Most travellers arriving in Vietnam will have at least some awareness of the catastrophic US involvement in the country in the 1960s and 70s. And they’ll see plenty of evidence of the “American War” as they visit the country’s museums and tourist sights. Fewer visitors are aware of the French colonial presence and Vietnam’s war of independence - The First Indochina War. That conflict ended with French defeat at the hands of Ho Chi Minh’s forces in the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Fewer again are aware of Vietnam’s long war against Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. It ran from 1978 all the way through to the early 1990s. Despite the fact that Vietnamese troops ridded the world of Pol Pot’s genocidal regime (a regime supported diplomatically to varying degrees by the US and western governments), you’ll find few mentions of it in Vietnam’s military museums. I was reminded of that conflict last week on a bicycle tour outside of Hoi An in central Vietnam, where I met Mr Dau. Dau is only a year older than me and in 1985, while I was in my third year of university in Sydney, he stepped on a landmine near Preah Vihear on Cambodia’s border with Thailand. It took off one of his legs. Dau now co-owns a small rice wine distillery in the Hoi An countryside. He’s a bright, friendly presence and makes his way around his place on a prosthetic leg. If you see male amputees in their early and late 50s in Vietnam, there’s a good chance they’re veterans of the same landmine scourge from the same war. Landmines from that war continue to kill and maim in Cambodia, while Vietnamese continue to die from unexploded ordnance from the American War. Vietnam paid a high price for ending Pol Pot’s reign of terror. It's estimated that between 15,000 and 25,000 Vietnamese soldiers died in Cambodia. Many more were wounded. Vietnam faced a major global backlash and a brief bloody war with China (the Chinese were also aligned with Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge) in 1979 on its northern border. A crippling US trade embargo was based in part on opposition to Vietnam’s presence in Cambodia. The withdrawal of Vietnamese forces in the early 1990s was a precondition for normalised relations with the United States and the beginning of Vietnam's two-decade run of rapid economic development.
