I thought I was going to miss the war.

A few days before America invaded Iraq, I left with my family on vacation, and we didn't come home until the end of March. It was disorienting to be overseas for so much of this momentous event. But it also turned out to be illuminating, given our itinerary.

As America fought the first transformative war of the 21st century, I found myself in countries against which America had fought its transformative 20th century wars -- Japan and Vietnam. Which meant this new war was never far from my thoughts, try as I might just to be a tourist.

The first afternoon in Tokyo, in a museum of everyday life called the Shitamachi, I found myself in front of a display of World War II ration chits. They reminded me of the collection of tissue-thin Japanese identity documents and yen notes I played with as a child. They'd come from a wallet my father had taken as a souvenir off a dead Japanese solider after the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944.

In the same museum gallery was a hand-cranked air raid siren used during the American bombing of Tokyo. My 13-year-old daughter whispered, "Do the Japanese hate us because we killed so many of their civilians and then ruled over them?" I told her no, I don't think so.

Later on, as we strolled down slick, shiny Omotesandodori, the only old buildings we saw were a low-rise modernist compound. They are, as I was told later, where American occupation forces lived. American occupation forces: I was reminded again, of course, of Iraq.

Arriving in Hanoi, our driver cheerfully pointed out the spot where the heaviest B-52 bombing occurred in 1972. Later I asked our guide if he was old enough to remember the American bombing. He said yes he was, just barely -- they were his first memories.

In Vietnam's Museum of the Revolution, it was tough to look at the displays of the dusty, grimy low-tech munitions we used to kill them and the even dustier, grimier lower-tech weapons they used to kill us. Tough...but at this moment bracing, too

"They must hate us here," my 13-year-old said. And you would think so: the U.S. killed at least a million Vietnamese. If anyone on earth has a right to hate us, it's those people's widows and children and friends.

Out on the streets of Hanoi, I found myself glancing hard at the older faces, the people who endured such hell for so long...and not just a few weeks or months, but years and years of war. Yet in Vietnam as in Japan, one gets no sense that people hold a grudge against America.

As I saw the huge billboards for western companies and felt the entrepreneurial mania, I thought: we lost the battle, but we won the war. Vietnam is a lot freer in every sense than it was thirty years ago. Maybe the same will be said someday of Iraq. And maybe, I thought, when my daughter's child asks her 30 years from now if Iraqis hate us, she might be able to give the same reply.

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