Glimpses of Vietnam in its surprising capitalist garb

Kansas City - Returning to Vietnam, 40-plus years after serving there as a U.S. Army correspondent, I expected great changes.

Photo: vietnamtravelmall.com

But I was not prepared to find swanky stores like Louis Vitton, Gucci, Chanel, Cartier, Burberry, and virtually every other upscale store from around the world in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, and Hanoi, once the capital of North Vietnam and now the capital of the united Vietnam.

What happened to the “domino theory” I trusted when I was a young soldier?

We were told that if South Vietnam fell to North Vietnam, all of Southeast Asia would fall like dominoes under the control of communists, much like Cuba today.

Four years ago, I spent 10 days in Cuba, and let me tell you, that is a truly communist country.

It is in sharp contrast to the Vietnam I saw during my recent week-long stay in that country. Vietnam is wildly capitalistic under its so-called communist rule.

Its 86 million population — which has doubled since the war ended in 1975 — has almost 50 million motor bikes buzzing around, a far cry from Cuba, where they are still driving American cars from the 1950s.

In Da Nang, Vietnam, where I had been headquartered during my 1968-69 tour, just a few miles from where I was stationed, there are now 12 new major resorts on the white sands of the nearby beautiful China Beach.

My tour guide told me there are 20 more on the drawing boards.

As a side note, while I spent a day in Da Nang, I made it a point to travel several miles out of town to Marble Mountain. This had particular significance for me because the nights I was not traveling as a military correspondent, I spent on guard duty in the tower. I could hear the gunfire from the Marines fighting the enemy day-after-day on that mountain. Yet I had never seen the mountain up close. On this trip, I arranged to go there, continuing down the same road I once traveled to my headquarters company. What I found was a state-of-the-art glass elevator that takes tourists up to the caves where in the past there were battles. What was once a battleground for capitalism is now a tourist destination.

While memories flooded back, it would be overstating it to say I remember much of Vietnam from four decades ago.

That is not just because my memory is not that great. It is because, like almost every other soldier who was stationed there, I did not get a chance to sight-see in much of the country.

Because I was a correspondent, writing stories for newspapers back in the United States about soldiers who fought behind the lines, I was able to see a large part of the country.

But most of it was by helicopter, and my destinations were not the cities in Vietnam, but the base stations where troops spent most of their tours.

I traveled from one base station to another.

Very few veterans touring Vietnam today can recognize much because they spent their tour either in the jungles or their military bases. For all but a few, the cities were off-limits, with the exception of Saigon.

And, of course, none of us — with the exception of prisoners — set foot in Hanoi. To go there as a visitor now and see the extraordinary charm of that city is quite a jolt from the enemy’s capital I had imagined as we were bombing it throughout the war.

The other countries in Southeast Asia I briefly visited on this trip, including Thailand, China, Singapore, and to a lesser extent, Cambodia, are upbeat, bustling, capitalistic nations.

Vietnam never became what we feared, and the dominoes never fell in that part of the world.

So, why did 58,000 American soldiers die there?

Sad to say, I don’t know.

By STEVE ROSE