I just traveled from Haoni , Vietnam to Jakarta, Indonesia – two cities that provide formative chapters in the lives of both presidential candidates.

For Sen. John McCain, Hanoi is where he spent five years as a prisoner of war. For Sen. Barack Obama, Jakarta is where he lived briefly as a child where he attended a public school in the heart of the Muslim country’s capital.

There’s no doubt that McCain’s path to politics – his world view — was forged out of his service and his experience in the “Hanoi Hilton,” as the prison camp was called. I wrote last week about the waters of the lake in Hanoi from which McCain, then a young bomber pilot, was plucked after his plane was shot down during an air strike on the energy plant in Hanoi.. I wrote about the small statue that commemorates the spot where Vietnamese citizens pulled him ashore and turned him over to the Vietcong leadership that held him in a prisoner of war camp. For five years. He would return as a Senator and help open ties between the US and the government that was once the enemy in the war in which he fought.

Obama lived from 1967 to 1971 in Jakarta as a child with his mother and stepfather, who was Muslim and Indonesian. For two of those years, Obama attended a small public elementary school in Menteng, an affluent neighborhood in Indonesia’s crowded, teeming capital. . The small public school is also part of the path of Obama’s journey — his world view — that led him into politics and what he hopes to achieve in reaching out to the world if he is elected president.

(It should be noted that Obama also attended a Catholic school for two of those years, according to the Obama campaign website.)

I stopped by the public school Obama attended to check it out after I landed in Jakarta.

Public School 01, as it is officially called, has a pleasant atmosphere with its red tile roof and green stucco walls. It is clearly well maintained and up-scale and I was told by locals it was one of the more desirable public schools in the city. I can tell you for sure it is not a “madrassa,” or religious school, as the unhinged hosts who rant on conservative talk radio persistently maintain.

When I visited the school, the morning prayer was just coming to an end and the chanting was carried on a warm breeze from the nearby minarets of the neighborhood mosques.

Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world. There are 230 million Indonesians and close to 90 percent are Muslim. It is a place where moderate Islam has flourished and where it is woven into the fabric of every aspect of life in this emerging democracy.

A father and son were returning from the mosque. Both had prayer rugs slung over the shoulder as they entered the gate of their home right next to the school. The father’s name is Tungal. He’s a 41 year old food distributor to small groceries.

“I think Obama will be a good president because of his background, the fact that he spent some time here means he understands who we are,” Tungal said, speaking through an interpreter.

“He will help America have a closer relationship with Muslims and with Islam. And I think that is important,” added Tungal.

I agree with Tungal.

Just as McCain’s experience in Vietnam defined him as a man, and confirmed his love for his country, Obama’s experience in Indonesia is also formative. Obama is defined by his international upbringing with a father from Kenya and a stepfather who was Indonesian. It is part of what gives him an ability to understand a complex world.

And just as McCain forged his experience in Vietnam into statesmanship as a US Senator and helped open relations between the US and Vietnam, it is very possible Obama will use his experience as the son of a Kenyan man who was born Muslim and a stepfather who was a practicing Muslim to forge a new relationship between the US and the Muslim world. Sadly, too many of the more than 1 billion Muslims worldwide have increasingly come to see America as a potential enemy and a military aggressor. I believe Obama has a uniqe opportunity to change the tone of the dialogue between the two faiths. I believe he has a chance to constructively challenge the Muslim world, to appeal to its moderates – who are the vast majority of the adherents of the faith – to condemn the blasphemy of Islamic extremists who have carried out terrorism in the name of the religion.

And so this was off the beaten path for me on this trip. I am here to establish bureaus and to hire correspondents. But this completely unplanned and fascinating part of my journey offered a chance to ponder the two candidates in light of these two places that are such a big part of who they are. What is certain is that the next president will have an extraordinary challenge before them to reengage with the world after eight years of a presidency that seemed to go out of its way to alienate the world.

By just about every measure, the reputation of the US has suffered greatly and the next president will have a daunting challenge to repair the damage that’s been done. It is the good fortune of all American voters to have two candidates who both have these personal touchstones to the wider world. For which ever one of them becomes president, their time in the wider world will serve them — as well as America and thew world — well in doing their job.

Both candidates addressed the idea of how they will seek to restore America’s standing in the world. Eight years of a George W. Bush presidency, both candidates agree, has undeniably damaged the reputation of America in the world. And so in the fall of 2008, these questions seem to resonate across the debate and across the world as it watches this debate:

What does America mean to the world?

How do we present ourselves to the world?

And what does the world think of us?

Vietnam defined itself against America. It’s birth narrative as a modern nation came in resisting an American invasion. Ho Chi Minh ’s Vietnam defeated America through patience and persistence and an unrelenting belief that it could shake off a leviathan like America with its B-52s and its Agent Orange and its ground troops and its sense of destiny.

And so Hanoi is an interesting dateline from which to observe the first debates in the presidential election in the United States at a time when America is involved in yet another fateful struggle in a distant land. This time it is the hardscrabble deserts of Iraq rather than the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam. But what the history of our involvement in Vietnam teaches us about Iraq hangs in the air over this election, particularly with the presence of Sen. John McCain as a candidate. The debate moderator Jim Lehrer even raised the question directly for McCain.

I spent some time today at a small memorial for McCain that stands on a promenade around the lake in the center of Hanoi where his fighter jet crashed as he carried out a bombing raid on a power plant in the major city of the north of Vietnam. The memorial is an abstract piece of art that pictures a US Airforce pilot suspended in a parachute and looking down at the wreckage of a plane.

All around this memorial was a modern city going about its business. There were families resting on a Saturday morning along side the lake, and young people playing fierce games of badminton and elderly couples practicing tai chi. A mighty river of motor scooters and bicycles flowed past with the sound of beeping horns and the low, grinding hum of traffic.

One young woman who works as a political reporter for a Vietnamese news agency had this take on the debate in a casual and background conversation I had with her: “There are many people in this country who like John McCain because he has a connection to this place. He knows the war here. He knows Vietnam. And he will be connected with us. But there are a lot of young people who think that it is Barack Obama who understands the world. They believe that Obama is the best leader to see that America needs to improve its image with the world. So a lot of young people are voting for him.”

Another young man who had just graduated with a degree in computer science from Hanoi Open University put Vietnam’s relationship with America in sharp focus. “We want to work with America and not for America… We see America on an equal level. I think Barack Obama understands this and I think he understands the world and how America figures in the world.”

Tomorrow I leave for Jakarta, Indonesia where Barack Obama lived and went to elementary school as a boy. I will arrive in the largest Muslim country in the world at the height of the festival celebrating the end of Ramadan. And it seems a wild — and fitting — coincidence that I am traveling from Vietnam where McCain has a deep connection to Indonesia where Obama has roots in his extraordinary American journey that goes from Kansas to Kenya through Hawaii and Indonesia and elsewhere.

I leave Vietnam having finalized a deal with a solid correspondent, Matthew Steinglass. I also completed the necessary meetings with officials from the Foreign Ministry to officially apply for a news bureau in Vietnam. Just like in China, we will be breaking new ground as the first international web-based news organization to open a bureau. While here, I also deepened our relationship with Mr. Tuan at Vietnamnet, the leading on-line news agency in Vietnam. We have vowed to work together in the future and he is planning on attending a pre-launch gathering we are holding in mid October for our board of advisers and our investors and a close circle of editors, reporters and writers who are connected to our mission. In Jakarta, I will continue signing up more correspondents and then push on to Delhi from there for the final leg of the trip.

The journey continues.

Hanoi is a beautiful and lush city full of smells of coriander and jasmine and wet streets crowded with bicycles and scooters and taxis and rickshaws. It is magical. I can feel that right away. I am here meeting with our new correspondent Matthew Steinglass and with officials of the Foreign Ministry to officially register our news organization and to establish a bureau.

I am staying with dear friends Michael Sullivan of NPR and his wife Martha Ann Overland and their two children, Aaron and Nina. Michael and I go way back. We’ve known each other for 25 years — that’s how long ago it was when we both landed our first job in journalism together at a small NPR affiliate station, WFCR in Amherst, Massachusetts. Their home is a French colonial manse with an overgrown garden and a terrace that overlooks one of the small lakes that seem to be everywhere in Hanoi. From the terrace, you can see Vietnamese fisherman casting nets and working bamboo poles.

On this trip I will also be hosted by Nguyen Anh Tuan, the publisher and editor in chief of Vietnamnet, a spectacularly successful website here that has an estimated 6 million unique visitors in a country in which there are approximately 25 million people with access to the web. That is an astounding share of a market for a website and we at Global News know we have a lot to learn from Tuan. He is not only a successful businessman but he has been a courageous voice of independence in journalism. He has recently completed a fellowship at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University and more recently has been invited to serve as an adviser on Southeast Asia to Harvard’s School of Business Administration.

Now that I can post freely, I will keep you posted on all details. More tomorrow.