Hearts and minds

National Review, Dec 2, 1991 by Donald Kirk

THE SUITE of offices and bedrooms in the Boss Hotel, across a leafy street from one of those sparkling little lakes that decorate downtown Hanoi, doesn't look much like a diplomatic mission. The half-dozen Americans who live and work in them prefer sports shirts to coats and ties and are sometimes seen wearing baseball caps at lunch. There is no gauntlet of security guards and secretaries barricading the halls-only smiling Vietnamese hotel clerks glad to wave a visitor up to see "the Americans" with or without appointment.

They are all military people, some of them still on active duty, others retired and working for the Pentagon as civilians. Most of them have spent years in or near Vietnam, beginning with tours in the South more than twenty years ago or on bases in Thailand from which planes flew on bombing sorties over this very city. Now they are here for quite a different purpose-one that evokes sad, bitter memories for all sides. They are here to look for the dead and missing.

"The ministry of defense, ministry of interior, foreign affairs-they're cooperating," says Garnett "Bill" Bell, who studied Vietnamese in the army and did four tours as an enlisted man in Vietnam. "The people we work with-they've been given more authority." Bell is the chief of what is formally known as the "U.S. Office of POWMIA affairs"-the first quasi-permanent American presence in Vietnam since the heliborne flight from the roof of the Saigon embassy in 1975. Without admitting as much, he leaves the impression the "POW" part of the name is a sop to the diehard group of politicians, veterans, and family members who persist in believing a few of the missing are still held captive somewhere in the jungles. "I don't know of Americans who are alive," he says. "People come up to me, people say they are sure Americans are held, but I don't see any proof."

What Bell does see evidence of is the anxiety of Vietnamese officials to demonstrate to a stream of visiting congressmen and representatives of veterans' groups that they are helping him do just about anything he wants in the way of getting to crash sites, reviewing data in Vietnamese archives, and interviewing witnesses. Team member Robert Destatte, a Vietnamese linguist who spent five years in the South during the war, tells how much the Vietnamese have impressed their American guests. "For the first time there's a prospect for getting a full accounting," he says. "I believe the government has formally decided to help."

To one who spent years covering the region as a correspondent, the transformation of attitude toward the "imperialist aggressor" appears downright revolutionary. This transformation reflects the desperation of a society that had come to know far more about war than peace. The real revolution in Southeast Asia has gone on elsewhere-in Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong. While new office towers rise in all these cities, architectural relics of the French colonial era provide the dominant motif here and in old Saigon, which are almost unchanged except for an occasional boxy concrete building put up since the end of the war.

The incredible irony now is that the Vietnamese again expect the United States to pour in dollars and advice-and the betting is the United States will. An exuberant crowd of Australians and Europeans in a newly opened bar in Saigon called Shakes-on the top floor of a building that once housed a branch of the Bank of America-points out the realities. You blokes are going to lose out on all the business," says a veteran of the small military force that Australia sent to Vietnam in the late 1960s. You're cutting off your nose to spite your face."

The White House had stipulated two conditions for lifting the embargo on U.S. trade and investment here-full cooperation in the search for the dead and missing, and non-interference in Cambodia. A casuist could argue that Hanoi has already lived up to the first condition by admitting the team of U.S. military experts and showing them some sites. True, the team has much more work to do, but the point in the end may be to find a face-saving way of certifying the search as successful. As for Cambodia, the conclusion of a deal demanded by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council may just be enough.

"Every Vietnamese people hope they lift the embargo," says Nguyen Van Nghiem, who learned his English at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center on Lake Michigan during the war. Nghiem chats with me in the Top Ten Restaurant, which he manages for a Singaporean company on the ground floor of the venerable old Eden building in Saigon. The restaurant is nearly empty-Nghiem says "we open a year ago for foreigners" with an inviting sign, "24-Hour Fast Food Restaurant," and a promise of Japanese-style Karaoke and dancing, but few are interested. "Life here will be better," he predicts, when the Americans are back.

Nghiem places his hopes largely on the influence of a man who once ran the city from a mysterious warren of musty offices in a delightfully rococo building just a few feet from the Top Ten. The man is Vo Van Kiet, a top leader of the Vietcong in the South during the war and then for four years secretary of the Ho Chi Minh City Central Committee-in other words, mayor of Saigon. Neither Vo Van luet nor anyone else on the Ho Chi Minh committee has been known to venture from the old city hall-a prize inherited from the French-and stroll among the shops in the Eden building, much less enter Top Ten. "I have no chance to see any officials," says Nghiem. Still, he says, "People in the South like Vo Van Kiet."