How do the Vietnamese feel about Americans and the war?
The only time the war came up at all was at the Cu Chi Tunnels War Memorial Theme Park and Shooting Range. (My renaming scheme.) A crazy percentage of the population is below 30, so they don’t remember the war. Vietnam is barreling towards Western style capitalist consumption at a breakneck pace, so I’m pretty confident they aren’t even thinking about “The American War” as it’s called there. You’re surrounded by a population of 20 somethings in t-shirts with bad English on them (I saw one girl in a pink “Brittney Spear” shirt), they’re wearing knock off Western brands – Dolce & Gabbana, Addidas, Nike, you name it, they’re toting cell phones and hauling flat screen TVs home on the backs of their scooters so they can watch MTV Asia… the war? I think it would be totally different if we’d had the chance to talk to anyone that had lived through the war. But everyone we encountered was young, young, young. I talked to a nice kid in a coffee place that was studying English and IT. I’m guessin
