Two-thirds of Vietnam's population is younger than 35, with no memory of war, its threat of sudden death, and its hardships.

The young people who have grown up through years of peacetime economic growth say their focus is on the fast-developing country's progress.

"I am proud to be Vietnamese, as we could defeat major powers like the French and the Americans. But I don't think many people now, especially the youth, want to talk much about what happened in the past," says Tran Mi Lan, 22, who sells clothes at a shopping center in Vietnam's southern commercial capital - Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon.

"I want Vietnam in the next 20 years to become another Singapore," says Nguyen Cong Truong, 28, an investment consultant.

With a per capita income of just over US$1,000, about 37 times lower than Singapore's, Vietnam has a long way to go.

Most people still work as farmers and in HCMC, the motorcycle, not the car, rules the road.

But, occasionally, a Ferrari or a Porsche can be seen, and the city's tidy Dong Khoi Street – known as "Tu Do" during the war – has started to look like a tiny piece of Singapore, with boutiques selling designer fashions and other luxury goods.

The battle against American forces and their surrogate regime in the then South Vietnam began in the early 1960s, costing at least three million Vietnamese and 58,000 American lives before it ended on April 30, 1975 when that first North Vietnamese tank crashed through the gates of the south's presidential palace.

Earlier Vietnamese resistance against French colonizers began in 1946 and continued for eight years until France's defeat at Dien Bien Phu led to the country's division.

"My parents told me that in 1968, life was very difficult and many people had to live on cassava," said Truong, whose mother and father still work the land in the southern province of Tay Ninh, earning just over US$100 a month.

Truong says he makes up to six times that much now.

"I was born in peacetime. I have the chance to improve myself," says another young man, Le The Huan, 20, a law student sitting in the park with a portable computer in his lap and an iPod beside him.

Even his parents did not talk much about the war, he said, because they were only 12 and 13 years old when it ended.

"I think that my life now, of course, is much better than my parents', materially," said Tran Trong Nguyen, a post-graduate physics student working on his equations across from the palace, which is now a museum.

"We have more opportunity for study, health care, education, and life now is more stable compared with the past," said Nguyen, also the son of farmers.

They may be focused on the present and the future, but young people are aware of the sacrifices made by previous generations, says Pham Thanh Cong, 52.

"The majority of them will never turn their backs on what happened in the past, as history is undeniable," Cong says.

He spent five years as a fighter for the Vietnamese Liberation Army and is now director of the My Lai Museum honoring hundreds of villagers massacred by US troops in 1968.

Source: AFP