Welcome to Sunny Vietnam

By Pico Iyer

The biggest surprise facing Americans who visit Vietnam today may be the fact that people in the North who lost two or three or even seven children in the "American war," as they call it, will greet American tourists as long-lost friends. This gift for forgiveness and pragmatism is all the more impressive, David Lamb suggests in his humane and often moving account, Vietnam, Now: A Reporter Returns (Public-Affairs; 274 pages), when you recall that 1 in every 10 Vietnamese was wounded or killed in the war against America. If the U.S. had suffered a proportional number of casualties, it would have seen 27 million people dead.

Lamb, a longtime foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, is best known as the author of useful and well-regarded introductions to some of the many worlds he has mastered (The Arabs, The Africans). In Vietnam, Now, he describes how, having covered the war as a journalist in his 20s and returned to witness the fall of Saigon, he went to Hanoi in 1997 to open his paper's bureau there, becoming the only American newspaperman to cover Vietnam at war and Hanoi at peace. The opposite of a jaded war correspondent, Lamb captures the country he came to love mostly through its people: an eager young waiter who is making his way through Jane Austen (in English), a handicapped veteran who confesses to no anger except with himself; a young Vietnamese-Australian lawyer who works tirelessly to help resettle boat people; and 11 returning G.I.s who swap sneakers and old pictures with the men they once fought against.

Conscientious in his reporting, Lamb enriches his narrative with facts that catch the promise and difficulty of life in Vietnam today. At a time when Hanoi has three times as many TV sets, per capita, as Tokyo, farmers in the countryside are still struggling to get by on $5 a month. Behind the hard data, though, lies a more stirring story about reconciliation on both sides of the fence. Pete Peterson, a POW for six years in Hanoi, returned to the country as U.S. ambassador in 1997 and quickly ingratiated himself with its people by riding around town on his motor scooter and marrying a Vietnamese woman.

If the people of Vietnam inspire Lamb's confidence and warmth, however, their government--by some accounts the most corrupt in Asia--seems to provoke nothing but frustration. After the war, it pursued petty vendettas against its neighbors in the south, and to this day it remains fearful of allowing its subjects the freedom they thrive on. At a time when 60% of the people in Vietnam were born after the American troops left, most of Vietnam's leaders are senior citizens. It's hardly shocking, then, that when a Vietnamese magazine whose name means "youth" held a poll among its readers two years ago, Bill Clinton proved twice as popular as the Vietnamese Prime Minister. Having worked so hard to liberate itself from France and then America, Vietnam still needs, Lamb suggests, to be rescued from itself. --By Pico Iyer