The Tourist Who Ran the Place

It took more than half a century of bloodshed and exile, but Nguyen Cao Ky, the ardent anticommunist and former ruler of South Vietnam, has finally come home to this communist capital.

A former air force pilot who flew bombing raids over North Vietnam, Ky arrived Friday in Hanoi on government-owned Vietnam Airlines. At 73, he has made peace with his former enemies and says he wants to help his homeland prosper. He hints that he may even move back.

“My heart is very clear,” the former premier said. “What I am doing now, I am doing for my country. When you look back today, the killing is nothing you can praise. It’s time to close that dark chapter of Vietnam history and open a new one. The road of old warriors has ended.”

Ky, who has been assailed by some Vietnamese exiles for setting foot in the country, arrived in Ho Chi Minh City on Jan. 14 on a three-week trip of sightseeing and reconciliation. It was his first visit back to Vietnam since he fled to the United States in 1975 ahead of the communist takeover. When he landed in Hanoi, it was the first time in 53 years that he had been back to the city where he grew up.

Standing on the balcony of his 15th-floor suite at the Sofitel Plaza Hotel overlooking central Hanoi, he could see the elegant French colonial building where he went to school, the pagoda where he prayed, and West Lake, where he used to swim.

“To be frank,” he said, “this is my hometown.”

Ky’s trip is a milestone in Vietnam’s postwar history, which has been a tale of rapprochement slowed by wary former enemies. Other key moments include the creation of a joint task force in 1991 to search for missing U.S. soldiers, the restoration of diplomatic relations with the United States in 1995, and return visits to Vietnam by former GIs seeking their own resolution.

Ky’s journey back carries special significance because there was no fiercer defender of South Vietnam, and his decision to travel home sends a strong, if unwelcome, message of conciliation to many Vietnamese exiles in Southern California.

“Some people in Orange County think that my return symbolizes a surrender,” he said. “Surrender to who? To what? Who did I betray? If you surrender to your country, what’s wrong with that? This is my country, not Little Saigon, not Orange County.”

As South Vietnam’s air force commander, premier and vice president during the 1960s and early 1970s, Ky was famous for his black jumpsuit and violet scarf, his ivory-handled revolver and his occasional outrageous remarks -- such as suggesting that he admired Hitler.

He still boasts that for two years as premier, he held absolute power in South Vietnam. “If I didn’t like your face,” he said, “I could shoot you.”

Living mainly in Southern California since 1975, he has long embodied the fight against communism. But in an abrupt turn, Ky has been welcomed by the Vietnamese government, which hopes that his visit will encourage other exiles to return and help rebuild the country. “We are friends now,” Ky said.

Retired U.S. Army Gen. Corbin Cherry, a chaplain and Vietnam veteran who accompanied him to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, said Ky had no political or financial agenda in coming back. This is not, Cherry said, “the return of a king.”

Instead, Ky said he believed that his homeland was gradually shedding its authoritarian ways. “Communism is over,” he said. “That’s what I want to prove on my trip.”

There has been little coverage of his visit in the state-controlled media. As he travels around, he often goes unrecognized. In a country where more than half the population was born after the war, his is a name from history. Younger people are much more likely to know of his daughter, Ky Duyen, a popular entertainer from Huntington Beach.

Ky looks much as he did during the war years. His hair is thinning and there are flecks of gray, but it is still black, as is his mustache. He is slender, stands straight, and stays fit by golfing.

He said he regretted that Vietnam was partitioned by foreign powers in 1954, prompting 21 years of war between the North and South that claimed 3 million lives.

“I don’t think war is good for anything, especially between the same people,” the former general said. “I regret that the country was divided and that the Vietnamese people had to fight and kill each other.”

Although Ky’s trip home has hardly caused a ripple in Vietnam, it has stirred up a storm of controversy among Vietnamese exiles. Some call him a traitor and a hypocrite and accuse him of legitimizing a corrupt and authoritarian government.

In Orange County, home to the largest overseas Vietnamese community, critics have ripped into Ky on Vietnamese-language radio shows.

Nguyen Phuong Hung, a former South Vietnamese army ranger who was wounded and lost two brothers during the war, is among those who have taken to the airwaves to attack Ky.

“He was our leader before 1975, not just an ordinary person,” he said in a telephone interview. “People think that our vice president in exile has surrendered. It hurts because he was my hero. Now he has lost my respect and buried his honor.”

But others have been less vocal and more accepting. “It’s no big deal, because he’s old and I don’t think he has the power to do anything anymore,” said Irvine engineer Dan Nguyen, 53. “He misses home just like many of us do.”

Hoang Thai Quang, an official with the Vietnamese Foreign Affairs Ministry assigned to assist Ky during the trip, said the exile community should look to the future.

“There are millions of people living in Vietnam who suffered too,” he said. “There are thousands of Agent Orange victims who will suffer the rest of their lives. But we have to look ahead to make things better for everyone. If we can forgive, why can’t other people?”

Ky was born in 1930 near Hanoi and raised in the city by his aunt. He said it was only by chance that he fought for the South instead of the North.

At 16, he had joined thousands of other young Vietnamese in the countryside to resist the return of the French after World War II. He came down with malaria, and his family brought him back to Hanoi for treatment. After he recovered, he was drafted by the French-controlled government and eventually sent to France and North Africa for training as a pilot.

By the time he returned in 1954, the war with the French was over and Vietnam had been divided into the communist North and the pro-American South.

In South Vietnam, Ky rose quickly to command the air force. In 1963, the military overthrew President Ngo Dinh Diem, and after several more coups, Ky was named premier in 1965. He was 34.

He ruled the country for the next two tumultuous years, then was elected vice president, serving from 1967 to 1971.

Ky last saw Vietnam on April 29, 1975 -- the day before South Vietnam fell to the communists. He escaped in his Huey helicopter and flew to the U.S. aircraft carrier Midway in the South China Sea. So many were fleeing that the crew pushed his helicopter overboard to make room for others to land.

Ky says he arrived in California with nothing. At first he supported himself by writing and lecturing, then borrowed money to buy a liquor store in Santa Ana, where he worked the cash register and stocked the shelves himself. The business failed, as did a boutique in Westminster and a shrimp venture in Louisiana. Today Ky lives in Hacienda Heights in a house owned by relatives.

“I was not a good politician,” he said. “I was not a good businessman.”

As Ky’s plane was approaching Ho Chi Minh City this month, he put on his Oakley sunglasses, looked out the window and cried. The last time he had cried, he said later, was the day he left the country.

Staying at the five-star Sheraton Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, he was wined and dined by old friends and some of Vietnam’s successful businessmen, including his former bodyguard, who now has a movie production company. During the first three days, he played golf with some of his former adversaries. Enough liquor has flowed during the trip to stock his old liquor store.

Ky said the trip was sponsored by a Singaporean businessman and other supporters of reconciliation and was not financed by the Vietnamese government.

Ky’s entourage included his third wife, Kim Le, her daughter Van, who lives in Ho Chi Minh City, and two retired U.S. Army generals, Cherry and Wayne Hoffman, both chaplains, who met Ky last year and play golf with him in California.

“This trip has washed away years of sadness for Gen. Ky,” Hoffman said.

Ky found Ho Chi Minh City teeming with motorbikes and studded with new high-rise buildings. He visited a new upscale shopping mall and a planned suburban community; either one could have been in Orange County. But he avoided wartime sites and museums -- even the former presidential palace he was instrumental in building.

“I’m not going to pay $5 to see my own house,” he said. “I already know what it looks like.”

Ky took a stroll one morning near his hotel wearing a crisp green T-shirt, white shorts and sandals. A woman selling postcards and small oil paintings on the corner spotted him.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” said the 57-year-old woman, wearing a conical hat and a wide smile.

She said she was excited to see Ky and admired him for speaking to “ordinary” people. “Returning to Vietnam means he loves the country,” she said.

Ky walked to a nearby restaurant, where he sat down unnoticed and ate a bowl of beef noodle soup.

“I know who he is because I read about him,” one waiter said, “but I don’t know exactly what he did in the past.”

Ky was joined by two of his grandchildren for a visit to Vung Tau, a seaside region southeast of Ho Chi Minh City.

During the two-hour drive, Ky passed rice paddies and water buffalo, women in straw hats planting grass, and dilapidated concrete homes patched with pieces of corrugated metal. But there were also new four-story homes, an amusement park and a Red Bull bottling plant.

He said he felt that Vietnamese people appreciated his coming back. “They love me,” he said. “I’m a good man. They welcome me.”

He mused about the possibility of moving back to Vietnam. “Why not?” he asked.

As they drove up a small hill, his wife pointed out a huge house on a cliff above the ocean -- Ky’s former vacation home, now a government museum.

“How come the government has your house, Grandfather?” Alexander, 6, asked. Ky looked out the other window and said nothing.

Later, Ky said he was ready to put the past behind him. He said the government had abandoned communism and begun letting the free market operate. The best policy, he said, was to engage the country and aid in its development. Within 10 years, he predicted, a middle class would emerge and one-party rule would give way to democratic elections.

When Ky landed in Hanoi, nearly 100 people were waiting outside the airport for friends and family members. When Ky emerged first from the terminal, one man came over and shook his hand. The others paid little attention.

“I remember when he was horrifying and fearsome,” Nguyen Linh, 59, said as he watched Ky from a distance. “But it has been so long in history, he’s like any other tourist now. He’s not a big deal anymore.”