Who will rebuild Vietnam? Much of the Mekong Delta, like the province of Ben Tre, can be reached only by water. It was from Ben Tre, little more than a collection of islands, that Thuy Tri Minh Nguyen's family fled to America as boat people, to join the 680,000 Vietnamese who left the country after the war ended in 1975. Thuy was five when the communists entered Saigon. Her father, a translator in the US embassy, had to abandon an attempt to get the family onto the last helicopter to lift off from the embassy roof, when his blind mother refused to leave her home. After the fall of Saigon, party cadres came to seize their valuables. They managed to hide them. Thuy concealed a ring in her mouth and a bracelet on her upper arm. "We were told to be quiet," she said. "I pretended to be asleep." The family decided to flee, as her seven brothers faced conscription into the army. Her father built a fishing craft on Ben Tre. In 1980 they tried five times to get away. The first three attempts failed when they couldn't reach the boat. The fourth time they were caught and brought to a prison. "We were separated and my mother and sister and I were taken into a room and stripped," said Thuy. "Our clothes were searched and they found our family jewellery hidden in the lining. Everything was taken except for a gold ring that my mother swallowed." After a month they escaped by bribing the guards. On the fifth attempt to leave the country they evaded the police by putting dirt on their faces to look like peasants, and made it to the South China Sea, where they were picked up with other refugees by a Greek cargo ship which brought them to Singapore. They were incredibly lucky. Thousands of boat people perished by drowning or at the hands of pirates. From Singapore, the whole family made it to the United States. Now aged 30, Thuy has come back to Vietnam for the first time, and this week she took me on a tour of the Mekong Delta with her boyfriend to meet some of the people and hear their memories of the war a quarter of a century after it ended. We crossed to the palm-fringed shore of Ben Tre on a small wooden boat. She pointed out where the family had hidden in undergrowth waiting to escape. There is a restaurant there now selling elephant's ear fish and other local delicacies to tourists. We returned to the mainland and drove east, past emerald green paddy fields with white stones marking family graves. The Mekong is a lush, densely populated estuary of rice paddies, coconut trees, mangrove and sugar cane, criss-crossed by countless tributaries and canals, where many villagers live in thatched houses supported by stilts. This is where many of the most bitter and personal battles of the Vietnam War were fought, and the evidence is there today in the form of broken bodies and bitter memories. As we queued for a rusting Danish-built car ferry to take us across the Co Chien River, two one-legged beggars in army clothes appeared at each side of the car. Seeing Thuy in the company of a westerner, one shouted at her through the glass, "You are with an American. You should give me money." By nightfall we reached Vinh Long, a delta town 150 kilometres from Saigon. An elderly woman stopped to rehearse her rusty French with a foreigner. "I much preferred the French to the Americans," she said, echoing a sentiment I heard many times from Vietnamese people, who like to praise the French for giving Vietnam architecture and a sense of style, though not forgetting that the French forces were the first to use napalm in their own colonial war here. Another common complaint I heard was that the Americans refused to help rebuild Vietnam when the fighting was over, as they did in Japan and western Europe. This was the view of Tam Khuynh, 77, a bee farmer whose village of Ankhan can only be reached by canal boat from the Mekong. Ankhan was designated a strategic hamlet by the American forces. Over a thimble of honey wine in his thatched home, he recalled that US troops forced everyone to come into one village "and if they didn't comply, they destroyed the houses". He lost two brothers in the fighting. Pointing outside he said, "shells from the Mekong fell there, and there and there. I didn't know if I would live or die." He thought for a moment and said, "Maybe we had hatred in the past, but now we are friends." Asked if the Americans had not done enough to help, he shook his head. "The French and the Australians did more." Next day we visited a little provision shop in Vinh Long's market place. The sound of B52 bombers and anti-aircraft fire filled the back room. It came from a little Daewoo TV set among boxes of soap, electric fans and a parked Honda motorcycle. Channel 31 was showing The Wide Field, a black-and-white documentary about the victory over the Americans. The shopkeeper, Dung, (she did not want to give her full name), a former Viet Cong nurse, feels very proud to be celebrating the anniversary of liberation this weekend. She experienced terrible suffering in the war. "I saw Agent Orange being sprayed from a plane," she said. "The Viet Cong soldiers had masks but the people did not. The leaves fell off the trees and the baby bananas suddenly grew big and nobody would eat them. People got cancer afterwards. I think often, especially at this time, of the people who died in the war. My older brother's seven children were killed, all but one. My mother was beaten by American soldiers who broke her ribs. She passed away just last year." She paused, blinking back tears. "What do I feel about Americans? I have a lot of hatred for Americans. I will hate them till I die. I cannot forget the sight of people dying, and being raped by American soldiers." She lapsed into silence and stared up at the television screen where a US helicopter pilot was falling to the ground in a staged scene, shot by a Viet Cong sniper. Fifteen kilometres beyond Vinh Long, along a road with narrow wooden canal bridges accessible only by motorcycle, we came to the town of Huu Thanh, where a sign admonishes residents not to allow, "cock-fights, gambling, sex videos, prostitution or begging". A terrible battle was fought here in October 1972. Only 23 of the 320 South Vietnamese soldiers in an army base in the village survived a Viet Cong onslaught. One survivor was a South Vietnamese sergeant called Son, who was airlifted to hospital after being wounded in 14 places. He lives today just beyond Huu Thanh, raising pigs and growing rice. He can't ever forget the war: a fragment of an M79 bullet is still lodged painfully in his chest. "When the Americans left I felt despair, I felt like dying," he said, as he cut slices of fresh star fruit for his visitors. "When the war ended I just waited around to be arrested. The local Viet Cong were pretty obnoxious at first. I was sent for re-education to a camp and told to forget what I had learned in the past and learn about the new government, and after my release I had to report regularly as an American collaborator. Now I am left alone. When I meet local Viet Cong we never discuss the past. After so many years, we have to cooperate with each other." He feels nothing but resentment, however, for his former protectors. "The Americans abandoned us," he said bitterly. "After the war we got no help from them." Back in Saigon the city is festooned with red flags and gold stars to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the end of a war that left some five million Vietnamese and 58,000 US combatants dead, and a generation in both countries bitterly divided. The beginning of the end came on April 29th, 1975, as North Vietnamese forces advanced on Saigon and American ambassador, Graham Martin, gave the order to evacuate the US embassy. In the following 18 hours, a fleet of helicopters flew a total of 2,362 Americans and 6,422 Vietnamese to vessels offshore, and the mad scramble to get onto the final chopper came to symbolise the ignominy of defeat. Saigon was remarkably untouched by the war and the scars appear less deep than in the delta. The centre of the city is much the same as it was when Graham Greene wrote The Quiet American in 1954 before the French withdrew. The turn-of-the-century Continental Hotel where he stayed is virtually unchanged, and there is still the same cake shop across the road where Phuong, mistress of his reporter-hero Fowler, was having a milk shake when a bomb went off. "You're a journalist. You know perfectly well that we can't win," a French officer had admitted to Fowler in the book. The Americans refused to learn from history, or from Greene, and took on the role of fighting an impossible war. The troops poured into Saigon and journalists occupied the Continental, drinking beer on the terrace known as the Continental Shelf, attending the "five o'clock follies" in the nearby Rex Hotel where American PR officers used body counts as a measure of progress, and sometimes going out to the battle zones like the Mekong to be killed or maimed. Many have returned this weekend to Ho Chi Min City, as Saigon is officially called. There are few war memorials, other than scattered armaments left around town, like tank 843 which broke down the metal gates of the presidential palace, and a War Remnants Museum. The palace has been left as it was on the day it was captured. Street traders sell photocopies of The Quiet American and other noted Vietnam books to tourists. There is an Apocalypse Now nightclub, where bar girls hang out in large numbers. Someone has written on the wall "I love the smell of Vietnam in the morning," rewriting Colonel Kilgore's famous line from Francis Ford Coppola's film: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." It is official policy to be friends with America again. Coca Cola is again on sale and the highest neon sign advertises American Citibank. Among those marking the anniversary in Saigon are thousands of Vietnamese like Thuy, who, encouraged by the government, are returning in large numbers, testimony to a powerful urge to identify with their native country. Known as Viet Kieu, they were the ones who lost the war but gained a new and often more prosperous life abroad. Thuy's family is now settled in America. For many Viet Kieu like her, material success overseas does not compensate for the loss of a country. She has obtained a master's degree in biochemistry and molecular biology, and next month will graduate as a doctor from the University of Texas, but she returned to Vietnam to do her international elective service at the Paediatric Hospital No 1 in Saigon, where many children are treated for deformities almost certainly caused by toxic defoliants used by US forces. It was a difficult decision to return, even temporarily. "Why are you going back to help the communists?" her mother had asked. Thuy's reason was simple. "It's so sad to see the kids suffer," she said. "The children are innocent. They are the future. I want to help rebuild Vietnam." By Conor O'Clery - The Irish Times - April 29, 2000.