Growing up, I saw Vietnam through the lens of Oliver Stone's dusty, dirty Platoon, Francis Ford Coppola's epically weird Apocalypse Now and a handful of other good, bad and sometimes indifferent movies.

Good or not, they all share this: A filtered image of a poor, downtrodden and weary people forced to fight but resigned to their fate.

Modern Vietnam could scarcely be more different. Shaped a bit like a skipping rope, with a bulky knot of land at the top and bottom and a thin squeeze of fertile earth in between, this is a country that has decided if not to forget then certainly to forgive.

I recently visited for the first time with my mother, whose determination to end the Vietnam War involved, at least in 1968 London, shouting ex-pletives at the American embassy before retiring to the pub for a few pints. Whether she joined the protests out of altruism or to work up a thirst I am unclear, but she did meet my dad on one of these evenings so I firmly believe some good things came of her efforts.

Arriving overland from Cambodia, both of us found Saigon (no one seems to call it by its official name, Ho Chi Minh City, except government officials and their domesticated press corps) a little overwhelming. Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital, is a shell of a city, lively but wholly lacking infrastructure, while Saigon is like an exciting older cousin home from the wars with a wooly beard and tales of naval skir-mishes and exotic Oriental girls.

Saigon buzzes. It starts humming in the early light and doesn't stop until the small hours. During that time, seven million people zip around the city on motor-scooters, honking horns, squeezing around melon-sellers and Mack trucks, and showing off their new girlfriend or boyfriend or linen skirt or dangly earrings to all and sundry.

By contrast, our tour of duty was more sedate - we hired a couple of cyclos, the rickshaw cyclists who are fast disappearing, and made off in the golden morning light at snail's pace for the first of the many museums and sights that dot a city growing by more than 100,000 people every year.

Our first stop was the Historical Museum of Vietnam, an elegantly faded building on Nguyen Binh Khiem that houses artifacts from prehistory and the Dongson period two millennia ago, as well as some of the best Cham sculptures around. The most eye-catching exhibits are giant rusting metal spikes used not once but twice to impale the boats of invading Chinese forces in Halong Bay in North Vietnam.

Humiliated first in the 10th century when their vastly superior crews were delayed by Vietnamese junks until the tide ebbed and the giant underwater barbs could pierce the ships' hulls, they came back for another dose 400 years later.

The obvious latterday analogy - the big bad United States, humbled and scarred by Vietnam, all too keen to make the same mistakes in another, equally hostile, country 30 years later - seemed almost too cruel to contemplate.

On we trotted to a noodle bar for lunch. Vietnamese food is excellent. We ate often and well, downing barbecue steaks and delicious vegetables with long draughts of Saigon beer. The first night we chowed at Luong Son, an outdoor restaurant on Ly Trong Street specializing in barbecued shrimp and beef dipped in the local, tangy mustard. For the more adventurous there were fried cockerel testicles, rat's feet and snake gall bladder - tempting, but, no.

The next evening we feasted at Pacific, an outdoor bia hoi, or beer stall, which served fresh seafood.

After lunch, loaded up with a couple of bottles of Saigon, we remounted our cyclos and creaked off to the Presidential Palace, an extraordinary building to the south of Nguyen Thi Minh Khai Street.

It was through these massive iron gates on April 30, 1975 that a North Vietnamese tank burst, a single helmeted Vietcong soldier glaring angrily from the top. It was an image captured on film and forever imprinted on the eye of the world, symbolizing the end of South Vietnam and its government and years of unremitting conflict.

Externally, the building looks like a cut-price Buckingham Palace.Inside, however, sits a collection of gaudy furniture of such exquisitely appalling late-1960s tattery as to sting the eyes - from the lime-green bubble chairs (one of which welcomed Dr Henry Kissinger in 1972) and polar-white fluffy carpets, to the giant black-glass coffee tables and bulky, space-age sofas. Could a government with such hideous taste have ever hoped to triumph?

Giant maps of the main war zones are pasted all over the basement's crumbling walls, watching over ancient telephones and radios. Everything in the war room is painted military green. A bizarre touch is provided next to the exit, where a shiny Chinese-made faux Rolls Royce Red Flag limousine sits.

We moved on to the chilling War Remnants museum. Though inevitably skewed toward the victor's version of the war, it provides a generally balanced view of what happened during those mad years. Young, clean-limbed Amer-ican boys were packed off to a foreign land and asked to make up the rules as they went. The humanity of some US soldiers and the barbarity of others is utterly compelling.

The Vietnamese take on it reveals the naked gore that resulted. Prisons where Vietnamese soldiers were chained, starved and tortured are reconstructed; on the walls, American soldiers, including current US senators, tell of how they killed innocent Vietnamese civilians.

It is a monument to the brutality any people are capable of inflicting given the necessary set of circumstances.

Later, rolling back to our hotel, the world seemed to move at a slower pace. Our cyclo driver was a cheery type but his hand-eye-leg coordination left something to be desired and we found ourselves marooned in a 10-lane smear of tarmac, with cars and scooters streaming around, horns honking, people gesticulating while our driver puffed on a cigarette and chuckled.

In the morning we journeyed by train north, where it was cooler and slower. Vietnam is literally a country of two halves: The South bristles and bustles with the cosmopolitan feel of Southeast Asia's great cities; the North feels more Chinese than Vietnamese, the people more watchful.

As is often the case with many defeated nations or regions, the South, humbled by the invading northern forces, has broadly prospered since the end of the war. Saigon is a boom city, with private equity firms springing up and foreign investors taking an interest in the country.

The further north one travels, however, the more backward things seem. Saigon thrums with vigor and vitality; Hanoi, despite its classic beauty being quickly replaced with modern metal-and-glass structures, seems almost medieval.

In the middle of a country that, thanks to its quirky geography, appears to lack a core, sits Hue, the ancient capital. We arrived via Vietnam's efficient coastal railway and enjoyed a chance meeting in our four-berth soft sleeper carriage with an aging Vietnamese couple. They appeared not to talk at all, yet seemed comfortable enough with one another, regularly unwrapping slices of fresh cheeses, meats, fish, fruits and vegetables.

While I was contemplating a bowl of noodles in the dining carriage, my mother made friends with Anh and his wife. Though she spoke no English, Anh had an American burr - he had spent 10 years in the US building a construction business and sending money back to his wife. His children were being educated in America, and he had now returned to be with the woman he had not seen for more than 30 years.

Imprisoned by the conquering North Vietnamese for 20 years, he had been released in 1995 and packed off by Hanoi's authorities to the US.

Anh received a war pension from Washington and went on to make his fortune but lost a wife and a life along the way. Together again, she was there for him, soldiering on, but he seemed dazed, unhappy. Perhaps he re-membered the years lost, perhaps he thought only of the events of war. I wondered if he spent his days trying to blot out 20 grinding years of solitude. His term had been indefinite and he never knew when he would be released.

Hue itself is a little gem, straddling the Huong Giang, or Perfume River. It was the base of the Nguyen Dynasty, which held sway over the country-save for what influence the French colonizers had - between 1802 and 1945, controlling large parts of then severely weakened China including southwestern Yunnan province. The colossal Imperial City, built on the orders of Emperor Gia Long in 1804, is built to the exact specifications of the Forbidden City in Beijing, though the rest of Hue is determinedly Vietnamese.

The city is spacious and airy, and full of good eateries. We stayed at the Dong Loi hotel on Pham Ngu Lao Street, which housed one of the best restaurants in town, Carambole. Bustling and welcoming, it served fine European and Asian food at Vietnamese prices and is chock-a-block by 8pm.

Up the road is Danang, which has donned a succession of hats throughout history. Now a growing commercial center, during the war, in-country R&R meant China Beach near Danang, where you drank beer, surfed, took drugs and made the acquaintance of local beauties. Much further back it was the seaport through which the Cham, a great dynasty that once ruled large parts of Southeast Asia for more than a thousand years, traded with the outside world. The Cham capital at My Son, 65 kilometers from Danang, is now a UNESCO heritage site preparing for a new invasion of tourists that, judging from the trickle of visitors we saw, is unlikely to happen. My Son was left virtually untouched for nearly 500 years after the Cham nation was destroyed in 1471. That was until Vietcong soldiers used the ancient temples, set in a tangle of then thick jungle, as a convenient hideout.

The American bombs and napalm that rained down in search of insurgent targets left My Son in tatters, and the surrounding countryside is still re-covering from the chemical invasion.

Nonetheless, Vietnam's ongoing regeneration, as well as that of its scrappy people, is promising.

Life is still hard hard and the communist government still deeply corrupt but at least people have choices and are increasingly able to make them undisturbed. Vietnam's future is the girl on her new Italian scooter in Hue, Anh's children raised in Vietnam but educated in America, and the young tour guide at Saigon's Presidential Palace who breathlessly told us the gaudy monstrosity was ``one of the world's most famous and most beautiful buildings.''

I didn't argue - she was happy, she had a job, and it was a beautiful day. And besides, out there somewhere was a Saigon beer with my name written all over it.