Cultural Differences in Trip to Hanoi

In my opinion, one of the most interesting wars throughout history was WWII in that it was fought on two different fronts: Europe and the Pacific. The Nazis were obviously brutal—the SS segment witnessed the mass murder of millions of Jews and other minority groups. As a whole, however, the Germans were easier to fight because they were more “westernized” in both tactics and culture and thus they were more familiar to us. We considered the Japanese, on the other hand, to be completely barbaric in their war strategies and deliverance. This is stemmed from cultural differences, which is why I find it interesting that the writer from Trip to Hanoi, despite his anti-war sentiments and North Vietnamese sympathy, discusses his cultural adjustments as one of his central focuses. I believe that is partly because of such cultural differences that Americans fighting in Southeast Asia found the conditions to be so miserable; for the writer himself says that “the cultural difference is the hardest thing to estimate, to overcome.”

You would expect that an obviously left-leaning writer would be politically correct in every way he sees fit, yet this author goes as far as to call the Vietnamese people “children—beautiful, patient, heroic, martyred, stubborn children” while he argues that he himself is not a child. I find it ironic that he travels to Hanoi to learn from the North Vietnamese yet spends a good portion of his account criticizing them, the people who he admires politically. He goes on to state that “[it is] impossible for us to understand them, clearly impossible for them to understand us.” This makes you wonder that if an American who is unbelievably ready to agree with and learn from the North Vietnamese even has difficulty communicating with them, was it a joke for America to fool herself into believing that she could ever defend a society that her conservative masses have nothing in common with? The most perplexing aspect that results from Trip To Hanoi is what can cause such cultural boundaries when both parties want to befriend one another? Is Vietnamese culture simply too different than ours?