A Silent Struggle Haunts Vietnam

All but the ghosts have abandoned the wartime cemetery here. No relatives visit. The monument to honor the sacrifice of the dead stands unfinished. The pagoda for family prayer is empty. Weeds run wild among the graves, and headstones lie toppled.

A generation ago, when these boy soldiers died, bereaved mothers encased their photographs in the stone markers. Surprisingly, many of the pictures have not faded. The faces--clear-eyed, clean-shaven, proud--look much like those of the young men one sees today on the streets of Hanoi.

Even the names chiseled in granite here in southern Vietnam are no different from those one might find in the manicured military cemeteries of the North and the central highlands that are tended by children and veterans organizations: Nguyen Van Them, Do Van San, Pham Hiem, all buried as teenagers.

But there is one big difference. The Northern cemeteries are for the fallen soldiers of the victorious North Vietnamese Army, or NVA. And these vast, desolate grounds, a 45-minute drive north of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), are where the vanquished lie--the men who fought for the Republic of Vietnam, as the South was known until its collapse in 1975.

The contrast between the cemeteries in what was once two countries underscores the unspoken conflict in Vietnam’s heart over how--or whether--to forget the past. In many ways, Hanoi has had an easier time reaching out to its former enemy the United States than its brothers who fought for the South.

From a nearby village, Nguyen Tan Trung, 25, approached the cemetery the other day on his bicycle, pedaling along the rutted dirt road once lined with handsome willows but now treeless and barren. On the way, he passed a sprawling water-bottling plant recently built on the edge of the hallowed grounds.

The cemetery was eerily still. Once a year, to mark the lunar new year, Trung and a handful of volunteers from the village cut the knee-high grass covering the graves. Once in a while they get letters from Vietnamese families in North America or Australia asking them to search for the grave of a loved one. If they find it, they honor the dead with incense.

Asked why the cemetery had been forsaken, Trung replied: “Who cares about this place? This belongs to the time before 1975.”

The people of the South who are not staunch Communists--and most are not--speak of everything in modern history as belonging to one of two epochs: “before 1975,” when war raged between North and South, or “after 1975,” when the Americans were gone and Saigon had fallen to the Communist forces of the North.

Not Seen as Civil War

When America’s Civil War ended at Appomattox, Grant allowed Lee’s soldiers to take their horses and sidearms with them and sent the men home to plant new crops. The victors in Vietnam offered no such forgiveness. In their view, the words “honorable” or “patriotic” were a contradiction in terms in describing a soldier from the South.

Unlike the Americans of 1865, Hanoi never acknowledged that its North-South conflict had any elements of a civil war. The conflict was, Hanoi contends, a war of liberation to free South Vietnam’s people from the grip of a corrupt, dictatorial Saigon regime and foreign invaders. Had there been an election instead of a war, Hanoi believes, the South would have voted overwhelmingly to unite the two Vietnams under Ho Chi Minh.

Indeed, the Geneva Accords that split Vietnam into two countries along the 17th Parallel in 1954 intended the division to be a temporary one, pending elections scheduled for 1956. The United States participated in the negotiations but did not sign the accords.

Almost immediately after the signing of the accords, which ended the French Indochina War, the CIA began an effort to undermine the Communist North. In 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem, who had become prime minister a year earlier, declared the Republic of Vietnam, with himself as president. The United States, determined to contain what it saw as Communist aggression around the world, began direct aid to Saigon within days. Diem, with American backing, refused to hold elections or even talk with Ho Chi Minh’s representatives.

North Vietnam’s army, sweeping south in the spring of 1975 in the final days of what is known in Vietnam as “the American war,” desecrated the military cemetery here in mid-April. It lingers as a monument of national shame. The families of those buried here do not want to admit their former association with the South, and those always loyal to Ho Chi Minh divide the war dead into two clearly defined groups: liet sy (martyrs) from the North and nguy (puppets) from the South.

But the government denies any official bias.

“Our policy has always been to treat all Vietnamese who suffered equally,” said Trung Minh Nhai, the Communist Party’s vice director for ideology in Ho Chi Minh City. “But it is natural to pay more attention to those who died for their country.

“Even before 1975, we considered the young soldiers who fought for the puppet Saigon regime victims of war. We understand they were forced to take up arms. We think it is the same for the American soldiers--they were forced to come here against their will.”

Such protestations notwithstanding, the mothers of Northern soldiers killed in battle received a onetime payment from Hanoi of $272 and still get pensions of $21 a month and free medical care. The mothers of Southern soldiers receive nothing. The former are honored as “heroic mothers”--similar to Gold Star Mothers in the United States--while the latter’s loss is not acknowledged.

“The only time we talk about the war is when we are alone behind closed doors,” said a former soldier with the South’s Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or ARVN. It is not that anyone today would be bundled off to jail for having supported the South--Vietnam is a much more open, relaxed place than it was a decade ago--but an association with the Saigon regime is still not something that a Vietnamese casually drops into conversation or puts on his resume.

Hanoi, however, has little to fear because there are few, if any, dissident voices left in Vietnam. The 1 million Vietnamese who resettled in North America, Australia and France were those most closely associated with the United States and the Saigon regime. As many as 400,000 Vietnamese were sent off “after 1975” to re-education camps, for stays that ranged from a few months to 17 years. More than 1.5 million others were forced into “economic zones” of collective farms that were such a disaster that Vietnam faced famine in 1986 and had to open its economy to foreign investors.

Having been removed from the mainstream, those who supported the South never caught up. What awaited those who were eventually released from the camps and economic zones were jobs pedaling “cyclos” (bicycles with a passenger carriage attached) or lugging bricks to a construction site or, if they were disabled, a street corner on which to beg. Most important jobs in government and business continue to be held by members of the Communist Party, or at least by those who were loyal to the North.

Still, the lot of former Southern supporters has improved greatly in recent years. Some have worked their way into senior business positions or a seat on people’s committees that oversee all aspects of life. One even became a member of the National Assembly.

Lobbying by U.S. Vet

Officially, at least, discrimination has come to an end because, Hanoi believes, the guilty have made amends for their misguided past.

“In casual conversations with the party and government,” said a U.S. Vietnam veteran who lives in Hanoi, “I’ve made the point [that] Vietnam could do a lot for reconciliation and its international image by reaching out more to vets of the Southern army.

“No one disagrees, but I get the same answer from everyone: ‘We can’t do it with the old leaders we have now. We’ll have to wait for the next generation.’ ”

Organizers of a 1,200-mile Hanoi-to-Ho Chi Minh City bicycle ride by former NVA soldiers and U.S. veterans in January tried to persuade Hanoi to include an ARVN serviceman, to no avail.

Nor have U.S. diplomats been successful in suggesting that the search for Vietnam’s 300,000 soldiers still listed as missing in action be expanded to include Southerners as well as Northerners.

Vietnam’s government-run newspapers and television regularly run pictures of missing soldiers whose families are looking for closure. The army leads families through old battlefields and helps them search for remains. But the campaign focuses exclusively on the North’s missing sons.

In the first weeks of “after 1975,” families of ARVN dead and missing burned their most precious keepsakes--photos, scrapbooks and letters from their soldier husbands and sons--rather than risk being associated with Saigon. Until the other day, Nguyen Thi Le, 51, had not talked about her husband’s role in the war for 23 years.

Le has lived in the same government-owned home at the end of a Ho Chi Minh City alleyway since 1970. Twelve children and grandchildren are crammed with her into the clean, spartan quarters. She is two years in arrears on her $5-a-month rent and often has trouble scraping together enough money for the next bowl of rice.

‘Lives So Far Apart’

She spoke of the day when, after three years of marriage, her 25-year-old husband, Trong Van Hai, left the two-room home to join an ARVN artillery unit. “We just hugged and said goodbye when he went,” she said. “That was it.”

He wrote faithfully every month. (June 10, 1973: “Time has gone by so fast, hasn’t it, honey? It is already three months on the front. I am so sad that our lives are so far apart.”)

Then the letters stopped, and one day in November 1973, an ARVN officer came to her door bearing a telex sent by her husband’s unit. Trong Van Hai was missing in action.

“My life was over,” she said. “I kept waiting, thinking perhaps he would return, but the days came and the days went, and now my children are grown up, and I am still here, waiting.”

Unlike her neighbors, Le hid her husband’s letters and photos in a kitchen cabinet, secured in a plastic bag. She does not know where Trong fell, nor how he died, nor if he was given a proper Buddhist burial. She would like to search for his remains, she said, but that would require money for travel and food.

She does not begrudge the government for not giving her a military widow’s pension. The Saigon government didn’t give her one either. She said that 10 years ago, she never would have talked to a stranger about her husband fighting against the North but that in today’s Vietnam, she no longer fears the authorities.

“I have heard that Northern widows get pensions and mothers of the dead and missing are called ‘heroic mothers’ of martyrs,” she said. “But here we are nothing. Our husbands and sons were considered traitors.”