After the War ...

I spent a day spent travelling around the area known as the De-Militarized Zone which was set up as buffer between North and South Vietnam when the country was split after WW2. Once the war between the two countries started it quickly became very heavily militarized indeed!

Viewing some of the sites; such as bomb craters, old look-outs and pill boxes, monuments to the dead, a cemetery and the remains of a bombed out tank lying by the road I began thinking what it must have been like for the soldiers who were fighting there in the 60s and 70s. I've been reading an excellent book, The sorrow of war, by a North Vietnamese who fought throughout the war and through tremendous strokes of luck managed to live through countless battles. The book really adds to the feeling of imagining what it was like (and i suppose still is in other countries) in the midst of a war.

Most obvious were the brand new forests that covered the landscape; all of the trees in the whole area were planted after the war and most of the villages were rebuilt too. There does not seem to be too much of an impact of the war on the Vietnamese now; though i did not get a chance to talk to any war veterans. Everyone else seems to have quickly forgotten the war, happy that the country is back together again and developing so fast. Maybe the generation of young people whose lives were totally changed from fighting (as described so vividly in the book) has now been overtaken by the new generations since; Vietnam suffered a population explosion after the war and continues to grow (there is a 2-child policy for urban residents) and so with this in mind and despite the many many differences between the 2 countries, maybe there is some hope for countries like Iraq, in 30 years....