Thuy was five when the North Vietnamese communists entered Saigon in 1975. Her father, a translator at the US embassy, had to abandon a frantic attempt to get the family onto the last helicopter to lift off from the embassy roof when his blind mother refused to leave her home. After the fall of Saigon, party cadres came house to house to seize people's valuables. The family managed to hide their most precious possessions before the knock on the door. Thuy concealed a ring in her mouth and a bracelet on her upper arm. "We were told to be quiet," she said. "I pretended to be asleep."
Soon afterwards, as the new government clamped down on people associated with the old regime, Thuy's family decided to flee. Their goal was given added urgency by the prospect of her seven brothers being conscripted into the army and sent to fight in Cambodia. Her father built a fishing craft on Ben Tre, a large island in the Mekong Delta. In 1980 they tried five times to get away. The first three attempts failed when they couldn't reach the boat. The fourth time they were caught and brought to a prison on Ben Tre.
"We were separated and my mother and sister and I were taken into a room and stripped," recalled Thuy, whose family name is Nguyen Thi Minh. "Our clothes were searched and they found our family jewellery hidden in the lining. Everything was taken except for a gold ring that my mother swallowed."
The ring saved them. After a month they escaped from prison by bribing the guards. They tried again to flee the country. On the fifth attempt they succeeded. They evaded the police by putting dirt on their faces to look like peasants, and made it to the South China Sea where they were picked up with other refugees by a Greek cargo ship which brought them to Singapore. They were incredibly lucky. Thousands of boat people perished by drowning or at the hands of pirates. From Singapore, the whole family made it to the United States. All together 680,000 people fled Vietnam by one means or another after the communists took over. Now aged 30, and a medical student, Thuy has come back to Vietnam for the first time. I accompanied her this week on a visit to the Mekong Delta as she retraced the events of her past life with a boyfriend. Anyone wanting to know about the legacy of the Vietnam war 25 years after it ended should go to the Delta, a Vietnamese man had told me in a bar in Saigon. "The war was fought there, not in the city," he said. "That's where the truth is."
As we approached the palm-fringed shore of Ben Tre on a small wooden boat, Thuy pointed out where the family had hidden in undergrowth waiting to escape. There is a restaurant there now selling elephant's ear fish and other local dishes to tourists. During the war military patrol-boats would tear along the wide river and the canals here, their wake lapping against the stilts of riverside houses and the muddy village paths, and their guns raking the palm fronds and farmyards full of chicken and ducks. Later, Vietnamese guards laid in wait for fleeing boat people. But all that is in the past. Today tour groups of European, Australians and Americans go out on patrol in specially designated areas, aiming only their cameras at the flaming red summer trees and green coconut palms on the peaceful banks.
We took the boat to the village of Ankhan, tucked away among deep canals. Once designated a strategic hamlet by the American forces, Ankhan is now a popular destination for conducted tours. The villagers here echo the official government line, that it is time to be friends with America again. "Maybe we had hatred in the past but now we are friends," said a local bee-keeper called Tam Khuynh, over a thimble of honey wine in his hardwood and woven rattan home. By his account, there is much to forgive. US troops forced everyone to come into one village "and if they didn't comply, they destroyed the houses," he said. Now 77, he still mourns two brothers he lost in the fighting. Shells fired from the wide Mekong River fell all around the village. "I didn't know if I would live or die," he said.
We returned to the mainland and drove east, past emerald-green paddy fields with brilliant white stones marking family graves. The Mekong is a lush, densely-populated estuary of rice paddies, coconut trees, mangrove and sugar cane, criss-crossed by countless tributaries and canals, where many villagers live in thatched houses.
This is where many of the most bitter and personal battles of the Vietnam War were fought, and the evidence is there today in the form of broken bodies and bitter memories. As we queued for a rusting Danish-built car-ferry to take us across the Co Chien River, hawkers crowded around selling all sorts of food, including coconuts, cooked rice, pork wrapped in banana leaves and cakes. Among them were two one-legged beggars in army clothes, who appeared at each side of the car. Seeing Thuy in the company of a westerner, one shouted at her through the glass: "You are with an American. You should give me money." By nightfall we reached Vinh Long, a delta town 150 kilometres from Saigon where the streets were filled with men on motorcycles and women in diaphanous pyjamas. An elderly woman stopped to practise her French with a foreigner. "I much preferred the French to the Americans," she said, echoing a sentiment I heard many times from Vietnamese people, who now remember the French more for giving Vietnam architecture and a sense of style than for the fact that they too tried to crush the Vietnamese and were the first to use napalm on the lush forests. The French ran Vietnam as a colony from 1859 to 1954 and their buildings still dominate towns such as Vinh Long, where the old army-barracks, with its louvered shutters, is now the town's high school. People are more ready to criticise the United States today for not offering reparations for acts of destruction such as the defoliation of half the Mekong Delta's mangrove forests.
In Vinh Long's bustling market street next day we came across a former Viet Cong nurse called Dung who now runs a little provision shop. She was watching a black and white television documentary called The Wide Field, the official account of the victory over the Americans, on a little Daewoo set in the back room. She offered us tea among boxes of soap and electric fans and a parked Honda motorcycle. The sound of B52 bombers and anti-aircraft fire formed a background to our conversation. Dung feels very proud to be celebrating the anniversary of liberation this weekend, but her round face became heavy with sadness as she recalled her days in action.
"I think often, especially at this time, of the people who died in the war," she said. "My older brother's seven children were killed, all but one. My mother was beaten by American soldiers who broke her ribs. She passed away just last year." She paused, blinking back tears. "I saw Agent Orange being sprayed from a plane," she said. "The Viet Cong soldiers had masks but the people did not. The leaves fell off the trees and the baby bananas suddenly grew big and nobody would eat them. People got cancer afterwards." What did she feel about Americans now, 25 years later? "I have a lot of hatred for Americans," she said. "I will hate them till I die. I cannot forget the sight of people dying, and being raped by American soldiers."
She lapsed into silence and stared up at the television screen where a US helicopter pilot was falling to the ground in a staged scene, shot by a Viet Cong sniper. Outside Vinh Long, we left the car and mounted the back of motorcycles driven by local youths whom we paid to take us 15 kilometres along a muddy road with wooden canal bridges only a metre wide to the little town of Huu Thanh. Torrential rain fell, making the track slippery but the young men were expert riders. We negotiated villages where water buffalo, pigs and cows wandered onto the roadway. The approach to the town was signalled by a propaganda hoarding admonishing residents not to allow "cock-fights, gambling, sex videos, prostitution or begging".
A terrible battle of the Vietnam War was fought here in October 1972 when the Viet Cong guerrillas attacked a South Vietnam Army base. Only 23 of the 320 South Vietnamese soldiers stationed there remained alive at the end of a week-long siege. We found one of the survivors in a little concrete roadside house, a former South Vietnam Army sergeant called Son who was airlifted to hospital at the height of the battle after being wounded in 14 places. Today he raises pigs and grows some rice. He can't ever forget the war: a fragment of an M79 bullet is still lodged painfully in his left chest. He also has his own painful memories.
"When the Americans left I felt despair, I felt like dying," he said, as he cut slices of fresh star-fruit for his visitors. "When the war ended I just waited around to be arrested. The local Viet Cong were pretty obnoxious at first. I was sent for re-education to a camp and told to forget what I had learned in the past and learn about the new government, and after my release I had to report regularly as an American collaborator. Now I am left alone. When I meet local Viet Cong we never discuss the past. After so many years, we have to co-operate with each other." He feels nothing but resentment, however, for his former protectors. "The Americans abandoned us," he said bitterly. "After the war we got no help from them."
Such feelings are carefully kept in check this week as Vietnam officially celebrates the 25th anniversary of the end of a war that left some three million Vietnamese and 58,000 US soldiers dead, and a generation in both countries bitterly divided.
It is easy for tourists to come to Vietnam now, but difficult for Vietnamese such as Thuy who have spent their formative years in another country. But many are coming back, testimony to a powerful urge to identify with their native country. Thuy's family is now settled in California. She has a master's degree in biochemistry and molecular biology, and next month will graduate as a doctor from the University of Texas. She came to Vietnam to do international elective service at the Paediatric Hospital No 1 in Saigon, where the toxic warfare of the Vietnam War continues to claim child victims.
It was a difficult decision for her to return. "Why are you going back to help the communists?" her mother had asked. Thuy's reason was simple. "It's so sad to see the kids suffer," she said. "The children are innocent. They are the future. I want to help rebuild Vietnam."