Opinion

Memory Lane

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

July 20, 2001 / 4:46 PM EDT / CBS

"It certainly is a quite different Vietnam than the one I left 32 years ago."

Colin Powell is not known as a man of understatement, but on the eve of his first trip back to Vietnam — and first ever to Hanoi — since he wore the uniform of the U.S. Army, this soldier turned diplomat may have become a master of it.

Powell arrived in Saigon, South Vietnam — now renamed Ho Chi Minh City — on Christmas Day, 1962. Asked if he shared the view that American involvement was a mistake, he told reporters at the State Department that as a young Army captain "I was convinced we were doing the right thing, and I think we were doing the right thing. It didn't turn out the way we expected it to or wanted it to or perhaps should have, but that is now history. We have to look forward."

It is a forward-looking Colin Powell who goes to Vietnam next week to meet fellow foreign ministers of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Powell said Friday his message to the Vietnamese people will be one of peace: "...we wish to be friends now, we wish to resolve the issues of the past."

Noting Vietnam's population is one of the youngest in the world, Powell hopes to encourage the government's moves toward openness and more reform which "will give these young people a new future."

Unlike so many Vietnam-era veterans who return to Vietnam, Secretary Powell says, "there are no ghosts within me that need exorcism." Clearly, however, there are memories. "I am sure the years will peel back three and four decades and the emotions will be powerful and strong," Powell told reporters.

"So two years of my life were spent in Vietnam," Powell recalled, "...and I lost many of my friends, some of my best friends from college, fraternity members, and a lot of people I was close to."

Those who know Powell well say he is not the type of Vietnam vet who "needs" to go back. One fellow vet who knows him put it this way: "he doesn't need going back to wash it away," adding "he has the ability to walk away from experiences, close the door and not look back, unlike a lot of vets."

There will be no time, at least on this trip, to return to areas of Vietnam where the young army officer served. Perhaps Powell is the kind of soldier who does not have to go all the way back to the scenes of battle to have memories recalled.

"So I go as Secretary of State, but I also go as a former battalion advisor, a former operations officer of an American infantry division and a soldier who fought there. And I am sure there will be a flood of memories." Powell sounds like a man who understands his next mission.