On what was once marshland, cars now park next to residential buildings in the newly developed section of Ho Chi Minh City. HOANG DINH NAM/GETTY IMAGES

Saigon redeux: Returning to the land where the bullets once flew

Date published: 12/1/2005

IT SEEMS STRANGE to return later in one's life to a country and a city where the only thoughts at one point were about leaving.

So it is with Vietnam and Saigon.

Americans who served in that conflict had, and have, a half-million memories of where they were, what they had done, and, sometimes, why they had done it. I chose to return to Vietnam for many reasons--some deeply personal, the rest to simply see what has happened in that conflicted land during the intervening years.

It had been 35 years since I had first flown into Ton Son Nhut Airport--what was then Saigon. The North had renamed the city after the hero of the Revolution, Ho Chi Minh, the legendary "Uncle Ho."

Now, as then, the tropical heat hit squarely as one exited the plane. The differences, however, were immediate. No jeeps, no MPs, no fighter aircraft on the runways--just a tropical evening at an international airport.

Late at night, the taxi, now a late-model Toyota (an extraordinary contrast to the old blue and pale yellow Renaults), rolled through the darkened streets on the way to Cholon. On a Monday night, many shops had already closed, but so many more were open.

The streets seemed cleaner, less cluttered, and free of the ubiquitous piles of rotting fruits and vegetables that were once a signature of the city. It was only on arriving at the hotel, a brightly lit 24-story tower, rising in the midst of endless rows of one-story shops and apartments, that I began to understand the changes.

Standing at the window of the well-appointed hotel room, looking out over the vast sprawl of this city, past memories of distant artillery flashes, combat aircraft roaming the night skies, "Hueys" clattering over the streets, Americans, Australians, Koreans, Vietnamese all mixing in a melange of expectation, had been transformed into a tranquil tableau of a city where the residents go about their business in a new time.

The image of a city on the edge of expectation now seems impossibly distant. Jobs, families, and the desire to succeed have largely banished the old fears.

Even though the city has undergone a name change, for another generation in another time, for both Vietnamese and this American visitor, Saigon retains a certain exotic aura, not to be easily erased.

Date published: 12/1/2005