Good Morning, Vietnam

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I thought returning to Vietnam would be difficult. After all, my first attempt had not gone well. In October 1974, I left the country newly married to Nguyen thi Phuong Nga and for a new assignment in Rio de Janeiro. I had just completed two years in Saigon for TIME, reporting the chaotic endgame of a cruel war. Six months later, with Communist forces close to overrunning the country, I headed back to Saigon to try to bring out Nga's parents, five sisters and her brother. We had arranged visas to the U.S. for them from Rio, but they needed help getting on an evacuation flight. On April 29, I boarded an Air Vietnam 707 in Bangkok bound for Saigon. But Tan Son Nhut airport had fallen overnight, and after circling over the Mekong Delta, the flight was diverted to Hong Kong. For me, Vietnam would have to wait. For Nga's family, it was six dreary years of privation before they were allowed to leave for the U.S.

Twenty-five years passed before I made it back to Vietnam. In 2000, I finally landed at Tan Son Nhut and discovered there was nothing difficult about returning after all. Vietnam and its people had been transformed. The outward scars of war—checkpoints, gun emplacements, soldiers—had disappeared, and the mind-set of war had melted away.

Now, returning to Vietnam is a lively, exhilarating experience with moments of giddiness. Wandering through Ho Chi Minh City earlier this month, I was charmed to see that painters were touching up the already-glistening white and gold trim on the old Saigon City Hall. Nga and I were married in that wonderful confection of a building. Could it be that the good comrade city fathers were refurbishing it in honor of our visit? A silly thought. No, they wanted it to look beautiful for the celebrations taking place this week to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.

The government is sponsoring ceremonies to commemorate the liberation of the South, but the people—the majority of whom were born after the war—don't seem terribly interested in the past. While the Japanese and Chinese are arguing over, among other things, versions of their own war history, the Vietnamese are looking to the future. They have even settled their differences with the Americans, who are now viewed as benign cash-spending tourists or customers for the endless stream of sneakers and clothing churned out in factories nestled around Tan Son Nhut. It's easy to be magnanimous when you'd won the war and business is ticking over nicely.

Saigon glitters these days as it never did in the '60s and '70s. One night, Nga and I jump into a white taxi and cruise in a sea of motor scooters through neighborhoods dotted with shops selling bright clothes, utilitarian furniture, the latest electronics. We join a friend and his wife for dinner at a charming restaurant tucked away on a quiet residential side street. It serves splendid food from central Vietnam, a new sophistication in itself. Ten years ago, our host could not find a job. His wife kept the family afloat by running a small day-care center. Today, he operates a brisk business raising orchids for export. Other Vietnamese friends of ours have similar hopeful stories.

Yet one has to take care not to overstate the case. Many people in Vietnam are crushingly poor and work long days on the street or in the fields to eke out a sparse living. They do not dine in the new quaint restaurants that now grace Saigon. When we traveled to the far north of Vietnam, near the border with China, the houses in the countryside reminded me of those I had seen in my travels in Ethiopia. My wife's aunt, a professor of social work in Saigon, reminds us that Vietnam is only beginning to cope with serious social problems like drugs and family violence.

Prior to this visit to Saigon, I spent five weeks in Kuala Lumpur, a city I first got to know in 1973 when it struck me as a sleepy, no-hope backwater. Today, Malaysia has raced far ahead of Vietnam, which is still hobbled by corruption, bureaucracy and ugly politics. Vietnam lost a generation of progress because it did not spawn leaders like Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad to set the country's economic course in the '80s and '90s.

I find myself uneasy when I describe Saigon's indisputable success to Vietnamese back in the U.S. How do you tell someone that parts of the country they abandoned out of fear and desperation are now prospering, despite the continued bungling of the Communist government they understandably despise? And what about the millions of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of Americans who lost their lives in the war to keep the Communists at bay? Was all that death and sorrow worth it? I don't know. That's still difficult for me.