VIET NAM
Hanoi is a city mobilized for peace, reports TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott, who spent three days there while accompanying the special commission headed by United Auto Workers President Leonard Woodcock (TIME, March 28). Returning to Washington last week, Talbott wrote these impressions of the Vietnamese capital:
In Hanoi's Chi Linh Park, amidst the tamarind, rhododendron and banyan trees, there are two man-made structures. One is a bomb shelter, constructed in the mid-'60s as U.S. air strikes crept closer to the capital. The other is a round cage with a pagoda-style roof, built in the French colonial period but maintained by the Communists; it houses two large cranes, symbols in the Far East of longevity and prosperity. The bomb shelter is overgrown with weeds and largely ignored by the populace. "It is marked for demolition," explained one of our official escorts. "We have other uses for the brick and iron." The nearby bird cage, by contrast, is the center of activity in the park. On the afternoon of our arrival, a squad of preteenage girls, dressed in uniforms consisting of white blouses and black trousers and wearing the red bandannas of the Pioneer Communist Youth Organization, marched around the cage. Three off-duty soldiers in green pith helmets looked on with amusement, while two women street cleaners in conical hats and surgical masks busily swept away bread crumbs that passers-by had thrown to the birds.
Chinese-made military trucks and Soviet troop carriers clog the rickety Long Bien bridge over the Red River, hauling sand and gravel to reconstruction projects around the city. The army has been pressed into service restoring communications, repairing roads, digging irrigation canals and even harvesting rice.
A bombed-out wing of Bach Mai hospital has been left in ruins as a memorial to victims of the 1972 Christmas bombing. But there are few such deliberate reminders of the war, either in the landscape or in conversation. Posters celebrating the accuracy of rooftop antiaircraft gunners have been replaced by ones exhorting greater industrial and agricultural production. In the city's teeming central market (where dog meat is sold as a delicacy), a loudspeaker system installed ten years ago for air raid alerts and tirades against the "imperialist" enemy is now used to announce the arrival of produce from the countryside.
When one of our group asked his guide about a nondescript gray building next to a children's playground downtown, he was told only that it "belongs to the government." In fact, it is Hoa Lo prison, the notorious "Hanoi Hilton," where captured Americans were held. Today it serves as a jail for common criminals. Another visitor noticed on sale in a shop a stack of pocket-size packages of Kleenex, obviously liberated from a U.S. Army PX in the South. His escort explained, "That is merely a souvenir from Ho Chi Minh City [as Saigon has been renamed]." Our guides unabashedly confessed to listening to the Voice of America. They prefer country-and-western music and Hollywood show tunes to The Ballad of Norman Morrison, a Vietnamese song commemorating the war protester who burned himself to death on the steps of the Pentagon in November 1965.