Kiriakou recorded an episode from Ho Chi Minh City at half past ten at night, apologising for the setup and explaining the itinerary ahead of him — Athens, Cairo, London, Washington.[1] He was in Vietnam for a week, brought over to address the annual convention of a large group of Australian investment bankers, and stayed on “to actually see Vietnam.”[2]
Why the country
The reason is family. He has four cousins, three of them still living, “with whom I’m very close”, and all four served in combat: “All four of them returned from Vietnam with the Bronze Star, two of them with the Purple Heart, and all four of them with PTSD.”[3] The purpose of the visit was to get “an idea of what old Saigon… was like as best that I could.”[3]
What he found
The city reminded him of Hong Kong more than anywhere else, and is nocturnal because the daytime heat and humidity make activity impossible.[4] What struck him in conversation was the absence of grievance and the presence of two American names: everyone speaks English, and everyone “wants to talk about how much they love Bill Clinton and Barack Obama” — Clinton for normalising diplomatic relations, Obama for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the free trade that “changed the lives of everybody in the country.”[5] English is now compulsory in schools.[6]
He travelled two hours south-west into the jungle toward the Mekong Delta, where B-52 bomb craters six to ten feet deep are still found with the jungle grown back over them, and down into the Delta itself — “water everywhere, bugs everywhere, snakes, and I mean pythons and cobras and crocodiles everywhere” — where thousands of canals carry cigarettes, pots and pans and passengers, and where much of the war was fought.[7][8][6][9][10]
The visit he presses on his audience is the War Remnants Museum: “it will make you sick to your stomach and it will make you ashamed of many of the things that we did during the Vietnam War, especially in relation to the use of Agent Orange… really something that I think every American should see.”[11][12] He immediately sets against it the thing he could not find: “I have not met a Vietnamese who even wanted to talk about this. To them, it’s in the past. They like the United States. They like Americans. They want us to be friends. This is all history.”[12]