SURFING INTO THE MELANCHOLY PAST

By GREGORY JAYNES DANANG

Grunt: It's pretty hairy in there. It's Charlie's point. Robert Duvall: Charlie don't surf. -- Apocalypse Now

During lulls in the rock-'n'-roll war there were G.I.s who rode the waves of the South China Sea on pieces of fiber glass shipped from home. The stretch of sugary sand they favored most came to be known as China Beach. When the war was quit and the Americans were gone, nobody, much less Charlie, was borne upon a breaker for a very long time. Then, about a year ago, a sentimental American vet in Hong Kong persuaded a couple of sports promoters to pitch a world-class surfing competition back in the very sea he had assaulted in 1969. Last week it happened. From Australia, Brazil, Tahiti, the U.S. and one or two other points came young hard bodies packing their tools in padded sarcophagi. The boards were put on a bus in Ho Chi Minh City, bound for Danang -- except that two bridges washed out midway. The mostly monosyllabic surfers (How do you like it here? ''Awesome.'' How do you feel? ''Stoked'') hung out without complaint. After all, all they ever do is eat, sleep, surf and have sex, wearing basically no more raiment in one endeavor than another. The scene of this wait was the Non Nuoc Hotel, which offered the same amenities (dim corridors, rough toilet paper) that you get in what used to be called the Soviet bloc. The Vietnamese smiled charmingly throughout, and soon enough the boards arrived and the games commenced. There was something squirrelly about the event -- an American flag snapping above terrain that has been under a U.S. trade embargo since 1975 -- but then squirrelly is a feeling Vietnam gives you these days. Out yonder was a gunless gunboat, its Vietnamese colors set off against a red gob of sun. In the bar was flat, skunky-tasting beer that had sat in the heat for a year, though the hapless representative of San Miguel, a Filipino brewery, insisted that he had accompanied 70,000 fresh cases into the country; they just got away from him, is all. An Australian sportswear manufacturer brought $20,000 worth of clothes to Danang, but they got away from him too. The host country kept on smiling, then stole my eyeglasses. ''We smile because we are happy to see you,'' a waif of a foreign affairs officer, named Le Thi Thu Hanh, said. She flashed a wonderful advertisement for dental hygiene. Indeed, said a Taiwan businessman, ''the Vietnamese would declare another war tomorrow and immediately declare themselves the losers if they could just get the Americans back.'' Venture capitalists were all over the place, maneuvering for the lifting of the embargo. A fellow from Wyoming, name of Irl, was trying to put together a golf resort here on China Beach, soon as the green light came from Washington. ''We want to put in hospitals as part of the development,'' Irl said. ''You don't want your tourists getting sick and dying.'' Irl said -- as does just about everybody one runs across in Vietnam -- that the MIA issue is a stumbling block, yes, but an issue, no. ''Hanoi is bending over backward looking for old bones.'' The trouble is, according to the herd of entrepreneurs moving cross the country like a solid wind, Bill Clinton has played out his string with the Pentagon, what with all the base closings and the gay controversy. So what if there are Americans unaccounted for? There are 300,000 Vietnamese missing. Let's get on with commerce. We're talking 69 million consumers here. And besides, said my companion Dave, who should know, just put it out of your mind that there are any old American soldiers presently living in these parts under duress. Dave spent two years as a prisoner of war. He says there wouldn't be a POW alive, living the way he had to live. For trying to escape once, they shattered his Achilles tendon. Dave is 46 years old and healthy now, at least in body. The surfing competition was his idea, as was keeping his full name to himself. The POW-MIA question is emotional, and people have come after him before for dealing with Vietnam, so Dave aims for a low presence. Nevertheless, because he was the genuine article, a war hero, the only one here, the press glommed on to Dave like beggar lice. ''They keep coming after me,'' he said, ''trying to corner me. They don't want to talk about surfing, but I do. I know what they want, but I haven't allowed myself to be cornered in a long time.'' In 1968 Dave, a surfer from Laguna Beach, California, became a Lurp, which is to say a sergeant in a Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol unit. These were said to be some of the baddest s.o.b.s of the war, and anyone who saw them then knew they did not suffer fools. They operated out where no one else went, and if you ever saw them in a civilized setting, they were likely to be drunk and abusive, and no wonder. Today Dave is a boon companion, but you are aware that his fuse doesn't have much length. We hired a car and went up to Hue together, intending to go to the Ashau Valley, home of Apbia Mountain, or Hamburger Hill, the site in May 1969 of one of the most appalling battles of the war. Dave was there. He was in enough places to be shot twice. When he got home in 1971, they popped him full of Thorazine. He wound up in Veracruz taking a Mexican passport, which he uses to this day. Out of Danang the road snaked north along the coast through emerald country, through two-cow towns with broken coolers brimming with hot soft drinks, mangy dogs sulking in the shade. Some of the most physically beautiful people on earth glided by on bicycles. All smiled. ''There's an old French fort on top of a mountain up here,'' said Dave. ''It was an ugly place to be.'' We stopped, looked at a few thousand bullet holes. On through Phu Bai, gone back now to rice paddies and oxen and lacerating elephant grass. Next, lovely old Hue; there the monks have enshrined the Austin that in 1963 carried one of their number to what was then Saigon, where he immolated himself (a photograph of the fiery moment was stuck on the grille). Then out on the Perfume River in a rented boat so busily tarted up that it resembled nothing so much as spaghetti Bolognese. The Lurp, a little sorry hooch in his belly, loosened up. ''Yeah, I saw Mr. Bob Hope. They came and got us in the bush. Said we were going to see Mr. Bob Hope. We thought we were the luckiest guys on earth. We got all cleaned up, went to Danang. Surfed for two days. Then they sent us out to set up an outer perimeter. I saw Mr. Bob Hope's ass come over in a chopper, and I saw Mr. Bob Hope's ass leave in a chopper. Yeah, I saw Mr. Bob Hope.'' The sun slid down and the green water grew dark, and kingfishers rode the air in search of supper. Now and again another boat passed, and the people smiled and waved, smiled and waved. In the morning we crossed the river on a ferry, passing two rusted American armor-plated patrol boats moored to a . banana tree. In the Ashau Valley, denuded today, Dave fell silent. After some time, he said, ''A lot of good guys bought it here.'' We looked for Hamburger Hill, where 242 of them bought it in a week. Once, a rocket-propelled grenade took half the face off one of Dave's buddies. Dave had his mate on his shoulder when he got shot himself. A month later Hanoi held the hill again. We couldn't find it. In the villages, in every dirt yard was a pile of scrap metal: live M-16 rounds, cannon casings, ammo boxes. An old woman thin as wire said she went to Hue during the fiercest of the fighting. ''I saw many bosses,'' she said, meaning American generals. Dave, still looking for Hamburger Hill, said, ''I don't know, man. You chopper in. It's raining. People are shooting at you. You're running, just trying to stay alive. It doesn't matter.'' Back in Danang, I tried to change a $100 bill, but the hotel could eat only $75. That was its entire stock of cash. In the bar Irl was playing a drinking game with a one-star Vietnamese general and his entourage. You spin a lazy Susan bearing a drink, and whoever it stops in front of has to drink it down. Irl was in very poor shape. Dave was sunk in a funk that he wouldn't climb out of for days. Out on the South China Sea, an Australian named Simon Law won the surfing contest. The purse was $8,000. ''Thanks for giving me the money,'' he said. And that was all he said.