KEY POINTS:
Notice something? In our apologetic postscript to the Vietnam War this week the Vietnamese didn't know their lines.
You had to be alert to catch the fleeting comments they were allowed in television reports of Parliament's apology and read past the newspaper coverage of veterans' tears and the
recalled righteousness of ageing protesters.
The text for the day was that the war was wrong but that the veterans were only doing their duty and should have been welcomed home with all the honour and gratitude due returning soldiers.
The old protesters went along with that, grudgingly, but typically they could not let it rest there. They said an apology was also owed the Vietnamese people. That is when the script started to unravel.
Reporters went to some Vietnamese in New Zealand and they certainly did not want an apology.
"The Kiwis didn't make any war for the Vietnamese people," said one of them, Viet Hung Nguyen, who served in the South Vietnam's air force. "Nobody in the south wanted the war. They fought to protect themselves when the north invaded the south."
Doesn't this man know his own history? Didn't he learn anything from his seven years in a concentration camp after the south's liberation? Had he been given more to say, he might have reminded us of the boat people. Remember them?
As one who had taken part in the big student "mobilisations" of 1970-71, I felt sick some years later when thousands of people started taking to rickety boats to escape the new Vietnam.
How had I been convinced the war was an indefensible contest against a benign nationalist force that was only incidentally communist and probably preferable to the autocratic little outfit the United States had been drawn to support?
Enterprising Vietnamese were still voting with their boats, adrift on the ocean, hoping to reach a free coast, when I saw communism for myself.
A simple university worldview couldn't survive the sheer awfulness of the Soviet Union. People there weren't terrified anymore, just muzzled, controlled, miserable. Service was mean, supplies lean, nothing worked, and nobody was allowed to say so. Thank God I didn't need a leaky boat to get out.
Much has changed now, of course. The Cold War is won. We were right that dominoes wouldn't fall following a communist victory.
In fact history went the other way. Within a decade Western governments were reviving free markets and even countries still ruled by nominally communist parties were permitting private enterprise. Looking back, the Vietnam War simply wasn't very important at all.
But any war seems to be the defining life experience of many of those who take part in it. Clearly it is for the Vietnam veterans who came along with their medals and memories for Parliament's belated recognition on Wednesday.
It is a pity that whatever pride they preserve for the cause in which they fought has been subordinated to their campaign to present themselves as victims of defoliant. They even deny they were volunteers, though they were.
I was coming up for military service just before Norman Kirk abolished conscription and I remember being mightily relieved to hear the National Government deny that anybody was being forced to go.
The assurance didn't reconcile me to the draft and, feeling gloriously defiant, I refused to register. Military service was the last thing I wanted to do, then. Now, I would have liked to have had that experience. How immature we were.
Opposition to the Vietnam War is often described as a defining event of my generation. Helen Clark invoked it in those terms on Wednesday.
"Significant divisions and tensions emerged within our society," she said. "Old allegiances and alliances were tested and New Zealanders began to question the role their country was playing in global affairs."
That's true, but younger generations must be getting an exaggerated view of the war's evils the way we go on. When you think about it, younger people have seen an American mistake much worse.
Vietnam was more or less at war before the US went in. An incident was concocted to justify the intervention. It may have been bogus but at the time it had more credibility than Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction.
Kennedy and Johnson tried not to be the aggressor; Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld didn't mind that role. Vietnam was not the naked display of dumb superpower we see in Iraq.
Nor were the predictable consequences of failure as bad. Vietnam would be united under a regime that would be economically repressive but capable of restoring order and peace.
And before too long the regime was to adopt the economics it had fought. Apologies are superfluous, Vietnam made fools of us all.
