Hanoi's victory undone?:

...On my last day I board a little motor boat and chug for an hour along the Saigon River, in and out among the junks and rowboats and freighters from all over the world...

...Here in the ninth-floor bar, mortars thumping in the background, Eric Sevareid advised Dan Rather to take a sabbatical and read the Great Books...

...at the next a man bathes in the same water...

...A hall is set aside to document the fate of "counterrevolutionary" movements, some allegedly church-sponsored, since 1975...

...destruction of the environment-the 1980 Central Highlands elephant herd of 2,000 is now reduced to 300...

...The Opera House, a replica of the Paris Opera, has closed for renovations, but, like the turtle, will reemerge in a year in fresh splendor...

...Meanwhile, though Catholic freedom in Vietnam is restricted, the churches are filled, even for daily Mass...

...rising drug addiction, prostitution, and AIDS...

...Their participants have been executed or jailed- a lesson to us all...

...Though popular with tourists, the exhibition's main function, like Ho Chi Minh's tomb, is to help form the unified nation's postwar identity...

...The liberation soldier, on the other hand, lives off the land-or dies for the land, "fresh blood oozing out of the young boy killed by an American soldier and penetrating into the homeland...

...It offers readers the opportunity to express their current likes and dislikes about the magazine and to make recommendations about future changes...

...At a newsstand, I pay $8 for two newspapers and a magazine, and turn to face a miserable creature who has no arms and one wooden leg...

...As I cross the square in front of the Municipal Theater at 11 p.m., a hooker in a long white dress on a white motor scooter swoops in on me and circles around...

...It portrays American troops as weighed down with technology, bewildered by their task, and hypocritical: the same soldier shown in the museum displaying the shredded corpse is seen in this book twice-dangling the piece of dead man and lighting a cigarette for a wounded prisoner...

...At the War Crimes Exhibition (in pretourism days, the Museum of American War Crimes), I am struck most by the animation of the enthusiastic young guides who usher their groups from one horrible exhibition to the next: a French guillotine, last used in 1960, stands in the yard surrounded by defunct American tanks, howitzers, and planes...

...Here, it is said, a turtle in the fifteenth century loaned the emperor Le Loi a sword to free Vietnam from the Chinese...

...A foreign investor is turning it into a shopping mall...

...The new gleaming white hotels and office buildings and towering Xerox, Honda, and Sony billboards anticipate the coming war for the nation's economic soul...

...On this twentieth anniversary ofthe Vietnam War's end, and two weeks before President Bill Clinton is to "recognize" Hanoi, this son of a World War I hero and journalist has had a compulsion to see the land that had defeated both France and the United States of America...

...In one shack a woman dumps her garbage off the porch into the river...

...Between the cathedral and the Saigon River, below the hotel, the streets swarm with beggars, hucksters, hookers, pickpockets, cyclo drivers-palms outstretched, demanding that you give, buy, pay up...

...Thank you...

...The armies the peasants beat are coming back, though the uniforms and weapons may have changed...

...Here they eke out their lives on the water as if this were a Hanoi street...

...today, in the context of Southeast Asia's economic boom, Communist Vietnam has decided to fight its way out of poverty by imitating the "success" of Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia, by opening itself up to foreign investment...

...Within the yellow walls of what was once the "Hanoi Hilton" prison, bulldozers and derricks dig and drill...

...Father Phan Khac Tu, secretary general of the Catholic Committee for Solidarity, which, against the wishes of the Holy See, "cooperates" with the Communist party, is one of three priests elected to the National Assembly...

...Ironically, having proven the village liberation fighter superior to the weapons capitalist imperialism threw against him, Hanoi now turns to capitalism to save the revolution...

...Hanoi, in its tree-lined boulevards and Old-City streets, which roar and belch with the zoom and fumes of half a million motorbikes, evokes the perpetual marketplace where.ev-erybody does everything out on the street: people squat on tiny plastic stools to eat rice cooked on sidewalk stoves, toil sweating and shirtless to build new homes and hotels, repair their bikes, give haircuts and shaves, play checkers, sip sodas, smoke, talk, or, in the evening, snatch imaginary solitude on a doorstep, shutting out the din of city life to read a novel...

...RAYMOND A. SCHROTH Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., author of The American Journey of Eric Sevareid (Steerforth Press), is a journalism professor at Loyola University in New Orleans...

...a GI holds up the shredded head, shoulders, and left arm of a Vietcong whose body has been blown to bits by a grenade launcher...

...Thus, we ask those receiving questionnaires to complete and return them promptly...

...I stay in the Caravelle Hotel for the journalism lore...

...I carry two novels, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (1990) and Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War (1991...

...READERSURVEY Within the next few weeks, a sampling of Commonweal subscribers will be receiving a four-page questionnaire...

...A leper woman cowers at the cathedral door...

...At my hotel I read The War for the Liberation of Vietnam (1977), a 479-page history of the war compiled by Vietnamese photojournalists...

...From the top floor you can look down Dong Khoi (Uprising) Street at the twin spires of Notre Dame Cathedral, where, under a statue of the Blessed Virgin perched on a neon-light crescent moon, the body of Paul Nguyen Van Binh, the eighty-four-year-old archbishop of Saigon, lies for five days of Masses and public mourning before his July 5 funeral...

...the sorrow of the war on both sides is that those who fought it, haunted by visions of rotted corpses and ruined loves, will never put it behind them...

...Thousands of the poor have built their homes, like the shanty towns of Lima and Soweto, on the river's edge...

...The response rate of those surveyed has a major bearing on the validity of the results...

...I wander around Hoan Kiem Lake, Hanoi's heart...

...The church, it seems, has had to spend twenty years reestablishing its credibility as a Vietnamese, rather than a colonial, institution...

...In photographs, American troops pose proudly with the corpses of Vietnamese they have beheaded...

...Vietnam is poised on the threshold of radical change...

...A twenty-second glimpse and we are out of the air-conditioned tomb and back in Hanoi's sweltering heat...

...at the next a boy urinates into the same stream...

...here CBS correspondent Peter Kalisher took Walter Cronkite aside in 1968 after the Tet offensive and convinced him the American policy was wrong...

...Its identity has been in the land, in rice paddies where peasants and water buffalo seem to work as equals...

...A twisted dwarf drags himself along the sidewalk...

...Yet, I sense that Father Tu and I are in different worlds when he defends government control of the press: if freedom of the press were allowed, he argues, the rich would control the media and the voice of the poor would not be heard...

...And with it come the other scourges that have made first-world urban areas unlivable: gridlock...

...Binh had appointed young bishops in Dalat and My Tho, who so far have not become politically involved, and who therefore may be acceptable to both Hanoi and Rome...

...On the terrace of the Rex Hotel, two Malaysian businessmen, who have come to set up a motorbike factory in Saigon, employing 1,200 workers and produring 50,000 bikes a year, tell me that in Malaysian cities there are no beggars, everyone has a job...

...Now, though very old, the turtle still appears from time to time...

...When I arrive in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), the noise and congestion of Hanoi-the roaring motorbikes and chung-chung-chung of construction-are doubled...

...Above them all, the billboards proclaim Xerox, Honda, Sony...

...Here is Vietnam's future-and its present and past...

...In the terrible heat of the cathedral, the Catholic people by the thousands, in their white shirts and dark pants, fan themselves around the archbishop's coffin...

...a drastic increase in tobacco consumption (at a Hanoi cathedral funeral, the pallbearers dangle cigarettes from their lips as they haul the coffin up the steps...

...In recent months the bishops have complained about restrictions on seminaries and Hanoi's blocking the Holy See's attempts to appoint Binh's successor...

...a 10-percent annual increase in traffic accidents...

...The reader survey is an update of an earlier one that proved to be quite useful...

...He tells me that Archbishop Binh and most Vietnamese Catholics have realized that the best way to improve the people's standard of living is to support the government, even though the church and the government have been at odds...