Guarding The Past

Matt Steinglass went to Vietnam in search of McCain's captors:

The Vietnamese have tried to bury the war, to forget it. In the US,  the mantra repeated by every Vietnamese who lived through the war – “that was the past, Vietnam prefers to look to the future” – would earn you an instant diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. In the 1990s some psychiatrists argued that PTSD was a problematic diagnosis because it encouraged survivors of trauma to dwell in the  past. After watching Duyet rock back and forth and sigh as he insisted  McCain was his friend, and witnessing Y hospitalised over the prospect of talking about the camps, I doubt that burying the memories works any better.