Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 27, 1993 TAG: 9301270314
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
NEW YEAR
SO TET, in these more normal times, is once again only a welcoming of the new year, a time of renewal and reunion.For 25 years, "Tet" mostly has been shorthand for the "Tet offensive" in the forums where U.S. policy is debated. There is something melancholy and jarring about the news stories of this past weekend's celebrations in Vietnam and Vietnamese communities in this country.
Tet: the Communist offensive against 30 cities in South Vietnam in 1968. Tet: a three-day Asian festival celebrating the arrival of the lunar new year. The two seem sadly incongruous.
The year of the Tet offensive was the year that marked the United States' longest involvement in a war. The offensive itself was fought back militarily, but proved a political defeat.
After Tet, there was growing frustration in this country, growing fear - when would the killing and dying end? Far from a holiday, Tet was an attack linked in the American mind not only to the painful losses we and our South Vietnamese allies suffered, but to the growing divisions in this country over the course and merits of the war.
So there is a certain sense of strangeness in seeing these celebrations of Tet, an air of unreality. But there is also a cause for hope.
Next to our memories of the waves of desperate boat people pouring out of Vietnam in the 1970s, there now are images of refugees flying back - from the United States, from Canada, from France - tens of thousands going home to celebrate Tet with relatives long left behind.
Vietnam has been working to rebuild since Communist victory ended the war in 1975. Now, says one adviser to the Vietnamese government, it wants "to let bygones be bygones."
That is a lot for a poor and struggling nation to ask of a rich and powerful one that it defeated in war - too much until the United States has as full an accounting as possible of servicemen who have not come home. But Vietnam seems to want normal relations with the United States as urgently as we want to lay to rest our last fears for the Americans who fought there.
In this season of renewal and reunion, it is not naive to hope we might win the peace. After all, Tet isn't really an offensive, but a holiday. And Vietnam, one day, will again be not a war that defeated and divided America, but a beautiful country in Indochina.