoil ride down the Mekong river.
It is also a fishing centre, and a servicing hub for Vietnam's oil and gas fields 70km offshore. This brings international customers to help sustain, between Anzac and Long Tan anniversaries, the Ned Kelly Eureka Inn, run by Alan Davis, the last governor of Melbourne's Jika Jika detention unit, and its new Aussie rival, the Waltzing Matilda bar, which opened on Monday.
BlueScope Steel has recently built a $160 million plant less than an hour's drive away. Many of the town's 220,000 inhabitants, more than eight times the total at the time of Long Tan, have migrated from the north of the country, including those given land by a grateful government for fighting against the capitalist south.
Among those whose families came down from the north after the fighting ended in 1975 is Thanh Hung Nguyen, aged 37, who says: "People don't talk about the war. They're too busy making money. It's a good life now, and they forget the past."
It's hard for the veterans to do that, especially those who have never returned to Vietnam. But they are likely to find, on visiting the country, an acceptance that reflects both its Buddhist heritage and the focus on commercial opportunities that has become ever sharper since doi moi, the economic reform process, began 20 years ago.
Half the population is under 25. These people were born years after the war ended and their elders are relishing the first extended period of peace and prosperity that Vietnam has enjoyed for generations.
Tweddell says the future of the relationship is bright. Australia established formal relations with Hanoi in 1973, giving the country a 22-year start on the Americans.
Vietnam is Australia's fourth biggest aid target, after Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Solomon Islands. Last year, Australia was Vietnam's fourth export destination, thanks chiefly to $2.8 billion crude oil sales.
Michael Mann, a former ambassador, is now running Vietnam's first foreign campus, for Melbourne's RMIT University, in Ho Chi Minh City.
While the Vietnamese find Australia's continuing fixation on the war somewhat baffling, they have steadily, if only after patient persuasion, agreed to permit commemorations at Long Tan - and a permanent cross, though there can be no medals worn today, nor a last post sounded that might arouse too many painful echoes.
The only other place where a foreign country is allowed to mark a military action, is Dien Bien Phu, where the French defeat precipitated their departure. The Americans have no similar marker anywhere.
About 200,000 people of Vietnamese origin are living in Australia today. Nguyen is the most common family name in the phone books of many cities. The immigrants are overwhelmingly from the defeated, capitalist south of the country, and they arouse wariness in the Hanoi government, but they have for years also been rebuilding links with the old country, through their extended families and through business arrangements.
Fundamentally, Tweddell says, "this is a country Australians feel they know about". And Vietnamese feel they know, and generally like, Australians.
For many Australians - both those who fought in the war, and those who criticised them when they returned - it is only now, through dignified and heartfelt commemorations around the country and in Vietnam, that they are able to start healing those wounds that divided their nation and damaged the veterans' morale as much as anything that happened to them in Vietnam.
But most Vietnamese, whose war of independence was also a civil war, have simply closed the door on that prolonged period of agony, and are able to move on because they have a massive project to occupy them: building a modern economy.
The new Vietnamese battlefield is the struggle for new investments, and new markets for their products. Some manufacturers have shifted there in the past couple of years from China, in part because of the trade wars that increasingly threaten Chinese exports, especially of clothing and footwear, to the US and Europe.
They mostly tolerate the continuing Australian angst about what happened here 40 years ago in their patient, gracious manner. But top of the Vietnamese wish list for the relationship right now would instead be investment to create jobs for their 19-year-olds whose own futures hang in the balance.
We Americans have much in common with the Australians...and that is a good thing, in my opinion. THANK GOD FOR THE AUSSIES!
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THANK GOD FOR THE AUSSIES!
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That needs repeating:
THANK GOD FOR THE AUSSIES!
"It is easy to forget Australia also fought in Vietnam. God Bless Australia."
The Aussies always send Aussome forces!! Here's a toast to the Aussies!
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