The Foreign Service Journal, April 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2015 67 about anything. Some members of our group concluded that the South had clearly prevailed in the postwar period—capital- ism had trumped communism. But the story was much more complicated, of course. We were seeing Vietnam as it appeared in 2015, not what it had gone through in the decades after 1975. In addition to its reeducation programs, the North had established a Stalinist sys- tem of political control, implemented land reform, seized private enterprises and even expropriated houses. By the 1980s, rice- producing areas were threatened with famine, the economy was collapsing and inflation had tripled. In 1986, following the lead of Deng Xiaoping in China, the Vietnamese government began to open its economy to market forces. The changes were gradual, but ownership of land, enterprises and homes was eventually privatized. Often properties were returned to their original own- ers, although there were more than a few stories about socialist cronyism. We were seeing the new Vietnam, a more entrepreneurial Vietnam, yes. Small shops lined the roads into and out of every settlement. But often the structures were shabby, even though they were of relatively recent origin. A very successful business- man (or somebody with a foreign source of income) might put up a narrow, one-lot-wide, six-story, brightly painted edifice, particularly in a bigger town, but most buildings were dingy and only one or two floors tall. The newer structures were mostly offi- cial: government offices, schools, hospitals and military camps. The military presence seemed to be everywhere: on former South Vietnamese and American bases and the old district head- quarters, all freshly painted ochre, three or four stories high with red-tiled roofs and surrounded by walled compounds. The war was over. Who was the enemy that required such a strong mili- tary presence? Likewise, similar communist party offices were part of each district. What were all these party groups meeting to decide? Nothing seemed overt, but a strong political-military presence was evident everywhere. Sprawl is an easy word to define modern urban life in Viet- nam. This increasingly urbanized country now has about 92 million people, twice the number its two halves had in 1975. Of course, old Saigon sprawls, but so does every other urban area, making them virtually unrecognizable to a visitor from the past. At least the old capital had its landmarks; the cities and towns we visited in central Vietnam often did not. Not only had old build- ings given way to new, but the urban centers had shifted and been extended for miles in every direction. The old town centers were hard to find. Heading out of Pleiku and Kontum into areas tradition- Parker and Anna Borg stand at the crossroads in the center of Tuy Phuoc, the district where he worked from 1968 to 1969. (He recognized no buildings from the past.) Low buildings like those shown here sprawl along the roads for three to four miles in all directions outside of every urban area in this part of central Vietnam.