In Viet Nam, the sacrifice and sadness seem always to come wholesale. During the ten years of war with the U.S., 1.5 million Vietnamese were killed. In the decade since the Communists took over, another million have fled the country, sneaking through the bush to Thailand via Laos and Kampuchea, or huddling in boats headed into the treacherous South China Sea. Viet Nam is now quiet and bucolic, the battlefields lush once again. But it is also an anxious, impoverished country, more than a little grim: the terrible random death of war has been replaced by the mean certainties of a...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
