"America #1! Vietnam #2!"

We had a very entertaining taxi ride on the way home from the Big C grocery store today.  The man driving us only knew about 30 words of English but was eager to learn and try out his skills.  For instance, he was asking how to say "right" and "left" in English and laughing when he was getting them wrong.  

Then he asked where we were from, and when we said "America" he acted surprised we had come this far.  Then he very emphatically said, "America #1!  Vietnam #2!"  We laughed, and he put his hands together and said, "America, Vietnam, good!".  He was also quick to point out that "Obama good" and "Bush bad" (I liked him already) and that the current president of Vietnam Trương Tấn Sang is "very, very bad".

This man was in his mid-to-late fifties, which means he would have been about Noah and Ellie's age at the height of the Vietnam War.  He probably had family members who fought in the war.  And yet, here he was with a car full of Americans laughing and saying our two countries are friends.  We've noticed this all over Hanoi, we read about it before we got here, and even U.S. Ambassador Osius pointed it out to us when we met him: the Vietnamese are forward-looking people who have very little (if any) animosity toward Americans.  The limited polling here indicates that somewhere between 75% - 90% of Vietnamese have favorable opinions of the U.S. In the States, the Vietnam War is often misunderstood, and as Americans we still struggle with what our role was and what exactly happened.  In our limited time in Hanoi, it appears to us that the Vietnamese have moved on.