Vietnam: Taking a trip to a living 'warscape'

By Andreas Baenziger

XUAN LOC, Vietnam (DPA): Nature has long since spread its lush verdant tentacles and covered the physical scars of the war in Vietnam.

In 1975, Nguyen Hong No, a short, wiry man who looks far younger than his 60 years, was a political instructor for his local Vietcong unit. He spent nine years in the rain forest in close proximity to South Vietnamese and American troops.

His bed was a hammock; shelter was provided by plastic sheeting. Often there was not enough to eat. "We suffered a great deal then," says No, without a hint of complaint in his voice. There was nothing anyone could do about it. It was simply so.

Xuan Loc, 70 kilometers east of Saigon, was the site of one of the last battles in the 30 years of fighting over Vietnam. Twenty-five years later, No leads us through the scene of the final, decisive defeat of the South Vietnamese army.

All that remains of the headquarters of its 18th Division -- "puppet division", as No calls it -- is the bullet-pocked triumphal arch at the entrance. People have built their simple huts and laid out gardens in the former barracks. Banana trees have also taken over the U.S. base at Hoang Dieu. The rain forest that No used to call his home is now covered with fertile orchards.

The "strategic village" near Xuan Loc, into which the South Vietnamese government had herded the rural population, was a prison for the locals and sought to isolate the Vietcong from their traditional supporters and food supplies.

Today it is again a normal village, while the Xuan Loc military base itself is a run-of-the-mill small Vietnamese town like thousands of others: narrow houses crowd the roads, shops and workshops on the ground floors with living quarters above.

When business is good, the townsfolk add a few storeys to their houses. As everywhere in Vietnam, the roads are clogged with mopeds.

In March and April 1975, the army of South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu were approaching their final collapse, taking the North's Communists by surprise.

At the beginning of April, the North Vietnamese stood at the gates of Xuan Loc, the last line of defense before the South's capital, Saigon.

Despite massive amounts of U.S.-supplied weaponry and financial aid, South Vietnam under Thieu was in no position to turn back the onslaught from the north. After U.S. president Richard Nixon had begun to withdraw troops in 1973, the South's fate looked sealed.

At the war's peak, there were 500,000 American soldiers deployed in the country. With pressure growing at home from all sides, they could not reverse the rot that had set into the South's forces, eaten up by corruption, intrigues and low morale.

Nguyen Hong No was commander of North Vietnam's 4th Division, which had come down from the northeast and was edging closer to Saigon.

In Xuan Loc, for the first time during the war's final phase, the South Vietnamese army had shown serious resistance. As his 18th Division began to falter, Thieu took the last course open to him by sending paratroopers from his presidential guard to help in the fighting.

With a notebook in his hand, No points to the field where the bloodbath took place. But today, there is little left of the field commander in No, he is more like a schoolteacher. "We completely wiped them out," he says.

That was on April 21, 1975. On the same day, President Thieu resigned, making the capture of Saigon a walkover. On April 30, the capital fell to the invading Communists.

Thus ended a war which had begun, in 1945, on the tails of the World War II when the French sought to recapture their former colony from the Japanese who had marched into Vietnam in 1940.

Ho Chi Minh, the grandfather of Vietnamese nationalism, waged a guerrilla war against the French. Victory was secured by 1954. After that, the country was split along the 17th parallel, but it was obviously to be a short-lived solution.

The American government believed its duty lay in protecting South Vietnam and with it the free world. The North Vietnamese Communists were set on reuniting the country under their leadership.

At its core, the Vietnam war, which cost the lives of 50,000 Americans and several million Vietnamese, was a tragic misunderstanding. U.S. presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Nixon sought to hold back the Communist advance at the 17th parallel because they feared that otherwise all of Southeast Asia would topple.

The North Vietnamese and their allies among the South's population, on the other hand, were in the main after something far more tangible: national independence.

In 1995, the North's legendary commander, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, explained it as follows: "The American lost the war because they failed to understand the situation. They believed they were fighting a war against an army, whereas they were actually battling a whole people. And the Vietnamese people has a centuries-old tradition of fighting its enemies with a will to independence at any price."

In the opinion of Gen. Tran Van Tra, who prepared the final offensive of 1975: "We were not fighting with a huge military machine but with the power of the spirit. The Yankees were fighting to force their American Way of Life on us. We, though, fought for freedom, independence, for our people's values. We had the right goal, and this is why the people were behind us."

But while the victorious Communists in 1975 felt themselves to be on the moral highground, they displayed no generosity to the vanquished southerners.

Although the "liberators" did not massacre the population as had been consistently predicted, they could not bring themselves to forgive the followers and hangers-on of the American-backed regime.

Many were sent to re-education camps; many never returned. The economy was brought under state control and agriculture was collectivised -- with serious consequences for production. South Vietnam experienced bleak years until the early 1990s when the government considered itself ready for a slow process of opening up to the world.

After the war, Nguyen Hong No was provided a job in the administration, the least the authorities could offer a war hero. His house is an ordinary one: one room wide and only two stories high. "We lead a simple life," says No, "not very rich, not very poor."

On the day Saigon fell, Nguyen Thi Dao was in a bunker deep under the rainforest in central Vietnam. She was working as a telephonist in the Vietcong's relay center on the famous Ho-Chi- Minh trail, over which the North Vietnamese sent supplies to the south.

She transmitted the victory announcement in April 1975 to Hanoi, she and her six colleagues having been the first to hear of the fall of Saigon.

"We were besides ourselves with joy," says Dao, "I cannot begin to describe how happy we were. We pushed open the bunker door and ran outside. We danced and sang for joy. Of course we were sad at the same time because so many of our comrades had died in the war. But in that moment we forgot all that and celebrated."

The then 20-year-old Dao, like her compatriots, had withstood years of American bombardments. "Life in the forest was difficult, especially for women," she recalls. "Hygiene especially was terrible. A war was on -- there were no special arrangements for us women."

Cooking was extremely difficult, too, because the smoke from a fire would have revealed their positions. Rice was in short supply and vegetables had to be collected in the forest.

Life was not much easier after 1975 either. "There was not enough to eat, no money to send the children to school. Our troubles were not at an end," says Ho Minh Tri, who has fought in all Vietnamese wars since 1945 -- the wars against the French, the Americans, the 1978 conflict against the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the short war with China in 1979 after its troops invaded North Vietnam.

"But things improved a little after the economic opening in 1990, and today life is far better than before. My three children are all at university now."

This slow, but steady improvement in lifestyle also explains why the Communist government in Hanoi is still practically unopposed politically and why, says a western diplomat, there is scarcely any demand for more economic rights.

The majority of Vietnamese alive today were born after 1975. "I am very proud when my 15-year-old son asks me about that time and I can explain how it was then," says Dao.

"We think carefully about it: it's important that the people can get to grips with the war." Ho Minh Tri is certain that youngsters have respect for the time that their elders spent in the war. And that is some compensation for the many sacrifices then -- and his lost youth.

Nature may have covered the scars which the war left behind. The bomb craters in the paddy fields are now filled and life has returned to normal -- "not very rich, not very poor." But the pain of 30 tragic years of war will hang over the people of Xuan Loc for many years to come.