I bought something that wasn’t made in China!

Dumb luck on my part. I hadn’t given any thought to where it was made. But I’m always glad to throw my business to an underdog.

It was a table, and the underdog was Vietnam.

Vietnam. I came of age when it wasn’t a country, it was a war. It was flaming controversy. It was demonstrations that turned into riots, liberation that turned into My Lai, lies that turned into denials. It was an anti-war war. It was napalm, B-52s, Hueys, Agent Orange, the draft and daily death tolls — theirs and ours — reported on TV like the score of a game

But it was a perverse game with an inverted score. The one with the most points was losing.

The table arrived in a heavy flat box on a sunny spring day. It was an outdoor table, slats of acacia with steel legs and supports, several bags of assembly hardware, great gobs of protective packaging, and a tiny red sticker that said in tiny white letters, “Made in Vietnam.”

In a gesture of undeserved generosity and understanding, the manufacturer had included one extra of each bolt, screw and washer, even an extra allen wrench. The assembly instructions were also generously redundant, with illustrations and clear explanations in — significantly — English.

Bygones, it seemed, have become bygones. We won the body count but failed to win the war. The communists prevailed. We perpetuated unimaginable horrors on the Vietnamese people, but the war machine and untold billions of dollars failed to solve the problem.

More than 2,400 years before the fake battle of the Gulf of Tonkin, Sun Tzu, master of war, warned us. He said, “The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.”

He was right. As it turned out, we solved the problem not by battle but by absence. We simply left.

The proof is in my table. Its production and shipment to our western shore had to involve wages, laws, bilateral trade agreements, investment, banks, credit, currency exchange, international payments, contracts, insurance, negotiation, lawyers, promises, profit and a whole lot of styrofoam. The workers who made the table and packaged it with such care may well have taken their wages to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal.

Add it all up and it looks a lot like capitalism. Or call it business. Or, in my case, a table. It all worked so smoothly. For a reasonable price, no blood, no sweat, no tears, there it was at my door on a sunny spring day. All the B-52s in the world could not have produced a better table or made the process any smoother.

And I must say, it’s a very nice table. Handsome. Sturdy. Impervious to rain. The specs say it will seat six and hold 550 pounds of food.

I’m so glad the strife of the past has been resolved with some goodwill, a few jobs and a table where half a dozen people can break a quarter ton of bread. Why didn’t we think of that 50 years ago? A job, a decent wage, some junk food and a Coke…so much more persuasive than napalm.

I did not go to Vietnam, neither the country nor the war. Again, just dumb luck. The very same day I became eligible for the draft, rated 1-A like the beef of a Big Mac, the secretary of defense came on TV and announced the end of military conscription.

The sigh of relief could be heard from my mother’s lips to the jungles of southeast Asia. Those who knew me then knew I was not one to be entrusted with a machine gun, much less under hot and humid conditions. I would have only made a bad situation worse.

Left to its own devices, Vietnam has learned to do business. It mixes a little socialism, a little capitalism, a little diktat, and a little free enterprise. It makes its own styrofoam, and it stays out of wars.

Funny how things work out when you give peace a chance.

Glenn Cheney is a writer, translator, and managing editor of New London Librarium. He can be reached at glenn@nllibrarium.com .