If Americans have done their best to forget the war in Vietnam, so have the Vietnamese. Many young Vietnamese told me they have very little concept of the war at all, preferring to think instead of the future they are making and of friendly relations with the United States. An undercurrent among Vietnamese journalists and intellectuals, however, is directed toward keeping memories alive. One morning Gerry Herman showed me two documentary films made recently by Vietnamese filmmakers.

The first film, dealing with Agent Orange, was titled Where War Has Passed: The Legacy of Agent Orange. A mother is onscreen telling of being in a field sprayed with Agent Orange and giving birth, long after the war, to five children, who are filmed with her. Not one of them can see. Three of the children are not only blind but have no eyes at all; flaps of skin are on their foreheads where eyes are supposed to be. According to the film, 2 million Vietnamese are victims of Agent Orange, half a million of them children. The second film, called Deadly Debris, was about landmines. The narrator says 15 million tons of explosives were either dropped on Vietnam or placed in its soil. Children are shown without limbs, lost when they stepped on landmines or previously unexploded bombs. As recently as 1997, seven children were killed when one of them touched a bomb and it exploded. The living children shown have shrapnel in their chests, heads, abdomen, eyes and lungs. All of them, the narrator says, "were born when the war had been over" for ten to fifteen years. These films are not marginal, anti-American diatribes; they were supported by Catholic Relief, Oxfam, the Quakers and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation.

That evening, my own film about the war, Hearts and Minds, was screened for several dozen people, including eight Vietnamese, in a large office. According to members of the film community in Hanoi, the documentary had never been shown in their country. It was my turn to be ambivalent. I wanted the film shown yet was afraid the Vietnamese wouldn't like it. Every time a Vietnamese was shown, I worried whether he or she would be seen only as a victim. A coffin maker, a Catholic priest and a Buddhist monk--each defiant, proclaiming Vietnamese independence--were reassuring, but then there were children and the elderly made homeless by our bombing, sometimes running from a new attack, all those refugees, all the wounded, the dead.

A Vietnamese man with stern features walked out, wordless, at the end of the screening. A 50-year-old Vietnamese woman rose from her seat, crying. "Seeing your movie," she sobbed, "I hate Americans again. I was a child running, one of those children running from your bombs. My sister and my mother and I all ran, and I got away. My sister and my mother were killed." But when the woman composed herself and went on speaking, she addressed everyone at the screening. "No, I don't hate Americans, all of you in this room are my friends, friends to the Vietnamese people." She turned to me. "Being American you have the freedom to do what you want," she said, "so do you think you could get President Bush to give two hours to watch this film and then he would think again about what he is doing and stop his war ways?"

As if.

Some days later, Tran Dac Loi, secretary general of the Vietnamese Union of Friendship Organizations (VUFO), the stern-faced man who had left the screening, asked if I would come to see him. With an almost severe concentration, he spoke to me as though he were trying to reach everyone in the United States. It turned out that despite his speedy exit he hadn't been offended by my film, but he did want to talk about Vietnam today. "See us with our achievements and also our problems," he said. "We think it's possible to have socialism within a market economy, but we are not there yet. Here is our biggest problem--how to find a model for development not dictated by business, which means also how to have elections not influenced by money, to find solutions to our social problems without elevating part of the population over everyone else. We don't have enough democratization in Vietnam and we want more, yet we also can't afford to create chaos. Our political system is not satisfactory yet, but we're working on it. We're in a truly dynamic process of development."

What Loi said confirmed what I'd been able to observe and hear elsewhere. This is not a country looking for its soul--it has had that for a long time--but searching instead for a way to be its best self and for the most congenial method of living in a world dominated by the United States. "We tried the model of the Soviet Union," Loi said, "and it didn't work. Education and medical care were free, but so little was achieved. We had to start over, and everything was costly. Now we have succeeded in making primary education free, but secondary education is not yet completely free even though the fees are small, and we have to improve that. Medical care is better, but it is still not guaranteed for the poor, and we're working on that, too."

The last place I visited in Hanoi was the Temple of Literature, a famous compound dedicated to learning in the middle of the city yet protected from it, and quiet. Literally, a retreat. It was a relief to be reminded that contemplation is perhaps the most beautiful of human endeavors, the paradox being that it is also invisible, like peace.

I had been tracking a group of traveling Americans who were not exactly tourists yet not quite a delegation, and I caught up with them in Hue. Sons and Daughters in Touch, as they are known, had approximately sixty-five out of their total membership of more than 2,000 fanning out in teams around Vietnam to the exact spots where their fathers had died during the Vietnam War. Some would call this a morbid errand, but to the Sons and Daughters, most of whom were very young when their fathers went to Vietnam, the journey had taken on the mystique of a mission.

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