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.