MARK PATINKIN Paintings reveal a brush with history

I thought I had Vietnam in perspective: It was a messy American mistake. Period.
But there is something about the war, and its aftermath, that we forget, and it's this. Whatever our missteps, we were fighting a repressive regime that did awful things.
You'd think the last place you'd hear about that would be Brown University, a liberal bastion more inclined to question American policies than defend them.
Let me introduce you to "Quinn."
That's how you pronounce her name. It's spelled "Quyen." Her last name is Truong. She's 21 and a Brown senior.
I went to see her because Brown is having a big conference on Vietnam this week. It marks the 40th year of our military involvement there, and the 30th of the fall of Saigon.
Quyen is exhibiting five big paintings about a part of the war we seldom talk about. They capture the horror of what the North Vietnamese did after we left.
They forced more than a million people into brutal "re-education" camps. They starved, beat and worked them half to death. Quyen's father was one of them. Her paintings capture what he went through.
Her dad is 60 now and a machinist in West Hartford, Conn. She told me he grew up in North Vietnam, but hated its communist regime and moved to the south for more opportunity and freedom.
Noble mission
When the war began, he was proud to work alongside the American military to keep the North Vietnamese from taking over. He was a South Vietnamese army officer doing intelligence analysis. He felt the Americans were there on a noble mission.
Then, in 1975, the United States left abruptly, and the conquering North Vietnamese put Quyen's father in a camp. He and others were led to believe it would be 10 days of literal re-education -- instructions on living in the new regime.
For him, it turned into seven years of being nearly starved in cramped conditions, often beaten and ruled by arrogant teenage communist soldiers.
Quyen captured such moments in her paintings.
She was born under the communist regime after her father was released to live in post-war Vietnam. It was hard for him to find jobs because camp survivors were blacklisted. After years of asking for permission to emigrate, he was finally allowed by the bureaucracy to move his family to America in 1991. They settled near Hartford to be near family. Quyen was 7.
She found astonishing opportunities here, such as libraries where you could borrow books and read them for free. And schools that taught more than just math and reading. Today, Quyen thinks it says everything about America that a child born into hardship to a blacklisted father in Vietnam could be admitted to an Ivy League university.
She is also mindful that her exhibit is an example of a free society. Were she to put up these same paintings in Hanoi, she has no doubt she would be arrested.
As I was talking to Quyen, it occurred to me that her generation has a distinction we don't often talk about. They're the children of the Vietnam era -- of people who either protested the war or fought it -- and they're now reaching adulthood. I asked her what most people her age think of Vietnam.
She said that, at least at Brown, most seem to feel it was an American mistake.
She has studied the war and has complex views of it. Perhaps, she says, there would have been less bloodshed if America had never gotten involved. She thinks our sudden retreat from Saigon was too quick, and chaotic.
But as the daughter of a camp survivor, she is mindful of something we often overlook. The North Vietnamese government was a repressive, brutal regime. And whatever our mistakes, America's intentions were to help a people stay free.
Stigma
Quyen only began thinking deeply about these things because her art project brought her to talk at length with her dad about his ordeal. She found that other Vietnamese-American children haven't done so with their own parents. They want to assimilate, she says, and they feel the war still has a stigma, so they leave it alone. Meanwhile, she says, many other Americans her age just have the general feeling that it was a mistake.
But Quyen feels it's not that simple. Like her father, she feels we weren't that wrong, at least not in all ways.
X Mark Patinkin writes for The Providence Journal. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.