Dragon Ascending

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 29 JAN 1996

Kamm, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for the New York Times who has been reporting from Southeast Asia for more than a quarter century, here explores Vietnam, its resilient people, its history and its likely future. The men and women he introduces us to include General Tran Cong Man, unofficial spokesman for the Communist Party; Duong Thu Huong, a dissident whose defiance of unjust authority landed her in solitary confinement; Duong Quynh Hoa, one of the founders of the National Liberation Front, whose comments reflect the disillusionment many Southerners feel toward Hanoi's postwar policies; and Pham Xuan An, who worked as a Time correspondent during the war while secretly serving as a Viet Cong colonel. In his interviews, including those with survivors of the My Lai massacre, Kamm notes the astonishing absence of postwar hostility toward the Americans. On the other hand, there is little forgiveness toward veterans of the defeated ``puppet army''; Kamm reports that Saigon's National Cemetery, with its thousands of ARVN dead, has been razed. He concludes that Vietnam, standing on its own after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is a stable country and that its heightened confidence seems justified. Photos.