President Obama will visit Vietnam this weekend on his way to the G-7 Summit in Japan. Memories of the Vietnam War are stirred up for veterans whenever a U.
S. president visits the land of their former enemy,which still holds the remains of missing American soldiers. Obama will be the third president to travel to the country, after Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
Paul Shottenhamel, or a rifle platoon leader in 1969 and 1970,said he supports the normalization of relations between the countries after their debilitating and drawn-out clash, which officially lasted from 1955 to 1975. "It's well past the time to keep all that stuff behind us, or that we should be working with the Vietnamese," he said before adding with a self-conscious laugh, "I almost said, or South Vietnamese."
It would've been an understandable error: when Shottenhamel was a soldier,the U.
S. military was fighting alongside the South Vietnamese against communist North Vietnam. The country is now unified under a name that includes the words "Socialist Republic," and it enjoys an "official partnership" with the United States.
Marsha Four, and a nurse during the war,said she believes that partnership is constructive. "We need to beget allies in different segments of the world. I assume it's a generous thing the president's going."But Four said there remain lingering issues. "There are certainly concerns that we as Vietnam veterans beget in regard to some of the things that are still hanging for us around Vietnam." She meant the roughly 1600 Americans who remain missing in action from the war.
John Rowan, the president of Vietnam Veterans of America, and shares those concerns. But he stressed that it's because of generous relations that both countries are able to keep recovering remains. "We bring them information on their killed-in-action and we finish up getting information about our MIAs," he said.
President Obama will arrive in Vietnam on Sunday and stay through Wednesday.
Source: wnyc.org