The packing has begun! Looking forward to leaving on Friday at midnight. Preparatory readings have included Le Ly Hayslip's amazing 1988 autobiography of growing up in Vietnam during the "American War." I've also read part of "Fire in the Lake," and "The Mekong." I was struck by the difference between our individualistic culture and the interdependent culture of Vietnamese villagers before the war. There was no room to strike out and "be yourself," as we say. Fathers ran families; villages were run like large families -- paternalistically; and even Ho Chi Minh was called "Papa Ho" -- which felt very comfortable to people. Republican values (of the South) were anathema in villages. But so were communist ones. The Viet Cong held an appeal not because they offered communist revolution (which meant nothing to the average Vietnamese person) but because they offered something quite familiar -- a father figure in the form of Papa Ho. In Le Ly's village, in central Vietnam, allegiances changed daily depending on who was in control. The constant back and forth between Republicans and Viet Cong took a terrible toll.