Sat, 11 Mar 2000

Buon Ma Thuot celebrates communist victory

By Paul Alexander

BUON MA THUOT, Vietnam (AP): With the type of pomp rarely seen in such a reserved country, Vietnam raised the flag Friday and marked a surprise communist victory 25 years ago that proved to be a turning point in the war against U.S.-backed forces.

The capture of Buon Ma Thuot on March 10, 1975, set the stage for a series of rapid-fire advances that led to the fall of South Vietnamese capital Saigon just over seven weeks later. That ended the Vietnam War -- known here as "The American War" -- and reunified the divided country.

"The Buon Ma Thuot victory is forever a glorious golden page of our people and army, a glorious milestone of our 4,000 years of national construction and defense," Nguyen An Vinh, the provincial Communist Party chief, said in a speech before a nationally televised parade just after dawn Friday.

"In a short period of time, we smashed and eliminated all of the enemy's war machines in this large battlefield, ushering in a domino effect and the miserable fall of the puppet regime in South Vietnam."

The parade by about 5,000 people began shortly after dawn Friday with 25 trained elephants, one method of delivering supplies to troops during the war. It also included a major military presence, with hundreds of white-gloved troops goose- stepping as patriotic music rang out on a thunderous sound system.

The military's normally low profile will remain high next week when William Cohen makes the first visit by a U.S. defense secretary since the end of the war.

Floats, youth groups, women in flowing ao dais and representatives of 43 ethnic minorities in traditional dress waved paper gold-star-on-red national flags as they passed a viewing stand for 1,000 invited guests that was set up at the main traffic circle, dominated by a massive victory statue that includes an old Soviet tank.

Jay Scarborough, then 28, has vivid memories of the fall of Buon Ma Thuot. After a six-year stint teaching English and training teachers, he was on what was supposed to be a two-month break from law school on a Ford Foundation grant to photograph documents in the Cham language.

He arrived in capital of Daklak province on March 9 for a short break in the cool central highlands.

His only real exposure to the war came in what he called a "small mortar attack," but he figured out pretty quickly that Buon Ma Thuot might not be such a good place to take a break.

"The Air Vietnam office was mobbed," Scarborough said in a telephone interview from Albany, New, York, where he is an attorney. "At 6 p.m., the provincial chief said no more gasoline was to be sold. Then we heard that the Viet Cong were only two kilometers away. At 3 a.m., they began to shell the city."

The attack lasted four hours. The technical school compound was adjacent to the South Vietnamese army's 23rd Division, a major target. There was no protection except the roof of the two- story wooden school.

"I have never been so scared in my life," he said.

Nguyen Thien Luong, then an infantry captain, recalled that Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces made a feint to Pleiku and Konton that drew away much of Buon Ma Thuot's protection and set up the surprise attack.

Scarborough ended up being taken with a dozen people -- mostly missionaries -- as prisoners of war. They spent six months in a POW camp for South Vietnamese forces, then two months near Hanoi.

"We weren't mistreated," he said. "They didn't know what to do with us. We were just all concerned about our health. A lot of people got malaria and gastrointestinal problems.

"We listened to the Radio Hanoi radio reports, and it seemed that some place was falling day by day. It could have dragged on for two years. That would have been hard."

Instead, it was over on April 30, although captivity dragged on until late October when the group was released.

"My life has been pretty mundane since then," Scarborough said.

Despite the experience, Vietnam has gotten under his skin. He has been back to Vietnam a dozen times and plans to keep returning.

The large scale of events in Buon Ma Thuot shows the importance that the government places on commemorations for a war that it claims it wants to put into the past.

But it remains clear that Vietnam, while not seeking a formal apology from the United States or its allies, would welcome aid, investment or reparations. With annual per capita gross domestic product of only US$370, Vietnam is one of the world's poorest countries.

Negotiations are under way with Washington on setting up joint research into the long-term effects of toxic defoliants like Agent Orange that were sprayed to eliminate cover for Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces and have been blamed for high rates of ailments among those who were exposed and birth defects in their children.

Nearly five years after relations were normalized, the two countries also are trying to negotiate a bilateral trade agreement and other pacts.

Next up on the list of historical dates is the fall of the imperial capital of Hue on March 26, followed by the capture of Danang, Vietnam's third-largest city, three days later.