Jocelyn Tran and Toan Nguyen are raising their young son Matthew in Vietnam and are as conflicted as their son's name implies. "I am bicultural," Jocelyn said, "and it's not easy. I want to be Vietnamese, yet I'm accustomed to American physical comforts. I had no hardships growing up in America, and I'm embarrassed now at how people live here compared to how I live. I'm too American, too Vietnamese."

In their split allegiance between East and West, Jocelyn and Toan reminded me of a couple I met in Danang during the war. The husband was the Vietnamese director of Mobil Oil, the wife a professor of philosophy at the University of Danang. Although she was a staunch anti-Communist who loved going to New York and Paris, she provided the clearest reason I'd ever heard why the United States should not intervene in a society it does not understand. Praising Ngo Dinh Diem, the South Vietnamese president who had been assassinated in 1963 when our government withdrew its support from him, she discoursed on his skill as a statesman, how he'd have made peace with the North Vietnamese, and how splendid a patriot he was, the last piece of praise catching in her throat so that she doubled back on it to declare, "In fact, I think Ngo Dinh Diem was without doubt the second-greatest patriot in the entire history of my country."

I bit on that one and gullibly asked who was the first greatest.

"Oh, Ho Chi Minh of course."

At that moment it was clear that if this philosopher's two seemingly irreconcilable assertions were true--according to the American left Diem was a puppet who was dropped when he proved both too corrupt and too independent, while Ho was George Washington and Abraham Lincoln combined; according to the right Ho was Stalinist and Diem was fine until he betrayed the cause--then the United States had no rational purpose sticking its nose, much less 2.15 million bodies, into what was taking place in Vietnam, regardless of whether the dispute was a revolution, civil war, insurgency against foreign invaders, anticolonialist struggle, reunification drive, or some of all of these. From today's perspective, what will we do if and when Iraq is partitioned and one of the parts, let's say an anti-American one, decides to reunite the others? We lost 58,000 Americans trying to maintain two Vietnams; Vietnam lost fifty times that many, almost 3 million, yet today there is one Vietnam.

Though a war in which one side is financed by a foreign country isn't properly a civil one, there is an aspect in the psychology of the north-south relationship in Vietnam that bears comparison with the American South after our Civil War. The Vietnamese southerners who sided with Americans are to a substantial degree a defeated people and have the attitudes and resentments of losers. They don't refer to Ho Chi Minh City as anything but Saigon, they smirk about northerners who run things, they take a Schadenfreude pleasure in pointing out police corruption and government failure, and they have still--a quarter-century after the war ended--not been able to get jobs equal to their preparation and abilities.

Truong, a middle-aged man who was our guide in the Mekong Delta, had been a teacher and school administrator before the war. In the war itself he was a low-ranking South Vietnamese officer. Like several other southerners we met, his job was well below his former status. When he smiled he showed gold-tipped teeth, an emblem of class, but Truong's smiles were rueful. "As soon as the war was over," he said, "I was sent to a re-education camp to change from capitalist to Communist." He paused and laughed, "But now we're all capitalists again because that's what the government wants."

In 1972 we had filmed a passionately independent Catholic priest in Saigon named Chan Tin, who was in hiding from the South Vietnamese government. I remembered him as coiled and intense, with dark hair and a visage radiating anger at both the South Vietnamese government and the American intruders. At 83 he no longer conducts all the services at his large church in Ho Chi Minh City, but he holds masses regularly and gives occasional sermons. His dark hair has vanished into gossamer wisps of white at the back of his head, and what he radiates today is a serenity that occasionally gives way to his pride at having a relationship with the Hanoi authorities not dissimilar to the one he had with the Saigon government. "The South Vietnamese gave me five years at hard labor," he said, "and after the North won in 1975, for a short time the Communists thought I was with them because I was part of the patriotic front opposed to the Saigon regime and the Americans. They soon saw I was for human rights above all. I spoke against the detainment of political prisoners, so they detained me and made me a political prisoner." These days Chan Tin preaches when he wants to and has no fear of the government. "I want another regime," he said, "but I want it by evolution, not revolution. Now there is amelioration. There is more democracy, some liberty, more freedom of the press. The economy is open, but for progress we need full political liberty."

Back in Hanoi, we saw a capital with the vitality of the country surrounding it. When the Vietnamese did not finish their work during the day, they took it home at night. Buoyancy was the national mood, the tone of Vietnam's intercourse with foreigners. I have to admit I did not want to go home.

As for the Americans, we ran into the West Virginia Trade Mission, holding what they called a Country Team Briefing before heading into the provinces. Doctors Without Borders was in town to help contain the SARS epidemic by setting up an isolation wing at Bach Mai Hospital, which had been leveled in the 1972 Christmas bombing. Connecticut College students were having a street-level lesson in the history and culture of Vietnam. A nimbus of contrition hung over the expeditions. "How I wished," Graham Greene concluded in The Quiet American, "there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry." It was impossible to be in Vietnam without wondering whether, perhaps in far fewer than thirty years, we will be saying that about Iraq.

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