THE NEW REBELS.

Vietnam's young people are leading a revolution--and it's not a Communist one

In the discos of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, the music pulses, and the young and well-to-do shake their bodies as a strobe light glitters on the latest Vietnamese youth style: multicolored sparkles in the hair. A fortunate few Vietnamese teens--some of whose parents fought Americans in the Vietnam War more than a quarter century ago--are embracing MTV and the Internet, but theirs is a gender rebellion than their posing and hip clothes might suggest. One young man in the disco, more daring than most, wears a nose ring--but it's a clip-on. He takes it off when he goes home to his parents.

And so it goes in Vietnam, a country still recovering from the brutalities of a war that cost 3 million Vietnamese lives and 58,000 American ones and ended with a Communist victory in 1975 (see "The War We Share," page 19). In November, Bill Clinton became the first U.S. President to visit the country since the end of the war. What he found there was an emerging youth culture enamored of American styles and consumer goods, and eager to join the outside world. But their revolution goes only so far. While they embrace personal freedoms their parents never dreamed of, even the edgiest kids aren't challenging the authority of their parents, or the Communist system they fought for.

Ta Thi Minh Hong, 19, a student at the Institute of International Relations, sums up the complicated generation gap this way: "My friends quarrel with their parents, because they're different from their parents in every way," she says. "But parents understand so much about life. Their advice is useful for me to be a good person."

ROCK-STAR TREATMENT

Vietnam's contradictions were on public display at almost every step of President Clinton's trip. To the shock of the country's leaders, Clinton was treated like a rock star by adoring Vietnamese crowds, with many young people, who lined the streets wherever the President went, screaming in adulation.

"He's coming! Here he comes!" people shouted as Clinton's motorcade approached the Temple of Literature, a historic landmark in the center of Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital, where U.S. bombs rained down during the war. Other voices shouted: "I can see him! How handsome he is! He seems so young and healthy, he's so pink, just the way he looks on TV."

For his part, Clinton hammered home a message of more freedom and openness at every stop. "Imagine how much more you will achieve as even more young people gain more freedom to shape the decisions that affect their lives," he said in one speech.

Vietnamese officials, however, many of whom fought in the war against the U.S., were not amused by Clinton's popularity. The Vietnamese Communist Party controls the government, the media, and the economy, and owns most of the country's businesses. While Vietnamese leaders have begun to gradually open the economy to the global marketplace, they generally oppose outside influences, and have shown no interest in allowing political freedoms. After the first two days of the President's trip, they kept crowds farther back to prevent Clinton from interacting with them.

LECTURES ON COMMUNISM

And they treated him to chilly lectures on the superiority of Communism. Despite the collapse of the Communist Soviet Union in 1989, "We are still on our feet," Le Kha Phieu, the country's leading hard-liner and Communist Party chief, reminded the President.

But beneath the rhetoric from both sides, Vietnam and the U.S. are caught in a more complicated relationship than either can acknowledge in public. Though Vietnamese rulers talk of keeping Communism pure, they need foreign investment to turn around a poor economy. And while foreign countries pledged $8 billion in investments in 1996 and 1997, red tape and corruption soon bogged down many projects. Last year, foreign investment fell to a seven-year low of $600 million.

On the other hand, President Clinton was caught in another bind. Despite repeatedly stressing the need to leave the past behind, he spent a major part of his trip visiting a site where a U.S. pilot is believed to have died in a jet crash during the war. He watched with the pilot's two sons as workers dug into the ground and began removing bits of shattered aircraft parts and fragments of what are believed to be human remains.

MISSING IN ACTION

With a total of 1,499 Americans still listed as unaccounted-for from the Vietnam War, the U.S. considers the recovery of those remains its number-one policy priority in Vietnam. As long as that is the case, Asia experts say, U.S.-Vietnam relations will remain stuck in the past.

So what does the future hold for Vietnam's youth? Slow change, most experts say. Take the Web, for instance. Remarkable as it is that any kids are surfing it in a once-closed society, only one-tenth of 1 percent of the people have been online so far--hardly surprising in a country where the weekly per capita income is $6 and going online costs $3 an hour.

THIS AIN'T NO DISCO

And though Vietnam's most privileged young can afford the discos of Ho Chi Minh City, life for most others is often harsh. In the countryside, most people struggle to raise enough food to feed themselves and to avoid natural disasters. Floods last summer in the Mekong Delta killed 319 people, an astounding 236 of them children, most under the age of 3. City life is tough, too. In Hanoi, pollution dogs the air, and a busy crush of motor scooters and bicycles leads to an average of one death and 80 to 90 serious accidents a day.

In addition, most experts believe that hard-liners are firmly in charge of the government and not likely to take a liberal turn anytime soon. "Security-minded people are still very strong at the top," says David Marr, a professor of history at Australian National University.

Vietnamese youth aren't expected to shake up the country politically either. They are only now beginning to discover their identity as a group. "This is the first generation in Vietnam to experience a true youth culture, with shared values, identity, symbols and language," says Gordon Milne, an executive for ACNielsen, a polling company that has collected hundreds of interviews with young people. Among the qualities shared by Generation V, it seems, are a lack of interest in politics and a desire to forget the war that once ravaged their country.

"In the past, they thought independence was the most important thing to focus on," says Hong, the Institute of International Relations student. "People in my generation don't care so much about it. We focus on music, fashion, making friends, and going on picnics. Now we're at peace, and if we want to, we can learn about all fields in life."

RELATED ARTICLE: REBORN ON THE BAYOU

On the east side of New Orleans, the plain, tiny brick houses that line the streets are solid and built to last. The residents there, immigrants from Vietnam, say the journey to get those homes was so hard, they don't ever want to move again.

"We walked through the jungle all day, and spent the next 30 days on the ocean in a small boat," says Mary Nguyen, talking about her escape from Vietnam a quarter-century ago. "We couldn't move. My 2-month-old boy had a fever, and I couldn't feed him because I couldn't produce milk for him. I didn't have food to eat myself. He died. I had to put the baby in the ocean. It was the worst day of my life."

After arriving in Malaysia, Nguyen flew to California, spent the night there, and the next day flew to New Orleans to join her parents. "We haven't lived anywhere else since," she says.

Some 26,000 Vietnamese a year now immigrate to the United States. Most are part of what a consular official calls "an expanding pyramid" of family reunification. Refugee citizens reach back to their homeland to bring their parents, children, siblings, and spouses--who eventually will send for more relatives.

SWAMPS LIKE HOME

That has been the pattern in New Orleans, where many early arrivals like Nguyen were resettled by the Roman Catholic Church after the fall of South Vietnam in 1975. An enclave of Asian immigrants may seem odd in New Orleans, considered one of the most European cities in America. But students of Vietnamese culture say it makes sense. Like the city as a whole, the Vietnamese arrivals are heavily Catholic, and most Vietnamese communities in New Orleans East are built around a Catholic church.

More than 10,000 Vietnamese live in the New Orleans East community, a hot, damp, swampy landscape like the homeland they fled. Here, the old do not have to adapt if they do not want to, do not have to change language or diet or customs, because much of the life they knew-the good parts-has been re-created in a community that sounds and feels like home. The open-air market rings with the Vietnamese language. Old women in conical straw hats work fields of greens with hoes and picks, and old men patiently fish the bayou and canals.

"I left Vietnam because I needed freedom of religion, freedom of speech, because I needed my children to have a future," says Nguyen, who is 41, has seven children, and is a preschool teacher here. "I like New Orleans. I have a job, a job I like. I have a family. I feel at home here. I can continue my culture here, and not be forced to leave it."

This is a neighborhood of survivors, Nguyen says, who have put down new roots and claimed a new home. From now on, she says, New Orleans, not Vietnam, is where "we bury our loved ones, and baptize our new ones." -- Rick Bragg

RELATED ARTICLE: The War We Share

Halfway across the world, on the coast of Southeast Asia, the American military once waged the longest war in its history. For more than a decade, the United States sent young people to fight in the jungles of Vietnam. There, 58,000 Americans and 3 million Vietnamese lost their lives, as the world's mightiest military power fought a poorly equipped peasant army--and lost.

Why? Mainly because the two sides were fighting different wars. After centuries of living under foreign invaders, Vietnamese nationalists wanted independence. The U.S., meanwhile, wanted to stop the spread of Communism, which it saw as a threat to capitalism and freedom. The leading Vietnamese nationalist, Ho Chi Minh, had formed a Communist Party dedicated to gaining Independence.

In the 1950s, Ho's forces won control of Vietnam's northern half from France, which had colonized the country in 1858. Americans feared that if Ho won all of Vietnam, Communism would spread to neighboring countries in Southeast Asia, threatening U.S. security. So when France pulled out of Vietnam in 1954, the U.S. sent advisers to help South Vietnam build a self-sufficient democracy and military.

The U.S.-backed government in South Vietnam proved corrupt and unpopular, and the Communists threatened to topple it. In 1964, U.S. ships were allegedly attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats in the Gulf of Tonkin (an attack later disputed) and Congress authorized "all necessary measures to repel any armed attack." The war was on.

The U.S. fought Ho on two fronts, north and south. In North Vietnam, Ho had built a conventional military. In South Vietnam, he supported a force of guerrilla fighters known as the Vietcong.

The first U.S. combat units arrived in 1965, pummeling North Vietnam with bombs, trying to break its will. But Ho refused to surrender. In the South, U.S. troops pursued the Vietcong, torching villages suspected of harboring its troops and spraying napalm and Agent Orange, a chemical that kills plants, to strip the jungle of its protective covering.

By 1968, some 500,000 U.S. troops were in Vietnam. As more young Americans were drafted for the war, more started coming home in body bags. The nation became deeply divided over whether its soldiers should be in Vietnam at all. On January 30, 1968, Ho launched a massive surprise attack known as the Tet Offensive. The blitz stunned the U.S. military, which had claimed it was nearing victory. Anti-war protests grew, sharpening dissension within the U.S.

In 1969, President Richard M. Nixon was inaugurated, promising to bring an "honorable" end to the war. He began to reduce troop levels, but also escalated bombing attacks. Americans became increasingly unwilling to die for a cause that seemed to have lost its meaning.

In January 1973, a peace agreement was signed. Two years later, columns of North Vietnamese soldiers took control of South Vietnam. After years of struggle, the Communists had finally succeeded in freeing Vietnam of foreigners-and the U.S. had lost its longest war.

Reporting by SETH MYDANS, the Southeast Asia bureau chief of The New York Times. Written by PETER VILBIG.

The New Rebels

FOCUS: Young Vietnamese Favor Personal Freedom and Consumerism Over Politics

TEACHING OBJECTIVES

To help students understand America's long involvement in Vietnam, what Vietnam is like today, and why young Vietnamese eschew the political passions of their elders as they pursue the twin goals of personal freedom and material rewards.

Discussion Questions:

* Are American teenagers different from or similar to Vietnamese teens in their views of the world, their country, and the older generation?

* How deeply do Vietnamese young people believe in Communism?

* As a college student, President Clinton opposed the war in Vietnam. Why do you think he chose not to speak out about this during his visit to Vietnam?

CLASSROOM STRATEGIES

Critical Thinking: Discuss the views of the young Vietnamese. Note, for example, Ta Thi Minh Hong, who says young people no longer care so much about independence, that today the focus is on music, fashion, making friends, and going on picnics. Do remarks like this show disrespect for the sacrifices of earlier generations? Or are they the normal expressions of young people everywhere? Are young Vietnamese caught between two different worlds?

Discussion: Does reconciliation with Vietnam dishonor the Americans who died there? Or can a new generation of American and Vietnamese leaders acknowledge the past and move forward?

Interviewing: Have students interview anyone who served in the Vietnam War, protested the war, or simply lived through the era. Some suggested questions:

* Do you believe the war was the correct policy at the time? * Have your views on the war changed? * Do you believe the U.S. should have trade and diplomatic relations with Vietnam? * Does any event or individual from the era evoke special memories for you? * President Jimmy Carter pardoned Vietnam-era draft evaders who fled to other countries. What are your thoughts on the pardon?

Students should discuss their interviews with the class. Is there a consensus on the war? Or do interviewees differ in their opinions of that era?

Web Watch: PBS provides background on Vietnam and views of life in the country today. Note the time line. www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam /resources/index.html