Westward Ho!
MURPHY, MIKE
Westward Ho! We seem to have won the Vietnam war, after all. BY MIKE MURPHY Saigon IN OUR NATIONAL PSYCHE, the word "Vietnam" remains heavily loaded with meaning, a synonym for failure. But as I...
...Despite the sign's peeling paint, it is starkly visible from a long distance...
...The U.S...
...The commercial signs burn all night, and you can see them for miles...
...America is seen as a land of opportunity, not an enemy (a designation reserved for Vietnam's ancient invader, China...
...The streets are thick instead with motorbikes racing about in a free-market blizzard of transportation desires instantly matching up with routes...
...The high stakes of the time are too easily forgotten...
...It marches forward on the power of its own force instead of at communism's bayonet point...
...Still, the government is tolerating more open criticism, and even the state's hand-picked interpreters roll their eyes at some of the Communist boilerplate they are instructed to recite...
...The children of families accused of complicity with the old South Vietnamese regime are discriminated against...
...You walk along old jungle paths once patrolled by U.S...
...The war casts a long shadow, though, and it forces a question...
...But as I travel through Vietnam, witnessing the explosion of free enterprise and the affection for so many things American, a divergent thought keeps recurring: We won, and we won big...
...Vietnam is not yet a capitalist paradise...
...Saigon's main hospital sees more than 200 head injuries from scooter and motorbike injuries each night...
...It features a kindly profile of Ho Chi Minh issuing a windy revolutionary hurrah...
...It's extravagantly rigged for illumination, but nobody bothers to turn the lights on...
...The concealed trip wires are now rigged with firecrackers instead of land mines (the European tourists laugh far more when you trigger one than do the Americans...
...Cell phones and the Internet are everywhere, and bright new office towers rise discordantly over the street poverty...
...That slaughter might have been prevented...
...This terrifies you since it is all done in a mad anarchy without traffic lights or stop signs...
...The VietMike Murphy is a political and media consultant...
...Bureaucracies still need to be shuttered, patents and intellectual property fully protected, and corruption stamped out...
...Despite the slow regional recovery from the Asian financial crisis of 1997, Ho Chi Minh City hums with the reckless, frantic capitalism of the new Asia...
...We can never know if South Vietnam would have endured, but we do know that after the South fell, the innocent people of Vietnam endured a horrific lost decade of bloody repression and political murder, forced reeducation, property confiscation, agricultural disaster, pogroms against ethnic Chinese, more war, and great poverty...
...From downtown, you look across the busy river to a long line of enormous billboards advertising various consumer brands and products...
...The great waste of Vietnam was not our noble war to save Southeast Asia from communism, but our abandonment of the southern regime after 1972...
...We had no choice...
...Retired Viet Cong fighters serve as guides to the sprawling underground redoubt...
...It is impossible to see the surging victory of free enterprise in Vietnam and then not wonder about the bloody cost of the war: Was it necessary...
...We won the Cold War so we wrote its history, and in doing so we have depreciated our old enemies into impotence...
...Vietnam's government remains sternly authoritarian...
...Americans are popular...
...Most of all, though, this increasingly free-market nation needs to be free...
...namese-American community is very much in touch with relatives back home, sending perhaps a billion dollars of aid and investment last year...
...You cross the street or pilot your scooter through this moving tangle with a wary understanding that while everyone will make a sporting effort not to run into you, boomtown Vietnam is in a very big hurry...
...soldiers...
...The largest sign of all is bright red...
...Vietnam's new revolution is Coca-Cola red, ubiquitous, and authentic...
...They were evil and they really did want to rule the world...
...Speech is not free...
...The new Hanoi Hilton is a shiny skyscraper...
...Cars are expensive and rare...
...The city is very crowded...
...The truth is far different...
...A Ford plant has sprung up near Haiphong...
...While her leaders have abandoned collectivized agriculture and the country is now a significant food exporter, too many government policymakers act like proud alumni of Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University, class of '69...
...dollar and the Vietnamese dong act as dual currencies...
...They lost only because they lacked enough strength, not because they were not serious...
...There is a burned out hulk of a destroyed American tank, a vile exhibit on booby traps, and an insulting propaganda film from the late sixties full of crude lies that only Jane Fonda could have believed...
...Ho Chi Minh City, still called Saigon by most residents, is the economic spark plug of the country...
...A sliver of the old POW prison remains as a museum, but the rest was leveled to build a modern office building...
...Vietnam's new economy is outracing her obsolete state...
...This ghastly theme park, the most popular tourist attraction in Vietnam, is for me the most disturbing...
...The Communists of the Stalin and Mao era built vast snarling armies, slaughtered innocents across the globe, and swore our destruction...
...At night, however, Ho's great sign disappears...
...The miles of insurrectionary tunnels displayed at the gruesome theme park answer the question...
...Danang is developing as a resort area...
...We did not fight the enemy to win, and when America finally withdrew, the Democrats in Congress and their allies in the media and policy-making elite compounded that mistake by abandoning our far-from-per-fect friends in South Vietnam and denying them the money they needed to fight for survival against an exhausted North Vietnam...
...As you move north from Ho Chi Minh City you see a more austere Vietnam, but one that is rapidly yielding to the invading mercantile armies from the south...
...Ho Chi Minh City runs mostly along the western bank of the Saigon River...
...Six million people live here, and the local economy is growing by nearly 20 percent a year...
...The Communists of the '40s, '50s, and '60s were not hapless comedy commissars to be chuckled about today...
...Smiling guides pop out of hidden trap doors...
...A frequent stop for Western tourists and Vietnamese school kids alike is the dank Viet Cong tunnel complex northwest of Saigon...
...Communism is dying fast...
Vol. 7 • January 2002 • No. 17
