About three weeks ago, I was rather aimlessly going through my Facebook feed, when I saw an ad for a kosher trip to Vietnam. I stared at it for a few minutes — I’d never thought seriously about going, so had no invested any time in learning what you’re “supposed” to see. I’d never heard of the tour company. Nothing about it, given my tendency to overdoing due diligence, made any sense.

But it was at that moment that I realized that I needed to get out of here. If only for a couple of weeks, I desperately needed out of the pressure cooker.

I showed my wife the ad. “I’m not going,” she said. “Avi could still get called up again any day.” “He’s not getting called up,” I said. “Lebanon is winding down, and his unit isn’t going anywhere.”

“I’m still not going. If you want, though, Vietnam’s always been higher on your bucket list than on mine, so I’m totally fine with your going.”

So I did.

The group was diverse, mostly American and Israelis, and there was an unspoken rule. “No politics.” Not American politics. Not Israeli politics. Yes, I looked at my phone periodically, but not once in the two weeks did I click on a headline to read the article. I looked enough to know basically what was going on, but I didn’t want details.

There was no point in going to Vietnam just to doom-scroll endlessly from far away instead of at home.

And for two weeks, to some degree, the war receded. No news made a huge difference. The cease-fire in Lebanon was declared soon after I got to Ho Chi Min City, and then, I knew for sure that our son wasn’t going back in. Another huge difference.

It almost felt like I could imagine once again what it might feel like not to be living in a war zone.

The United States pulled out of Vietnam in 1975, when I was in the middle of high school. So for all of my childhood and well into my teens, Vietnam was the story.

Vietnam was the place that led you to flee to Canada, so you didn’t go die in a swamp in the Mekong Delta. Vietnam was what got lots of Jewish kids to sign up for yeshiva in the United States, so they could get their 4-F draft classification and thus not have to go. Vietnam was the place that if you went there, it was impossible to know who and what you’d be when you got back.

Given the years in which I grew up, the very notion that in order to escape a war zone you would travel to Vietnam sounds almost laughable. But that was exactly what it was. Vietnam was fascinating, rich with history, culture and beauty (and I spent many hours on the planes reading Neil Sheehan’s magisterial, Pulitzer Prize Winning A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, which provided context and a fascinating historical account (warning: it’s a 896 page commitment!)).

But more than anything, Vietnam felt like a reminder—wars end, societies move on. Futures that seem entirely implausible can, in fact, come to be. Of course, I understand that America could lose Vietnam and not be destroyed, which is not the case for Israel in this war. Of course I understand that Vietnam was (on some level) a civil war, which is also not the case here. If anything, our horrid war might have prevented civil war— though the threat of internal Israeli violence is far from gone.

I’m making no analogies between the two wars, their causes, their outcomes or anything else. I’m just saying what it felt like—it felt like a breath of fresh air to be reminded that there’s life after war.

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If you grew up when I did, this was once of the iconic photographs that you’ll never forget:

That long line of people desperate get to out of Saigon on the very last helicopter in April 1975 was an image etched in our minds, in a way that the Twin Towers burning was for a later generation.

We were walking down a busy boulevard in Saigon when our guide pointed to a building with yellow outlines and asked us if we recognized it. We didn’t—at least, I didn’t. But then he took out his iPad and showed us the photo above.

It took my breath away.

That building that so many of us had stared at with the helicopter poised precariously on top, that building that symbolized Vietnam and defeat and shame and waste for so many of us back then, is now nothing but an afterthought in the growing metropolis that is Saigon.

I couldn’t help but wonder. Strangely, being in Vietnam, I couldn’t help but hope.

It was bound not to last forever, obviously. On the flight back (which, incidentally, goes through a ridiculous route because El Al planes are still not allowed to fly over certain countries) …

… as we were getting close to Tel Aviv, the pilot got on the mic and thanked everyone for flying El Al (kind of hilarious, since there’s nothing else to fly these days), and then said that the crew speaks for all of us in expressing our thanks, as well, to the soldiers, “who are fighting night and day so we can have a home.”

Lots of heads nodding. Silence in the plane.

Welcome back.

And then he ended with words of hope that the hostages would soon come home. Suddenly, Vietnam was both geographically and emotionally far, far in the rear-view mirror.

Then, of course, Assad fell, and if you have not listened to Yaakov Katz explain what all this means for Israel in our podcast yesterday, you really should. As soon as it was clear that Assad was out, Israeli tanks took the Syrian side of the Golan Heights. It’s hard to imagine us leaving that any time soon. Israeli warplanes began to bomb Assad’s stockpiles of chemical weapons, all over the country that used to be his, and are destroying his army’s hardware. The goal is to make sure that whatever falls into the hands of HTS cannot be used against us.

Yet another enemy falls.

This morning, the news is reporting that Israeli tanks are some 20 kilometers outside of Damascus. True? Reason for that? Goal? Hard to know at this stage. The fog of war is intentional.

Though there’s much we don’t know, here is what we do know. Fourteen months after the worst catastrophe in Israel’s history (which will never, ever be over until every hostage is back), we are in a new Middle East.

* Hamas is badly bludgeoned. It still exists, but no one in the military world thinks it’s a threat.

* Hezbollah is destroyed. It has missiles, still, but it is no longer a serious threat to Israel.

* Iran? Even before we hear Yaakov Katz, it’s clear—Israel can send over 100 warplanes to the skies of our mortal enemy, do what we want, and not only have them all come home safely, but come home in formation, for all Israelis to see. This video of the planes on their way home from Iran made its way all over Israeli social media:

If one knows the history of Israel’s battles for the Golan Heights, in 1967 and in 1973, you know that they were battles soaked with Israeli blood. They were battles that created stories of heroism that we still tell today.

But this week, Israeli tanks just rolled across the took the rest. As simple as that.

This war is far, far from over. Just yesterday, seven more soldiers were killed, ruining forever the lives of hundreds of people. Tragically, those sorts of losses are not over, either.

But with our enemies finally falling, with Iran’s axis in tatters and especially given the symbolism of the Golan—you can feel it in the air. There’s a bounce in people’s steps. A few said to me at minyan this morning, “What in the world? We’re actually winning?”

We are, even if at tremendous cost, even if the hostage issue still desperately needs resolution. Cellcom, one of Israel’s primary cell providers, dug up an old ad and began replaying it in recent weeks (it’s the ad at the very top of this post).

In the ad, note the perfectly healthy soldier being carried on the stretcher. It’s a central part of training—no one gets left behind, “everyone carries the stretcher,” no matter how long the distance. It’s a phrase that’s been cited, ironically and with anger, when talking about the Haredi draft issue.

Soldiers are still fighting everywhere, but air raid sirens hardly go off, we’re slowing putting those generators we bought up in the attic, and like the kid in the cast in the ad, there’s a sense that things are starting to heal.

There are still thousands of soldiers at the front, and we need them to come home safely. There are still a hundred hostages who must come home. There’s a plethora of challenges. Nothing about this is over. Not even close.

Still, though, there’s change in the air.

Turns out, you don’t really need to go to Vietnam to begin to imagine a life after a war.

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