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| Rep. Rob Simmons discusses
the future with the enemy of the past. |
| Courtesy Rep. Rob Simmons |
Connecticut Republican Rep. Rob Simmons recently
took his third trip to Vietnam. After serving there
in the Army in 1967-68 and a tour as a CIA officer
in 1970-72, he returned to Vietnam on a Codel (congressional
delegation) to look for the remains of a helicopter
pilot lost during the war who hails from his Connecticut
district.
“The first time I was there, the people tried
to kill me, and the country was devastated by various
wars, and their infrastructure was destroyed, the
economy completely disrupted. To go back 30 years
later and have tea with people in uniform, to see
a train from Ho Chi Minh City [in the very south]
to Hanoi [high-up north], to see tourists at the beach
in Danang to go swimming [the U.S. military landed
troops in on the beaches around Danang], it’s
a wonderful development,” Simmons says with a
genuine smile.
Simmons returned to Vietnam in spite of a feeling
that he wanted to close the door to this part of his
life and the painful memories. But the MIA (missing
in action) issue and the fact that one missing U.S.
serviceman, Capt. Arnold Holm of Waterford, Conn.,
is from his district, forced the door back open. Simmons
did not regret having walked through it.
“A missing soldier brought me back, and I am
glad he did. Now Vietnam is much less a war and more
a country to me.”
Simmons, who represents Connecticut’s second
district, says the experience has changed his outlook
significantly. He supported the Vietnam Human Rights
Bill that has weighed on U.S.-Vietnamese relations,
but he says after his experience in Vietnam he may
well vote against it, and even debate the sponsors,
including his Republican colleague Chris Smith from
New Jersey, on the merits.
Simmons says he sees clear evidence of improvements
on the human rights situation in Vietnam. “In
April 1975, we evacuated the last of our people
from the roof of our embassy by helicopter. For
a decade, we had no relationship at all. There was
along period of a closed society without assistance
from the West. But I would argue that the human
rights situation in Vietnam is better now than 10
years ago, and 10 years ago it was better than 30
years ago.” He also views Vietnam’s cooperation
on American MIA’s as a humanitarian symbol,
especially in a country that has 300,000 of its
own servicemen still missing.
Look into the future
“Our fathers’ generation fought the Germans
and the Japanese, and then committed themselves to
rebuilding these countries. We have an opportunity
in Vietnam to help do something similar,” Simmons
says. “To punish and degrade the relationship,”
he says with reference to the Vietnam Human Rights
Bill, “does that help the problem? I ask myself,
did the embargo on Iraq make the regime more or less
compliant? Has [Fidel] Castro been in power longer
because of the embargo? Long-term embargoes don’t
help. The regime will adjust and even use it to stay
in power.”
Simmons thinks that to put an embargo to good use,
it has to be imposed and then lifted, so that the
people in the country can see the difference.
Simmons admits that the absence of a large Vietnamese
community in his district that could lobby for sanctions
against the country they fled makes it easier for
him to look into the future than for some of his colleagues.
“But the future is where we have to go. Two-thirds
of Vietnam’s current population were not alive
in 1975, when the war ended.” That fact alone,
he believes, makes the Vietnamese a people that looks
into the future rather than the past, and he wants
the United States take a similar approach.
“It’s all about moving beyond,” Simmons
says, and plans parliamentarian exchanges between
his peers in the U.S. Congress and Vietnamese National
Assembly members. “The war is an important memory,
but it should not be a driving force in our relationship.”
His wife, Heidi, a schoolteacher, who accompanied
him on his recent trip, went to schools to initiate
school exchanges and educational links.
In the context of exchange, he also favors trade links.
“If trade and exchange programs put a human face
on our relationship, that’s a good thing.” |
