I was on the helipad of the old American Embassy in downtown Ho Chi Minh City this past weekend to make an anniversary broadcast. The concrete surface was scattered with rotting sandbags left behind by the Marine guards when a last chopper lifted them off into history at the end of the Vietnam War 20 years ago. The view from the roof is pretty much as it used to be when the city was called Saigon–a motley collection of rain-stained late colonial buildings on motor-scooter-clogged streets. It was not difficult to cloud the landscape with the nostalgia of war memories. They drifted across my mental landscape like the pre-monsoon afternoon showers washing down the grimy walls of the city below.
The rooftop seemed as fitting a place as any to reflect on the war and its latest cause celebre–the tortured memoirs of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. To that end, CNN’s “Larry King Live” hooked Mc-Namara in a Washington studio; I would join in from the embassy roof in the harsh light of a Saigon morning. But the reputed “best and the brightest” of America’s war architects refused to confront such an intimate reminder of the war’s excesses, and I had to sit it out.
Which was a pity. The embattled former secretary has a far more understanding audience for his memoired mea culpa in Viet-nam than in America, where he is being crucified by some critics. Even though the communists once tried to assassinate Me-Namara, his memoirs are welcomed here. That he finally ‘fessed up to what he declared was a wrongly conceived war confirmed what the communist Vietnamese have been saying for years: that the war was always unwinnable. The legendary Vietnamese scholar-general Vo Nguyen Giap described McNamara’s revelations as “honest, courageous.”
This capacity for forgiveness has long seemed to me the most remarkable quality of postwar Vietnam. After all, the communist side admits to losing 1 million soldiers in the American war. I can only presume that quality comes from Vietnam’s history of wars of survival against very long odds.
Survival also requires a knack for entrepreneurship. The Vietnamese are succeeding in marrying the two to a degree I have never before seen. Call it “war as a theme park” if you will, but the merchandising of once bloody battlefields is proceeding at a rapid pace. Former Viet Gong fighters are conducting tours to battle sites at Khe Sanh, the Ho Chi Minh Trail and others. The ultimate theme-park location is two hours northwest of Ho Chi Mirth City, wherehuge blue-painted arches welcome you to the legendary Cu Chi tunnels. A place once notorious for its concealed hiding places that could mean death to passing American GIs, the tunnels have been opened up to the tourist trade. In an underground kitchen, eat the rice congee once favored by the 43d sapper battalion. Have a scratch tended in a bunker by a corpsman from the 2d medical company. Compare the firepower of an M16 with an AK-47 at the firing range for $5 a burst. Buy a genuine pair of rubber sandals once worn on the Ho Chi Mirth Trail. What about a green jungle cap still stained with sweat? And for a break in the action, try the Cu Chi Karaoke bar and restaurant. “It’s Cong World,” commented a startled TV colleague on his first visit.
The Vietnamese are not insensitive to the feelings of visitors. When an American Army veteran recently objected to the use of the title “war crimes” in the name of a building in Ho Chi Minh City displaying captured American weapons and documents, the director obligingly changed it to “war relics” museum. But you keep bumping into reminders that Vietnam is a tightly controlled society. When colleagues decided to honor visiting veteran Fleet Street correspondent Donald Wise by unfurling a large red banner inscribed “Saigon hails Wise, glorious capitalist” in the lobby of the Continental Hotel, security forces were called and the banner was sternly confiscated.
Which only goes to show that even though Vietnam can be a fun park, others still decide what the fun is.
