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FitzGerald's most recent book, "Way Out There in the Blue," depicts the political forces that led to the triumph of President Reagan's unworkable Star Wars missile defense program.

Also Today "Way Out There in the Blue" by Frances FitzGerald The definitive account of Star Wars, the military fantasy that's soaked taxpayers for $60 billion -- and counting. By Ian Williams

In an interview this week with Salon News, FitzGerald looks back on Vietnam with the eyes of a perpetual student of the region and suggests that Americans must try to understand Vietnam as a place, rather than a battlefield, to understand why U.S. policies backfired.

What are your thoughts on the Vietnam war, looking back?

What happens in this country is that we become so focused on our own problems, and we've really never seen it from the Vietnamese point of view. This remains true in the coverage of the 25th anniversary -- it's endless gazing at one's own navel. There have been some very good pieces in the New York Times and so forth, but so little attention paid to Vietnam. Vietnam means a war to many people, not a country.

One magazine, which will remain nameless, asked me in January to do a piece on the 25th anniversary. I said to them, "Well, I'm going to Vietnam in March, wouldn't you like a piece?"

"No," they said. They wanted a piece about the United States.

Frankly, I don't think the 25th anniversary is anything much more than a number. This reconsideration, the debate about the Vietnam War, went on for years afterwards. It's kind of stopped now, some time ago really. I don't mean by that that there's a total consensus on what it meant, but the sharpness of this debate, which was terrific throughout the '70s and into the '80s, has really died down.

What after-effects of the war did you observe while you were in Vietnam this year?

I think I only had about two or three conversations about the war the whole time I was there. People are interested in what they're up to now. In the jungles the war damage was really considerable, and it's a real ecological disaster that has been exacerbated by populations pressures in Vietnam now. But in the countryside you wouldn't know the war had ever been there. You wouldn't know it had happened.

What was your impression of the country this year, vs. when you had been there before?

I was there in 1993, and otherwise not since 1974. This trip I spent a great deal of time in the villages, including the villages of North Vietnam, which I really didn't know. That was really fascinating because the North is the center of Vietnamese culture for historical reasons. The villages are very different in the North than they are in the South. They look like fortresses in the sense that they are surrounded by the hedge of bamboo. It's like the difference between New England towns and towns out West, historically. In New England, you'd have a settlement all in one place and the farms outside it. Elsewhere you'd have the farmer's house and his own land surrounding it. The social structure is very different as a result. In the North, people worship their ancestors back to the 15th generation. In the South, it's only the third.

Nowadays, they're very much going back to their older traditions. When I was there, there were all of the village celebrations in which people would dress up in traditional dress, great processions and prayers to the genie of the communal house, or the dinh. The importance of history is so great in the North. Most of the genies are former Mandarins who fought the Chinese from the 10th century on, and sometimes former kings. At one of these celebrations I met a man who spoke French, who told me the entire history of the village from the time of the Tran Dynasty on.

People are very rooted to their past. Nothing has changed in that way at all. In fact, since the renovation which started in '86, the whole communist apparatus in the villages has pretty much disappeared. There's a government of course, but everybody used to be organized in work teams and so forth. Now the organization is traditional all over again. If you're a tourist, it's very hard to tell you're in a communist country. You can tell you're in a country with a one-party state. But apart from that, the free market has simply taken over.

Next page | The American war was "just another incident to them -- resisting foreign invaders"