Good morning, Vietnam: on the long road to freedom and prosperity, Vietnam is taking the first halting steps.

ON THE leafy corner joining Mac Dinh Chi Street and Le Duan Boulevard, the former American Embassy squats against the morning sun. Twenty years ago, with Communist forces rapidly advancing on Saigon, young Marines on the other side of these bars did their best to hold back the crush of Vietnamese wanting to be let inside. Even at that late stage, they could not believe America would abandon them.

At the time I was a junior in high school, too young to remember in much detail the course of the war but vividly aware of its impact around me: the older boys suddenly in uniform; the prayers for the fallen at the end of the Memorial Day parades; the frenzy of TV images alternating between combat in Vietnam and protest at home. But nothing has seared itself in my memory as much as the images from those last, sad days around this compound.

At its peak (in April 1969) the American military presence in South Vietnam numbered some 543,000, but that only hints at the magnitude of the U.S. involvement. Between the arrival of the CIA's Edward Lansdale in Saigon in 1954 and the final, ignominious retreat from the rooftop here two decades later, more than three million Americans were channeled through Vietnam. The embassy was only one of many government buildings around the country (the infamous War Crimes Museum, for example, is housed in the old U.S. Information Service offices), all built in standard-issue Concrete Gothic. Even today everything about it suggests the Great Society transported abroad: its bulk, its ugly functionality, and, perhaps, its ultimate failure.

Last Laughs

FOR the writer in search of easy irony, Vietnam is a gold mine. Everywhere history seems to have had the last laugh. In the countryside a peasant girl in black silk pants walks the family bullock past the helplessly rusting hulk of an M-48 tank. In Hanoi the first billboard that greets a visitor is for American Express. In Saigon, meanwhile -- the name Ho Chi Minh City has never really caught on -- huge advertisements for IBM and Hewlett Packard have sprung up along the riverbanks; the nightclubs are back on Dong Khoi Street (formerly Tu Do Street, formerly Rue Catinat); and though the GIs and jeeps are gone from the city streets they have been replaced by a new army of Taiwanese businessmen in Toyota Crowns. And of course there is the War Crimes Museum, a catalogue of American atrocities. In the grisly section on Chi Hoa Prison, our guide wryly points out that for all the horrors it has not lain idle since the Liberation. "Always fully booked," he smiles.

For those so inclined it would be easy to conclude that the changes since the launch of doi moi, or economic rejuvenation, in 1986 have been purely cosmetic. Yet the striking thing about the War Crimes Museum is how incongruous it looks in today's Vietnam. "It all reminds me of Hong Kong back in the Sixties and Seventies," says Jack Keenan, a retired Marine colonel who was back recently on a business trip. "Incredible energy and absolutely no sense of direction."

From my point of view, the most dramatic changes are to be found in Hanoi. Only a few years ago, any foreigner walking the streets would have been taken for a Russian, and the city was possessed of that malevolent Soviet aura familiar from Eastern Europe. Today, street shops sell everything from Johnnie Walker to tubes of Pringle's potato chips. The old, rat-infested hotel where I stayed in 1989 -- the Thong Nhat, once the French Metropole -- has been restored to some of its former glory, and American accents predominate. On Wednesday I pop into the bar to meet with Al DeMatteis, a transplanted Brooklynite who runs DeMatteis Construction. Over in the corner having coffee with a friend is Tanya Pullin, the leading authority on the issue of intellectual property rights in Vietnam. On the other side is the former Taoiseach of Ireland, Albert Reynolds. And then there is Don Riggs from Operation Smile, truly a remarkable group, which brings American and Canadian surgeons to poor countries to perform plastic surgery on children with birth defects.

Operation Smile's first mission here was in 1989, and it was financed by three American Vietnam vets, who put up $40,000 each. Two years later the team included Captain Ned Shuman, a former POW whose previous stay had been for five years in the infamous Hanoi Hilton.

The Vietnamese stories are similarly compelling. In the operating room of Tran Hung Dao Hospital, I meet the head of Operation Smile Vietnam: Dr. Nguyen Huy Phan. The country's highest-ranking physician, Dr. -- General -- Phan began his career as a surgeon at the battle of Dien Bien Phu and spent his life on the front lines during the wars against the Americans and the Chinese. The general proudly shows me a certificate proclaiming him an honorary citizen of Maryland (he had gone there to deliver a lecture), and I ask him how life these days differs from life when he was growing up. He says that his granddaughter is taking piano lessons. "I didn't have time for such pursuits," he says, smiling.

Undoubtedly this is not the answer a Saigonite would give, but it does suggest the difference in reference points between South and North. "Saigon is a place where you make money," says Tanya Pullin. "Hanoi is a university town where people read Proust and talk about politics."

This is not the least of Hanoi's many charms, for while the Vietnamese never accepted French colonialism they took readily to French culture, and the rice baguettes I had for breakfast rank as the most delicious treat I have ever tasted. Judging from the frenzy of construction going on all over the city, however, old Hanoi is not long for this world. Although much of this is blamed on foreign development, if Hanoi is to be saved it will be the foreign developers who will do it.

Not that any of this means the hard men running Vietnam have renounced their past or accepted the idea of representative government; men like Dr. Nguyen Dan Que rot away in prison for advancing just such heresies. Indeed, one of the least-reported stories since the end of the war is how badly those non-Communist critics of South Vietnam have fared under the new order. When Thic Quang Duc immolated himself on a Saigon street in 1963, it was news around the world and helped set the stage for the U.S.-backed assassination of Diem. But how many read about the Buddhist who immolated himself last year at the Linh Mu Pagoda in Hue?

In Hanoi I stumble across a Missionary of Charity who is getting ready for a visit by Mother Teresa. The nuns are here taking care of the people no one else wants: disabled children. But the government has laid down any number of onerous restrictions. These include keeping the nuns out of Hanoi itself (even though the archbishop's residence has loads of room) and forbidding them to have daily Mass. Doubtless in the old days many of Vietnam's Catholic elite might have deserved to be brought down a peg or two. Today, however, the Church is completely dispossessed and yet even more of a challenge to the government.

St. Joseph's Cathedral tells the tale in sad grey walls representing fifty years of neglect. Mass is permitted only twice a day, at 5:30 A.M. and P.M., but the Sunday service we attended was packed, and the papers reported that on Christmas Eve there were overflow crowds. As I pass the statue of Our Lady in its very sorry state, I nonetheless suspect that for all its trials the Cross will remain in Vietnam long after the hammer and sickle have become a footnote.

On my last day here, I make the round of the art galleries. In Hong Kong, where I live, Vietnamese artists are quite popular and the prices have escalated accordingly. Most prominent of these is the late Bui Xuan Phai, whose street scenes of Hanoi suggest Degas and whose works go for about three times those of any other Vietnamese artist. Alas, the world's discovery of Vietnamese art is having two economic consequences. The first is a booming business in fake Phais; he seems to have produced more in the 7 years after he died than in the 67 years he was alive. The other is an explosion of bad art. In a nation where average annual income is $210 and a painting can easily fetch $300, more and more people are discovering the inner artist in themselves.

In an upstairs gallery, the young women all speak excellent English. We chat about America and the opportunities in Vietnam these days, and as they roll up a purchase, I decide to ask about the imprisoned Dr. Que.

After conferring with one another in Vietnamese, they turn to me. "He is involved with democracy and human rights?" one asks.

I admitted this was so.

"That is not a good thing to be involved in here."

Indeed.

A Country, Not a War?

DEPUTY Foreign Minister Le Mai likes to tell people he hopes Americans will come to think of Vietnam "as a country, not a war," but there are no signs that this will happen any time soon. Not, at least, as long as there's still money in the war. Everywhere you look there are memorabilia, from dog tags and shell casings to purple hearts.

And I wonder what Uncle Ho would make of CCB Tour (the initials stand for the Vietnamese words for "war veterans"). The bookshelf in its modest offices includes an American guide to major engagements of the war, and a glossy brochure lists several standard package tours to former battlefields. Tour #5, for example, tailored for vets from the U.S. 1st and 3rd Marine Corps and the 101st Airborne Division, covers the northernmost provinces of central Vietnam. "A visit of any Vietnam veteran to our country is to be a rendezvous with his or her youth," says the brochure.

Even those who couldn't have been more than infants when the war ended are not immune to the pull. While in Da Nang we stroll along the exquisite white beach, which offers little hint of the legions of grunts on R&R who once surfed and swam in its waves. My old college roommate spots three girls sitting up in the lifeguard's chair and thinks of inviting them to join us for lunch at the Soviet-built resort. They are obviously American, one of them dressed in classic Peace Corps style: braided hair, peasant blouse, long skirt and sandals. But our vanity is punctured when they ask us if we are vets (we are all too young by at least five years). "All we know about Vietnam is China Beach," says one, in reference to the Dana Delaney TV series.

They prove not to be the only Valley Girls on the beach. On a tour that takes us to the top of nearby Marble Mountain, we are surrounded by about a dozen Vietnamese girls, 10 to 15 years old, carrying outrageously overpriced souvenirs and jabbering away in conversations peppered with "okey dokey," "totally awesome, dude," and "hasta la vista, baby." I ask one of the girls where she learned to talk like this. Her answer is charmingly frank: "I watch too much television."

Opportunity Calls

WHEN I visited Saigon in 1989, I found it a relief after the dreariness of Hanoi but not without its own overtones of melancholy. The day I left, in the dingy waiting lounge at Tan Son Nhut Airport, I met a 42-year-old Vietnamese woman, who pulled out a sandwich bag of dog-eared photographs. There was a black-and- white shot of herself, many years younger and much prettier, but the most treasured picture in her bag was of her old American boyfriend. This was Harry, I learned, a North Carolinian with a grin and haircut right out of Mayberry R.F.D.

The woman's name was Nguyen Thi Xuyen, and she was one of 150 or so people in the lounge this day as part of the U.S. Orderly Departure Program, designed to bring out Vietnamese who had some link to the United States. In this case the link was the Amerasian son, sitting next to her, whom Harry had fathered 22 years before. Next to the son was a younger sister (by a Vietnamese father) crying furiously because she didn't want to go. "She does not want to leave her grandmother, my mother," the woman explained, and we left unsaid what both of us knew: their good-bye outside the airport door would be their last. The lounge was full of stories like this one.

In refugee camps across Southeast Asia that sense of desperation remains, but here it seems to be gone. In the South, where annual earnings are roughly twice those of the North, the fruits of doi moi are more abundant. The government reports 2.7 million registered motorscooters (a scooter costs about $1,500) and estimates there will be five million in five years' time. Boys as young as 8 or 9 years old line up outside the hotels to sell postcards and foreign newspapers that have been read before, but at least they are selling: in the Philippines they would simply stick out their hands and beg. The only incongruity I notice is the preponderance of South Vietnamese army vets among the cyclo drivers, suggesting that not all are welcome at the banquet of the new Vietnam.

Even the currency suggests that history has not quite turned out the way it looked back in 1975. The greenback might be shrinking everywhere else, but here in Vietnam a dollar is still a dollar. The amounts involved are staggering. Estimates of actual American notes in circulation range from $600 million to $2 billion, with perhaps another $3 billion in gold. It is possible for the American to spend a month here and never have to change money.

Total foreign investment is given as $13.7 billion, and the government's goal is to double per-capita income to $420 by the year 2000. While foreign businessmen (especially those who have had experience with China) generally have good words for Vietnam's reforms, they are not without their difficulties. The legal code is as yet incomplete, as are rules governing who can actually sell land rights in a country where the state nominally owns all land, and until the Vietnamese clarify these and other issues most of the investment they get will be from overseas Chinese, who are more comfortable working in this kind of Wild West environment. The Vietnamese are desperate for the as yet elusive American investment, both because they see it as a wedge against China and because they are keen to have the larger-scale projects American money would mean. Yet should the government make good on a directive outlawing the use of the dollar, by imposing more currency controls, much of that $13.7 billion in investment -- most of which is only pledged and has not yet arrived -- will never materialize.

Yet for all the problems, Saigon is shedding its olive drab for high heels and slit skirts. It may not be as cultured a city as Hanoi, but there is enough here for those in search of old ghosts: the Caravelle Hotel, from whose bar the American press once covered the war; the Continental, where Graham Greene's Quiet American would come for a beer; the Rex, once Bachelor Officers' Quarters for the U.S. forces and whose kitschy rooftop restaurant looks just as it did in its heyday, complete with those ubiquitous porcelain elephants brought home by a whole generation of soldiers.

Doors Opening

YET overall it is hard not to be bullish about Vietnam's future. It may come too late for brave men like Dr. Que, but by opening the door to outside investment Vietnam has also opened the door to outside ideas. To be sure, the relationship between an open economy and a liberal democracy is neither as simple nor as direct as advocates have sometimes claimed, not least in Asia, where it is complicated by tradition, history, and, today, fear of American- style social chaos. But whether or not the Vietnamese ever get genuine democracy they are getting something even more precious: the privatization of their lives. In statistical terms, this is reflected by the dwindling of 12,000 state enterprises to 6,000 and the demobilization of more than half a million men from what was, only a few years back, the world's fifth largest army.

Nor is it only on the Vietnamese side that these changes are visible. As far back as 1961, Lyndon Johnson, returning from a fact-finding trip to Vietnam, stated that the challenge was not Communism but hunger, ignorance, poverty, and disease, and the corresponding export of the Great Society to deal with it helped corrupt a society that was less prepared for it than ours was. Today that has all changed. Opportunity International has superseded USAID; Federal Express has replaced Air America; and the Americans in Hanoi these days are businessmen trying to make a buck, not prisoners of war in the Hanoi Hilton.

With the understandable exceptions of architecture and cuisine, moreover, Vietnam's engagement with America has led it to a marked preference for American goods. When Vietnam Air was shopping around for planes, it wanted Boeing, not French Airbus. The pirate CDs sold on the streets are Mariah Carey and Tina Turner, and if there is a war these days it's the one for market share between Coke and Pepsi. "Before, the Vietnamese thought that their problems would be solved if only the Americans left," says Bud Williams, a Special Forces veteran who runs a consulting firm out of Hong Kong. "Now they think that their problems would all be solved if only the Americans would come back. They were wrong then and I think they are wrong now."

Back in front of the old, neglected embassy, I marvel at the extraordinary turn of events twenty years after our rooftop retreat. A few months ago the grounds were full of rusting metal drums and overrun grass. But today the building is being spruced up, and the workers patching up the sidewalk out front tell me they are getting ready to give it back to the Americans. As I shade my eyes to look up at the rusting helicopter pad, a young, mustachioed Vietnamese whizzes by on his motorscooter and shouts to me, "America Number One." It's nice someone still thinks so.