Nah….I love my roots.

We were going to go to East Germany and look up some of our relatives when my parents came to England to see John and I in 1968. Unfortunately, that was right when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia and if we had crossed into East Germany, my Air Force husband would have had to go through a security clearance to get back to the West and we would all have had to give up our passports to get in and we refused to do that. It just wasn’t worth the hassle. So we never got to meet our German relatives.

Most of the time, after governments sign the peace treaties, the belligerent populations quickly bury the hatchet and resume normal trade and travel relations, especially when faced with a common threat, as did Western Europe after WWII.

If you watch movie and TV fiction about Viet Nam, it is often hard to discern who actually won from the story line. And of course, revision and history re-writing is rampant. To this day, writing on the subject often emphasizes what we “gained” from that unfortunate adventure instead of the pointless waste which was its true legacy; or obsesses about how we were “betrayed” and “stabbed in the back” by traitors.

To this day, the South is still fighting the Civil War over and over, playing “what if”, “if only” and the “blame game”, and whitewashing what happened, and why. Much the same happened in Germany after WWI, when the Germans were forced to accept a bitter and unfair peace even though their arms were never decisively defeated.

American domestic politics changed after Vietnam, too. It became more divisive, more ideological. It became more about ends than it did means. In some ways, we are still fighting that war, except we’re fighting it right here at home.

The Vietnamese now welcome normal relations, tourism and trade with the US. Hell, most of them weren’t even born when the war ended, and to them we were just one in a long string of enemies, the French, the Japanese, the French again, their own civil war against the South, and after the US left, the Chinese and the Cambodians. And their country has a long history of fighting off invaders, stretching back to the Bronze Age.

For us, it was a symbol of our decline, the big turning point in our history; which is nonsense, of course. Even the Romans at the height of their Empire got whupped occasionally by their enemies.

For them, it’s not a grudge thing or a personal vendetta, like it is with us. It’s over now. They got over it.

Besides, even if we suffered a tactical defeat, we can always claim a strategic victory: Asia did not become Communist. That was our stated reason for going there.

I don’t feel that way particularly about Japan. I look forward to going to Germany. Weird.