Returning home from traveling overseas, whether long or short, one tends to feel good. Released from the inevitable tension that comes from an unfamiliar environment, you have a light heart expecting the smiling faces of your family and the aroma of kimchi stew on the dinner table.

When I got back to Incheon Airport last Friday from a five-day private trip to Ho Chi Minh City, I had a sense of reluctance, like stepping into a war zone. And the following night, candlelight protesters seeking to oust President Park Geun-hye again filled Gwanghwamun Plaza. From a few hours earlier, the Taegukki demonstrators packed the City Hall Square and Taepyeongro to denounce the anti-Park forces, who they branded “pro-North leftists.”

Television newscasters refrained from estimating the sizes of the two separate crowds and just showed aerial shots to allow viewers to make their own estimates. Conspicuous was the remarkable growth of anti-impeachment forces from the tiny group at the time they began speaking out against the massive calls for Park’s departure and punishment upon disclosures of the Choi Soon-sil scandal.

Like the blue and red halves in our national flag, the center of the capital city is perfectly bisected on every Saturday night with politicians, including presidential candidates, leading the waves of marches. Fortunately, no direct, physical contact has been made between the two opposing streams.

Extreme optimists may see a healthy balance in participatory politics, but people’s concerns are growing about what would happen once the Constitutional Court makes its decision for or against the president. None of the many presidential contenders has declared they would accept any ruling the top court will make.

The nation is split, over the culpability of the president and related issues. During the New Year’s Day dinner, both my eldest son and son-in-law disagreed with me and criticized a district court judge for refusing to issue an arrest warrant for Samsung head Lee Jae-yong, accused of bribery in collaboration with President Park. An impromptu opinion poll at a New Year’s party with my fellow university alumni showed an overwhelming tilt for the pro-Park Taegukki rallies.

My KakaoTalk mobile messenger platform is swarming with messages from people variously connected to me, including church colleagues, old friends and hardly remembered names. They convey news items, commentaries, patriotic poems and other political literature generally denouncing the candlelight activists. They must be regarding me as their sympathizer, or a potential one.

My mobile correspondents are so fervent in this campaign that I have come to worry about what they would do in the event the top court approves the impeachment of President Park. Of many times greater concern, however, are the potential consequences of the court’s rejection of the bid to remove Park and allow her to remain in office until Feb. 25, 2018.

The sojourn in Ho Chi Minh City under a mild heat below 30 degrees Celsius. temporarily quashed these worries. Instead, envy grew in my mind about the peace and comfort the people of Vietnam enjoy now four decades after a ravaging war. Roaming through the streets of Dong Khoi (former Tu Do), Le Loi and Tran Hung Dao (where the ROK-V headquarters was located in the 1960s), a tourist is genuinely impressed by the mood of nonchalance amid the noise and motorbike fumes of Southeast Asia.

They may have political and economic woes a foreign visitor may not be able to readily understand, but apparent was their graduation from a long chapter of suffering in history. A travel guidebook compiled by a team of resident foreigners emphasizes the words generosity, optimism, hard work, resilience, tolerance and safety, and readers find little to object.

The War Remnants Museum keeps reminding foreign visitors how their countries were involved in the painful past of Vietnam. The focus was, of course, on the inhumanities committed by Americans in the 1955-1975 Vietnam War, in which Korean troops also participated as a US ally. Pictures of massacres, indiscriminate destruction of hamlets, the use of napalm in carpet bombing and spraying of defoliants revive the tragedies of war.

Statistics include over 40,000 people killed in the explosion of leftover bombs since the war ended in 1975, in addition to the 3 million deaths between 1963 and 1975. In one photograph, a Korean Army officer testifies to the use of Agent Orange over large areas of the country that caused uncountable civilian and military damage, including deaths and genetic deformations. The sense of guilt on the part of American or Korean visitors is eased a little when they detect plain indifference in the faces of the Vietnamese in and outside the museum.

Inside the Reunification Palace, the former presidential office called Independence Palace, I was particularly nostalgic, having been there in 1967 as a young reporter in a Korean delegation invited by the Saigon government to demonstrate its stable rule after President Nguyen Van Thieu’s reelection. In the labyrinth of a basement war room, tourists are shown the communication facilities and strategic maps left by Thieu’s top officers when they escaped from the place on the final day.

Korea stationed two Army infantry divisions and a Marine brigade in South Vietnam to contribute an aggregate of 300,000 troops over seven years, of which 3,000 were killed in action and 8,000 wounded. After four decades, Koreans form the second-largest group of foreign visitors to Vietnam (1.5 million in 2016, trailing China’s 2.9 million) while Korean industrial investment in Vietnam grew rapidly to overtake Japan and reach the top spot in 2014.

Time has healed the scars of war and drawn the two former enemies into close friendship. And we see in Vietnam our past, the national drive toward a better tomorrow after long hardships. We achieved a lot, but arrogance stopped us at the threshold to joining the club of first-class states, to give way to internal conflicts in the guise of democracy.

Revisiting Vietnam for the first time after the war, I pondered what difference there was between the two peoples that share so many similarities. Their suffering lasted longer and left deeper scars, but somehow they forged a national trait of tolerance on the basis of pride. Vietnam may be one or two decades behind us in terms of economic development, but is certainly far ahead in the maturity of people that we direly need in this time of political crisis. 


By Kim Myong-sik

Kim Myong-sik is a former editorial writer for The Korea Herald. – Ed.