On the terrace of her hotel overlooking the Perfume River, Cindy Rheinheimer, a 38-year-old public school teacher and divorced mother of twin teenage girls, told me about her visit. The previous day she had been to the site where her father, Cpl. Richard Sanders, a 22-year-old medic from California, had been killed in 1967. Rheinheimer was 3 at the time, so in a sense she was looking for a father she'd never really known. "I just have a vague memory of my father sitting in a Naugahyde chair flicking a cigarette lighter shaped like a cannon," she said. "He'd been a cowboy growing up around Santa Maria, spending a lot of time on a cattle ranch, and he had guns. He was working in a factory that manufactured Columbia records, still trying to figure out what to do with his life, when he was drafted."

Though he'd hunted as a teenager, Sanders chose to be a medic rather than a rifleman. Rheinheimer showed me a picture of her father kissing her as a toddler, another of her father in uniform looking straight ahead, and a very pretty one of herself at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. "The night before I was to go to my dad's site," she said, "I called home and told my boyfriend I couldn't bear this, I just didn't think I could do it. He said, 'Take a deep breath, this is what you went to do.'" She left her hotel the next morning nervous, her stomach in knots. Having the radio operator's diary from her father's unit, she knew where to go. "My dad had flown in on a chopper to a ridge they called Hill 82," she continued. "His company was on a search-and-destroy mission northeast of Saigon, part of the Ninth Infantry Division. A couple of guys were hit and my dad went and got them out to safety. Then another man was hit and my dad went to get him, and somebody threw a grenade that killed both my dad and the wounded guy.

"When I got near the top of Hill 82, I was so surprised. I thought it would be darker, closed in, a jungle. I didn't expect it to be so beautiful and peaceful and light. I was looking out over a river. I just lost it entirely. As soon as I cried and started to actually look around I felt so much better. We all imagine death as dark, and I found this place just filled with light--if there's an afterlife I hope that's it." Rheinheimer took a sip of her Coke and looked away, out over the Perfume River where several little fishing boats went by carrying Vietnamese families who live in them. "I had asked my daughters--we're Catholics--to find some Scripture. They'd e-mailed me three passages from the Bible and said, 'Tell grandpa hi for us.' I lit some incense and laid down flowers and choked my way through the Scriptures. Then I left a little note for my dad, just telling him my girls and I are fine and we'll try to make you proud of us until we're all together again. That was it, really, that was my pilgrimage."

It's a commonplace that when you return to a location you once spent important time in--a childhood home, a school, a lake in the woods where you first fell in love--what you're looking for is not the location itself but the old, which is to say the young, you. I had no interest in that, given how miserable I'd been the first time in Vietnam and how glad I was to be there now in the midst of such national optimism. Yet from time to time I was pulled back to the war. In our flight to Ho Chi Minh City, there was a twilight moment as we approached Tan Son Nhut Airport and saw gun emplacements around the perimeter. Holdovers, precautionary defense, warning, declaration: Don't fuck with us. Whichever, the reminder would not be lost on anyone with designs other than friendly. From the Caravelle Hotel in 1972 I became accustomed to flares in the distance as mortars and other night firing began; the nocturnal action at the Caravelle now is in the hotel's own noisy, yuppified bar, Saigon Saigon.

Old Saigon has become a bustling Los Angeles sprawl, a commercial churn much larger than the cultural and political capital of Hanoi. We went to dinner at the home of a businesswoman named Jocelyn Tran, whom I had met in Hanoi. Both she and her husband, Toan Nguyen, left Saigon as children and grew up in Southern California, where they met in their early 30s. Jocelyn's father was an officer in the South Vietnamese Army, and Toan's parents had a prospering pharmaceutical company. "My parents got out just in time in '75," Jocelyn said. "They were very bitter and vowed never to return, but then my father came back in 1999 for a short visit before he died. My mother returned briefly this year, but she made the whole trip just to say two words to me, 'come home,' by which she meant California."

Toan's parents, on the other hand, chose to retire in Saigon, living far more modestly than they once did but nonetheless in their native land. They could not return to their former home, a mansion now occupied by their old servant, who is permitted to stay there until she dies, at which point the estate will belong to the government. "This is still a police state," said Toan, who designs computer software, "though the government's heavy hand is lighter than it was a few years ago. I don't go past my childhood home because it is too painful, and my father refuses even to go into the neighborhood." I could wince a little for Toan's family, but what I really regretted was not having the time to look up the family servant and see how she was enjoying the old proprietor's digs, lounging in the rooms she used to mop. Is there a just god somewhere who would mandate that destiny for all servants, all masters?

Jocelyn and Toan live very well, with servants themselves, and Jocelyn is the country representative of a firm that manufactures women's clothing for labels such as Victoria's Secret and Henri Bendel, a globalized effort employing local workers. A trade union does exist in Vietnam, but it is an umbrella organization belonging more to the government than to the labor force, which means its independence is compromised. Factory workers, according to a regional specialist named Kate Jellema, who teaches Vietnamese history and culture at Marlboro College, make much more than they would as peasant farmers, but they often have to work far from their families, whom they may see only once a month or less. Meanwhile, their rather toothless union, typical of the Third World, cannot press for minimum wages or maximum hours. "Opening up markets gives jobs to people who wouldn't otherwise have jobs at all," Jellema told me, "and it provides entrepreneurial opportunities for the middle class, but conditions are substandard and there is no structure for improving them. Those who work for multinational companies like Coca-Cola or Victoria's Secret or Nike do better than those in small Vietnamese businesses, because the foreigners are at least susceptible to outside pressures."

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