Don't Mention the War by David Clement Davies

We'd had our fill of the war. We'd seen the appalling photos of American atrocities in Saigon's Military museum and crawled around a tiny section of the Cu Chi tunnels, the warren which was used by Viet Cong guerillas for twenty years and runs for 250 kilometres above Saigon. Along Highway No 1 we'd photographed the broken bridges and the regiments of young trees, replanted after the US dropped its half a million tonnes of ordnance on Vietnam. So at Hue we ducked a tour of the DMZ, the Demilitarized Zone, a misnomer because it became the most bombed out battlefield of all. Instead we drove over the Hai Van pass, where communist North and capitalist South were once unsuccessfully partitioned, and went in search of some local talent.

Everywhere you go in Vietnam you'll find the country's ancient artistic traditions still at work, and in Hoi An's warren of riverside alleys every doorway bulges with paintings, drawings and silk prints. Hoi An is a slice of old Vietnam, carefully preserved on the tourist trail, but its pagodas, temples and Japanese bridge are charming. Some of the art is good too, though much purely imitative. In Saigon, you can find whole teams reproducing David's Napoleon by numbers, or cobbling up anything from a soapy version of the Mona Lisa to a do-it-yourself Hockney. It is as ubiquitous a sight as the endless photocopy shops you see in Vietnam.

Tourists also come to Hoi An, though, to visit the neighbouring citadel of My Son. The ancient Cham complex was begun in the 4th century, the longest lasting of any in South East Asia. It outstrips Cambodia's Angkor Wat by six hundred years. Most of the wonders of Cham art it threw up have been moved to the museum in Danang, where the US first landed troops in the sixties, but it is still a numinous place. The rain had turned the bamboo bridge to a slip road and the river to a swirling coffee-coloured torrent. The old US jeep bumped us up the track past grazing water buffalo, towards a series of extraordinary overgrown temples, like giant walk-in chimneys.

Of course we couldn't escape the war. "Keep off the way!" said a lopsided sign sprouting from the ruins. Recalling the concerned look on that buffalo's face, we backed off. In the hills above My Son a buffalo becomes a mine sweeper. Funny perhaps? Not so the limbless veterans in Saigon, selling photocopies of Graham Greene's prophetic 1950s novel, ‘The Quiet American’, or newspaper articles on the lingering effects of Agent Orange.

Unlike Buddhist Vietnam, Cham culture was Hindu, influenced by India. Through the bushes stood another temple with a carving of Shiva the destroyer. Chipped pillars lay everywhere, shattered remnants that could have been cast down by time, or by the shells that rained down from the surrounding hills. It is the bullet holes that make the place so strangely moving. The Viet Cong used My Son as a hideout and in trying to bomb them out the Americans peppered the place with craters, now overgrown and guttering with water.

The damage to Vietnam's monuments is a war legacy that is hardly talked about, not surprisingly considering Vietnam's human tragedy. But My Son and ancient Hue are a dramatic illustration. At Hue we stood behind the pagoda containing the last King's throne and saw open fields where palaces once stood, running clear to the citadel's giant walls. Nearly all the royal complex was destroyed. In the shadow of the walls the lotus-fringed grounds were being tilled by local people, cultivating rice.

The Government's attitude to monuments like My Son, Hue or the extraordinary palace tombs along Hue's perfumed river, is a litmus test for change in Vietnam. Mostly they seem to be a source of ready tourist dollars, and entrance fees are hefty. But after years of neglecting these symbols of feudal tyranny the party is beginning to rebuild and protect them, with the feeling that they are rediscovering more than a source of cash. The official reinstatement of their heritage may help a country cope with its past, as it steps so rapidly beyond the simplicities of ideological conflict.

At My Son the rain dripped on and we came round the track to find a headless soldier, a pock-marked stone buffalo and a linga, one of the phallic statues so representative of Cham art. The ancient penis suddenly looked like nothing so much as a shell cartridge and for a moment helped me grasp a fact that I find so startling about Vietnam: the lack of bitterness about the war. The Vietnamese have been fighting wars for centuries. Internally against the Cham and each other, externally against China, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and the French. And finally the Americans.

That lack of bitterness has other causes, as does the Vietnamese's disarming warmth towards Westerners, often so money orientated in the cities but so genuine in the countryside. Memory is one cause, or the lack of it. Vietnamese still haven't seen that many foreignors in the villages, but I have never been to a country that seems so young, both in its attitude and in the faces along the roads. There are children everywhere you go. But then what else does a country do after a war, but make love?
Driving south again I realised what had been troubling me about the ravishing sights we were seeing; the stilted fishing platforms across Lang Co bay or the palms rising in rectangles around the villages; the men and women in their connicle hats stooping in the red earth, or a grey army launch coming round a bend in the Perfumed river. They were already a part of my own memories and another reason I couldn't escape the war. Not because I really knew anything about modern Vietnam, but because I was travelling with painful cliches from that dominant western art form - movies. Thanks to Messers Stone and Coppola we've only recently explored the West's psychic horror, shame and sense of failure at the Vietnam war in films. But for Vietnam it is, after all, a quarter of a century old.

Perhaps that's not very long and I was travelling on surface impressions. Older people's attitude to foreigners is more complex, especially in the North, though Hanoi, the Northern capital, is far more europeanised than it was. But more often than not young people just don't want to talk about the war. They are more interested in normal things like jobs, mopeds, football, sex and money. In their future. The problems will come as that generation grows up and opens its arms fully to the West.

It causes a strange scyzophrenia watching the Vietnamese selling you the war in momentos and guided tours. Even in Hanoi there is an oulet of the 'Apocalypse Now' chain of bars, doing a roaring trade to tourists and occasional Veterans trying to exorcise their memories. But if the sight of Citibank in the middle of Saigon made me wonder for a moment what the North ever fought so hard for, Vietnam belongs to the Vietnamese. For a country trying to heal, and having to open up to the dollar, perhaps it is no bad thing to forget recent history. For cliche hunting tourists too, because Vietnam's war trail is only a small part of what this extraordinarily varied and beautiful country has to offer.