[nasional_list] [ppiindia] Tet and remembrance of the dead New Feature

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Tet and remembrance of the dead New Feature

 Brennon Jones International Herald Tribune 
 Monday, February 28, 2005

Vietnam II 

HO CHI MINH CITY The end of April marks the 30th anniversary of America's 
defeat in Vietnam, and many U.S. veterans are expected to return there, heads 
filled with memories of the war and, undoubtedly, of former comrades killed or 
lost in action. 
.
The Vietnamese pay special respect to their own dead on Tet, the Lunar New 
Year, which fell earlier this month. Finally, after three long decades, this 
year's holiday saw an increase in the honoring of South Vietnamese soldiers who 
died in the war fighting alongside U.S. forces. 
.
In the "dark years" after the Communist victory, the Vietnamese government 
dismissed such dead combatants as puppets of the former Saigon regime. While 
elaborate cemeteries were built to honor Communist soldiers, the South 
Vietnamese dead were accorded pariah status. Their cemeteries were neglected, 
dishonored, sealed off or built over. 
.
For many years, most relatives of dead South Vietnamese soldiers made little 
effort to visit their graves. Large numbers were "Viet Kieu," Vietnamese who 
fled into exile after the fall. But even those who stayed kept away, to avoid 
being tainted in the eyes of Hanoi officials. Besides, with the Vietnamese 
economy in shambles, most were too poor to travel to distant cemeteries or to 
pay to maintain the graves. 
.
One wholesale casualty was the old military cemetery in Go Vap, a northern 
Saigon district. It was turned into an industrial park. Another was Mac Dinh 
Chi, the bucolic European cemetery in the heart of Saigon. It had been the 
resting place not just of French colonialists and their Vietnamese supporters, 
but of Ngo Dinh Diem, the onetime South Vietnamese president, his scheming 
brother, Ngo Dinh Dzu, and even François Sully, the French correspondent who 
wrote for Time magazine. It is now a park and playground. 
.
The former national military cemetery in Bien Hoa is the one that is seared 
into my own memory. Created in the mid-1960s, it is the resting place for 
thousands of South Vietnamese soldiers killed in the latter phase of the war. 
As part of the crew for the documentary "Hearts and Minds," I visited it in 
1972. We filmed the shattered bodies of young soldiers in the cemetery's 
morgue, and long rows of hollow graves waiting to be filled with what seemed an 
endless stream of arriving dead. We also documented one family's anguish as it 
buried one of its own. 
.
The experience has haunted me ever since, and after I began returning to 
Vietnam several years ago, I revisited that cemetery. The first time, in late 
2002, I was shocked at its condition. Cattle grazed in the high grass between 
shattered and neglected tombstones, and the narrow roadways between cemetery 
sections were being mined for soil by a nearby brick factory. 
.
In January, however, I discovered a remarkable transformation. With Tet 
approaching, countless graves were substantially rebuilt and freshly painted. 
New planting abounded. 
.
Local residents told me that Viet Kieu and other Vietnamese are increasingly 
arriving at the cemetery. They are more prosperous now, and they know that the 
Hanoi government in recent years has quietly taken an increasingly lenient 
approach toward the cemeteries of these former South Vietnamese soldiers. It's 
a promising start to what I hope will lead one day to full reconciliation. 
.
On a visit to Bien Hoa, I talked with the wife and daughter of Nguyen Hang Anh, 
a soldier who was killed in the Delta in 1974. Their home is in Quang Ngai 
Province, in far-off central Vietnam. This was their first opportunity in 31 
years to make what had previously been a prohibitively expensive trip to visit 
Anh's grave. "Until now, we have been too poor to travel here," his wife told 
me, as they bent over his grave burning a Tet offering to his spirit. It 
included an expensive new shirt and pants, still in their wrappings. 
.
Before I left the cemetery I gave some money to two old women, caretakers of 
the graves for relatives of the dead who can't make the trip to the cemetery 
themselves. I asked them to upgrade a few neglected graves on my behalf. "Chuc 
Mung Nam Moi," I said. "Happy New Year!" 
.
I meant it for those fallen South Vietnamese soldiers, may they rest in peace. 
But I also meant it for all those young Vietnamese, from the north and the 
south, who made the ultimate sacrifice, right or wrong, in a sad and tragic 
conflict. I hope come April 30, Americans will remember each and every one of 
them, just as we do our own. 
.
(Brennon Jones was a journalist and social worker in South Vietnam from 1969 to 
1971.) 

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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