"A Journey to My Bir ..." a Ho Chi Minh City Travel Page by Eurasian68

Ho Chi Minh City is the largest city of Vietnam and the economic powerhouse of the region. Situated in the fertile south along the banks of the Saigon River, Ho Chi Minh City has borne the brunt of the world's struggles for communism, capitalism and colonialism. What has emerged is a resilient and opportunist city with some interesting contradictions.
Despite the development, there are still traditional conical hats weaving in and out of the waves of zipping mopeds. Fading French buildings, propaganda billboards, modern shampoo ads and several imposing tanks someshow slot together quite comfortably.
Formerly Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City has enough to occupy the visitor. It doesn't quite have the sense of history that is found in other parts of Vietnam, but has a likeable dynamism, personality and spirit that is found nowhere else in Indochina.
The French colonial structures and religious pagodas that dot the city lend some charme, but the most famous sights are related to the American war and reunification.

On March 8 1965, US troops enerted south Vietnam to halt the spread of communism from the north. Ten years later, more than 5 million people, most of them Vietnamese civilians, were dead and the last Americans were forced to flee from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon.

The Vietnam War or Second Indochina War was a conflict between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN, or North Vietnam), allied with the National Liberation Front (NLF, or "Viet Cong") against the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam), and its allies - notably the United States military in support of the South, with US combat troops involved from shortly after the Korean War until the official withdrawel in 1975.

Things had gone frombad to worse by 1968 for the Johnson adminstration. In late January, the DRVN and the NLF launched coordinated attacks against the major southern cities. These attacks, known in the West as the Tet Offensive, were designed to force the Johnson administration to the bargaining table. The Communist Party correctly beleived that the American people were growing war-weary and that its continued successes in the countryside had tipped the balance of forces in its favour. Although many historians have since claimed that the Tet Offensive was a military defeat, but psychological victory for the Communists, it had produced the desired results. In late March 1968, a disgraced Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek the Democratic Party's re-nomination for president and hinted that he would go to the bargaining table with the Communists to end the war.

This was the year when I was born.... in the 29th Evacuation Hospital in Can Tho, on the 29th of October.