HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — Flying in low over the rice fields, you can see bomb craters for miles in acre after acre of splintered, blasted earth.
In seaside towns along the coast, old bomb casings are cut in half and set fins-down in hotel courtyards to serve as planters.
On rivers that sweep and curl east into Vietnam from Laos and Kampuchea, fishermen use warped and dented U.S. Army helmets as bailing buckets.
On the streets of Hue, the ancient imperial city north of Da Nang, bullet- pocked buildings and ruined walls attest to the war's devastation, and victims are still being treated in the city's hospital.
Today, more than 13 years after U.S. helicopters lifted the last panicked Americans from the roof of the barricaded U.S. Embassy in Saigon, subtle reminders of the war that pitted the communist North against the capitalist South are everywhere.
But the worst devastation - the destruction of more than one million lives - is visible only in barren cemeteries and stark monuments. By the time it was all over, on April 30, 1975, the war had killed 58,130 Americans. Vietnamese losses were far worse. At least 220,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, 440,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong fighters, and hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed.
It was a war that a generation of Americans will never forget. And it was a war that left the victor in economic shambles and its people in abject poverty and isolation.
Even today the war is taking its toll, as Vietnamese farmers from time to time die when their plows strike undetonated American bombs still buried in the countryside.
But as this country of 62 million struggles to find its future, a way into the 20th century, there seems to be a startling absence of what so many Americans thought was inevitable - bitterness.
Across this narrow S-shaped strip of land that borders its old enemy China to the north, Laos and Kampuchea to the west and the South China Sea to the east, there is a poignant atmosphere of hope, courage and hardly veiled desperation.
There is, as well, an overwhelming longing for a further loosening of the bonds that have held the country back in an era in which much of the rest of East Asia has prospered.
From every quarter is heard a clamor for a new beginning, the start of an epoch in which Vietnam will look beyond its own borders and become a part of the developing world.
