VIET NAM: A Dubious Communist Victory

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Long after Saigon's "liberation;" Hanoi still faces hard times

It has been just five years since the jubilant troops of North Viet Nam swept into the crushed city of Saigon and brought an ignominious end to the Republic of South Viet Nam. For Hanoi, those euphoric days of victory held hope that the long years of sacrifice would finally be repaid with peace and prosperity. A U.S.-built network of roads, ports and communications facilities remained largely intact throughout the South and a united Viet Nam, blessed with two rice-rich river deltas, abundant coal and fertile fishing grounds seemed ready to emerge from the ashes of civil war.

That dream of economic strength has never materialized. Viet Nam today is a somber country where austere militarism remains a way of life. TIME Correspondent David DeVoss and Photographer Dirck Halstead, who both covered the Viet Nam War, recently spent 17 days in Viet Nam to assess what has gone wrong—and what is going right. De Voss 's report:

In some deceptive ways Saigon seems not to have changed. The nostalgic visitor can still order a Grand Marnier Souffle in a good French restaurant or go to the Rex Hotel on Saturday night and dance with a lissome girl in a pastel ao dai. But such moments are illusory. The Marxist regime of the North makes its presence felt down to the naming of streets and buildings. The elegant Caravelle Hotel is now the Independence. The city's raffish main street, Tu Do (Freedom) has been renamed Dong Khoi (General Uprising), commemorating the Communist takeover of 1975.

Gone is the excess of the war years, when American G.I.s crammed Saigon's bars for instant companionship with girls who sipped "Saigon Tea" as packs of Vietnamese motorcycle cowboys roared through the streets. Now the signs of hard times are everywhere. Once well-to-do matrons slip into Tu Do's antique shops to sell family porcelains and ivory for cash. Beggars haunt the streets by day. At night, scores of vagrants sleep on the steps of the old National Assembly.

Outside the former capital, evidence of the ten-year war remains starkly apparent across the Vietnamese landscape. Sixty miles north of Saigon in An Loc, now called Binh Long, the twisted debris of Jeeps and armored cars lies rusting in the sun. Bunkers have collapsed. Abandoned shell casings and brittle gas masks litter the barren ground. No other town in the South suffered so severely during the war. In the spring of 1972, when it was encircled by the Viet Cong, at least 1,000 artillery and rocket rounds fell on An Loc every day. Today only a handful of buildings has been restored.

Apart from such physical damage, some of the saddest human legacies of the war are the re-education camps, where Saigon's military men, bureaucrats, suspect lawyers and doctors have been incarcerated to be "rehabilitated" into right-thinking citizens. Officials admit to having 20,000 in the camps, but one informed foreigner in Saigon insists that more than 200,000 are still confined.