With the arrival of United Airlines flight #869, direct commercial flights to Saigon from the U.S. have resumed for the first time since 1975. My sister actually sent me a clipping from Yahoo News that showed a picture of one of her former boyfriends buying a ticket on that flight.

I applaud this move -- it means first, flights to visit my relatives in Viet Nam will now be cheaper presumably, and second, it’s another indication that U.S.-Vietnamese relations are normalizing, whether the staunch anti-communist Vietnamese here in the U.S. like it or not.