...[Expatriate socialist entrepreneur Gerald] Herman introduced me to an artist named Tran Luong who is well known in Hanoi and was about to leave for New York, where he was to attend an exhibit of Vietnamese art at the Museum of Natural History. Luong is an eagle-eyed man just old enough to have been sent as a child to relatives in the countryside in order to escape American bombing. "I wasn't taught to hate Americans," he said. "I was only taught to hide. Even as kids running from bombs, sent away from our parents, my friends and I knew about the US peace movement. We knew there were Americans we could like. We felt you had bad leaders." According to Luong, the peace movement did give aid and comfort to the Vietnamese, just as its opponents charged, and did help sustain them under our bombardment. Two weeks later, after the invasion of Iraq began, I again heard from Vietnamese the excuse that Americans were good people who happened to have bad leaders. I wondered how long we can get away with that one.... *****
Peter Davis, "Dispatch From Vietnam," _The Nation_, April 14, 2003, <http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030414&s=davis>. -- Yoshie
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