PEACE-MAKER

The award-winning musical, Miss Saigon, will be staged starting this month in Manila. 

Set during the final days of the Vietnam War, Miss Saigon is an epic love story of a young couple — Chris, an American GI, and Kim, a Vietnamese woman — caught in a world at war. 

We remember watching this show with wife Gina at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1999, when it was first staged in Manila, and earlier, at the West End in London. Indeed, Lea Salonga, who played Kim, was spectacular. She is truly world-class, and a treasure and pride of the Philippines and of Asia. 

Miss Saigon brings back memories of our days as a young presidential assistant and economic, and press counselor at the Philippine Embassy in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh) from 1966 to 1969, during the Vietnam War. 

It was in Saigon, in 1967, where we conceived and began the implementation of the historic dollar Remittance Program for the Philippine overseas workers, which rapidly enlarged each year and which now raises more than $37-billion a year for our country.

In Saigon, we had the privilege of befriending Admiral John McCain Sr., US commander in the Pacific, who helped our Armed Forces with the organization of our first Engineering Battalion and whom we invited to Manila. He is the father of the late Sen. John McCain, also a war hero shot down over North Vietnam skies, prisoner of war in Hanoi, and who later ran but missed the presidency of the US. 

Later, we also invited and accompanied to Manila the most bemedalled World War II hero in Europe, Gen. Creighton Abrams, later US Commander in Vietnam after whom the US Abrams Tank was named, for he was the celebrated combat officer of the equally famed US General George Patton, the feared and foremost Allied military commander then against the German forces. Abrams later also helped the Philippines with its first Armalite Battalion and engineering equipment for our Philcag troops in Vietnam. 

We also had the chance of meeting then UN secretary general U Thant of Burma (now Myanmar), who was credited for helping resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 where the nuclear powers, the United States and Soviet Union, led by then President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Krushev, respectively, were in the brink of a collision course, which placed the world under the threat of a nuclear inferno. 

It was in Saigon where we crossed paths and became friends with the then young military officials who were with the Philippine Civic Action Group (Philcag) and who would later rise to national prominence – Major Fidel V. Ramos, who became Armed Forces chief, Defense Secretary, and then President of the Philippines; Captains Jose Almonte, who became National Security Adviser under Ramos; Renato de Villa, later Defense chief; psy-war and civic action leader Jose Magno; Thelmo Cunanan, who became a general, and later, a highly-regarded ambassador to Cambodia; and Lieutenants Lisandro Abadia and Arturo Enrile, who later became heads of the Armed Forces. 

We first flew to the then South Vietnam capital Saigon (Hanoi was the capital of then North Vietnam) in 1956, as a 19-year-old journalist, to cover the visit of then Vice President Carlos P. Garcia, who was also Secretary of Foreign Affairs, for the Proclamation of the Vietnamese Constitution and the first anniversary of the Vietnam Republic. 

We visited the second time in 1959, when we were invited by then President Garcia to join him on his official visit. We remember sailing the Saigon River with President Garcia and the then South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem aboard the Vietnamese leader’s presidential yacht. 

The French ruled Vietnam as a colony since the 19th Century, until the defeat of the French army by the North Vietnamese forces in the classic battle of Dien Bien Phu in North Vietnam. The French defeat led to the Geneva Agreement partition of Vietnam at the waist, along the 17th Parallel into North and South. 

Later, then South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem and his family were killed by assassins and much later, the North Vietnamese Army and Vietcong guerillas overran the South, defeated the South Vietnamese Army and forced the pullout of some 50,000 American troops, and reunited all of Vietnam in 1975. 

In Saigon, where we lived for four years, the Viet Cong routinely blew up bars serving American GIs. We saw dead bodies in the streets of Saigon. We experienced up-close the horrors of wars. 

Truly, peace is a universal longing and mankind’s most shared, yet elusive goal. The world needs peace for a long and sustained time and not in intervals. For Asia and the world have a surfeit of war. 

We cannot walk away from the pursuit of peace because the alternative — war — is immeasurably costly and makes all of us losers.