Vietnam's Revolution Revisited Capitalism Amid Socialism

The diminutive president of Vietnam, Nguyen Minh Triet, was on the reviewing stand greeting high-level well-wishers after the big reunification day parade in Ho Chi Minh City. In the absence of Vietnam Communist Party General Secretary Nong Duc Manh, Triet was the central figure on hand to lend top-level dignity to a three-hour review of history as reenacted on the 35th anniversary of “the fall” of the ancien regime of old “South” Vietnam.

After compelling journalists to arrive at dawn and stand on a platform for the media, minders and guards mostly wandered off as the crowd dispersed in the heat. Policemen who had blocked us most of the morning from getting down from the media platform seemed to have lost all interest. Having ventured across the street for a closer look at President Triet, I found him managing diffident smiles for a small cluster of the faithful gathered around him.

No one questioned my presence as I shook hands with the president and then followed him down the avenue in the center of a smaller entourage toward the gates through which a tank had crashed on April 30, 1975, and then rolled onto the expansive lawn of Independence Palace, once the center of power of the old U.S.-backed Saigon regime. Inside the gate, I met a man in white shirt and dark trousers who said he was providing security before pointing the president and aides to their limousines, parked behind the fence. Apologizing for breaking off our brief exchange, he hopped into an SUV and was off, just ahead of the VIP s in vehicles massed behind him.

It was a strange ending to an anniversary laden with symbolism and significance for a country and a society that seems strangely uncertain whether it’s socialist or capitalist – and old-style communism exists less as a frighteningly repressive influence than as a firm reminder that the power still lies with the forces that marched to victory in 1975. The flag of Vietnam, gold star on a red field, flew everywhere, from shops and stores and office buildings, for the long holiday weekend, but whoever planned the celebration seemed more interested in appealing to southern sensitivities, and promoting capitalism, than in preaching revolutionary values.

Undoubtedly for that reason the most visible man on the anniversary was Triet, a southerner who had been with the old National Liberation Front, i.e., the Viet Cong, the guerrillas and activists who fought in the South before the Americans arrived in force in 1965 and the North Vietnamese began taking over. And it seemed equally logical that Nong Duc Manh, who may have more power than Triet in his role as general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, was not there. He after all is a northerner – rumored to be the son of Uncle Ho and his one-time housekeeper, from an ethnic group near the Chinese border, though he has denied the rumor.

The course of the parade was only a couple of miles, up the broad avenue leading to the palace, and all those in the cheering throng had to have passes to attend, but non-stop television coverage on a panoply of government and party networks insured maximum publicity. It was the biggest event of the holiday, this city’s day to wallow in pride – or, more accurately, the chance for the Ho Chi Minh People’s Committee – that is City Hall – and the local branch of the party to breathe inspiration and loyalty into a populace that tries not to think about the ultimate dominance of Hanoi.

In that spirit the vice chairman of the HCM People’s Committee dwelled on the vibrancy of a metropolitan region that rivals that of some of the major cities of China in its aggressive pursuit of industrialization and modernization. “You can see a lot of changes here,” he reminded a group of foreign journalists, many of whom had covered Vietnam in “the old days,” that is, before April 30, 1975. “We are the most vibrant center for economic advance. We are a city of enormous economic potential with an average economic growth rate of ten percent a year.”

While such figures are always difficult to prove, this city does appear to be the driving force, the hub, of expansion whose tendrils extend throughout at least the southern one third of the country – and whose influence and benefits cover all Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh City, now bursting with at least 9 million people, including 2 million who have moved in from outlying provinces in search of jobs, contributes 21 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, 13 percent of the national budget and an astounding 40 percent of the country’s export revenue.

The question is whether the people of Ho Chi Minh – and much of the rest of the southern reaches of the country, including the Mekong delta rice bowl – will eventually grow restive under the grip of the northerners. The answer for now and at least the near future is maybe -- but certainly not to the point of a rebellion that would only end the economic boom but also result in tremendous hardship and suffering reminiscent of the tragedy of the Vietnam War.

As the holiday parade suggested, the policy of Hanoi is to display nationalist benevolence, to encourage free enterprise and let the good times roll. There is just one catch: All news and views, everything in print, on the air, in theaters or on the Internet, even if totally non-political, has got to be reviewed and censored. And, of course, there is no bona fide political opposition in a society where the party, which includes the president, but is controlled by the general secretary, reigns supreme.

A retired general, Nguyen Van Tai, talking about the “Ho Chi Minh campaign” that precipitated the downfall of the Saigon regime, said General Duong Van “Big” Minh, who took over as president for the last 43 hours of the regime’s existence in order to arrange the surrender, and his cabinet were free to “return to their families” after the Communist victory. He claimed, however, to have no information when asked about the reeducation camps to which thousands of southerners, notably officers of the South Vietnamese armed forces, were consigned, many of them never to return.

“Our policy is to put aside the past and look to the future,” said Colonel Nguyen Van Bach of the Veterans’ Association. “The victory was a victory of the whole nation.” That’s a message repeated constantly as television channels broadcast endless footage of Communist forces on the march to victory. There is no mistaking the need to hark back again and again to those days. People in the south need no better reminder of the need to stick to business and leave policy to the conquerors. If Ho Chi Minh City dominates the economy, no one forgets that Hanoi, 1,500 kilometers to the north, remains the center of power – and final dispenser of fear and favor.

Thus it was that goose-stepping soldiers, airmen and sailors led the anniversary parade, followed by rows of marching Viet Cong decked out in pith helmets and black uniforms, then cardboard tanks, prancing ballerinas in pink and white, mountain people in traditional dress, schoolchildren holding balloons and float after float. No special interest, it seemed was left out in an endless procession of mobile displays with one bit of décor in common. They all featured huge portraits of Ho Chi Minh, who died in 1969 but remains the unifying revolutionary figure.

For those who had known “South” Vietnam in the late 1960’s and early 1970s, the whole show conjured memories. One letter in those days from an employer to the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office on the ground floor of the Rex Hotel in Saigon (the name by which the historic core of Ho Chi Minh City is still known), or two letters from editors willing to vouch for freelancers, sufficed to get a press card good for U.S. military transport, for cheap dining in military mess halls, for discount shopping at post and base exchanges, and even for receiving and sending mail via the Army post office. And hotels, markets, bars, and restaurants of Saigon and other Vietnamese cities offered services at amazing discounts for those who changed their dollars for local dong at “the bank of India” – the catch-all name for the money-changers from India who operated behind the cover of book stores and offices.

One-time war correspondents in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos share nostalgic memories of restaurants purveying fine French menus, mingled with the adrenalin rush of rocket attacks and firefights, distant battles and close-up coups. Even the daily military briefings, known as the “five o’clock follies,” evoke stories of tiffs with briefing officers, of reporters noted for relying more on the word of MA CV, the Military Assistance Command Vietnam, than on first-hand views from the scene. Those days have disappeared into the miasma of history while U.S. forces wage war in very different environments in which security is never certain and nightlife, as experienced in Saigon, Phnom Penh, and Vientiane, the sleepy capital of Laos, largely nonexistent.

Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s long-reigning hereditary leader, called his country as “an oasis of peace,” and it still seemed that way after he was overthrown in March 1970 while drumming up support on a mission to Moscow and Beijing. You could go to war in Cambodia, accompanied by a local assistant, in an old Mercedes-Benz taxi, picked up behind the Hotel Royale, listening to American pop music on the Armed Forces Vietnam Network. Down the road, you might hear the crump of artillery or even staccato of small arms fire, interview a few villagers about the spreading war, return in time to file a story by cable or telex, and then relax over dinner by the pool.

It was all deceptively easy, and then it got dangerous. I never saw my interpreter again after visiting Cambodia for the last time in 1974, where we interviewed peasants telling us the Khmer Rouge were terrifying the populace, sawing off heads with sugar palm leaves in public displays of torture. British photographer Tim Page, wounded severely four times, has been searching for years for the remains of photographers Sean Flynn, the son of the swashbuckling actor Errol Flynn, and Dana Stone. I last saw them at a roadside stand on Route One in eastern Cambodia in early April, 1970 before they vanished on motorcycles, never to be seen alive again. All told 37 foreign correspondents, photographers and assistants died in Cambodia and 32 in Vietnam before April 30, 1975.

Such terrible episodes, though, seemed isolated in a war that ebbed and flowed. There was no censorship, no officials blocking or slowing the flow of stories or photographs. Not that reporters were totally free to roam everywhere. No reporters witnessed the “secret air war” over portions of Laos and Cambodia. The bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail down which North Vietnam shipped men and supplies to the South remained a mystery, exposed occasionally but never actually seen.

Nowadays you can go down the Ho Chi Minh Highway, a newly built route through the mountains and valleys on the Vietnamese side of the border, roaring through jungle once scarred by air strikes and artillery fire. People and products routinely cross the borders with no fear of ambushes or hassles, and lurid casinos lure Vietnamese into Cambodia in the Parrot’s Beak, the area of Cambodia that juts into Vietnam on Route One. It seems safe to bet on the economic future of a region that is gambling on capitalism long after the victory of revolutionary socialists.