Ho Chi Minh haunts America still

HANOI, Dec 3 (Reuters) A warm light bathes ''Uncle Ho's''head in the darkened mausoleum, wispy goatee floating above his black tunic, as the faithful file past the glass case where he has lain for nearly four decades.

No hats, hands in pockets, assume a solemn expression, the rules say. Four sentries stand like acolytes at the corners of the crypt.

Marble engravings of the hammer and sickle and Vietnam's red star rise in the background.

It's like being in a communist church.

I came to Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum while covering the Asia-Pacific summit in Hanoi last month to see the embalmed remains of an iconic figure of my age.

Fellow baby boomer President George W Bush did not, opting for a stop at the centre charged with the hunt for the remains of 1,800 Americans still listed as missing in action in the Vietnam War.

But he could hardly avoid ''Uncle Ho'', the Marxist revolutionary whose images are everywhere in Vietnam.

Photographers gratefully snapped the president grinning gamely at his official welcoming ceremony under a huge bronze bust of the founder and leader of communist North Vietnam.

A generation on, what happened in Vietnam continues to haunt American political discourse, the more so in the climate of mounting opposition to Bush's war in Iraq.

FOUR DEAD IN OHIO It is early May 1970. Ho Chi Minh had died the previous September, six years before the communist conquest of the South when its fallen capital, Saigon, would be renamed in his honour.

President Richard Nixon, elected on the promise of a secret plan to end the war, had just announced instead an invasion of Cambodia, igniting protests across the country.

At Kent State University, members of the Ohio National Guard shot dead four students during campus protests.

I was with 100,000 anti-war demonstrators on the Mall in Washington, ringed off by police buses to keep us from getting too close to the White House.

''Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is going to win,'' the more radical among us shouted, referring to the National Liberation Front of the Viet Cong.

I recall adding my voice to ''Draft beer, not boys'' ''Hell no, we won't go'' and the ever popular ''Make love, not war''.

Some said Nixon was amongst us and we thought they must have been hallucinating on LSD. But it turns out he did talk briefly at dawn with protesters at the Lincoln Memorial.

Friends and relatives were coming back in body bags and wheelchairs. The draft was forcing painful choices: fight the ''wrong war'' or flee to Canada. Many of us just wanted America to pull out pronto.

Now our children are experiencing a similar angst. America no longer has the draft but the nearly 2,900 servicemen and women killed and more than 20,000 wounded in Iraq are again taking a toll on the psyche of Americans.

My friend Ellen Quart, who was in Washington for that 1970 protest, wrote recently to tell me of the grief and anger her two children feel after a good friend from their high school was killed in Iraq.

''I'd never seen so many young men, sitting quietly, arms folded as if trying to hold in their pain, while tears and moans burst out,'' Quart, a psychology professor, wrote of the soldier's funeral in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

CLOSING THE BOOK The United States has had a far harder time closing the book on the Vietnam War than has Vietnam, now busily wooing foreign investors to keep the economy growing at 8 percent a year.

The conflict has figured in the past four US presidential campaigns: who served, who dodged; who was brave, who shirked; Bush the Texas National Guardsman against John Kerry, the Swift Boat lieutenant in the Mekong Delta.

The Hanoi Gallery in the Old Quarter of the picturesque capital displays hundreds of lithographed propaganda posters featuring ''Uncle Ho'' and soldiers in heroic poses rendered in the style of socialist realism.

Only one is disturbing. It shows a mother holding a bloodied baby, screaming a thunderbolt at a mean caricature of Nixon's face on a bomb dropping on Hanoi.

''It's been 30 years since our independence and the hurt has faded,'' said Minh Ngueyet, a saleswoman at the gallery. ''That's because we were the winners.'' Reuters LL RN0958