A misunderstood revolution of love and trust

The Vietnamese were misunderstood, if not because Americans did not try or could not succeed in trying to. A westerner needs lots of time to grasp, just a little of a culture so different from that of their own.
Facts do not tell the entire story of Vietnam. Brief encounters do not either. Rather, long extended stays could only begin to scratch the surface of Vietnam's culture. "I already knew a great deal; and I could not hope to collect more or significantly better information in a mere two weeks than was already available." Doing this is hard enough, and with preset mindsets formed from American propaganda or from writers that didn't fully grasp their experience or audiences that couldn't fully grasp by reading alone makes it even more difficult when you can't overlook them immediately. "Indeed, the problem was that Vietnam had become so much a fact of my conciousness as an American that I was having enormous difficulty getting it outside my head." The author goes on to admit after arriving he new nothing exept from a 'distance.'
Overtime one should overcome right? However, many things get in the way as one tries to understand another culture. Language for one, "it seems to me we're both talking baby talk." This refers to the minimum he had to talk in english to someone in Hanoi for them to both understand. These were his first impressions, but he hadn't noticed subtleties yet just his preset condition of his mind, "eveyone seems to talk in the same style." He became baffled by the Vietnamese admiration for American Democracy, their kindness to American's and how they understood, "only the present government of America is (their) enemy," not Americans. It was a third dimension that was missing from his interactions with the Vietnamese that kept him from understanding them more. A dimension one would have to have learned only by growing up as a Vietnamese person, for they developed different subtleties in their styles, speech, nuances different from American's and westerners. For instance, they don't have words to fulfill irony based speech. A different kind of politeness, more meaningful than American's which, " for us, politeness means conventions of amiable behavior people have agreed to practice, because their real feelings aren't consistently civil," and it has created irony in our chilvary because politeness is "never truly honest." The Vietnamese are nice to the Americans because they mean it. They understand us more than we understand them because we are our form of politeness, that which lacks meaning and contains irony. "By definition, politeness is never truly honest, it testifies to the disparity between social behavior and authentic feeling."
Did we really want to help the Vietnamese or to prevent the spread of Communism? Did we mean what we said to them more than Ho Chi Minh? In the end, being truthful won out maybe to the Vietnamese by definitely to the author, and to him, possibly the American soldiers who didn't want to be there hurting them after being experiencing their politeness and thusly, "in him the 'revolution' has just started," and after leaving Vietnam, "it continues."