eroes and heroines who opposed foreign rule are all part of the historical fabric of this country. Resistance leaders such as the Trung sisters of AD 40, who committed suicide when their anti-Chinese rebellion failed; Le Loi, who successfully led a guerrilla war against the Ming in the 15th century; and Ho Chi Minh, who first stood up to the French, then the Americans, are seen by many Vietnamese as belonging to the same unbroken thread of defiance towards foreign domination.
Today's leaders don't like to admit that their struggle against the Americans was part of a civil war that pitted north against south as well as capitalism against communism. They prefer to see it as having been an antiforeign struggle against the Americans, as it had been against the French in the 1950s.
But the north-south division is present even today in the minds of many Vietnamese. In the 16th century there was a wall across Vietnam, not far from where the demilitarized zone partitioned the country at the 17th parallel from 1954-1975, behind which northerners and southerners rallied against each other.
The French in the 19th century divided the country into three parts: Cochin China in the south, Annam in the center, and Tonkin in the north. The first harbingers of European domination came in the 18th century when Louis the XVI's adventurers planned a raid here in Danang, which the French called Tourane, when France began taking an interest in Vietnam as a gateway to China. Missionaries had already spread the Catholic faith more than in any other Asian country save the Philippines, providing France with an excuse to intervene when Vietnamese rulers cracked down on Christians for promoting foreign ideologies.
Even the USS Constitution got involved when it sailed into this bay in 1845. The captain took some Vietnamese mandarins prisoners when he heard that a Catholic churchman was being held prisoner in the capital, an incident for which Washington later apologized.
In 1847 the French were back aboard the battleships Gloire and Victorieuse to shoot up Danang and land troops as colonialism first began in earnest. It was here, too, that the first US combat troops - as opposed to advisers - came ashore in March of 1965 when the United States decided to throw its full weight against the same cause that defeated the French.
Danang was the scene of an enormous military base in the '60s and early '70s and the city groaned under the American presence. Planes took off day and night for bombing runs, and from here the Marines and Army fought the bloodiest battles of the war. After 1967, the year I first came to this region, more than half the Americans who were killed in Vietnam would die in this northern part of the Republic of South Vietnam.
Danang saw the mass panic of early 1975, when the morale of the Saigon armies finally cracked and people fought with soldiers to get onto planes and boats fleeing south.
Ten years ago, I saw mountains of scrap metal, the rusting detritus of war from the armories of America, piled up on the docks here, ready to be sold to the Japanese to make automobiles.
Today there is very little of the war left to be seen. Danang has returned to being a pleasant city on the Han River. The bridge to China Beach, where Marines and GIs spent their idle hours, is now named for Nguyen Van Troi, the man who tried to assassinate Robert McNamara on one of his trips to Vietnam.
The sparse, post-1975 Russian bungalow hotel on China Beach, where Soviet workers who had exceeded their industrial quotas took the place of American soldiers, has been torn down. It has been replaced with the glamorous and decidedly unsocialist Furama Hotel that would not be out of place in Palm Beach, complete with Filipina waitresses and Belgian managers to cater to the growing tourist trade of Japanese, Americans, and Europeans - especially the French, who are seeking the bygone and largely bogus glamour of what was once called Indochine.
