Ben Taylor's Vietnam Rising

As a reporter, my friend Ben Taylor traveled around the world, picking up on the nuances of geopolitics, among other heady pursuits. Now he's written an insightful piece about Vietnam, to which he recently traveled. He took very good notes and his article in this morning's Boston Globe, "Vietnam Rising," is a must read for all of us who lived through what the Vietnamese call "the American War." I first heard that reference from a Vietnamese ex-pat some years ago and that alone tells its own story. When I visited Laos 15 years ago on a "mission" for the UN Development Program, we went to a cafe along the Mekong River. I couldn't reconcile sitting along its banks without expecting strafe bombing and "Viet Cong" to rise from its waters, this after the war had been over for more than two decades. Vietnam's indelible mark on all of us from that era remains -- thank you, Ben, for bringing it into focus in a new way.