Dinner with Two Colonels

Ho Chi Minh City, 2000. Last night of a ten-day return trip. I’d decided it would be the best one.

Dinner with two Viet Cong colonels. Survivors. For men who fought what they fought, surviving without a crippling wound was its own medal.

Both had fought in Cu Chi and Tay Ninh Provinces. Both were still nationalists, and neither apologized for it. The senior colonel had fought on Nui Ba Den in 1968 and 1969, a young lieutenant then. He couldn’t recall the exact dates. I had our interpreter press him twice more over the evening. Too many years had passed — or he didn’t want to remember. I watched his face. Couldn’t tell which. Maybe both.

I wanted him to have been my adversary on June 16, 1969. I wanted the man across the table to be the one whose decisions killed four of mine. I don’t know what I thought that would give me. An answer, maybe. A face to put on the day. But he looked frail. Pushing a dying man to relive his worst hour so I could feel something wasn’t a trade I was willing to make. I let it go.

Neither colonel spoke English. Both were fluent in French — a small irony nobody mentioned. I sat next to the older one, our interpreter across the table. Before dinner, the group agreed I’d take the hot seat. I had the most questions and the least sense to keep them to myself.

We opened with toasts. Old enemies raising glasses. The senior colonel said it was an honor to sit among men who’d fought for what they believed in, and that he hoped we’d led good lives since. Simple. Gracious. I believed him.

Dinner was excellent, with drinks on both sides of the table. By the time I started my questions, everyone was loose enough to talk.

I asked how long they’d been away from their families during the war. The younger colonel said nine years. The senior colonel said thirteen.

My jaw dropped. Thirteen years. What dedication to his cause.

Nobody at the table believed it. We had the interpreter repeat the question, sure something had gotten lost in translation. Nothing had. The senior colonel explained: he’d fought the Japanese in World War II, then the French after that. When the Americans came, he told his family he wouldn’t come home until every foreign army was gone and the country was whole, the way Ho Chi Minh had promised it would be. He’d meant it. Thirteen years meant it.

He stood. Took his time about it. Let his eyes move slowly around the room. Then he threw a question that stopped every conversation at the table cold.

“Do you all realize that your country could never have won the war?”

Another slow pass around the table with his eyes.

“Unless you killed every man, woman, and child in North Vietnam. Do you think your country could do that? I do not think so. Everyone knows America is a good country. But this time, your leaders picked the wrong cause.”

He wasn’t finished.

“Do you think your early colonials would have ever surrendered to the British? I think not.”

Then he said what I suspect he’d come to say all along. Thousands of lives, spent on both sides. Nobody had learned a thing from history.

I have never had trouble living with what I did in that war. I’d do it again tomorrow if my country asked. But his words followed me out of that restaurant and into the days after. For the first time in thirty years, I questioned not what I’d done, but what it had been for.

The next day, I put the question to a career brigadier general traveling with us. How does he answer when someone corners him on the morality of the war?

He didn’t hesitate. Never goes into detail, he said. Just tells them: “We got into the war for a worthy cause. But somewhere along the way, something went terribly wrong.”

Then the part he actually meant.

“If the listener has any brains, he knows what I mean.”