In the Cold Seat

Really, it was an unequal contest between a knee-high railing and an excited journalist.  

The excited journalist won.  


Quick as a flash I sat down in the seat of the President of the Republic of Vietnam, and then picked up one of his phones...  

...No dial tone.   Of course.

In Saigon, and here in Hoi An, where I write, hotels have been warning tourists to expect crowds and perhaps chaos as parades and concerts take place over coming days.  Celebration music has been playing over the town’s loud-speaker system.

But otherwise the run up to the fortieth anniversary of the end of South Vietnam has been subdued, on the whole.  The majority of people here were born after the fall of Saigon.  In next-door Cambodia, where conflict lasted until much more recently, wounds seem much more close to the surface.

This was in the bunker part of the President’s palace in Ho Chi Minh City / Saigon (as locals mostly still call the city).  And specifically in the bomb-proof basement, alongside maps of the Demilitarised Zone, Ho Chi Minh Trail, US and South Vietnamese bases, and those (suspected) of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese army.

Here, the furniture was of drab olive green and grey stainless steel.  (Which reminded me of BBC offices in the late 1980s).  Upstairs, all was light and airy - vast rooms, high ceilings, broad windows - all very Feng Shui meets Californian mansion.  

The palace facade incorporates the Chinese symbols for good fortune and a happy future.

General Duong Van Minh knew his future was finally up, as North Vietnamese tanks tore through the fence outside.  He offered to hand over control to the enemy officers that marched in…

"You cannot give up what you do not have,” they replied, and shuffled him off to the radio station, to tell his citizens what had befallen them.

General Minh had only been leader for two days, this time around.  His predecessor had given up after a week.  Before that Nguyen Van Thieu had been in power for about a decade - and had flown away, allegedly with a couple of suitcases full of gold.

Thieu turned up living in Wimbledon, South West London, ending his career about 20 kilometres away from where Ho Chi Minh started his, in West Ealing - although Ho was then a commis chef, not a commie chief.  

Of course a lot of former leaders have spent time in Britain, licking their wounds.  I bought a kitchen from the same branch of Homebase as Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan!  Apparently he was lovely to the staff, picking out his sinks and hobs.  Happy to be in selfies, he was.  There is no evidence that Thieu spent his gold on kitchen fittings.  He kept himself to himself, apparently.

Unless pushed hard, both the old ‘sides’ are largely content to repeat their propaganda, if they speak about the war at all, and leave it there.  Recent wealth has contributed to social stability.  And as long as you don’t dream of political change, the (very) red tape of the state of Vietnam won’t seem too tight around your neck.  

A conscript into the South Vietnamese army, Mr Trung runs tours of the DMZ from Hue...  

He feels the Communists won’t last forever, thinks they will become irrelevant as the years pass, and sees the internet (even though heavily censored - with bloggers thrown into prison) as a window onto new ideas which are inspiring youngsters.

But he regrets the US getting into a ‘family row’.  

American forces became a rallying target for the North, and started a contest of virility between West and East which need not have happened, he thinks.  And he insists the South Vietnamese could have held the line by themselves…  “If someone comes into your house, you fight harder to push them out, than anyone else would.” 

As far as the Domino Theory is concerned, it can look like both sides got it right.  

Vietnam is Communist, Laos too.  Cambodia has still got a large proportion of old Communists in government. How that impacts on you positively or negatively varies.  It helps to be a Party member, certainly.
People protest largely impotently for change and pluralism.

But - mostly - old French Indo-China being Communist has never really impacted on the outside world.  And all three nations are embracing capitalism, although not everyone gets a slice of the bigger pie.

Which makes the war seem an even more dubious waste of blood.