The last battle in Vietnam took place on May 15th, 1975, but 30 years after the fighting ended the legacy of one of the 20th century's most bitter conflicts lives on. David McNeill reports from Ho Chi Minh City
'The bombs fell constantly," says Le Hoang Khanh, a lean, leathery man in his mid 60s who once fought Americans a few miles from his family home. "Day and night became the same. Everybody left or went underground." It is a suffocating afternoon outside Ben Suc, about an hour's drive northeast of Ho Chi Minh City, in Vietnam. The lush rice-growing countryside bathes the eyes in green as it rolls towards a cloudless blue horizon. The only sounds are the whisper of a breeze rustling through the grass and the occasional mournful lowing of a buffalo.
It is impossible to imagine now that Ben Suc and the neighbouring district of Cu Chi once made up, in the words of the British writers Tom Mangold and John Penycate, "the most bombed, shelled, gassed, defoliated and generally devastated area in the history of warfare", an area that bore the brunt of a previous assault by the US, not on terror but on communism.
During what is known here as the American War, which ended almost exactly 30 years ago, peasant resistance fighters such as Le, many of whom lived for months in a vast complex of tunnels, dominated this 100sq km area. The US dubbed the fighters Vietcong, for Vietnamese communists, and called the area the Iron Triangle. It was, it said, a "dagger pointing at the heart of Saigon", as Ho Chi Minh City was known in the days when it was the capital of South Vietnam, partitioned from communist North Vietnam, whose capital was Hanoi. Like present-day Iraq, this tiny chunk of land, smaller than Co Louth, became the front line in a global battle against an elusive enemy, and a vast military machine was mobilised to smash it.
Soldiers came to herd Le's family, friends and neighbours into "secure hamlets", or compounds ringed with barbed wire, free from Vietcong contagion, before setting the deserted villages and hamlets alight in what became notorious as "Zippo jobs". Ben Suc, wrote a US general in 1968, "no longer existed" after his men trucked the inhabitants out, set fire to their homes, bulldozed houses, schools and graveyards and detonated five tons of explosives and napalm.
The soldiers came in bigger numbers, trying to kill an invisible enemy that melted underground or back into the civilian population. Finally came the planes: wave after wave of bombers that dropped 400,000 tons of napalm and more than 11 million gallons of defoliant chemicals on the south of the country to try to clear the dense jungle and undergrowth that the resistance used for cover. Then millions of tons of bombs were dropped to destroy the tunnels, leaving this lush countryside looking like the face of the moon.
Locals in Ben Suc will show you craters from the bombs. There are two on Le's small rice field, where, he says, rice never grows. Still, he says, he's not angry. "It's just war," he says. "The American boys who came here didn't want to fight. We didn't want to fight. The US soldiers were ordered to come by their government. And when they came we had to resist. We were just trying to defend our country."
His neighbour Nguyen Thi Kieu, whose husband fought, like many South Vietnamese, for the Americans, in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, says the same. "You had to pick a side, and we chose the losers," she laughs. For his sins, her husband spent more than 10 years in a Vietnamese "re-education camp" after the war ended. He died before he could emigrate with his family to the US. "It was too bad, but we managed. It could have been worse."
Three million dead Vietnamese - including two million civilians - more than 15 million Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian refugees; more than 10,000 hamlets like Ben Suc and 25 million acres of forest in South Vietnam laid waste; 58,169 dead and 304,000 wounded US soldiers; thousands more casualties from Australia, South Korea and other countries who sided with the US; and a country laid waste. How could it have been worse?
One possible answer emerged in 2002 with the release of another extract from the secret tapes recorded during the administration of Richard Nixon, which have been dribbling out of his archives for years. In May 1972, unable to defeat the Vietnamese peasants and hounded by protesters at home, an increasingly frustrated Nixon proposed to Henry Kissinger, his national-security advisor and, later, secretary of state, that they drop a nuclear bomb on Hanoi. "I just want you to think big, Henry, for Chrissakes," said the president. Thumping a map of the world in anger, Nixon is heard on the tapes saying: "I'll see that the United States does not lose. I'm putting it quite bluntly . . . South Vietnam may lose, but the United States cannot lose . . . Whatever happens to South Vietnam we are going to cream North Vietnam . . . For once we've got to use the maximum power of this country . . . against this shit-ass little country: to win the war. We can't use the word 'win', but others can."
In a later exchange Nixon observed to Kissinger: "The only place where you and I disagree . . . is with regard to the bombing. You're so goddamned concerned about the civilians, and I don't give a damn. I don't care."
Kissinger replied: "I'm concerned about the civilians because I don't want the world to be mobilised against you as a butcher."
In the end, of course, Nixon fell before South Vietnam, being impeached in 1974, a year before communist tanks entered Saigon, on April 30th, 1975. The last battle of the Vietnam War was fought on May 15th, 1975, a bitter firefight on the small island of Koh Tang; it ended, fittingly, with the extraction of 29 exhausted young marines.
In his memoirs Kissinger blamed the US failure to prevail on the refusal of Congress to provide open-ended support to the South Vietnamese.
"We managed," says Nguyen Thi Kieu. Vietnam is like that. People disarm you with their matter-of-factness when you expect them to howl and rage at the tragedy etched into the country's DNA. Up to a million Vietnamese still suffer health problems linked to the chemicals dropped during the war, including cancer and severe birth defects. Last month a US judge rejected the latest in a series of lawsuits against the companies that created Agent Orange.
The United Nations and the US state department estimate that more than three million landmines are still buried in Vietnam. The Vietnamese government claims that by 2000 nearly 40,000 people had been killed and more than 60,000 injured by landmines and unexploded ordnance. Vietnam now has probably the world's highest proportion of amputees, according to the Leahy War Victims Fund, an organisation managed by the US Agency for International Development. "People here say in ordinary conversation, 'Oh, my mother or father died in the US bombing,' the same way someone back home might say they died of cancer," says Aoife Bairead, who works with the Christina Noble Children's Foundation in Ho Chi Minh City. "It leaves you wondering how to reply."
You wonder, too, whether it is stoic endurance or black humour that allows the Vietnamese today to sell Zippo lighters as tourist trinkets and B52 cocktails - Grand Marnier, coffee liqueur and Irish cream liqueur - in upmarket bars.
"You have to remember what the Vietnamese have put up with," says An Pham Xuan, a former journalist for Time magazine who also helped the Vietnamese resistance. "We fought off the Chinese, the French and the Japanese before the Americans, then the Cambodians and the Chinese again. So much war has shaped our character. We haven't been at peace long."
Indeed, Vietnam has just basked in its first decade of peace since the second World War, and it has embraced it with all the energy of a man released from a life sentence.
Economic growth of 9 per cent a year from 1993 to 1997,fuelled by foreign investment and dominated by "red capitalists", replaced the revolutionary images of the Ho Chi Minh era with advertisements for western and Asian multinationals. Insulated by currency controls, the boom survived a brief stumble after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and the economy grew by nearly 8 per cent in 2004.
The end in the 1990s of a long US embargo against the country - and the visit in 2000 by Bill Clinton, the world's most famous Vietnam-draft dodger, trailed by 1,500 politicians, journalists and businessmen - signalled the start of a bilateral trade agreement and convinced many that the war era had been laid to rest.
But Clinton's Vietnam speech was characterised less by Gandhi-style contrition, as some had expected, than by Rambo-style swagger: the president tearfully pledged that he and his country would not rest until "we bring every possible fallen hero home". William Cohen, his defence secretary, pointedly refused to apologise for the war. "Both nations were scarred by this. They [ the Vietnamese] have their own scars from the war. We certainly have ours."
Some of the scars can be seen in the faces of children who end up at Christina Noble's foundation, which has helped thousands of Vietnamese children. "I've seen things that will stay with me forever," says Nicolas Pistolas, its director. "Children with arms coming out of their chests and backs, kids with two heads. It breaks your heart, because they had nothing to do with any of this, and they're going to have to pay for it for the rest of their lives.
"It's taken a long time for people here to have belief in the future, but the young people now just want to move forward. And it's a testament to the beauty of the Vietnamese soul that they still welcome us foreigners in."
Today, Ho Chi Minh City's five-star hotels are crowded with foreign businessmen making deals with eager young Vietnamese, to take advantage of some of the cheapest labour in Asia. Outside, the streets are choked with 50cc motorbikes - the vehicle of choice in growing Asian cities - along with the odd Mercedes of someone who has made it to the top of the pile. (Vietnamese will tell you that government officials prefer Japanese jeeps.) A Nike factory employs 6,000 people a short drive from where Le fought to keep Americans out. Ho Chi Minh City even has that indispensable accessory for a modernising city: an Irish pub.
Everywhere you can sense the energy of a country where about 70 per cent of a population that has almost doubled since the end of the war is under 30 and eager for a slice of what the rest of the world has.
The US has a newly built consulate in the centre of the city, and there is a small consignment of Americans in Vietnam - some way below the million that crowded the country during the war. The consulate's public-affairs officer, Robert Ogburn, says that the consulate's business is mostly routine visa applications and that is has never had any problems with locals.
"The Vietnamese are very pragmatic," he says. "They see Americans as the moneymakers and are willing to forgive things." One of the most pressing bilateral issues has been a trade spat over catfish. The eagerness of the Vietnamese to make up for lost time and tight government controls meant that, unlike in many Asian and European cities, there were few post-September 11th demonstrations outside the consulate's doors. Ironically, the United States' official presence in Vietnam is probably among the safest in the world.
But strong economic growth and a decade of peace have not magically transformed the country. Nearly 40 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line; GDP per capita is still under €2,500, compared with Ireland's €25,000; and schools, hospitals and Ho Chi Minh City's heartbreaking orphanages are pitifully underfunded.
Still, it's a long way from the days when Vietnam's economy was warped to provide for the needs of a giant army, from the days when Saigon had 56,000 registered prostitutes and hundreds of thousands of people catering to the entertainment needs of a million foreigners. "I'm amazed at what the Vietnamese have done," says Pistolas. "You have to take your hat off to them."
Walk around Ho Chi Minh City today and chances are that you'll bump into a US or Australian veteran of the war. Some have come to repent for what the writer Murray Sayle calls "the folly of relying on brute force masquerading as good intentions", like the vets of PeaceTrees Vietnam, who uproot mines and plant trees.
Others have come to cry for dead friends or look for lost ones. Bob Winkler, a Texan who flew US fighters over Vietnam for six years (and who was shot down and badly hurt in 1973), lost track of his Vietnamese fiancee after the fall of Saigon. In 2002 he returned to search for her.
"It was hard being back, I can tell you. I was in a bad way, especially when I saw the plane I'd actually been shot down in sitting in a museum. But I managed to track down somebody who told me her whole family had moved to Las Vegas, and I found her there soon after. She'd stayed beautiful and I'd gotten old and ugly. But we're going to get married."
Rob Burgess, one of 54,000 Australian Vietnam vets, runs the Australian Veterans Vietnam Reconstruction Group, which builds orphanages, creches, daycare centres and clean-water facilities.
"The war was a waste of time, effort and human lives. It achieved nothing," says Burgess, who has since married a Vietnamese woman and set up a business in Ho Chi Minh City. "Not that much seems to have changed. The US still wants to be the world's policeman. I'm not sure what America has learned."
An Pham Xuan thinks he knows. "Everybody thinks the US learned the lesson that they should get out quickly when they get involved in wars, but that's not right. They learned how to stay and fight. This was the longest war in their history, and they only left because they could no longer afford it. That's the lesson they took to Iraq."
And the lessons for the Vietnamese? I'm urged to visit a cemetery for those who fought on the US side, off Ben Hoa Highway outside Ho Chi Minh City. The cemetery is not signposted and takes hours to find. When we finally stumble on it we find badly tended graves overgrown with weeds, mostly dated from 1972, the peak of the Nixon-Kissinger bombing.
A veteran of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, Ho Van Hinh, wanders over to cadge a cigarette and ask if we have seen the graveyards of their former enemy, the communists. Yes, we say, remembering the immaculately laid-out rows of gravestones all over the south that resemble smaller versions of Arlington National Cemetery, in the US. Does it make him bitter? "Not bitter," he says. "Just sad. Nobody cares about us now, but we were once considered very important."