Correspondents' Correspondence

...it extends to projects in the hotel and agriculture industries as well...

...I can't think about the future," she said...

...Gazing wistfully westward, an East Berliner sees first an almost 7-foot-high wire fence, backed by barbed-wire entanglements and concrete barriers sunk in antitank-formation to prevent cars from crashing through...

...Like most other South Vietnamese widows, for example, Mrs...

...My daughter will not be able to remember her father," Mrs...

...Sat was informed of her husband's death two weeks after it occurred...

...Almost four times what all of Soviet-American trade amounted to last year, it suggests that the Russians are now quite serious about spending money...

...Peterson himself said some of the business deals under discussion or consideration would come to billions of dollars...

...And although a flag with the inscription "To Quoc Ghi On" ("The Nation Remembers") covered the coffin, only three mourners were present: Sat's wife, her mother and his five-year-old daughter...

...The Soviets seem to think so, too...

...A major one already announced is the $750 million grain sale to the USSR by the Commodity Credit Corporation...

...When I woke up yesterday, my husband was alive...

...In the evenings, poorer citizens can often find quality furniture, books and clothes deposited along the sidewalks, the throw-aways of the city's Joneses, keeping up to standards...

...Tens of thousands of West Berliners have now passed through the wall for short visits, taking advantage of the eased travel restrictions provided under the Four Power Berlin Agreement and the relative relaxation of international tension that may soon lead to a European Security Conference...

...It is all so strange...

...Peterson left the impression that these long-standing problems would have to be resolved in a package because, for example, President Nixon will not approve credits until Lend-Lease is out of the way, and General Secretary Brezhnev won't act on Lend-Lease until MFN status for the Soviet Union is assured...

...Vast funds, both governmental and private, were mobilized to build an architectural paradise on top of the rubble...

...government has also licensed American firms to bid on equipment for the huge Kama River truck factory in Siberia...

...She did not learn where he died until she saw the tag on his coffin, and she never found out how it happened...

...After the War, the Allies chose to make West Berlin into a showcase of Western affluence and democracy...

...Then, stepping down, the widow walked over to a grave marked by a freshly painted white cross bearing her husband's name, and while a chaplain chanted prayers and a bored squad of soldiers stood at inattention, she and her daughter huddled together for the final rites...

...The U.S...

...The ceremony, one of a dozen held in South Vietnam's busy national cemetery that day, was brief, because the chaplain and soldiers assigned to it had other funerals to attend...

...Sat remarked...

...She kept one hand on the oblong box next to her until they arrived at the gravesite and the pallbearers had lowered the coffin beyond her reach...

...The government provided Corporal Sat with a wooden coffin and muddy gravesite free of charge...

...the names of residents are not displayed outside above the bells...

...Yet begging is not uncommon...

...But both sides are down to detailed language and major issues that Peterson said will likely be decided at the "highest levels" of government, that is, the White House and the Kremlin...

...But it also has highrise working-class complexes of tiny closed flats lacking play space for children and plagued by high crime rates...

...It has, for example, the largest luxury apartment block in the world, comprising thousands of dwellings and offering centrally located shops and recreation facilities...

...The Soviets' response was to try to wreck the city's economy by dumping thousands of maimed and starved German POWs in the Western sectors, simultaneously matching the reconstruction effort in their own sector through the deployment of resources from other Eastern European countries...

...streetcar tracks disappear under its concrete slabs...

...The Soviets need help in extracting gas and oil from the Tyumen region in northern Siberia, and one of their ideas is to transport frozen natural gas by special ships to the energy-hungry United States...

...Parallel to the current talks, Soviet ministries and the American government-business partnership have been working on other individual deals...

...The latest superdeal was signed by Occidental Petroleum Corporation, headed by American industrialist Armand Hammer, whose contacts with the Soviet Union go back to personal acquaintance with Vladimir Lenin...

...Mrs...

...When she could, she talked about her husband, revealing what war does to the lives of little people caught in its crossfire...

...Other results of Richard Nixon's self-reliance program for Saigon are debatable, but at least death has been successfully Vietnamized...

...And since the last trade agreement between the two countries was concluded in 1937 (then canceled by the U.S...

...the chaplain and soldiers went off to another funeral...

...Together with the Karl-Marx-Allee, an avenue of tile-facaded highrise apartments, it forms a district of shops, offices, travel bureaus, and luxurious homes for East Berlin's elite...

...After it was all over, Mrs...

...and if your host does not expect you after closing time, then he had better have a phone...

...If nothing else, the Vietnamiza-tion of death belies the popularly held Western notion that life in Asia is cheap...

...The working class districts of East Berlin are better off than those of other large Eastern European cities, but they are still uniformly drab...

...Such worries, however, are for later...

...Though historically and geographically one city, since 1945 the two Berlins have developed in completely different directions while constantly watching and spurring each other...

...signposts marking the stops of bygone buses stand abandoned in the no-man's-land separating the two halves, still strewn with rubble and overgrown with tall grass...

...Finally, there is die Mauer itself, 10 feet high, formed of grey slabs of concrete with a wide pipe mounted along the top...

...Specially trained police dogs patrol the area, their leashes attached by rings to a tense, hardly-visible cable that alone could cut down a man trying to dash across...

...A small woman with a shattered look on her pretty face, the young widow tried hard to maintain her composure...

...Nonetheless, if the firing heard along the strip by Allied forces is an accurate gauge, there are weekly escape attempts...

...For East Berliners, however, there has not been any corresponding extension of travel privileges...

...Many of the funerals are held here, in South Vietnam's equivalent of Arlington National Cemetery, located 12 miles northeast of Saigon, and this year's upsurge in righting has turned the area into something resembling a macabre supermarket: Neat rows of labeled coffins stacked in Catholic and Buddhist sections wait to be chosen by mourners...

...The stumbling blocks of what Peterson called a "system" are chiefly Export-Import Bank credits, settlement of the old Lend-Lease bill and MFN-most favored nation status for the Soviets to let their exports into the United States at lower tariff rates...

...Export licenses represent about $1 billion in potential sales so far, although American manufacturers are bidding against European competitors and won't sell the whole amount authorized...

...Other American industrialists are jetting into town to see for themselves just what the sales possibilities are, and to learn how one copes with the centrally planned economy...

...The long absences hurt, his wife said, because he was a devoted husband and loved his child deeply...

...Nguyen Van Sat was 29, an aspiring civil servant who was drafted in 1970 after he could no longer afford a bribe to keep him out of military service...

...Indeed, for the past few years the East German government has been quietly refurbishing the 26-mile-long wall and the 350-foot-wide top-security zone fronting it, where trespassers are shot on sight...

...the small taverns are overcrowded with men who clearly have little interest elsewhere...

...The source of almost continuous East-West friction for a quarter of a century, Berlin is larger than Munich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt and Dus-seldorf combined...

...Barefoot and clad in peasant's clothing, a clean white mourning band about her head, she sat at the foot of the coffin waiting for the chaplain to return from two other funerals...

...Most of the houses have been restored rather than rebuilt, with a few razed to make room for well-appointed parks, some including swimming pools...

...Overhead looms a series of observation towers, 65 feet tall, each manned by three guards with submachine guns...

...Divided City Berlin-behind the wall, a weary foreign correspondent sat down on a patch of grass to roll a cigarette, carefully aligning a tree between himself and the nearest observation post to keep out of the gunsights...

...The Russian leader, he told foreign correspondents, was outgoing, informed, intelligent and a surprisingly good story teller...

...And the contrast between the East's observation towers and the West's elevated tourist platforms, between the police dogs and trenches on the one side and the bicycle runs for young children on the other, is certainly not lost on the rest of the world...

...From the other side, an American tourist peered across what Berliners call the strip of death...

...In fact, life seems to have gone a bit sour in the Berlin showcase of democratic prosperity (itself possible only because of massive subsidies from Bonn...

...But Occidental's five-year agreement is not restricted to oil and gas activity alone...

...The cigarette was not yet half smoked when a uniformed Pioneer, the horror of imperialism carved on his young face, came cautiously to investigate, soon followed by a policeman...

...The West Berliners, who were at their best confronting the Communist threat from without during the tense blockade years, have found themselves unable to cope with the challenge from within presented by the new generation in this era of detente.s-Thomas Land...

...and the war went on.-arnold Abrams Moscow Inc., Moscow-the Americans and Soviets are picking their way through the wording of a trade agreement and finding it harder going than they probably expected...

...Still, it would cover such items as legal and financial ground rules for business operations in the Soviet Union that would clearly help American firms...

...Commerce Secretary Peter Peterson, who spent 12 days here in July with a 25-man negotiating team, left August 1 saying that there was a "pretty good chance" for an agreement by the end of this year...

...Nevertheless, West Berlin is an immensely rich island, the dream of experimenting city planners...

...women stare out from their windows with expressionless faces...

...But what particularly excites both sides are the prospects for enormous joint ventures-bartering Soviet raw materials for American equipment and technical knowledge -that could involve amounts running into several billion dollars..-Mark Hopkins...

...Sat, who watched with frozen anguish as the cortege passed, followed her husband into the vehicle and found a place beside him...

...An aura of utter despair overhangs everything...

...The Western sector has a disproportionately high population of old people, particularly women, who spend their afternoons in the many parks of the middle-class districts, talking to the ducks, squirrels and rabbits...

...In his two years with the Army, serving as a radioman for the 18th ARVN Division, Sat had received only three home leaves...

...My husband is dead...

...Wide roads designed to accommodate heavy traffic end in cul-de-sacs at the wall...

...Violence among educated youth erupted here some years ago with an unusual intensity by European standards, and though massive student demonstrations have largely ceased, the hostility lingers on...

...Young people tend to move to West Germany in search of greater freedom of movement and better opportunities...

...Sat did not know she was entitled to that payment, but showed little interest when told about it...

...The trade agreement, moreover, is only one facet of present efforts to widen Soviet-American commercial relations...

...Then I received a message, and he was gone...

...He left when she was an infant, and she saw so little of him afterward...

...But the Joneses are frightened, and for good reason, since the young middle class has turned against them, and terrorist bombing has become a common occurrence...

...in 1951 at the height of the cold war), a new one would codify another area where they both have expressed a desire for cooperation...

...He had been married seven years, and owned a modest house in a hamlet near the city of Tay Ninh, about 50 miles northwest of here...

...On the subject of Soviet-American commercial relations, Brezhnev remarked that it was time to "move to the frontier" for both economic and political reasons, and spoke of "large and concrete steps" toward joint Soviet-American projects running through the '70s...

...Well over 10,000 government soldiers have been killed since the Communist offensive opened last March 30, with the task of presiding at their burials falling largely to old women, young widows and children...

...Due to the war, the rest of the family was too widely scattered to receive word of his death...

...Street doors are locked after 8 P.M...

...The Soviets, who integrate foreign commerce with their five-year economic plans, seem to want the document more than the Americans...

...It will matter, though, for she now is largely alone in the world, a 23-year-old widow with a tiny daughter and a 68-year-old mother to care for...

...It has been completely rebuilt with large modern hotels, conference centers and memorials in the spacious Russian style...

...Periodically, a motorcycle roars along the quiet streets, escorting steel-helmeted troopss-their ubiquitous submachine guns at the ready-on their way to relieve the guard at the observation posts...

...No sitting allowed here," he said apologetically...

...Alexanderplatz, the heart of the prewar German capital and now in the Eastern sector, is practically unrecognizable to West Berlin visitors today...

...Communications in this country are slower, death benefits more meager, the burial process starker...

...A fugitive seeking a grip would only cause the pipe to revolve toward himself, leaving him a perfect, immobile target under the blaze of East German searchlights...

...it will also give his widow $30 in compensation if she is persistent and shrewd enough to avoid the bureaucratic squeeze...

...When it was time to bury Nguyen Van Sat, four soldiers lifted his coffin and carried it slowly to a waiting army van...

...What does the money matter...

...Incredibly, every month two or three refugees get out alive...

...For the record, Peterson said he was impressed with Brezhnev, to whom he talked for three hours at the General Secretary's Soviet Crimea summer house...

...The shock and sorrow etched on Vietnamese faces reflect the same pain felt by some 50,000 American families who have also lost loved ones in the war...

...Across the wall, West Berlin is also still fighting the War...

...The guards themselves risk death if they leave their posts and stray into the strip...

...Meanwhile, the Pullman Company has received permission to set up an office in Moscow, joining Pan Am and American Express...

...Sat went with her mother and child to the cemetery gate to wait for a bus back to Tay Ninh...

...Rough estimates suggest that normal trade between the Soviet Union and the United States could reach $1 billion by 1975...

...Unfortunately, the Saigon government cannot cushion the blow for the relatives of fallen soldiers as well as Washington can...