Good morning, Vietnam: on the long road to freedom and prosperity, Vietnam is taking the first halting steps

National Review, May 15, 1995 by William McGurn

ON THE leafy corner joining Mac Dinh Chi Street and Le Duan Boulevard, the former American Embassy squats against the morning sun. Twenty years ago, with Communist forces rapidly advancing on Saigon, young Marines on the other side of these bars did their best to hold back the crush of Vietnamese wanting to be let inside. Even at that late stage, they could not believe America would abandon them.

At the time I was a junior in high school, too young to remember in much detail the course of the war but vividly aware of its impact around me: the older boys suddenly in uniform; the prayers for the fallen at the end of the Memorial Day parades; the frenzy of TV images alternating between combat in Vietnam and protest at home. But nothing has seared itself in my memory as much as the images from those last, sad days around this compound.

At its peak (in April 1969) the American military presence in South Vietnam numbered some 543,000, but that only hints at the magnitude of the U.S. involvement. Between the arrival of the CIA's Edward Lansdale in Saigon in 1954 and the final, ignominious retreat from the rooftop here two decades later, more than three million Americans were channeled through Vietnam. The embassy was only one of many government buildings around the country (the infamous War Crimes Museum, for example, is housed in the old U.S. Information Service offices), all built in standard-issue Concrete Gothic. Even today everything about it suggests the Great Society transported abroad: its bulk, its ugly functionality, and, perhaps, its ultimate failure.

Last Laughs

FOR the writer in search of easy irony, Vietnam is a gold mine. Everywhere history seems to have had the last laugh. In the countryside a peasant girl in black silk pants walks the family bullock past the helplessly rusting hulk of an M-48 tank. In Hanoi the first billboard that greets a visitor is for American Express. In Saigon, meanwhile -- the name Ho Chi Minh City has never really caught on -- huge advertisements for IBM and Hewlett Packard have sprung up along the riverbanks; the nightclubs are back on Dong Khoi Street (formerly Tu Do Street, formerly Rue Catinat); and though the GIs and jeeps are gone from the city streets they have been replaced by a new army of Taiwanese businessmen in Toyota Crowns. And of course there is the War Crimes Museum, a catalogue of American atrocities. In the grisly section on Chi Hoa Prison, our guide wryly points out that for all the horrors it has not lain idle since the Liberation. "Always fully booked," he smiles.

For those so inclined it would be easy to conclude that the changes since the launch of doi moi, or economic rejuvenation, in 1986 have been purely cosmetic. Yet the striking thing about the War Crimes Museum is how incongruous it looks in today's Vietnam. "It all reminds me of Hong Kong back in the Sixties and Seventies," says Jack Keenan, a retired Marine colonel who was back recently on a business trip. "Incredible energy and absolutely no sense of direction."

From my point of view, the most dramatic changes are to be found in Hanoi. Only a few years ago, any foreigner walking the streets would have been taken for a Russian, and the city was possessed of that malevolent Soviet aura familiar from Eastern Europe. Today, street shops sell everything from Johnnie Walker to tubes of Pringle's potato chips. The old, rat-infested hotel where I stayed in 1989 -- the Thong Nhat, once the French Metropole -- has been restored to some of its former glory, and American accents predominate. On Wednesday I pop into the bar to meet with Al DeMatteis, a transplanted Brooklynite who runs DeMatteis Construction. Over in the corner having coffee with a friend is Tanya Pullin, the leading authority on the issue of intellectual property rights in Vietnam. On the other side is the former Taoiseach of Ireland, Albert Reynolds. And then there is Don Riggs from Operation Smile, truly a remarkable group, which brings American and Canadian surgeons to poor countries to perform plastic surgery on children with birth defects.

Operation Smile's first mission here was in 1989, and it was financed by three American Vietnam vets, who put up $40,000 each. Two years later the team included Captain Ned Shuman, a former POW whose previous stay had been for five years in the infamous Hanoi Hilton.

The Vietnamese stories are similarly compelling. In the operating room of Tran Hung Dao Hospital, I meet the head of Operation Smile Vietnam: Dr. Nguyen Huy Phan. The country's highest-ranking physician, Dr. -- General -- Phan began his career as a surgeon at the battle of Dien Bien Phu and spent his life on the front lines during the wars against the Americans and the Chinese. The general proudly shows me a certificate proclaiming him an honorary citizen of Maryland (he had gone there to deliver a lecture), and I ask him how life these days differs from life when he was growing up. He says that his granddaughter is taking piano lessons. "I didn't have time for such pursuits," he says, smiling.