Vietnam.  More than any other country I’ve wanted, nay, needed to come here.  And so far it’s nothing like what I expected.

There’s all the obvious reasons to come to Vietnam right now.  The food is incredible, the price of living is very, very low to a westerner (a beer, my international barometer of cost, run about $0.50 – $1.50 here).  It is not overcome with tourism like Thailand which gives you an opportunity to have real experiences in a truly developing country. 

Or at least that’s the hope.  And for many of the travelers I’ve met thus far those are exactly the reasons they’ve come here.  But my reasons are more cloudy.  In all honesty, I’m not even sure I understand them.

The last few months I’ve been challenged like I never have before.  And truth to tell I haven’t felt that I’ve lived up to them.  I launched my website (www.thesacrev.com) in October and yet have struggled to find the long-term vision of the site after making so many pivots before launch.  Additionally, my role at my job has has taken on a more intricate, much larger leadership role.  Which begs the question for me, what does true leadership look like? 

What I needed, I realized, would be impossible to accomplish at home..  I needed to put distance between myself and others and re-learn the things I had gained from my first time living abroad in Amsterdam: who am I, at my core?  What do I believe in?  What drives me in this life?

Buckminster Fuller has a quote that I’ve always come back to : “How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.”

So this trip has become a journey for me, almost a quest, to continue to develop and define leadership.  Go to a country where no one knows your name or speaks your language and see what comes of it.  How do you act?  How are you perceived by others? Adapt, refine, impact.

So that’s the biggest reason I’ve gone to the other side of the world for a month.  But in looking for where to go I realized there was one spot on the map that intrigued me more than any other.

The Vietnam War (or as it’s called here, the American War or the War for Independence) has always fascinated me.  Even in middle school when I first learned about the war itself I had questions.  Unlike other wars I’d studied Vietnam had no clear start date.  Then it became a question of why had we escalated the war in the first place? Or the second place? Or the third place?

Then it was the sheer amount of presidents involved in the conflict: Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon.  Then it was the foreign policy theories behind the justification for the war (Domino Theory chief among them).  But that theory was based on Eastern European countries which were falling quickly to the influence of the USSR.  Why would a theory that worked in Eastern Europe, a region that has historically always been heavily influenced by Russia, work for South East Asia, a region with histories of shared empires and religious interconnectivity yet a region of divided nationalities and cultures

I went to college to help make sense of this issue.  I plowed through ream after ream of correspondences trying to understand the escalation process.  I wrote an essay on the ramifications of a single unknown Foreign Assistance Act that turned off funding for the war.  I wrote paper after paper on the attrition/guerilla warfare strategies of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese versus the conventional warfare and aerial bombardments of the US.  And every time I wrote or researched I became more and more confused on a subject that seemingly had no clear start date, no clear end date, and no real reason or justification for happening in the first place.

Vietnams history and the early history of the US are shockingly similar.  Both countries took on the largest military in the world at the time (the British and the US respectively) and came out with an independent and unified country.  The true underdog stories of nation building.

I’ve learned about the war in Vietnam on two contingents, hoping to get more unbiased versions of the same events.  But as time went on I knew that the only place I could really get the answers I was looking for, the only place that would help fill in the other side of the story was, of course, Vietnam itself.

Ah, but my fine yet cynical reader, you’re thinning “but Brian, why do you care?  This all happened well before you were born.  What does it matter?”

I don’t know why it matters to me so much but in a very real and personal way I feel a responsibility to be here.  In the same way that I believe the first step to bettering yourself is to admit your own faults so you can fix them, I believe that the role of a good citizen is to recognize the mistakes of their country in the past.  Ensuring history doesn’t repeat itself is, in my mind, the goal of any generation preparing to take over the reins from the previous one.

So make no mistake – I’ll be having fun here.  My little time I’ve spent in this country has only highlighted that.  But I’m looking for something here too.  I’m not sure what or what it will mean to me when I find it.  But I, like so many others, have come to Southeast Asia in search of some form of enlightenment.