Asia Watch: Saigon Serenade
Aikman, David
AS IA WATCH by David Airman Saigon Serenade ii elcome to Vietnam," reads the banner being carried by two slender young women at Da Nang's dockside. In front of them, bearing expressions of...
...We prefer to call it Saigon...
...On the dockside at Da Nang, enterprising souvenir salesmen have assembled copies of Vietnam war-era Zippo lighters embossed with poignant, counterculture messages: "With booze you lose, with dope there's hope" and "Always ripped or always stoned, I made it a year...
...Young European and American backpackers seem to have discovered Vietnam by the thousands...
...The underground war-rooms still sport the South Vietnamese military's last balance-offorces maps...
...dog-tags — name, ID...
...The wealthier expatriates hang out at the upscale steak houses and French or Mexican restaurants that have sprung up within a block of Tu Do ("Independence") Street, which few people call44 An army officer gleefully displays a whole row of metal-spike booby traps designed to maim and kill U.S...
...But aren't those who fought and died in the war also owed the debt of truth...
...Saigon's Communist rulers respond to this disadvantage with appropriately crude touches...
...abandoned South Vietnam...
...As our cruise ship— a Norwegian liner packed with Americans, Germans, and Latin Americans—noses its way into the harbor, the reception committee rumbles into action...
...The North and the South are ruled by the same party, the Communist Party," she says...
...Diplomatic relations were established the following year, and another step toward normalization came in April, when a former POW, Rep...
...Did he go home...
...Hoa looks at him blankly...
...Hanoi, it seems, doesn't want anyone to forget who won the war...
...In its sometimes fumbling and often angry and self-flagellating way, America keeps trying to tell the full story of its ordeal in Vietnam...
...Now Hanoi must do the same...
...The palace is immaculately kept up as a museum, but with the white Mercedes of President Nguyen Van Thieu proudly displayed on the ground floor...
...ambassador to postwar Vietnam...
...army major, suddenly recalling his arrival in Saigon at the height of the 1968 Tet Offensive...
...officer expresses deep remorse at how the U.S...
...troops...
...Not much of this comes to the surface in the tours organized for foreigners...
...The tour guide looks uncomfortable...
...A tour guide in the former southern capital lets slip the resentment he feels towards the regime...
...But the largest reception hall now has Stalinist-era white doilies protecting the arm chairs and a large bust of Ho Chi Minh beaming down from above a red velvet cloth...
...And how should a Vietnam Veteran react to the battered G.I...
...Visitors have reported plenty of references to Agent Orange, napalm, and the My Lai massacre, but deafening silence about the deliberate Vietcong murders of civilians at Hue or thousands of other places throughout South Vietnam during the course of the war...
...I really have a guilty feeling now that we let them down," says Lt...
...0 ne place not on the official tour was the War Crimes Museum in Saigon...
...In front of them, bearing expressions of bored indifference, is a boys' drum ensemble and a dozen grade-schoolers in socialist girls' uniform: dark blue skirt, white blouse, and the red neck-scarf of the Communist Young Pioneers...
...Only now, with considerable aid from UNESCO and extensive investment in the tourist trade, is Hue beginning to recover...
...By busload after busload, the arriving tourists are shipped from quayside to Da Nang City or Hoi An, a historical village that used to be a major trading port, or even to Hue, the once-spectacular capital of nineteenth-century Vietnam...
...troops...
...There's still not a single member of the Hanoi politburo who ever lived in South Vietnam before 1975...
...What does the memorial say, someone asks...
...number, blood-group and religious affiliation—also for sale at a dollar each...
...A vast network of underground passages up to 15o miles in length and stretching from close to the Cambodian border to Saigon, the tunnels were a constant thorn in the side of U.S...
...The American Spectator • June 1997 63...
...On the other hand, the price the Vietcong themselves paid for suicidal attacks ordered by Hanoi are passed over...
...But for older Americans, a visit can be acutely discomforting...
...At least 15o Marines and thousands of South Vietnamese died in the struggle to retake the city...
...But at least we gave these folks a taste of freedom...
...I believed the propaganda of the Communists," he says with an embarrassed smile...
...The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is doing its awkward best to tell dollar-bearing foreigners that it likes their capitalist money—even if its leaders are not about to abandon the Neanderthal philosophy of socialism...
...Perhaps a few are still in captivity twenty-two years after the war because they refuse to be reconciled to the mendacious notion that their country was "liberated...
...Then they sold half of the plots and built apartment buildings...
...But she has passed the formal test to be a guide, and recites the necessary line as the bus drives by an unattended Communist-erected war memorial on Da Nang's outskirts...
...Prices are easily the cheapest in Southeast Asia, a reflection in part of the artificially low cost of labor...
...Nor does it want anyone to know what really happened after it took over the South...
...The elegantly decorated reception rooms reveal a style and verve that socialist regimes never seem to quite manage...
...Why didn't he flee...
...the tourist persists...
...Da Nang itself sprouts with signs for Castrol and Coca-Cola, but in April the primary emphasis was on recalling the "liberation" of the city by North Vietnamese forces on April 29, 1975...
...Superbly crafted lacquer jewelry boxes can be picked up for $5, while Hard Rock Cafe T-shirts, embroidered with "Saigon," not "Ho Chi Minh City," are offered everywhere for $3...
...She makes no mention of the thousands of South Vietnamese officers the Hanoi government "remembered" in some cases for more than a decade in re-education camps...
...Vindictiveness and suppression haven't prevented Hanoi from scrambling to bring Americans into both the north and south since President Clinton lifted the trade embargo in 1994...
...62 June 1997 • The American Spectator himself spent in a re-education camp—and the fourteen years he could obtain no work at all except as a construction laborer...
...Though in the grip of rapid economic growth and foreign investment mania, the south still has the look not so much of an errant region "reunified" in a nasty civil war, as of a country under occupation by people who speak the same language (though with a different accent), look the same (though lighter-skinned and with bad teeth), but otherwise come from a different universe...
...I feel we wasted everything...
...Banners across the city's streets announced this anniversary, as did line paintings of a grinning "Uncle Ho" at intersections...
...The Communists who came here were given plots of land...
...They said everyone would be forgiven...
...The much-photographed T-55 tank that broke through the palace gates on April 30, 1975, sits neatly on a pedestal near the palace gate...
...During their 26-day occupation, the Vietcong rounded up some 3,000 high-ranking South Vietnamese civilians and executed them on the spot...
...No genuine Hard Rock exists in Vietnam...
...Outside, a Vietnamese army officer gleefully displays a whole row of metal-spike booby traps designed to maim and kill U.S...
...Defense Secretary Robert McNamara...
...The government remembers you forever," she tells us...
...She was only two,after all, when those North Vietnamese Soviet tanks clanked through the city's streets...
...Traipsing around Saigon's former presidential palace, a handsome structure now called "Reunification Palace," one sees readily how much more culturally talented and freer the South Vietnamese were—even under the autocratic Diems —than their northern cousins...
...As every American old enough remembers, Hue was devastated during weeks of fighting after the Vietcong overran the citadel during the 1968 Tet offensive and proceeded to demonstrate one DAVID AIKMAN is a former correspondent for Time...
...What to make of a regime that has renamed one of the main avenues of its largest city after Nguyen Van Troi —the would-be assassin of U.S...
...when it fell...
...Almost as ugly are the tunnels of Cu Chi...
...You couldn't believe the thousands of Vietcong bodies lying inside the compound," says a former U.S...
...Hoa, our pretty and smiling Vietnamese tour-guide, seems oblivious to these exhortations...
...When the Communists occupied this area," he tells one busload of Americans, "they called it Ho Chi Minh city...
...People were afraid to go out at night...
...Repayment of financial debts is fine...
...Then, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin finalized an agreement by which Hanoi promised to repay the $145 million in debt South Vietnam owed the U.S...
...So there's no more fighting now...
...Chuck Drake, a helicopter pilot decorated for bravery during his 1966-1967 tour in-country who is now on his first visit back to Saigon since 1973...
...En route to Cu Chi the road passes directly by Tan Son Nhut airfield, the former air base near Saigon...
...In this area were many battlefields," she says...
...I'm going home...
...The girls doff their conical straw hats and wave...
...aspect of Communist rule...
...T here are some healthy signs of resistance and non-conformity...
...A former U.S...
...and South Vietnamese forces trying to locate the elusive Communist main forces or headquarters...
...So much for McNamara's latter-day penitence...
...Today, the tunnels are a museum, and "Vietcong" re-enactors clad in black pajamas show a grainy, black-and-white, 1960's-era propaganda movie depicting Vietcong fighters receiving rewards for killing huge numbers of Americans...
...A middle-aged American on the tour bus, who seems not to have picked up a newspaper for thirty years, asks: "Is there much distrust between the North and the South...
...As for the rest of South Vietnam, it may be generations before the wounds of the war are fully healed...
...They are a new bourgeoisie!' His eyes grow misty as he remembers the years he South Vietnam is humming with commerce and tourism, yet it still feels like a country under foreign occupation...
...Pete Peterson, was confirmed as the first U.S...
...the boys clatter through a side-drum routine and a loudspeaker blares Vietnamese folk songs...
...11 by its Communist-designated name: "Uprising Street...
...Many of the Zippos are obviously modern copies, but some are not...
...Forgiven is one thing, but trusted is another...
...Hoa evades the thrust of the question...
Vol. 30 • June 1997 • No. 6
