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Vietnam: the country, not the war  by Dick Peterson Public Relations The only Vietnam that Cindy Cupit Swenson, Ph.D., ever knew was served up nightly in 1970s TV news broadcasts. But an hour-and-a-half layover at Atlanta International Airport last year changed all that. Pete Peterson It was there that she ran into her former Florida State University supervisor and mentor, Douglas "Pete" Peterson, now America’s first post-war ambassador to America’s old enemy, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.  Cindy Swenson Swenson, an MUSC child psychologist, still beams from her two-week, late November visit to the Southeast Asian country. As she flips through clear plastic photo pages, each snapshot surfaces another story or observation about the people and culture she had just recently come to appreciate. “I hadn’t seen Pete for seven years, and running into each other during the flight layover gave us time to catch up,” Swenson said. What she caught was Peterson’s enthusiasm for the country he once bombed as a U.S. Air Force pilot, and at whose hands he suffered six years of isolation, torture and interrogation as a prisoner of war.  “He said I had to visit. I had to go to Vietnam. And he assured me that the people there held a positive view of Americans. They see Americans as a means to improve their lives.” Further inquiry led to an e-mail correspondence with Vietnam War veteran Max Moody, who for 11 years has been performing humanitarian work for the people he once fought.  Village children learn dance at Madame Vi’s center. “Max turned my vacation into a humanitarian mission, one of those life-changing experiences,” Swenson said. “He arranged for my husband and me to carry three boxes of children’s cough syrup, medical supplies and computers that had been donated to him in Florida. He introduced us by e-mail to Madame Tuong Vi who met us at customs in the Vietnam airport.” Madam Vi was the first Vietnamese woman Swenson met. A retired colonel in the North Vietnamese Army, Madame Vi is affiliated with the Vietnamese Red Cross. She is known throughout Vietnam as “The People’s Artist” for her singing and work as director of a community center that teaches performing arts to children in her village on the outskirts of Hanoi.  A health clinic in Madame Vi’s village on the outskirts of Hanoi serves people with basic health care needs, but operates with a constant shortage of equipment and supplies. She is working to expand the center to include a health clinic, a project they estimate to cost about $28,000. Swenson was pleased to have had the privilege of taking over the first computers for a children’s computer lab.  Madame Vi Madame Vi and her associates are grateful for any help they can get and welcome donations of medicines, medical equipment and other supplies to aid a terribly impoverished people. A physician in Madame Vi’s village met with Swenson and made her aware of the lack of even basic medical supplies that Americans might keep in their homes. For Swenson, as for most Americans, Vietnam was a war, not a country. The 1970s had painted a black-gray mental picture of a land of smoke and death. But that meeting in the airport customs office was her port-of-entry to a culture colored with real people.  “Most people there are too young to remember the war,” Swenson said. But she chafes at the “Hanoi Hilton” prison-now-museum where visitors are told that leg irons and torture devices on display there were used by the French on Vietnamese people when the country was a French colony. And they describe how well they treated the captured American pilots who were killing and oppressing them in return. Everybody has a job in Hanoi. This streetside vendor pumps bicycle and motorbike tires for a fee. But that’s government spin. Swenson found the people to be full of ambition, struggling against a repressive political system, but finding triumph in hard work, education and artistic expression. There’s not a person in Vietnam who doesn’t sell something, Swenson said as she recalled the ubiquitous urban street vendors. And traffic is so heavy and unregulated, foreign pedestrians need a Vietnamese guide to teach them to cross the street. Although they lack opportunity and remain impoverished by a wealthy and authoritarian government, she found them to be resourceful. “You’ll see whole families on a motor bike, and most people work dawn to dusk and then take classes to be better educated.” Swenson intends to maintain contact with people she came to know in Vietnam, and appeals to anyone who would like to donate medicines, health care equipment and supplies to contact her at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Family Services Research Center, 876-1802.