Vietnamese

What if you want a quick lunch of soup or salad? Or maybe you're in the mood for a vegetarian meal? Or maybe it's time for multiple dishes with contrasting flavors, varied textures and exotic ingredients? Vietnamese cuisine can satisfy all these requirements and is becoming increasingly popular. Pho Dat Thanh, off Snowden River Parkway at Columbia Market Place, opened April 17 and offers about 150 authentic Vietnamese dishes. "We're still working with the menu, to improve it and find new and excellent dishes," said manager Jim Louang.

A tiny corner of Lexington Market bears witness to the growing mainstream appeal of Asian grilling. Amid the bustle of carryout chicken and pit-beef sandwiches and the other traditional fare offered in Baltimore's oldest market, 32-year-old Sunmi Son scurries to fill orders at Bulkoki Corner, her Korean barbecue stand. For $3.95, her customers get a long, thin strip of beef that has been marinated for a day in soy sauce, garlic, ginger, sugar and fruit juice, then grilled. It's served on a bed of steamed rice.

PITTSBURGH - The government of Vietnam stinks. But it doesn't stink nearly as much as it did just a few years ago, and it is likely to stink less in the near future. If we are shrewd, we can accelerate the rate at which the government of Vietnam de-stinks. But we must have the patience to realize that change will come at an Asian pace, not an American one. There will be no significant moves toward genuine free enterprise, human rights, or democracy until the war generation in the Communist Party leadership has passed away.

SINCE BOB Kerrey's confession that his unit killed about 20 unarmed civilians in Vietnam, there has been a lot of talk about "the fog of war" and the "moral ambiguity" facing our soldiers there. Especially noteworthy is the way other veterans have rallied to his defense. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "The injunction to love all as we would be loved is the first casualty of war." War's traditional first casualty is, of course, truth. The "war is hell" defense was the standard American reaction to the revelations of the My Lai massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in 1968.

In the fall of 1969 in Bing Duong province of Vietnam, a North Vietnamese soldier sat at a table in a large underground tunnel, taking notes. "Do you know about the heavy artillery warning yet?" he scribbled in English as an American soldier's voice crackled over his radio. "Negative," another American responded. "The coordinates are 550 600, 3/5/31 until 1130 hours," the first soldier said. In the margin, the North Vietnamese soldier wrote "heavy artillery = B52 Strike, at [11:30 a.m.]"

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - The Thanksgiving party at Pho 79, a Vietnamese noodle shop, crackled with the laughter of family and friends who sat drinking and sipping pho - Vietnam's signature minty, beef noodle soup. The reverie ended when an argument between two men in the parking lot led to gunfire and the death of a 26-year-old man. When Virginia Beach police officers arrived, they encountered the confusing din of an unfamiliar language inside the restaurant. Officers struggled to understand witnesses' accounts told in Vietnamese or broken English.

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam - In the spring of 1975 - less than two weeks before Saigon would fall to the Communists - 7-year-old Tony Nong and his mother, Ann Tran, a Vietnamese employee of the U.S. Agency for International Development, hailed a taxi and headed to the airport and what they hoped would be a new life together in America. The city was under martial law, and the streets were filled with fear and chaos. They stopped for a drink of sugar cane water because Tony's 4-year-old sister, Mimi, was thirsty; the taxi driver fled.

HANOI, Vietnam - When President Clinton attends a Vietnamese production tomorrow evening at the Hanoi Opera House, he will be stepping back through time in a city that is among the most beautiful in Asia. After entering the ornate French-colonial building, which is a smaller version of the opera house in Paris, the president will probably stride up the red carpet that covers the Italian marble staircase and sink into a crushed velvet chair in the VIP box overlooking the horseshoe-shaped theater.

They aren't exactly your typical foodie couple. Paul Pham, a clinical pharmacist by training, is on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. His wife, Nina Song, operates two eponymous coffee bars. (One Nina's is in Glen Burnie, the other is downtown.) So why are they venturing into the often perilous business of running a restaurant? "We wanted a good Vietnamese restaurant to eat in," says Pham, "and there weren't any in Ellicott City." The couple decided to open one in the Golden Triangle shopping center on the corner of Routes 29 and 40. House of Asia should be up and running by mid-July, once the various inspections have been completed.

As Saigon was falling, Van Nguyen bounced about in the South China Sea in a battered boat with a dead engine. After two days, a U.S. Navy ship approached. He clambered aboard. On deck, finally safe, Nguyen found himself on the unsteady threshold of his new life. Eventually finding his way to the Washington area, the former police officer worked night and day jobs, pooled money with relatives and hardly ever slept. In the quarter-century since arriving in the United States, he finally found his solid ground: A front yard and a place in the American middle class.