Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

A Large War
The Vietnam War was the Syrian war of my generation.
Two days before Christmas in 1972, seven bombs killed 27 patients and
members of staff at the Bach Mai hospital in Hanoi in Vietnam. I was
studying medicine in Uppsala in Sweden. We had plenty of medical
equipment and yellow blankets. Agneta and I coordinated a collection, which
we packed in boxes and sent to Bach Mai.
Fifteen years later, I was in Vietnam to evaluate a Swedish aid project. One
lunchtime, I was eating my rice next to one of my local colleagues, a doctor
named Niem, and I asked him about his background. He told me he had been

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inside the Bach Mai hospital when the bombs fell. Afterward, he had
coordinated the unpacking of boxes of supplies that had arrived from all over
the world. I asked him if he remembered some yellow blankets and I got
goose bumps as he described the fabric’s pattern to me. It felt like we had
been friends forever.
At the weekend, I asked Niem to show me the monument to the Vietnam
War. “You mean the ‘Resistance War Against America,’” he said. Of course, I
should have realized he wouldn’t call it the Vietnam War. Niem drove me to
one of the city’s central parks and showed me a small stone with a brass plate,
three feet high. I thought it was a joke. The protests against the Vietnam War
had united a generation of activists in the West. It had moved me to send
blankets and medical equipment. More than 1.5 million Vietnamese and
58,000 Americans had died. Was this how the city commemorated such a
catastrophe? Seeing that I was disappointed, Niem drove me to see a bigger
monument: a marble stone, 12 feet high, to commemorate independence from
French colonial rule. I was still underwhelmed.
Then Niem asked me if I was ready to see the proper war monument. He
drove a little way further, and pointed out of the window. Above the treetops I
could see a large pagoda, covered in gold. It seemed about 300 feet high. He
said, “Here is where we commemorate our war heroes. Isn’t it beautiful?”
This was the monument to Vietnam’s wars with China.
The wars with China had lasted, on and off, for 2,000 years. The French
occupation had lasted 200 years. The “Resistance War Against America” took
only 20 years. The sizes of the monuments put things in perfect proportion. It
was only by comparing them that I could understand the relative
insignificance of “the Vietnam War” to the people who now live in Vietnam.