Marchers Wary About Vietnam Ties : Protest: O.C. residents are among 1,000 in Washington to mark communists’ entry into Hanoi 49 years ago.

The nation’s capital was a virtual ghost town Friday with Congress in recess, the President vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard and the city practically disengaged for the holiday weekend. But a thousand or so Vietnamese demonstrators marched and chanted anyway, the significance of the date more important than the reality that there might be very few in town to hear them.

It was 49 years ago Friday that the communist Viet Minh first marched into Hanoi, and the protesters who came by bus and plane from as far away as Orange County, Houston and Canada could not let the anniversary pass without voicing concern over the Clinton Administration’s moves toward normalizing relations with Vietnam.

This was not the largest demonstration to assemble since President Clinton lifted the trade embargo against Vietnam in February, but activists said it was the largest yet to converge upon the nation’s capital.

“The date is very significant to them,” said Joe Jordan, a Vietnam War veteran and POW activist who stood by in reverent support of the marchers, wearing combat gear and holding the yellow and red flag of the fallen Republic of Vietnam. “It doesn’t matter what the weather was or whether or not anybody was here.”

The demonstrators walked 16 blocks from the Capitol to the White House--doctors, lawyers, housewives, children, mothers-to-be, even a cocker spaniel--toting banners and chanting demands for freedom in Vietnam.

Three men attempted a human re-creation of the three-soldier statue that stands at the Vietnam Memorial, their faces and combat fatigues stained bronze. But the idea was foiled when authorities confiscated two assault weapons they planned to use as props. (One was said to have been disabled and the other a toy, but police took them nevertheless.) They delivered to the White House staff a stack of petitions opposing the impending opening of the Hanoi Liaison Office in Washington, which will officially recognize and facilitate relations with that communist seat of power.

“We are here to remind people that it is OK to have relations, but you cannot take the communists at their word. If you don’t learn that lesson from history, you have learned nothing,” said Dat Vo, a Santa Ana internist who came to the United States at age 10 with his family after Saigon fell. He marched with his father.

Vo was one of 28 to fly in from Orange County, home of the largest concentration of Vietnamese Americans in the country and an immigrant community divided over the wisdom of recognizing Hanoi’s communist leadership.

The Los Angeles Times Poll found recently that more than half the Vietnamese living in Southern California favor normalization, many believing that fostering a healthy business climate will improve the quality of life in Vietnam and lead to democracy. But many of those in favor hesitate to say so, fearing they will be socially or politically banished.

“We understand the resentment, but we have to overcome our pain of the past,” Co Pham, a physician and outspoken advocate of normalization, said in a phone interview even as half a dozen picketers staged their own protest outside his Westminster office.

“One thousand (marchers) is not a very big number. There are 1 million Vietnamese in the United States,” Pham said, suggesting that a silent majority favors re-establishing relations and helping Vietnamese overseas in the process. “There are different ways to skin the cat.”

But the demonstrators who marched in yellow headbands, their symbol of mourning for those who died fighting communism, preached at the very least caution as Washington reaches out to Hanoi. They said they left family still living in Vietnam without religious freedom, monks jailed and dissidents in labor camps, even as much of the rest of the communist world breaks free.

“In Eastern Europe there are free elections and a free market to give people the freedom to choose their government and pursue human happiness. Unfortunately, things have not changed in Vietnam,” Tien V. Doan, a Westminster attorney, said as the march began. “We want you to return to Vietnam a victor. . . . Fifty thousand Americans were lost in Vietnam. It’s like their lives were wasted.”