HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam, Nov. 16, 2000
When East Meets West
A War Correspondent Returns To The Scene
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Vietamese vendors walk past Western-style billboards (CBS)
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Interactive The Fall of Saigon Revisit the final chapter of America's struggle in a decade-long war through pictures, maps, video and stories.
Saigon, the country's economic engine is a fast-growing urban sprawl of 5 million people and 1.5 million motorbikes.
Its skyline is punctuated with office towers and hotels and even luxury apartment buildings, reports CBS White House Correspondent Bill Plante, who was a correspondent there in the last days of the Vietnam War.
Ho Chi Minh is still the revered symbol of Vietnam's fight for independence, but now, U.S. companies and their brand names have popped up all over the city that was renamed for him.
For the new generation of Vietnamese, the war with America is ancient history. Half the population was born after it ended.
The government does try to keep the memory of Vietnam's victory alive.
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Museums in every major city display captured aircraft and weapons. There are war souvenirs everywhere - models of tanks and planes, cigarette lighters engraved with GI unit symbols and sayings allegedly dating back to the American presence here.
But the influence of the West is obvious,from the moment you step off the plane at a new airport terminal that symbolizes the Vietnam of recent years. It has been under construction for years, with work stopping occsionally when money got tight.
Billboards touting Kodak and other Western goods provide evidence of how Vietnam has opened its once-closed doors over the past 15 years.
These ads jut from the patchwork of rice paddies where people farm as their ancestors have for centuries, using water buffalo to plow, planting each tender rice shoot by hand and irrigating bucket by bucket.
Vietnam's traffic is chaotic, with a mass of motorbikes, mostly operated by people in baseball caps. Accidents are so frequent that the United States backs a program there to encourage the use of helmets.
Travel just 30 miles outside Ho Chi Minh city to what used to be called the "iron triangle," where the Viet Cong lived for years in a huge underground tunnel complex, some of it directly underneath the Army's 25th infantry division.
Thirty-three years ago, Plante watched bulldozers leveling the rubber trees as the U.S. tried unsuccessfully to flush out the VC. Today, the place is a kind of bizarre theme park, where you can pay a dollar a bullet to shoot weapons, like the AK-47, which the VC used during the war. Now in these woods the sound of automatic weapons fire means more tourists.
In Saigon, there is a bar called the Apocalypse Now, decorated like a battlefield. All this means the war is no longer real to any but those who were in it.
Signs of commerce are everywhere, from street-side shops that spill onto the sidewalks to women selling food, clothing and other odds and ends from a pair of baskets slung over their shoulders from sticks of bamboo.
More and more Vietnamese frequent the many Internet cafes that now dot the city, sending email around the globe. The best students now study overseas, many of them in the U.S.
Vietnam's government is trying to have it both ways — opening the door to change while keeping the lid on dissent and opposition. But history suggests that once that door is open, it is pretty hard to push it shut again.
©2000 CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
