Some WP articles, 29/4 - 4/5/00 (3)
hytran
* Expert's picks: Books on Vietnam
By David Chanoff
Sunday, April 30, 2000; Page X04
If you wanted to fill a shelf with the best books on the Vietnam War,
you'd do well to ask an expert for advice.
Our guide is David Chanoff, author of many books on the War.
First-Hand Accounts,
Fiction and Nonfiction,
by American Participants
Phil Caputo. Rumor of War (Holt Rinehart Winston, 1977; paperback,
Owlet, 1996). First-person account by a Marine lieutenant. Vivid battle
scenes, affecting depiction of war's absurdity and madness, the
archetype of a recurring Vietnam theme: the brutalization of young
Americans.
James Carroll. An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That
Came Between Us (Houghton Mifflin, 1996). A pacifist and former antiwar
priest whose father was a leading Air Force general tells of their
mutual alienation. A closely examined life by one of the great
contemporary literary stylists.
Stuart A. Herrington. Silence Was a Weapon (Presidio, 1982; out of
print). A detailed, insightful picture of the secret war in the
villages by an Army intelligence advisor.
Ron Kovic. Born on the Fourth of July (McGraw Hill, 1976; paperback,
Pocket, 1996). The story of a Marine sergeant, desperately wounded, and
his transformation into a peace activist.
Tim O'Brien. Going After Cacciato (Delacorte, 1975; paperback,
Broadway, 1999). An Army vet, O'Brien is one of the truly significant
talents to emerge from the war. Imaginative, tragic, grotesque and
hilarious, this novel is the high standard. The Things They Carried
(Houghton Mifflin, 1990; paperback, Broadway, 1999). Short takes mixing
fiction and fact. The title story is a masterpiece.
James N. Rowe. Five Years to Freedom (Random House, 1971; paperback,
Ballantine, 1991). Rowe was a Green Beret who spent five years as a
prisoner of the Vietcong. The story mesmerizes with its humanity and
courage.
Al Santoli. Everything We Had (Random House, 1981; paperback,
Ballantine, 1988). The best of the oral histories.
James Webb. Fields of Fire (Simon & Schuster, 1978; paperback, Pocket,
1991). By a Marine lieutenant who later became Secretary of the Navy.
Should be regarded, with O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, as one of the
enduring war novels.
By Journalists, Historians, Policymakers
Dale Andrade. Trial By Fire: The 1972 Easter Offensive. America's Last
Vietnam Battle (Hippocrene Books, 1995; out of print). Detailed account
of the least understood of the war's three major communist offensives.
Peter Braestrup. The Big Story (Westview Press, 1977; out of print).
How and why the press got the Tet Offensive so wrong. A landmark in the
history of journalism.
William Duiker. The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam (Westview Press,
1981; paperback 1996). U.S. Containment Policy and the Conflict in
Indochina (Stanford Univ., 1994). Two thorough accounts by a leading
historian. Remarkable for their objectivity.
Bernard Fall. Street Without Joy (Stackpole Press, 1961; revised,
1994). Hell in a Very Small Place (J.B. Lippincott, 1967; paperback, Da
Capo, 1988). Last Reflections on a War (Doubleday, 1964; reissue,
Stackpole, 2000). Respectively, these address France's Vietnam War, the
battle of Dienbienphu, and miscellaneous reflections. Lucid,
analytical, moving, Fall is the classic journalist scholar.
David Halberstam. The Making of a Quagmire (Random House, 1964;
paperback, McGraw Hill, 1987). The Best and the Brightest (Fawcett,
1969). Respectively, Halberstam's early reporter's reflections and his
later history of how we got there. Very different political
perspectives, both are first-rate reading.
Michael Herr. Dispatches (Knopf, 1977; paperback, Vintage, 1991). Gonzo
journalism by a master.
Stanley Karnow. Vietnam: A History (Viking Press, 1983; paperback,
Penguin, 1997). Sparse on the post-1973 period and on the South
Vietnamese, this is still the best journalistic history, fluent and
untendentious.
Henry Kissinger. White House Years (Little Brown, 1979; out of print).
Years of Upheaval (Little Brown, 1982; out of print). Years of Renewal
(Simon & Schuster, 1999). Kissinger's three-volume memoir, one of the
great books by a second man. A subtle intelligence facing an almost
infinitely complex dilemma; and both failing and succeeding.
Don Oberdorfer. Tet! (Doubleday, 1971; out of print). Definitive
account of the turning-point battle the United States both won and lost.
Bruce Palmer. The 25-year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam
(Univ. of Kentucky, 1984; paperback, Da Capo, 1990). A professional
military history, detailed, technical, yet personal and highly readable.
Douglas Pike. Viet Cong (M.I.T. Press, 1966; out of print). The
application of intelligence and inside information to understanding the
Vietcong as a sociopolitical phenomenon. PAVN (Presidio Press, 1986;
out of print). The story of the North Vietnamese army.
Neil Sheehan. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in
Vietnam (Random House, 1988; paperback, Vintage, 1989). Biography of
the brilliant but flawed American colonel and later senior civilian
advisor, seen by the antiwar journalist as a symbol of American
involvement.
Shelby Stanton. The Rise and Fall of an American Army (Presidio, 1985;
paperback, 1995). Vivid battle-writing enlivens this important,
analytical history of the U.S. Army's Vietnam experience.
Harry Summers. On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War
(Presidio, 1982; paperback, 1995). The highly influential after-action
analysis of what went wrong militarily and what the strategic lessons
of defeat were.
Robert Timberg. The Nightingale's Song (Simon & Schuster, 1995;
paperback, Touchstone, 1996). A dramatic, poignant interweaving of the
lives of five high profile Naval Academy graduates, four of whom fought
in Vietnam. Superb storytelling.
Thomas Thayer. War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam
(Westview, 1985; out of print). Teaches more and better than most
full-scale histories through statistical data simply and plainly
presented. An invaluable sourcebook.
From the Vietnamese Side
Bui Tin. Following Ho Chi Minh: Memoirs of a North Vietnamese Colonel
(Univ. of Hawaii, 1995). A rarity. A true North Vietnamese insider
speaking candidly.
Van Tien Dung. Our Great Spring Victory (Monthly Review Press, 1977;
out of print). The victor of North Vietnam's final offensive. Heroic
poetry with interesting sidelights.
Bao Ninh. The Sorrow of War (Secker and Warburg, 1994). A North
Vietnamese soldier's novel. Rough, but authentic and bursting with
compressed emotion.
Tran Van Tra. Vietnam: History of the Bulwark B-2 Theater (JPRS SEA
Doc. 82-783, 1983). Tra was the communist military chief for the Mekong
Delta and the Saigon area. His postwar history, commissioned by the
party, was confiscated for its emphasis on the southern revolutionary
achievement.
--David Chanoff
* At the Wall, Rubbing Away Pain Visit to Memorial Salves Wounds of
Vietnam
By Tracey A. Reeves Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, May 1, 2000;
Page B01
For 18 years, Bob Hoffman had avoided the wall and the memories and
flashbacks he knew it would evoke.
He was afraid, too, that the powerful black granite memorial would
rekindle his anger toward the United States for entering a war that he
and many Americans thought their country should have stayed out of.
But yesterday, on the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Hoffman,
of Pearl River, N.Y., stood stoically at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,
his body trembling and his eyes red and watering, as he took rubbings
of the names of three friends on a blank piece of white paper.
Wiping the tears from his face, he took a deep breath. He had made it.
"It's hard to say why I came today," Hoffman said, clinging to the
paper that would forever symbolize his first encounter with the wall.
"But I know that I'm glad I came."
Hoffman was among many who stood at the giant stone wedge yesterday and
cried.
Many were repeat visitors, soldiers and their families who come to
Washington this time every year. Others were like Hoffman and his buddy
John Kleber, 67, a veteran of the Korean War, who made a special trip
to the nation's capital with a bus load of veterans to observe the
poignant anniversary.
"A lot of people died for no reason over there," said Kleber, also of
Pearl River. "It was a war that was for nothing."
Hoffman added, "To this day, I don't know what we were fighting for
over there. . . . It just doesn't sit right with me. That's what's so
painful."
Throughout the morning and afternoon, visitors trekked by the hundreds
to Constitution Gardens on the National Mall to touch and hug the
memorial that was envisioned by Vietnam veteran Jan C. Scruggs and
designed by Maya Lin, who was then a student at Yale.
The granite glittered in the warm spring sun as several
groups--including one comprising Vietnamese children later adopted by
Americans--held somber ceremonies honoring the men whose names are
inscribed there. Nearby, two bouquets of red roses lay on the bronze
statue of three women and a wounded soldier that is the Vietnam Women's
Memorial.
In another annual gathering, Vietnamese American veterans conducted an
elaborate ceremony of song and prayer to honor their country's fallen
comrades, along with soldiers from other countries who fought and died
in Vietnam.
Walter L. Orton, an Army veteran who served in Vietnam, was in
Washington over the weekend for an annual meeting of the Vietnam
Veterans of America when he heard about the Vietnamese ceremony and
decided to wander over.
"It's funny. After all this, Vietnam is still not free," said Orton, of
Little Rock. "I've been back there several times. They're still a
communist country."
Patricia Martin, of New Orleans, was less pragmatic in her view of
Vietnam.
She came to the wall not to debate the rights and wrongs of the war,
but to look for her cousin's name.
"I found it," she said gleefully, after scanning an encased book near
the wall listing the names of soldiers whose names are listed on the
memorial. "Arthur Justilien Martin! That's my cousin."
Martin explained that she never knew her cousin, but had heard of him
growing up in New Orleans. She looked at the book again and calculated
that he was 27 when he was killed in action in June 1969.
But on the quarter-century anniversary of the end of the war that was
never officially declared, as always, seeing the wall moved visitors to
tears and even sobs.
Harry Sine, 59, a former Marine who never got the call to go to
Vietnam, was among the most upset.
"I wasn't there, but I wish I had been," said the ponytailed Sine, of
Bethlehem, Pa., wiping the tears through his long, scruffy beard.
"Being here makes me feel good, because even though I wasn't in 'Nam, I
was part of the team. We all were."
On his first trip to the wall, Dominick Pileggi could feel his emotions
swell as he tried to find the names of 46 men from his home town, who
lost their lives in Vietnam. An Army veteran, he said he was never
"lucky enough" to get the call to go to war.
"A lot of the guys say they wished they were there," said Pileggi. "Not
that we wanted to die. There's just something about being there. I get
emotional about it."
Rachel Neiderer says she can get emotional, too, especially when she
looks at the face of her 3-year-old adopted son, Tyler, who was born in
Vietnam.
Neiderer and her husband, Clem, of Hanover, Pa., came to Washington,
especially for the commemoration. While their son is still young and
unaware of the significance of the wall, she plans to use future trips
to Washington as an opportunity to teach him about his heritage and the
evolving relationship between his native and adopted countries.
"We watch videos about Vietnam and spend time with Vietnamese
families," said Neiderer. "But we want to use these trips as lessons,
too."
The lesson that Hoffman, the Vietnam vet, said he learned yesterday was
that in finally seeing the wall, he was able to confront the fear that
has dogged him for years.
It was a fear, he said, that prevented him from putting a pencil and
paper to the wall to take rubbings of the names of his three
friends--Heinz Ahlmeyer, Robert Hagan Jr. and Joseph E. Hartz.
"I was scared," he said. "Scared of the memories, scared of what I
would remember--the pain and the death."
* 'Saigon's' Sad Celebration Residents See Little That's Festive in
Anniversary of War's End
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, May 1,
2000; Page A16
HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam, April 30遊ietnam's government marked the
25th anniversary of the end of "the American War" today with speeches
and a parade that drew enthusiastic cheers from thousands of Communist
Party faithful at the city's Reunification Palace. But for most
residents of this former South Vietnamese capital, there seemed to be
little to celebrate.
Residents of this city--which they still call Saigon--generally avoided
the festivities and instead spent the four-day weekend traveling or
relaxing at home, highlighting the tension that still exists between
supporters of the former U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government and
their Communist rulers from the North.
Apparently fearful that government opponents might use the anniversary
as an opportunity to protest before television cameras from around the
world, officials confined most of the events to the grounds of the
former South Vietnamese presidential palace, and attendance was limited
to invited guests.
The parade did wind its way out the palace gates and down a tree-lined
boulevard, affording ordinary people a chance to partake in the
festivities. There were no protests, but the sparse attendance in the
public viewing area was in marked contrast to the spirit of unity the
government has struggled to portray.
"This day is nonsense to me," said Nguyen Van Thanh, 54, a former
officer in South Vietnam's air force who spent this morning at the
small cafe he runs. "There is nothing to celebrate. Most Saigonese
don't feel anything but loss. We don't have nearly as good a life as we
once did."
Inside the palace grounds, though, the mood was strikingly different.
An estimated 20,000 guests, from grizzled war veterans to fresh-faced
students with miniature red Vietnamese flags, stood under a blazing
morning sun to watch a carefully scripted parade that began with
goose-stepping soldiers and ended with a campy, circus-like pageant
featuring unicycle riders, stilt walkers, aerobic disco dancers and
children wearing animal costumes. Marching bartenders hoisted cocktail
shakers with red stars, and policemen rode American-made
Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
In between, columns of government workers, from telephone repairmen to
electricians, strode to revolutionary tunes with such lyrics as "We are
marching to Saigon to liberate our country."
Although no military hardware was on display, the parade's most surreal
moment came about halfway through when a float shaped like a tank--with
several young women standing atop it dressed as soldiers and carrying
bouquets--emerged from the palace gates.
"For what Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh City can enjoy, the entire nation has
paid 30 years of continuous fighting, the loss of millions of human
lives and the loss of the most beloved members of millions of
families," the mayor of Ho Chi Minh City, Vo Viet Thanh, said in the
keynote address, speaking under a larger-than-life painting of the
revolutionary leader for whom the city is named. "The country and the
people of Vietnam acknowledge and recognize, with profound gratitude,
the immeasurable heroic sacrifices of all those who have laid down
their lives for the country."
Vietnam's senior leaders, including Prime Minister Phan Van Khai and
Communist Party General Secretary Le Kha Phieu, attended the ceremony
but did not speak. Also on stage were two of the country's most
renowned military leaders, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, who masterminded
victories over French and U.S. forces, and Gen. Van Tien Dung, who
commanded the final campaign that took Saigon.
It was 25 years ago today at 11:30 a.m. that two North Vietnamese tanks
crashed through the gates of the presidential palace. The accompanying
soldiers hoisted their flag--red with a yellow star in the center--and
forced the South Vietnamese leader to resign.
Although direct U.S. military involvement in the war ended in January
1973 with the signing of the Paris peace accords, South Vietnam
President Nguyen Van Thieu had asked the U.S. government to help fend
off the North Vietnamese invasion. But in March 1975, the House of
Representatives rejected President Gerald Ford's request for $300
million in military aid for the South. In his farewell address, Thieu
said the United States had broken its promises to his country.
In the decade following the North's victory, the Communist leadership
sent hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese to re-education camps.
Millions of others fled by boat, and many eventually settled in the
United States. The government implemented a socialist economy,
establishing collective farms and state-run factories, moves that
caused widespread shortages of food and other basic commodities.
In 1986, though, Vietnam began taking its first steps toward a free
market, allowing farmers to grow what they wanted and urban residents
to set up small shops. Those reforms have yielded tangible financial
gains for millions of Vietnamese--the streets of this city are now
clogged with motorcycles, not bicycles--but many economic analysts say
the country needs to escalate the pace of reform dramatically if it
wants to continue the trend of prosperity.
In his speech, the mayor pledged to increase the city's economic growth
and streamline business regulations. "Although the past 25 years have
seen admirable achievements, we should not be complacent with them, for
a considerable gap still exists between the great and diverse potential
the city possesses and the huge and pressing demands the city is
facing," he said.
Outside the palace, though, most residents went on with their daily
routines, unfazed by the speeches, the parade and the bright red
hammer-and-sickle banners hanging from seemingly every light pole.
"This may be the happiest day for people from the North, but it is the
saddest day for people from the South," said Tang Thi Xuan, 49, as she
walked near the palace on her way home for lunch. She said her husband,
who was a colonel in the South Vietnamese army, died in a re-education
camp in 1977.
Because of the family's ties to the old regime, she said, she has been
unable to get a job with the government. Nowadays, she works in a small
clothing store. "There are less comforts now," she said. "Before 1975,
I used to play tennis, but now I cannot afford to. We used to have a
car, but now all I have is a motorcycle."
Ho Chi Minh City, with its skyscrapers and trendy boutiques, only
appears more prosperous, she said. "For me and most people in my
neighborhood, life is much tougher," she said.
The lingering bitterness also was evident in Nguyen Van Thanh's cafe.
"This is not our holiday," said a 50-year-old woman who gave her name
only as Lan. "We don't care about it. The only thing we should be
celebrating is the fact that we have survived for the past 25 years."
In another corner, seven middle-aged Vietnamese professionals--four men
and three women--spent the morning sipping mugs of Tiger beer on the
rocks and smoking cigarettes. None watched the festivities, either in
person or on state-run television, which broadcast the events live.
But when the subject turned to 1975, the seven took sides. Phan Anh
Tuan spoke of his father, a Viet Cong guerrilla who fought U.S. troops
in South Vietnam near the Cambodian border. Tuan, 40, who has worked as
a customs inspector for the past 15 years, described himself as "100
percent Viet Cong."
Sitting across the table was Thi Nguyen Duc, a former soldier in the
South Vietnamese army, who said he was not interested in today's
celebrations. Pointing to a reporter at the table, he declined to
elaborate, saying: "People here dare not speak out."
Despite the ideological split, Duc and Tuan were clinking beer mugs a
few moments later. "Now it is all right to sit together and share the
same beer," Tuan said. "Everything is in the past. We have to close
that chapter of our history and let bygones be bygones."
* Pham Van Dong Dies at 94 Vietnamese Prime Minister
By Richard Pearson Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, May 2, 2000;
Page B07
Pham Van Dong, 94, the erudite, iron-willed and tenacious communist who
was prime minister of North Vietnam for two decades of war before
achieving the unification of the nation on his terms in 1975, died
April 29 at a hospital in Hanoi. The cause of death was not reported.
Dong, who died a day before the 25th anniversary of the communist
victory that ended the war, led a unified Vietnam as prime minister
until retiring in 1986 as "government adviser," an old, ill and largely
unpopular leader.
Dong had been a leader of the struggle for a united, communist Vietnam
from the beginning. Better known to the outside world were Ho Chi Minh,
the charismatic political leader, and Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the
legendary military genius. But Dong, the administrative workhorse and
the man who held the struggle together, was the other irreplaceable
member of the ruling trio.
He led the communist takeover of the North Vietnamese economy in the
1950s, and in the South in the 1970s. Over the years, he also signed
most major treaties with foreign communist states that brought aid to
the ever-struggling state.
Despite a mandarin birth, he became a nationalist and a revolutionary
in his teens and joined the Communist Party in 1930. By the time he
returned for good from Chinese exile during World War II, he was a
party leader.
A co-founder of the Viet Minh during the war, he was named finance
minister in Ho's interim government after the war. He was elected to
the party Politburo in 1950 and attended the historic 1954 Geneva
Conference as Ho's foreign minister.
The conference resulted in the French evacuation of their empire in
Indochina and the "temporary" halving of Vietnam. South Vietnam was
effectively a pro-West state and North Vietnam a communist entity, with
Dong becoming its prime minister in 1955. He held that job through the
entire struggle for unification. He attempted to hold his state
together as it fought South Vietnamese forces and, from the 1960s, a
massive allied coalition led by the United States.
At first blush, it seemed improbable, if not impossible, that North
Vietnam could "defeat" the seemingly endless manpower and supplies this
country committed to the struggle.
But Dong, who was a leader in propaganda efforts in the war, could
laugh as he explained to American reporters just why their country
would lose.
He maintained that America had no conception of the length of the
struggle his people had fought or their implacable will to resist,
regardless the cost. He asked one reporter in 1966: "And how long do
you Americans want to fight? One year? Two years? Five years? Ten
years? Twenty years?" He added, "We will be glad to accommodate you."
It was pressure from a communist sister state, the Soviet Union, that
led Dong and North Vietnam to accept a 1973 cease-fire agreement that
led to the withdrawal of American forces. Dong was against the
agreement and resumed the war in 1974, and approved the final 1975
offensive that took what was then Saigon and ended the war.
After that, the world watched as hundreds of thousands of South
Vietnamese went through "political reeducation" and a million others
fled their homeland. These people represented an elite that was needed
to rebuild both Vietnams and help run the new country. Perhaps
inevitably, the economy collapsed, and before long, Vietnam was
involved in new battles.
In 1979, it made a major invasion of Cambodia, and it later had major
border clashes with its giant neighbor to the north, China. Ironically,
it was wasting precious resources fighting fellow communists.
Dong continued to try to modernize his country and normalize its
relations with its neighbors and the world, and in 1981 introduced a
system of some capitalist incentives. But his heart was just not in it.
He ruefully concluded: "We are plagued by problems. . . . Waging a war
is simple, but running a country is very difficult."
Since stepping down as prime minister, he had battled a variety of
ailments, including blindness. But he continued to write articles and
give speeches against free-market economic reforms that a new
generation of more pragmatic officials favored.
Pham Van Dong was born in Quang Ngai Province in central Vietnam. His
father was chief secretary to Vietnamese Emperor Duy Tan. The youth
attended upper-class French schools, where his classmates included the
future president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem. In 1925, Dong
enrolled in the University of Hanoi, where he led a major strike
against the French overlords before fleeing to China.
Sent back to Vietnam by the Communist Party, he was captured and
imprisoned by the French for six years. He returned to China in 1939.
After Japan took control of Vietnam during World War II, he returned to
Vietnam and helped lead the military resistance. After the war, during
the struggle to evict the French from Vietnam, he became known as Ho's
"best nephew" and "other self."
* Silenced Vietnam
Wednesday, May 3, 2000; Page A22
THE COMMUNIST victory in Vietnam 25 years ago brought the usual
Communist political brutality. Thousands of political "enemies" were
killed; many more "boat people" died trying to flee by sea. Tens of
thousands were herded into "reeducation" camps. Today Vietnam is
attempting to rejoin the world economy, and the worst of the postwar
human rights abuses have ended. The reeducation camps have been all but
emptied. Many refugees have returned to visit.
Yet Vietnam remains a one-party state whose leaders seem hesitant about
how far they want economic reform to go; rampant corruption retards
foreign investment, and a key trade agreement with the United States
remains in limbo pending Hanoi's approval. Apparently the Communist
Party fears more openness toward the outside world could bring in more
political heterodoxy--for which the party still shows zero tolerance.
As a new report from Human Rights Watch, "Vietnam: Silencing of
Dissent," documents, the brutality of the '70s and '80s has given way
to a more legalistic but still repressive system under which
independent religious, political and intellectual leaders are subjected
to constant surveillance, periodic house arrest and arbitrary
"administrative detention."
In honor of the victory 25 years ago, Hanoi has announced an amnesty
for some 12,000 of the country's 78,000 prisoners. But it's anyone's
guess how many of those to be released are political prisoners, since
no one can say for sure how many people are jailed for political
reasons in Vietnam. The authorities have acknowledged that more than a
hundred people are imprisoned for crimes against "national security."
Human Rights Watch was able to identify by name 22 political prisoners,
as well as 26 Roman Catholics, Buddhists and Protestants, who are doing
time for practicing their beliefs.
The human rights issue in Vietnam is closely connected to the issue of
corruption, which is rarely dealt with through transparent judicial
procedures. Indeed, corruption charges are sometimes used as a pretext
for expelling reform-minded party members. As for the press, it is
completely state controlled. Tran Do, a Communist Party member for 58
years, was expelled from the party in January 1999 because he advocated
a more open political system. His subsequent request to publish an
independent newspaper was summarily rejected. But his application
letter eloquently summarizes the state of freedom in Vietnam: "People
with ideas do not want to speak, do not dare to speak, do not know
where to speak. They hold their silence in agony."
* The Lone, Wobbly Domino
By Richard Cohen
Thursday, May 4, 2000; Page A25
HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam輸mericans and others here are buying blazing
red Vietnamese caps, the ones with a bright yellow star on the crown.
They can buy counterfeit U.S. Army dog tags and green pith helmets of
the type once worn by the North Vietnamese Army and, if they want, they
can go out into the countryside to see the tunnels where the Viet Cong
once lived and, for $1, fire a round from an AK-47. This is the way the
Vietnam War has finally ended, not as tragedy and not as farce, but as
kitsch.
It has been 25 years since the fall of this city, then Saigon, and even
longer since I met a one-armed Vietnam vet at a massive antiwar
demonstration in Washington. He took me to the amputee ward of Walter
Reed Army Hospital. He knew the men there--the ones with no arms and no
legs and the one I will never forget. He opened his bathrobe to show me
what had happened to him. His groin was gone.
The sheer waste of human lives in a war that made no sense, that still
makes no sense, has come back to me in force here. I did not fight and
I did not see men die, but I remember that hospital ward and I think of
those men to this day. Some of them are probably still hospitalized.
How can anyone laughingly wear the red cap with the yellow star?
The Vietnamese must have similar thoughts. The communists won the war,
uniting their country and making it independent--and that is no slight
achievement. But the domino that Vietnam was supposed to be, the one
that would topple all the other dominoes of Southeast Asia, now stands
alone and wobbly, a model for no other nation. The nearby dominoes have
fallen, all right--but into the arms of Goldman Sachs.
This is a government by a clique of musty old men. They fought so hard
for so long--against the Japanese, the French and the United
States--but the glorious victory is tarnishing in the soggy heat. Their
children want to learn English, live in the States, surf the Web. Even
the son of a great war hero has left the country. He is said to live
deep in the heart of Texas.
Is the story true? Who knows? It was related by a former army general,
an important man, and the fact that he believed it, laughed at it, sort
of approved of it, was all you have to know about what has happened to
this country. Four million dead, men still on the streets with plastic
peg legs, and the kids not only know little about the war but also want
to emulate the very people their fathers and mothers defeated.
Saigon--it's still Saigon. The communist government can't even make the
new name stick. The city is reverting to its hedonistic, bustling self.
It is thick with motor scooters and signs in English, new hotels and
well-stocked stores whose customers, according to the official
statistics, are too poor to afford what's in them. The ethos of
communism has mutated. Hands once raised in a clenched-fist salute are
now extended for a bribe.
Corruption is so brazen, not to mention chaotic, that the official and
industrious censor does not blacken out mention of corruption in the
International Herald Tribune. (A reference to political intimidation,
however, has to be read by holding the paper up to the light.) When
asked if he pays bribes, a hotel manager reacts as if he's been asked
if the pope is Catholic: Yes, of course. Trouble is, too often a bribe
buys nothing. The lack of rules--legal and otherwise--has taken a toll.
Foreign investment is flat. The economy is stalled. Vietnam is
wandering in a desert of its own making, waiting for a generation of
old communists to die out.
Out at the Fulbright Center, Marshall Carter, a combat veteran and now
CEO of State Street Bank, is lecturing Vietnamese on the basics of
investment. "Let me talk about the shift from bank finance to capital
market finance," Carter says. A translator renders his remarks in
Vietnamese. Familiar words pop out of the soup of strange sounds:
"IPO," "Internet." What do the students understand? It's impossible to
know.
But here is the paradox of Vietnam in a nutshell. The loser has
returned to instruct the winner. A quarter of a century after the end
of the war, mostly everyone wants the same thing: American-style
prosperity. Never mind that the red of the cap symbolizes blood and the
yellow is the skin of the people. Tourists don't know that. Red?
Yellow? Who cares anymore? The only color that really matters is dollar
green.
hyt...@my-deja.com
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