O CHI MINH CITY - I am a ghost wandering in this city, a shadow of another time that ceased to exist a quarter-century ago when the last American helicopters rose up over the red roofs of this city like departing souls in the death throes of the South Vietnam Republic.
Today Vietnam is a country again, not just a war, as the government is fond of saying. More than half its people were not born when the final US evacuation took place in 1975. So fast has the population grown that no more than 15 percent could have experienced the 30-year war that ended the French and then the American effort here. As happens with ghosts, people passing on the street cannot see my reflection.
The American embassy building from which I hastily departed that night 25 years ago has been razed. But the walls that surrounded it are still in place, walls which thousands of terrified Vietnamese tried to breach on that dreadful last day before the North Vietnamese tanks entered the city. In 1968 a band of Viet Cong managed to enter the embassy compound through these walls during the great upheaval of the Tet Offensive - the turning point of the Vietnam War. Today a small US consulate sits on the grounds. Diplomatic relations between a united Vietnam and the United States were established in 1995, and these grounds once again belong to Washington.
The brown stream of the Saigon River is no longer filled with vessels bringing war materials into a divided country. Armed insurrection does not threaten the traveler on lonely roads as it did during the war.
Nor is this the sad town of the late '70s and early '80s when the northerners imposed their harsh discipline on the people of the South. North Vietnam was organized for war, like Sparta, but incompetent and cruel in the first years of peace. Concentration camps, which the Vietnamese said were for ''reeducation,'' bulged with southerners who backed the losing side. And southern revolutionaries would tell you of their bitterness against the northerners who had shunted them aside in favor of their own in the new order.
In those postwar years these busy streets were silent as very few people had either the money or the gasoline to drive a car or a motor bike. The ''Amerasian'' kids, the product of GI liaisons, who once hawked cigarettes on the streets - despised by the Vietnamese and abandoned by the Americans - have now either been resettled in the United States or grown up and disappeared into the population.
The ships in the Saigon River right after the war were from the Eastern Bloc, and the beefy Caucasians on the streets were Russians. ''Lien Xo, Lien Xo,'' children would yell at you, meaning Soviet Union. The Vietnamese called the Russians ''Americans without money.''
All of that has been swept away as Vietnam has backed away from socialism, and the largest ship alongside the riverfront quay recently was the cruise ship Astor, flying the flag of the Bahamas and bearing Hawaiian-shirted tourists.
Today Vietnam - albeit less successfully than China - is trying to join the market economy, but cannot compete with its neighbors because an aging and infinitely corrupt Communist Party is too afraid of losing control to take the necessary steps.
The streets today are noisy with motorbikes and cars. The old Peugeots and Citroens of the '60s are gone, replaced by Japanese cars and the occasional BMW. The two-wheeled Honda, however, is as ubiquitous as it ever was, and shops bulge with commercial goods as they once did during the wartime boom. Tall buildings are rapidly replacing the graceful French villas. Consumerism is king and people can do more or less what they want as long as they do not criticize or threaten the party. Superficially, one has to wonder which economic system won the war. The values of Sparta have succumbed to those of late Rome. No one can tell me if the new Ngan Dinh restaurant by the river where I am having lunch is housed in the old French club, the Cercle Nautique of my memory. Everyone working here is too young to know or care. My guide from the Saigon Tourist agency - few bother to call it Ho Chi Minh - would rather be in a Karaoke bar singing ''Yesterday'' or the theme from the ''Titanic,'' a film she has seen four times.
People don't speak French as they did when I first came to live here more than 30 years ago. Whereas the Vietnamese elite then sent their children to French schools or to Paris, now the Communist upper-strata study English and send their kids to the United States, Canada, or Australia. France spends millions here trying to promote the French language, but the people aren't buying. English is the language of modernization, Vietnamese believe, and that's what they want.
Ten years ago, American and South Vietnamese souvenirs of war - uniforms, medals, insignias - could still be found in this city's shops. Today there is much less of that, save for the ubiquitous Zippo cigarette lighter. Zippos were what many GIs carried during the war years, and today lighters, supposedly from the war era, are to be found for sale on every corner with inscriptions such as ''Danang, 67-68'' and slogans: ''Let me in to heaven because I've done my time in hell,'' and ''My business is killing and business has been good.'' Almost all of these old-fashioned cigarette lighters were made yesterday or the day before in a cottage industry that has sprung up in peacetime Saigon. Wartime nostalgia has become kitsch, with a restaurant called ''Miss Saigon'' and the ''Apocalypse Now'' bar.
Walt Disney has triumphed here where William Westmoreland, the American commander, could not. Plywood cutouts of Snow White and Mickey Mouse are for sale everywhere as the cult spreads.
The Museum of American War Crimes that I visited in 1985 is now called the Museum of War Remnants, in a gesture of reconciliation, but the pictures and exhibits are just as arresting: Vietnamese being tortured and dragged behind armored personnel carriers. New to the exhibit are expressions of regret from American veterans. Sergeant William Brown of the 173d Airborne, for example, has donated his bronze and silver stars, his Purple Heart, as well as other decorations, to the museum with a note saying: ''I was wrong. I am sorry. June 1, 1990.''
I don't remember meeting Sergeant Brown, but I met many of his colleagues and saw some of them die. In 1967 I spent Thanksgiving with the 173d on a blasted hill known only by its height in meters, 857, near the Central Highland town of Dak To. They had 287 soldiers killed and more than 1,000 wounded trying to evict several companies of North Vietnamese who had dug into carefully constructed bunkers with interlocking fields of fire. The battle was over on Thanksgiving Day, leaving a World War I-type landscape of shell craters and shattered trees. Not all the wounded had been evacuated yet, and some of the dead were being put in green rubber bags. In one of those incongruities of the Vietnam War, the military transported by helicopter turkey dinners to what remained of the brigade on the hill with their gaunt faces and thousand-yard stares. I tried to eat some but my appetite deserted me.
''When the 173d held services for their dead from Dak To the boots of the dead men were arranged in formation on the ground,'' wrote Michael Herr in ''Dispatches,'' his classic book about the war. ''It was an old paratrooper tradition, but knowing that didn't reduce it or make it any less spooky, a company's worth of jump boots standing empty in the dust taking benediction, while the real substance of the ceremony was being bagged and tagged and shipped back home....''
I have a cup of coffee at the old Majestic Hotel with Pham Xuan An, my best friend in Vietnam from the days when we both covered the war for Time magazine. After the war, An revealed that he had been not only a journalist for the empire of Henry Luce, but a spy for the Viet Cong with the rank of colonel. He is fond of Americans, and retains many American friends. He just didn't think they should be in Vietnam.
He is a gentle person. I used to bring him birds from the markets of Bangkok. He allowed me to file the story of Saigon's fall on the Time Inc. telex when I worked for the rival Washington Post. He is a reminder to me of how much I saw of Vietnam, but how little I understood.
Ten years ago he was very bitter - as so many southerners were - at the way the northerners had treated him. An, despite being a patriot who had put his life at risk more than once for the cause, was sent to a mini reeducation camp to learn about Marxism. Today he is philosophical, saying that by spending his days as a spy in the South, he never had time, nor I suspect the interest, to learn about Marxism. Today he is retired with the rank of brigadier general.
The fearsome reeducation camps are empty now, and many of the Saigon soldiers - for whom the new regime had few jobs - have left, either on parlous boats or in what was called the Orderly Departure Program to the United States.
There are monuments to the fallen Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in towns up and down this country, and there is the black wall in Washington to remember Americans who died here. But there is no monument to the South Vietnamese soldiers who, although badly led, died by the thousands, many of them bravely. Their war cemetery outside town is overgrown with weeds and neglected. Their ghosts do not rest. And neither do the hundreds of thousands on both sides whose bones have never been found and whose spirits wander.
In the countryside, where most of the war was fought, there is peace now, and the bomb craters have softened into duck ponds. The timeless rhythm of rice planting goes on as it always has. And the farmers? I suspect, as Fowler told the American innocent Pyle in Graham Greene's classic 1950s tale, ''The Quiet American'': ''They want enough rice. They don't want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don't want our white skins aound telling them what they want.''
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H.D.S Greenway is editor of the Globe's editorial page. He covered Vietnam regularly from 1967 to 1975 for Time magazine and then The Washington Post. Since 1975, he has returned to the country six times for the Globe.
At left: Greenway's Bao Chi Press card, one of many he had while there.
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