‘The bombs fell constantly,’ says Le Hoang Khanh, a lean, leathery man of 62 who once fought Americans a few miles from his family home. ‘Day and night became the same. Everybody left or went underground.’

It’s a suffocating August afternoon outside Ben Suc, about an hour’s drive north east of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. The lush rice-growing countryside bathes the eyes in green as it rolls toward a cloudless blue horizon; the only sound the whisper of a breeze rustling through the grass and the occasional mournful lowing of a buffalo.

Impossible to imagine now that Mr Le’s home Ben Suc and the neighboring district of Cu Chi was once, in the words of British journalists 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 U.S., not on terror, but on communism.

During what is known here as ‘The American War,’ peasant resistance fighters like Mr. Le, many of whom lived for months in a vast complex of underground tunnels, dominated this forty-square mile area. The U.S. dubbed the fighters Vietcong, for Vietnamese Communists, and called the area the ‘Iron Triangle,’ a ‘dagger pointing at the heart of Saigon,’ then the capital of Vietnam. Like present day Iraq, this tiny chunk of land, smaller than Country Louth, became the frontline in the global battle against an elusive enemy, and a vast military machine was mobilized to smash it.

Soldiers came to herd Mr. Le’s family, friends and most people in this area 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 U.S. 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 in the center of the village.

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 in an attempt 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 these bombs. There are two on Mr. Le’s small rice field where, he says, rice never grows. Still, he insists 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 U.S. 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 neighbor, Nguyen Thi Kieu, whose husband fought like many South Vietnamese for the Americans (in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam or ARVN) says the same. ‘You had to pick a side and we chose the losers,’ she laughs. For his sins, her husband spent over ten years in a Vietnamese ‘reeducation camp’ after the war ended, and died before he could emigrate with his family to the U.S. ‘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, Cambodians and Laotians refugees, over 10,000 hamlets like Ben Suc and 25 million acres of forest in South Vietnam laid waste, 58,169 dead American soldiers and 304,000 wounded, thousands more casualties from U.S. allies Australia, South Korea and elsewhere, and a country laid waste. How could it have been worse?

One possible answer emerged last year with the release of another extract from the secret tapes recorded during the administration of Richard M. Nixon, which have been dribbling out of his archives for years. In May 1972, unable to defeat the Vietnamese peasants and hounded by protestors at home, an increasingly frustrated Nixon proposed to his national security advisor and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger dropping a nuclear bomb on the northern capital of North Vietnam, Hanoi. ‘I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes,’ 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 mobilized against you as a butcher….’

In his memoirs, Kissinger has blamed America’s failure to prevail in the war the refusal by the U.S. Congress to provide open-ended support to the South Vietnamese, including the continued use of American firepower as the hammer to beat the communists out of the country.

Revival

‘We managed,’ said Mrs. Nguyen. Vietnam is like that. People disarm you with their matter-of-factness when you expect them to howl and rage at the tragedy literally etched into the country’s DNA. Vietnamese researchers say that between 800,000 and 1 million Vietnamese still suffer health problems linked to the chemicals dropped during the war, including cancer and severe birth defects. The United Nations and the U.S. State Department estimate that there are still over three million landmines in Vietnam. The Vietnamese Government claims that by the year 2000 nearly 40,000 people had been killed and over 60,000 injured by landmines and unexploded ordnance. Vietnam now has probably the world’s highest proportion of amputees, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Leahy War Victims Fund.

‘People here say in ordinary conversation, ‘Oh, my mother or father died in the U.S. bombing the same way someone back home might say they died of cancer,’ says Irishwoman Aoife Bairead, who works with the Christina Noble Foundation in Ho Chi Minh. ‘It leaves you wondering how to reply.’ You wonder too is it stoic endurance or black humor that allows the Vietnamese today to sell Zippo lighters as tourist trinkets and B52 cocktails (Grand Marnier, coffee liqueur, Irish cream liqueur) in up-market 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 WWII, and it has embraced it with all the energy of a man released from a prison life sentence.

Pell-mell economic growth of 9% a year from 1993 to 1997 fuelled by foreign investment and dominated by ‘red capitalists,’ has swept away the revolutionary images of the Ho Chi Minh era and replaced them 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 7% in 2002.

The end of the long U.S. embargo against the country in the 1990s and the late 2000 visit by the world’s most famous Vietnam draft dodger, U.S. President Bill Clinton, trailed by 1,500 politicians, journalists and businessmen, signaled the start of the US-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement and convinced many that the war era had been laid to rest.

Clinton’s Vietnam speech, though, was characterized less by Ghandi-esque contrition, as some expected, than by Rambo-esque swagger, tearfully pledging that the U.S. would not rest until ‘we bring every possible fallen hero home.’ His Defense Secretary William S. Cohen pointedly refused to apologize 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 the Christina Noble Foundation, which has helped thousands of children across the country. ‘I’ve seen things that will stay with me forever,’ says Director Nicolas Pistolas, son of the eponymous Irish founder. ‘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’s five-star hotels are crowded with foreign businessmen making deals with eager young Vietnamese, making the most of some of the cheapest labor in Asia. Outside the streets are choked with the vehicle of choice in growing Asian cities, the 50cc motorbike, 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 4WD cars). A Nike factory employs 6000 people a short drive from where Mr. Le fought to keep Americans out. Ho Chi Minh even has that indispensable accessory for a modernizing city – an Irish pub. Everywhere you can sense the energy of a country where about 70% 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 U.S. has a newly built consulate in the center of the city and a small consignment of Americans in Vietnam, some way below the one million that crowded the country during the war. The consulate’s Cultural Press and Attache, Robert Ogburn, says the Consulate’s business is mostly routine visa applications and they’ve never had any friction with the local population. ‘The Vietnamese are very pragmatic,’ he says. ‘They see Americans as the money-makers and are willing to forgive things.’ The most pressing bilateral issue these days is a trade spat over catfish. The eagerness of the Vietnamese to make up for lost time and tight government controls mean unlike many Asian and European cities, there have been few post 9/11 demonstrations outside the consulate’s doors. Ironically, America’s official presence in Vietnam is probably among the safest in the world.

Strong economic growth and a decade of peace, however, have not magically transformed this country. Nearly 40% of the population live below the poverty line, GDP is just US$2,240 compared to Ireland’s US$31,855, schools, hospitals and Ho Chi Minh’s heartbreaking orphanages are pitifully under-funded. Still, it’s a long way from the days when this economy was warped to providing for the needs of a giant army, from the days when Saigon boasted 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 Mr. Pistolas. ‘You have to take your hat off to them.’ ?

Returnees

 Walk around Ho Chi Minh Cit today and chances are you’ll bump into a U.S. or Australian veteran of the war. Some have come to repent for what Vietnam journalist Murray Sayles calls, ‘the folly of relying on brute force masquerading as good intentions,’ like the vets of Peace Trees Vietnam, who uproot mines and plant trees. Others have come to cry for old dead friends, or to look for lost ones. Bob Winkler, a Texan who flew U.S. fighter planes over Vietnam for six years and who was shot down and badly hurt in 1973, lost track of his Vietnamese fiancée after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Last year, 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, kindergartens and day care centers and clean-water facilities. ‘The war was a waste of time, effort and human lives. It achieved nothing,’ says Mr. 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 U.S. still wants to be the world’s policemen. I’m not sure what America has learned.’

An Pham Xuan thinks he knows. ‘Everybody thinks the U.S. 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 take to Iraq.’

And the lessons for the Vietnamese? I’m urged to visit a cemetery for those who fought on the U.S. side, off the Ben Hoa Highway outside Ho Chi Minh. 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. An AVRN vet, Ho Van Hinh, wanders over to cadge a cigarette and ask us 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 the U.S. Arlington Cemetery. Does it make him bitter?

‘Not bitter,’ he says. ‘Just sad. Nobody cares about us now but we were once considered very important.’

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