It’s Visa for victory at Vietcong parade
timesonline.co.uk
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The Sunday Times - World
May 01, 2005
It’s Visa for victory at Vietcong parade
Michael Sheridan, Ho Chi Minh City
THE only tank was made of plywood and pretty girls brandished giant plastic Visa cards in a victory parade yesterday that showed just how far Vietnam has come since Ho Chi Minh City, once known as Saigon, fell to communist forces 30 years ago.
While venerable Vietnamese soldiers proudly wore their medals, mobbed by crowds of admiring youths, a handful of American veterans visiting the city could hardly hold back their tears as they reflected on the losses of the past three decades.
Three of them spoke with emotion of how they had been welcomed on former battlefields and in cities where US forces once fought insurgents in a war that divided America and brought millions of protesters onto streets around the world.
“We were warmly embraced, from the smallest child to the most grizzled veteran,” said Robert Wagner, 63, who landed with the US Marine Corps at Da Nang in 1965.
If it was a day for the grizzled veterans as far as Vietnam’s communist rulers were concerned, it was also a chance for the regime to put its new capitalist credentials on display.
No veteran could enjoy higher mythical status than General Vo Nguyen Giap, now 94, who defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu and routed the South Vietnamese two decades later. He sat under shady awnings with Raul Castro, 74, younger brother and heir to Cuba’s dictator, Fidel Castro, to review a parade that started as if waxworks had come to life in a museum of communism.
They watched hundreds of soldiers, sailors and airmen stamp down Le Duan Boulevard in the tracks of Tank 390, which smashed through the gates of the presidential palace on April 30, 1975, to take the surrender of the government of South Vietnam.
But yesterday the soldiers followed only a model tank and even the girls who followed them — dressed in slinky black pyjamas as Vietcong commandos — looked more like fashion plates than urban guerrillas.
There was plenty of authentic communist authoritarianism on show. Flak units were deployed to guard Tan Son Nhut airport against who knows what enemy, the authorities sealed off the city centre and the police shoved away anyone without a pass to attend the “spontaneous” celebrations.
But many of the boys and girls were carrying symbols of commerce, not war, as they mustered in line outside the old US embassy, next to a shrine where joss sticks burnt in a blue pot and flowers were scattered to honour a suicide squad of Vietcong who died attacking the fortified compound in the Tet offensive of 1968.
Few gave it a glance as they flirted and chatted while waiting to march in the searing sun. And military display was soon replaced by something much more revolutionary — corporate sponsorship.
The hard-hatted stalwarts of socialist labour were outnumbered by a troupe of girls pushing supermarket trolleys. Two girls in shimmering green ao dai, the traditional clinging dress, carried giant Visa cards on a float modelled in the shape of a cash machine. Ho Chi Minh’s visage beamed down from a float promoting tourism.
The original US embassy building, so familiar from countless news photographs, was torn down in the late 1990s and was replaced by a low-rise consulate protected by a thick anti-terrorist wall. Its guards leant over in relaxed style to watch the show. Michael Marine, the American ambassador, was among the official guests on the reviewing stand. And despite a torrent of party rhetoric, nobody mentioned US imperialism, George W Bush or Iraq.
It was all a bit confusing for the old men wearing badges that proclaimed them “anh hung” (hero).
“Many of my friends died,” said Tran Van Nho, 69, an infantryman in the 4th Regiment of the North Vietnamese army, who was a soldier for 11 years.
“My wife, son and mother were all killed in the American bombing of the north. But now I look around Ho Chi Minh City and everything is growing again, everything’s changing.”
Left on the stand when Giap and the party elders had gone was Lieutenant-General Le Van Tuong, 87, who sounded concerned about Vietnam’s future. “Our young people must keep up the strong spirit of the old people,” he said, sitting amid some young admirers.
If some Vietnamese felt mixed emotions yesterday, the Americans said that it was hard to confront the reality of death and destruction in the country.
“Here the liberators were honoured. When we went home the people opposed to the war called us baby killers and the old salts called us wimps,” said Wagner.
With US troops serving in a controversial war in Iraq, the veterans said that they felt uncomfortable echoes of history on their return to Vietnam.
“Have we learnt from the past?” asked Al Bergstrom, a retired colonel. “Hindsight is such a wonderful thing. Many of those anti-war protesters did a great disservice to the Vietnamese people and to the American people, too, many years ago.”
Giap’s own campaign memoirs reveal that North Vietnam never intended to abide by the 1973 Paris peace accords, for which Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho shared the Nobel peace prize (although Le declined it).
In articles to be published by the People’s Army Newspaper, a Vietnam journal, General Le Huu Duc is to outline how staff officers began planning the 1975 assault on Saigon within two months of the agreement.
Nonetheless, Robert Olson, 67, who served two tours in Vietnam, said that the American government had not told its people the truth then or now, and its soldiers had paid the price.
“It is just inconceivable to me that our leadership would go into Iraq without a thought about what happened afterwards,” he said.
Wagner, Bergstrom and Olson are from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which helps to clear mines, rehabilitate victims and educate children about the dangers of explosives left from Vietnam’s wars.
“I guess the thing that strikes me most,” said Olson, “is the lack of animosity.”
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