Remembering a lost war

By Donald Kirk

SAIGON ― Memories of a brutal past mingle with images of new beginnings in a region of thick mangrove swamps interlaced with canals from which Viet Cong guerillas more than 40 years ago fired rockets into the heart of the capital of "South" Vietnam.

Returning for the 40th anniversary of the fall of the old Saigon regime on April 30, 1975, instead of running into Viet Cong guerrillas, I find 50,000-ton freighters loading and unloading cargo containers by a dock that's 80 percent owned by a Middle Eastern company. The new port facilities are on a branch of the Saigon River lined with thick jungle that was largely impenetrable to American troops before they withdrew after the signing of the "Paris Peace" in January 1973. Upstream, you can see a cluster of oil tanks that the Viet Cong occasionally managed to blow up, sending shockwaves of noise and fear.

I remember black plumes of smoke rising from the oil tanks one morning in July 1968 hours after hearing rockets whistling overhead, exploding as they landed. The dense swampland south of the city formed part of "the rocket belt" from which the Viet Cong showed they could fire at will despite heavy losses incurred in the Tet Offensive in February in which Communist forces attacked virtually every provincial capital and district town.

Now, revisiting the country that I had covered as a journalist for American newspapers and magazines, I am just as shocked by the shining signs of foreign and Vietnamese companies over coffee shops, motor vehicle agencies, high-fashion shops… everything. Wherever you go, the talk is of construction, burgeoning projects, tearing down the old and building the new.

Korean companies have much to do with Saigon's revival. You see Korean signs everywhere ― Samsung, Lotte, Hyundai, LG, they all have stores, offices and factories. Korean coffee shops are also visible ― Cafe Bene and Tous Les Jours, to name a couple ― while Koreans are also moving into a new district of high-rise condominiums and shopping plazas, sending their kids to a new Korean school near schools for Japanese- and English-speaking students.

Life, however, is not easy for many whose memories go back to the defeat of the Saigon government and the fear that the victors from northern Vietnam would annihilate them. Thousands with ties to the old regime, including military officers, government bureaucrats and business people, were sent to "reeducation" camps from which many never returned.

You sense the contrasts on a visit to the sternly modern central building of Vietnam National University, an institution with five different colleges. They all opened 10 years ago with the mission of providing inexpensive education to a new generation of bright, eager young people to whom the war is not even a memory, just a blur from parents' stories.

Students say they worry about the lack of freedom ― and the risks of talking about sensitive problems. They say they don't know about the past or can't really discuss it. Nobody can afford to appear openly rebellious. One student says it's easier having only one political party ― the Communist Party ― rather than having many conflicting groups. She cites political unrest in Thailand as an example of what happens with too many voices opposing one another.

No doubt about it, real freedom is out of the question while the party reigns supreme. Vietnamese flags ― a gold star on a red field ― fly everywhere. You rarely see the flag of the Viet Cong, the National Liberation Front that waged guerrilla warfare in South Vietnam before the North Vietnamese took over the war and staged the final campaign. Ho Chi Minh died in 1968 but remains the iconic figure of the revolution against the French and then the Americans.

At a complex of underground tunnels and bunkers at Cu Chi, 40 miles west of the center of the city, an old Viet Cong fighter whose right arm was blown off in a tank battle talks about the guerrillas' struggle. He acknowledges that the army from the North, not the Viet Cong, played the leading role. In fact, he says, one of the commanders of the complex was Nguyen Van Linh, who rose to become party leader in the late 1980s.

Nowadays, the country is obsessed with other concerns. Admiral Tran Thanh Minh, deputy chief of Vietnam's small navy, focuses on the border war with China that lasted from 1979 to 1991 and on the threat posed by China's claim to the entire South China Sea.

China once provided the Vietnamese Communist forces with all their rifles, machine guns and ammunition, but Vietnam now is in the market for U.S. weapons under terms of a "comprehensive partnership." After 40 years, times are changing in more than just appearances.

Columnist Donald Kirk, www.donaldkirk.com, covered much of the Vietnam War for American newspapers and magazines and wrote two books about it. He's at kirkdon@yahoo.com.

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