There are some places that you are absolutely certain you’ll get around to visiting in your lifetime. Vietnam was never one of mine. I’m going to be living in a country with a political system completely antithetical to anything I’ve ever known; a place which, when I thought about it before, carried only images of war and burning forests… [I always thought] Ho Chi Minh… was simply a lesser Mao or Stalin, his murders numbered in thousands rather than millions.

I wrote those words over two months ago. I’ve come a long way since then.

Perhaps there’s little point in apologising for comments made on a blog with a combined readership I can count on my fingers, but I’d like to retract the above statements. They were made in ignorance, and as a (armchair) student of history I should know better.

When I came to this country I didn’t know the first thing about it. First, and most surprising, was the forehead-slapping realisation that the ‘Domino Theory’ was pretty much the worst foreign policy idea in the history of the White House. For one thing, the Vietnamese and Chinese vehemently despise each other. Admittedly so do most other countries bordering China, but it sort of puts a damper on the idea that Maoists were going to start streaming down into the country on their way to the rest of South-East Asia (Cambodia and Laos, by the way, despise the Vietnamese).

It’s also unlikely that the borderline-xenophobic Vietnamese would have allowed their country to be used for Russian military efforts. In fact, the few thousand Soviets and their families who came in after 1975 to help rebuild the country’s infrastructure were apparently ridiculed and ostracised to a large degree. It didn’t much matter; Russia was too preoccupied with Eastern Europe and the vagaries of the Cold War.

So the Second Indochina War was far less a proxy war than anyone in the United States believed. Ho Chi Minh – who was at various times a spy, a monk, a sailor, a general, an author (in five languages), a film reviewer, a wandering revolutionary and a pastry chef – was so fervently devoted to nationalism that he would bend his policies and beliefs in any direction in order to further the cause of his country’s freedom from the colonial French. As he said, “Better to sniff American shit once than eat French shit for the rest of our lives.”

Chameleonic, he ranged the political and diplomatic spectrum to suit his needs, appealing to the United States on countless occasions, writing letters and even attempting to sneak into a diplomatic gathering in order to personally deliver a plea to Roosevelt. The letters apparently never reached any American President, whose advisors stubbornly continued to pigeonhole Uncle Ho as a Maoist stooge. The President also managed to ignore the opinions of the OSS, his overseas intelligence network which had grave doubts about the purported ideological links between Ho and the Chinese (the OSS would later be rebranded as the CIA, a far less competent organisation with far fewer moral and ethical qualms).

In short, like the Americans before me, I came here clueless as to the political and historical realities of Vietnam. I had no idea, for example, that there used to be a bloody enormous South Indian-derived Hindu kingdom in what is now central Vietnam, and that it lasted for an incredible 13 centuries before the Vietnamese razed it, Carthage-like, to the ground. I didn’t know that the southern Viet tribes were the only people in the 12th and 13th centuries to successfully repel the unstoppable might of Khublai Khan’s Golden Horde, and they did it not once, not twice, but three times in a thirty year period.

I had not a clue about the pioneering guerilla warfare techniques of General Vo Nguyen Giap, or the complex political planning that went into the systematic Buddhist self-immolations of 1962, or the American complicity in the military decapitation of the Diem regime, or the astonishing fact that the official in charge of the much-reviled ‘strategic hamlet’ program was later discovered to be a Communist agent. Most criminally I had never even heard the name of Dien Bien Phu, the greatest and most decisive siege battle of the 20th century, during which the fearless paratroopers of the Foreign Legion actually volunteered to jump at low altitudes, at night, into a garrison that had become a blazing inferno of artillery and anti-aircraft fire in order to fight an enemy that had them completely surrounded.

I had no idea what I was getting into, but at least now I know better. Someone once asked Winston Churchill what three pieces of advice he’d give a man to help him succeed in any field of endeavour. Churchill replied: “Study history, study history, study history.” I tried this quote out on my travelling companions recently and they didn’t buy it. “But Churchill was a politician,” they complained. “They need to know about history.”

In my opinion so do plumbers, carpenters, musicians and just about anyone else. Perhaps not at the lowest, rote-learning level of their profession, but I can’t think of any craft in which mastery can be attained without reference to the accumulated knowledge of the past. I imagine that knowledge of the Roman aqueducts would greatly benefit any plumber, unless he really doesn’t care for his job at all.

It’s the same with writing. Modern storytelling has been refined by thousands of years of adaptation and evolution and in a sense, all human history is a story. The writer who is ignorant of the history of other people cannot put himself in their shoes; cannot change his mind. And the ability to change our minds has to be our most powerful storytelling tool. Without it, we would forever write characters who are nothing but pale reflections of ourselves.

So whatever you do for a living, give it a shot: Study history, study history, study history.

Or just mess about on the internet. That’s good too.

I’ll be in Hanoi very soon, where the body of Ho Chi Minh is still encased in glass, Lenin-style, and sequestered in a monumental tomb for all to visit (his friends and followers in the Party having betrayed his last wishes, which were for his body to be cremated and buried in his home village). I look forward to having a chat with the softly-spoken former pastry chef. Perhaps he’ll accept my apology.