Hanoi's victory undone? Vietnam embraces the market.

Ho Chi Minh's corpse glows under the yellow light. A twenty-second glimpse and we are out of the air-conditioned tomb and back in Hanoi's sweltering heat.

On this twentieth anniversary of the Vietnam War's end, and two weeks before President Bill Clinton is to "recognize" Hanoi, this son of a World War I hero and journalist has had a compulsion to see the land that had defeated both France and the United States of America.

Hanoi, in its tree-lined boulevards and Old-City streets, which roar and belch with the zoom and fumes of half a million motorbikes, evokes the perpetual marketplace where everybody does everything out on the street: people squat on tiny plastic stools to eat rice cooked on sidewalk stoves, toil sweating and shirtless to build new homes and hotels, repair their bikes, give haircuts and shaves, play checkers, sip sodas, smoke, talk, or, in the evening, snatch imaginary solitude on a doorstep, shutting out the din of city life to read a novel.

Vietnam is poised on the threshold of radical change. Its identity has been in the land, in rice paddies where peasants and water buffalo seem to work as equals; today, in the context of Southeast Asia's economic boom, Communist Vietnam has decided to fight its way out of poverty by imitating the "success" of Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia, by opening itself up to foreign investment.

Ironically, having proven the village liberation fighter superior to the weapons capitalist imperialism threw against him, Hanoi now turns to capitalism to save the revolution. And with it come the other scourges that have made first-world urban areas unlivable: gridlock; a 10-percent annual increase in traffic accidents; a drastic increase in tobacco consumption (at a Hanoi cathedral funeral, the pallbearers dangle cigarettes from their lips as they haul the coffin up the steps); rising drug addiction, prostitution, and AIDS; destruction of the environment - the 1980 Central Highlands elephant herd of 2,000 is now reduced to 300.

I wander around Hoan Kiem Lake, Hanoi's heart. Here, it is said, a turtle in the fifteenth century loaned the emperor Le Loi a sword to free Vietnam from the Chinese. Now, though very old, the turtle still appears from time to time. The Opera House, a replica of the Paris Opera, has closed for renovations, but, like the turtle, will reemerge in a year in fresh splendor. Within the yellow walls of what was once the "Hanoi Hilton" prison, bulldozers and derricks dig and drill. A foreign investor is turning it into a shopping mall.

When I arrive in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), the noise and congestion of Hanoi - the roaring motorbikes and chung-chung-chung of construction - are doubled. The new gleaming white hotels and office buildings and towering Xerox, Honda, and Sony billboards anticipate the coming war for the nation's economic soul.

At the War Crimes Exhibition (in pretourism days, the Museum of American War Crimes), I am struck most by the animation of the enthusiastic young guides who usher their groups from one horrible exhibition to the next: a French guillotine, last used in 1960, stands in the yard surrounded by defunct American tanks, howitzers, and planes. In photographs, American troops pose proudly with the corpses of Vietnamese they have beheaded; a GI holds up the shredded head, shoulders, and left arm of a Vietcong whose body has been blown to bits by a grenade launcher. A hall is set aside to document the fate of "counter-revolutionary" movements, some allegedly church-sponsored, since 1975. Their participants have been executed or jailed - a lesson to us all.

Though popular with tourists, the exhibition's main function, like Ho Chi Minh's tomb, is to help form the unified nation's postwar identity. At my hotel I read The War for the Liberation of Vietnam (1977), a 479-page history of the war compiled by Vietnamese photojournalists. It portrays American troops as weighed down with technology, bewildered by their task, and hypocritical: the same soldier shown in the museum displaying die shredded corpse is seen in this book twice - dangling the piece of dead man and lighting a cigarette for a wounded prisoner. The liberation soldier, on the other hand, lives off the land-or dies for the land, "fresh blood oozing out of the young boy killed by an American soldier and penetrating into the homeland." I carry two novels, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (1990) and Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War (1991); the sorrow of the war on both sides is that those who fought it, haunted by visions of rotted corpses and ruined loves, will never put it behind them.

I stay in the Caravelle Hotel for the journalism lore. Here in the ninth-floor bar, mortars thumping in the background, Eric Sevareid advised Dan Rather to take a sabbatical and read the Great Books; here CBS correspondent Peter Kalisher took Walter Cronkite aside in 1968 after the Tet offensive and convinced him the American policy was wrong. From the top floor you can look down Dong Khoi (Uprising) Street at the twin spires of Notre Dame Cathedral, where, under a statue of the Blessed Virgin perched on a neon-light crescent moon, the body of Paul Nguyen Van Binh, the eighty-four-year-old archbishop of Saigon, lies for five days of Masses and public mourning before his July 5 funeral.

Between the cathedral and the Saigon River, below the hotel, the streets swarm with beggars, hucksters, hookers, pickpockets, cyclo drivers - palms outstretched, demanding that you give, buy, pay up. A leper woman cowers at the cathedral door. A twisted dwarf drags himself along the sidewalk. At a newsstand, I pay $8 for two newspapers and a magazine, and turn to face a miserable creature who has no arms and one wooden leg. As I cross the square in front of the Municipal Theater at I I P.m., a hooker in a long white dress on a white motor scooter swoops in on me and circles around. On the terrace of the Rex Hotel, two Malaysian businessmen, who have come to set up a motorbike factory in Saigon, employing 1,200 workers and producing 50,000 bikes a year, tell me that in Malaysian cities there are no beggars, everyone has a job.

In the terrible heat of the cathedral, the Catholic people by the thousands, in their white shirts and dark pants, fan themselves around the archbishop's coffin.

Father Phan Khac Tu, secretary general of the Catholic Committee for Solidarity, which, against the wishes of the Holy See, "cooperates" with the Communist party, is one of three priests elected to the National Assembly. He tells me that Archbishop Binh and most Vietnamese Catholics have realized that the best way to improve the people's standard of living is to support the government, even though the church and the government have been at odds. In recent months the bishops have complained about restrictions on seminaries and Hanoi's blocking the Holy See's attempts to appoint Binh's successor. The church, it seems, has had to spend twenty years reestablishing its credibility as a Vietnamese, rather than a colonial, institution. Binh had appointed young bishops in Dalat and My Tho, who so far have not become politically involved, and who therefore may be acceptable to both Hanoi and Rome. Meanwhile, though Catholic freedom in Vietnam is restricted, the churches are filled, even for daily Mass. Yet, I sense that Father Tu and I are in different worlds when he defends government control of the press: if freedom of the press were allowed, he argues, the rich would control the media and the voice of the poor would not be heard.

On my last day I board a little motor boat and chug for an hour along the Saigon River, in and out among the junks and rowboats and freighters from all over the world. Here is Vietnam's future - and its present and past. Thousands of the poor have built their homes, like the shanty towns of Lima and Soweto, on the river's edge. Here they eke out their lives on the water as if this were a Hanoi street. In one shack a woman dumps her garbage off the porch into the river; at the next a boy urinates into the same stream; at the next a man bathes in the same water. Above them all, the billboards proclaim Xerox, Honda, Sony. The armies the peasants beat are coming back, though the uniforms and weapons may have changed.

Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., author of The American Journey of Eric Sevareid (Steerforth Press), is a journalism professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.