Vietnam tries to forget bitter past and enter new peroid

Vietnam tries to forget bitter past and enter new peroid

By Olaf Kanter

SAIGON: Vietnam underwent a veritable apocalypse. In the late
1960s and early 1970s more bombs fell on the small South-East
Asian country than on the entire German Reich throughout World
War II.

Three million people were killed. Yet today the Vietnamese
show no signs of the horrors they experienced. They are
capitalizing on them. Necessity is, after all, the mother of
invention.

The neon sign over the bar door is in bad taste. Apocalypse
Now is the name of the bar. Here in Thi Sach Street the night is
young and people are thick on the ground: rickshaw drivers and
beggars, hawkers and shoeshine boys, pimps and prostitutes.

They all want to earn some of the money that is burning a hole
in the visitors' pockets. The visitors are businessmen and
tourists, mainly from the Far West.

Vietnam went through the real thing, but the neon sign would
seem to indicate that the apocalypse is now history - and that
Vietnamese no longer want to hear anything more about it. They
want to get on in the world and are even prepared to capitalize
on the horror that cost three million lives.

In 1979 Francis Ford Coppola made a blockbuster film about the
Vietnam war, Apocalypse Now, in which the emphasis was on the
darker side of mankind. In the film, U.S. helicopter gunships
dance over the sandy beaches of Vietnam to the accompaniment of
Wagner music.

In the bar, helicopters are painted on the ceiling in ugly
camouflage colors. A real "chopper" has rotors that turn. Here in
the bar, electric fans whirl hot and humid air across billiard
tables and the dancefloor.

A few Vietnamese girls are dancing to the sound of 1970s
American rock music. European and American tourists eye the
talent as they drink Tiger beer. A U.S.-Vietnamese joint venture
or two look as though they might be in the making.

Twenty-three years after peace terms were agreed in Paris, the
Vietnamese apocalypse is indeed history, but its traces are
assiduously marketed. Tourists arrive with visions of the Vietnam
War: scenes such as the naked girl running away from a burning
village and U.S. soldiers throwing their prisoners out of the
airborne helicopter.

Saigon has set up a museum, the War Crimes Museum, as a
memorial to the victims of atrocities.

Nguyen Quang Tho, a wiry man with a predilection for Hawaii
shirts and neat trouser creases, tells a group of German visitors
about the howitzers and helicopters, tanks and fragmentation
bombs.

He shows them pictures of U.S. atrocities. A tank is seen
dragging a Vietcong behind it to his death. A GI is seen posing
for a picture holding a Vietcong's scalp.

Grossly deformed children were born after the defoliant Agent
Orange was dropped on large areas of Vietnam. "A monster: three
mouths and no eyes" is the caption to a picture of a baby on the
dissecting table, a baby that only lived to be three months old.

Tho tells his tale in a detached manner even though he
personally experienced the war. He fought with the Vietcong at
the age of nineteen. Now, at 47, he cautiously says that "this
collection only shows the Vietnamese view of what happened."

At the museum's exit souvenirs are on sale. For 22,000 dongs,
about two dollars, you can buy a Zippo. GIs scratched their
posting and the year on one side of their cigarette lighters -
and slogans from the poetry album of death on the other: slogans
such as "Death is my business, and business has been good."

Business with these macabre souvenirs is good. So good that
fake Zippos are now manufactured in Vietnam, complete with
slogan!

Thirty years ago U.S. General Curtis Le May boasted that he
was going to "bomb the Communists back into the Stone Age." He
was as good as his word. Millions of tons of bombs were dropped
on Vietnam, not to mention millions of gallons of defoliant.

Today the harbingers of destruction are sold over the counter
as children's toys: jet fighters and bombers made from the tin of
old Coca-Cola cans.

Vietnam, like China, Laos, North Korea and Cuba, is one of the
last bastions of Communism. The Vietcong flag - a yellow star on
a red background - still flies from many houses.

But since reunification in 1976 Vietnam has been politically
and economically isolated. It remained the poorhouse of Asia -
until the late 1980s when communist regimes fell like ninepins
all over the world.

In 1986 the Vietnamese Communist Party called its version of
perestroika, Doi Moi, or New Thinking. But that referred solely
to economic thinking. The Communist old guard has surrendered
none of its political power.

The Vietnamese economy has been booming ever since trade and
industry cast off the fetters of economic planning and even
foreign capital is welcome. Vietnam is making up for lost ground
- with double-digit growth rates. Saigon, a bustling center of
economic recovery, is one big building site.

The endless hard work of its six million people is reflected
in the gleaming plate glass and steel of new office buildings,
while international companies show their presence on house-sized
hoarding by the Saigon River. They range from Carlsberg, the
brewers (they brew in Hanoi), from Toshiba, the computer company.

This input has transformed the life of the city. Tho tells the
tale of his brother-in-law, a highly decorated officer who now
works as a doorman for a Korean investor.

"We won the war but we have lost the peace," Tho says. It is
the first and only time he sounds a note of bitterness.

Sixty kilometers north-east of Saigon the Vietcong were the
winners. Near Co Chi they dug in deep into the yellow clay,
building a labyrinth of narrow tunnels several hundred kilometers
long and three stories deep - from the Saigon River to the
Cambodian border.

As the Americans were unable to defeat this army of moles on
the ground, they attacked it from the air. Nowhere in Vietnam is
the ground so pock-marked as here. Sixteen thousand people lived
in the Co Chi tunnels. Only a third of them survived the war.

Today the tunnels are a theme park. Behind the box office
(eight dollars a ticket) a narrow path leads through the
undergrowth to the "armory," which is guarded by two uniformed
shop-window dummies.

A hand-painted sign on the door promises: "Here you can dress
up as a Vietcong." The kit includes an olive-green plastic topee,
jacket and trousers made of rough denim, a raincape and sandals
made from old car tire rubber.

The main entrance to the tunnel, which used to be a hole in
the forest floor no bigger than a manhole cover, is now clad in
concrete. A staircase leads down to the "field hospital" - a six
by four metre room which, in the days when it saw active service,
was just big enough for the nurses to stand up as they went about
their work.

On the broad wooden table in the middle of the room operations
used to be carried out in the light of a gas lamp. The surgical
equipment in a tin box on the wall looks more like a carpenter's
tool kit. Tho takes out a saw and says: "They did amputations
without an anesthetic."

The underground passageway to the field kitchen has since been
widened to accommodate the average Western tourist. Once you have
overcome any feeling of claustrophobia you might have, you can
sample a Vietcong snack: manioc in a salty peanut dip and a cup
of bitter yellow tea.

The tour ends at the shooting range. "A dollar a shot!" - And
two Japanese visitors fire a Kalashnikov at gaily painted
cardboard animal targets.

On the road from Saigon to Vinh Long the bus trails an age-old
American pickup with a coffin and six young people casting
banknotes to the wind.

Tho explains that "when someone dies suddenly, the evil
spirits which took him away are still nearby. The money is
intended to distract their attention and stop them from do any
more dirty work."

Vietnam was too poor to impress the evil spirits who landed at
Danang in March 1965, invading the country. By April 1969
Washington had sent 550,000 U.S. servicemen to Vietnam.

Tho only came into contact with the enemy. His unit, the 304
Infantry Division, the "iron fist of the army," was in charge of
supplies.

On his very first combat assignment the young Tho was
seriously injured by a grenade splinter. So his war ended in
1971, when he was sent to study in East Germany: German studies
at Leipzig's Karl Marx University.

He then worked as an interpreter for government delegations
from Hanoi and for the past two years had worked as a publisher's
reader at the Communist Party's children's book publishing house.

He earns a little extra as a tourist guide.

Sooner or later every visitor asks him how he came to terms
with the war and how he deals with the Americans who now come to
Vietnam as tourists. Nearly everyone in Vietnam gives his answer:
"The war is over. There is no reason to hate the Americans any
more. You only need hatred in war."

Vietnam is a narrow strip of land on the South China Sea. In
the course of history Mongols and Chinese have repeatedly tried
to overrun and occupy their small neighboring country.

The Vietnamese have always offered valiant resistance, "but we
never could afford to be unforgiving," Tho says, trying to
interpret Vietnam's pragmatic reconciliation with its history.
"You can only do business with your enemies if you get on with
them again."

-- Die Welt