Isn't that a war?

When telling other students about going to Vietnam, Audrey's been asked a few times, by children, "Isn't that a war?" The relevance of it as a country is minimal to most and while I can't be angry about it (VN is rarely discussed in the media outside of the war), it does become frustrating for all of us. Maybe especially Audrey who has no connection to it as a war and saw very little evidence of it as a war-torn country.

In a NYTimes article, the author wrote:
Many Americans who returned from Vietnam were stunned that “Vietnam” meant something completely different back home. It had ceased referring to the country we had tried, for better or for worse, to help, and had become shorthand for a monumental domestic crisis of identity. I don’t mean to suggest that Americans caught up in that wrenching clash were callous or cynical, but for most of them the war in Vietnam became lost in the ensuing domestic conflict over the morality of warfare, the exercise of power, the draft. That, for them, became “Vietnam.”

Even though he's talking about the wars and how the US can get out of Iraq in a more dignified fashion that our sudden abandonment of Vietnam, he makes a good point for those of us who have only recently traveled there. Yes, there was a war there. But Vietnam is so much more than the American War.