Still scarred, Vietnam wavers between the old and the new

By Paul Alexander

DONG HA, Vietnam (AP): The two Viet Cong soldiers made it through the mines and through nine of the 11 barbed-wire fences around Charlie 1 support base near the Demilitarized Zone.

There they died and there they lay for about three decades, with their antitank rocket lying beside them and their two grenades wrapped in banana leaves. Until February, when mine- clearers found their bones in the underbrush.

Vietnam has 300,000 missing soldiers, but not the DNA technology to help identify them. Its fighters usually carried their names on paper slips in small plastic syringes. One of the two men at Charlie 1 carried such a syringe, but when it was opened, the aged paper crumbled.

And so they were buried in anonymous graves at nearby Gio Linh cemetery -- ghosts of a war that ended 25 years ago but left scars that have yet to heal.

Travel north from here along this slender swan's neck of a country to Hanoi, the capital, and it's hard not to wonder who ultimately won the war that officially ended on April 30, 1975, and reunited North and South Vietnam.

At the New Century disco, Generation Next is bobbing to ear- splitting dance mixes, wearing bib overalls and backward baseball caps. The Jack Daniel's and Johnny Walker flows. The cover charge of 40,000 dong (nearly US$3) is three days' salary for the average Vietnamese, but the place is packed.

At home, people are watching South Korean soap operas or bootlegged tapes of Apocalypse Now on Sony color TV sets. They sing along with the Beatles on karaoke machines. They're discovering the microwave oven and abandoning their bicycles for locally assembled Honda motorbikes.

Japan, the brutal World War II occupier, is now the industrial godfather. The French colonial masters have left their architecture and a smattering of their language. Now, with globalization reaching even this communist redoubt, the age of Coke and Disney is at hand.

After a decade of self-isolation following the war, Vietnam began opening up in the mid-1980s with a policy of economic reforms called Doi Moi, or renovation. It has since gone from poverty-stricken rice importer to world's second-largest rice exporter.

Not far from the Cu Chi tunnels in southern Vietnam, where guerrillas lived for months at a time, emerging at night to mount attacks, a factory makes Nike tennis shoes. Another company makes toys for McDonald's Happy Meals. A Vietnamese travel firm offers tours of the tunnels on its Web site.

Like China, its giant communist neighbor, Vietnam desperately wants to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) and boost its export markets, but it also appears unready or unwilling to open the state sector to outside competition.

Inefficient state enterprises, legacies of the Marxist years, are drains on the debt-ridden state banks. The country wants more foreign investment, but red tape and corruption turn it away.

It's worth it for international giants like Pepsi and Coca- Cola to slug it out here, absorbing losses for years to build brand loyalty. But there are too many tales of small-time foreign restaurateurs and manufacturers bringing in money and knowhow, only to have it stolen by a local partner. After years of deprivation and tiny salaries, the lure of the quick buck can be irresistible.

Meanwhile, by isolating dissidents in house arrest and restricting religious activities, the government invites attack from human rights advocates.

When Abdelfattah Amor, a UN investigator, came last year to look into religious freedoms, he said he was barred from going where he wanted. The government denied it and said such visits were no longer welcome.

In Vietnam, all religions must have state approval. Those that aren't are branded unlawful superstitions.

But the government is torn between its communist instincts and its longing to catch up with the developed world; between welcoming erstwhile enemies like America while blaming their influence for the rise in crime, prostitution and drug abuse.

Capitalism also is a thorn in the side of a government anxious to stem rapid urbanization and avoid the missteps of other socialist countries that have opened up. Now that the easy reforms are out of the way, the bigger ones have slowed to a crawl.

Some 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) long but just 30 miles (48 kilometers) wide at its waist, Vietnam ranges from the flat rice paddies of the Mekong Delta to the tea bushes and fruit trees of the mountainous north.

War certainly has stunted Vietnam. The Chinese dominated for 1,000 years and have invaded several times, and this century has been particularly brutal.

Some 100,000 Vietnamese were sent to fight in World War I, and one-fifth of northern Vietnam's then 10 million people starved to death in World War II, in part because the Japanese seized so much of their rice.

There were two wars against the French, and then what Vietnam calls "the American War" that killed 3 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. That was followed by an ill-fated invasion of Cambodia in late 1978 and a few months later a bloody border war with China. Only in the 1990s, with the end of the U.S. embargo and establishment of diplomatic ties, did Vietnam's relationship with the outside world become fully normalized.

The strength of this land is its people, resilient, hard- working and far too familiar with hardship. After all, it was Vietnam that produced Ho Chi Minh, one of the century's longest surviving revolutionaries and fighters against colonialism.

The frail, wispy-bearded Ho didn't live to see victory. He died in 1969. Since then, many lives have been wasted and many more may never get to fulfill their potential.

So who's doing all right? Nguyen Van Hien, for one. He doesn't have to worry about job security. He makes artificial limbs at the hospital in Quang Tri province, site of some of the war's fiercest fighting.

Since the war ended, 2,780 people have been killed by the land mines, artillery shells and cluster bomblets that still sit just under Quang Tri's surface. Another 1,633 have lost eyes, arms or legs.

Hien's ward produces 130-150 limbs annually. At $50 each, they are low-tech and wear out in two years, so demand is steady.

Hoang Hai Nam, a 60-year-old fisherman, is getting an artificial left leg. His leg took a bomb fragment in 1972 and finally had to be amputated two months ago. The wound just wouldn't heal.

At rush hour in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, it seems that all 1.5 million motorbikes -- one for every three inhabitants -- are honking inches apart as they cruise past a billboard featuring Ho Chi Minh.

The riders are virtually all helmetless, though the women are wearing gloves above their elbows against the subtropical sun. The bikes are like a swarm of angry bees occasionally stinging each other. The government, so efficient at tracking down dissidents and unsanctioned worshipers, seems helpless to enforce the traffic laws, even after empowering police to bring down speeding bikers with tear gas.

The city whose fall in 1975 signified the end of the war is now the economic engine of reunified Vietnam, and it looks like it. The teeming street life spills over into rickety houseboats on the rivers. Hookers cruise around tourist hotels on motorbikes. Vendors, beggars and pedicab drivers jostle for trade. This is the place to do business and party long past midnight.

With salaries averaging several times more than in the countryside, the city is swelling with rural migrants regardless of government controls on movement. So a second city is being built next door as a magnet for industry and migrants.

Hanoi, with its lakes and tree-lined streets, is the stronghold of communism. It sees itself as the country's political and cultural heart. To southerners, it's slower, bureaucratic, straitlaced.

Saigon was the capital of the American-backed south, and as Ho Chi Minh City it remains suspect in northerners' eyes. Near the bottom of the pecking order are men like Day.

As a soldier in the vanquished South Vietnamese army, he had few options after the war. He spent a year in "re-education camps"; then he and his family fell victim to Vietnam's disastrous experiment in collective farming. They nearly starved.

In 1980, Day returned to what was now Ho Chi Minh City and became a pedicab driver, ferrying passengers around town on the back of a three-wheeled bike.

"What choice did I have? I couldn't get work. If you fought for the other side, they never let you forget it," said Day, a thin and wiry 48-year-old who asked that his full name not be used.

Dressed in faded fatigues from a military surplus store, he spends 12 hours a day ferrying a dozen or so passengers around town to make $2 to $3.50 a day. Then he goes home to his wife and four children in a tiny house.

Things have gotten tougher since his wife became ill two years ago. He spends his earnings on medicine and worries that motorbike taxis will squeeze him out of business.

"It's getting harder and harder to survive," he says. "I'm not as strong as I used to be. My children say I worry about the future too much."

What really unites Vietnam is soccer. During the 1998 World Cup tournament in France, millions stayed up all night to watch every match live. People with large-screen TV sets opened their doors so neighbors could watch from the sidewalks.

When Vietnam's national team wins a match, people drag-race motorbikes in celebration. Sometimes hundreds are injured in the chaos.

But in the countryside, the old calm prevails.

Country folk make up 76.5 percent of Vietnam's population of 76 million, and the widening gap between rich and poor worries the government. It has made spending on agriculture its top priority.

Rice paddies are still farmed by hand, whole families growing up wading in the muddy water and bending for hours over tender shoots.

The Mekong Delta, the country's rice basket, is a network of rivers and canals, and often the only route to a village. Wooden boats ply the narrow passageways, lifting their clattering outboard motors out of the water to avoid spraying oncoming traffic.

Fresh water and electricity remain luxuries in most remote areas. In one commune, only about 15 of 100 people have wells. The rest get their drinking and cooking water from a rank canal that serves as road, sewer and bathtub.

Some of Vietnam's scars are as obvious as a legless victim of a land mine. Others emerge subtly from the outward beauty of the landscape.

Down in a valley of the A Luoi district in Vietnam's central highlands, an airfield that stored Agent Orange near the village of Dong Son has all but vanished in a tangle of undergrowth. But Le Van Do, 57, and his wife, Ho Thi Pa, 42, have suffered through four miscarriages, an infant who died after six months and two children with birth defects. Of Dong Son's 1,078 villagers, 272 report being disabled by illnesses.

People here blame the defoliants sprayed from U.S. planes to strip the jungle hiding places of communist forces. Officials warn against eating fish oils and fats, where the poison seems to linger.

Low green grasses wave on the mountains of A Luoi. The terraced rice fields built over lifetimes of backbreaking labor have long been abandoned, but hardy weeds have finally come back, overcoming the effects of toxic dousings.

The villagers have no choice but to remain. There are no savings to start a new life, only the rice and cassava they can raise. Their water holes are old bomb craters.

At Route 9 Cemetery in Quang Tri Province straddling the DMZ, there are more scars.

Few come to mourn the 9,500 soldiers buried here. Anonymity rules among the rows and rows of low white headstones, each with a gold star. Some of the graves are freshly dug for bodies recently discovered. Three-quarters of them say Chua Biet Ten Liet Sy: unknown martyr.

Quang Tri has 150 war cemeteries, including the one where the two men found at Charlie 1 base have just been buried. Each features a towering patriotic statue that still manages to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the losses.

Among the people exercising before dawn at My Khe beach near Danang, only a couple remember it as the GI oasis called China Beach. The dozens of bomb-proof hangars that once protected American fighter jets at Danang's airport house a handful of aging Soviet-made MiG fighters.

A coastal breeze whistles through Hai Van pass on National Highway 1 north of Danang. After the long haul up the snake of a two-lane road, people get off buses for a break and gaze at the sea.

Few walk across the pavement to the weed-strewn hill where the French and then the Americans built their fortifications. It is one of the few places where the war still feels close.

A tunnel is to be built that will cut the worst nine miles off the journey. Then this place too will fade from memory.