In next Tuesday’s eFlyer, I’ve got a story about the Ho Chi Minh Golf Trail. It’s a travel promotion for golf resorts and deluxe lodging up and down the length of Vietnam. For those of us who came of age in the Vietnam era, it’s odd to see the words “Ho Chi Minh Trail” in such a banal context. At the same time, it’s an admirable tribute to time marching on.

I had a friend named Bruce back in the late ‘60s who was a Vietnam vet, and he used to talk about how much he loved the climate of Vietnam, how beautiful its coast was, how he hoped to be able to go back as a civilian someday. All of us little hippies thought he was yanking our chain. Bruce married another friend, Kathy, in the ‘70s, but we eventually lost touch. I wonder if he ever went back. I wonder if he plays golf.

The use of the name Ho Chi Minh Trail to market golf to Americans isn’t as strange as it seems; the name “Ho Chi Minh Trail” was devised by the Americans, not by the Vietnamese. It was how we referred to the maze of ancient footpaths, bicycle paths and truck routes that enabled the North Vietnamese to resupply the Viet Cong, and vice versa. Essentially, it referred to the unanticipated difficulties we found in fighting a guerilla war.

We should all be grateful, I suppose, that the need for international commerce transcends the antipathies of war. My mother lived in a boarding house in New York’s Yorktown district during WWII, owned by Germans who had moved here prior to WWI. My dad, then her fiance, loved to tell the story of how odd it was coming home from his paratrooper training to spend Christmas with my mother and singing “Oh Tannenbaum” and “Steilige Nacht,” knowing he was shipping out to fight German forces a week later. Advertising legend Jerry della Femina wrote a book named after his admittedly tongue-in-cheek suggestion for an ad campaign for Panasonic in the 1960s, called  “From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor.” While the slogan didn’t fly, the products did. The world moves on. After the last few wars, it took less than 20 years for commerce and friendship to replace antipathies. It’s pretty hard, right now, to imagine Baghdad Disneyland in 20 years’ time, or golfing in North Korea. Business travelers can get a bad rap for being apolitical capitalists who explore the possibilities as soon as the shooting stops—but the fact that we drive Toyotas and Audis and play the Ho Chi Minh Golf Trail is a tribute to everyone who has gone to break ground before it was comfortable to do so. Let’s hope we can do it again.

–Mary Hunt, Editor, eFlyer