Morley Safer, Live From Ho Chi Minh City : FLASHBACKS On Returning to Vietnam <i> by Morley Safer (Random House: $18.95; 224 pp.) </i>

Morley Safer takes a trip back to the Vietnam he reported from for most of the conflict, and his findings and recollections are well worth reading. His style is spare and sharp. Mercifully, he avoids finding great lessons where there are none.

I attribute his manner to his being essentially still a Canadian, despite years at CBS. Like most Canadians, he routinely deducts 90% of the ballyhoo of American journalism.

His trip starts in the north, in Hanoi, where the deprivation in daily life today is little changed since the worst years of the war. He writes: “The sheer drabness of the place is punishment enough . . . “ for the crime of being Communist. But in the north, “they just do not seem to care about things like pleasure.”

He visits a hospital outside Hanoi for veterans who lost limbs, a horror of rudimentary prosthetic therapy. The men are old and the building is cold and lonely. “Surely (Vietnam) is not so poor,” Safer writes, “that it must do this to these loyal men who have had their bodies broken so badly. Ho would be ashamed.”

In short, the North Vietnamese veterans were not even born on the Fourth of July.

He visits the legendary Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, then the genius of Dien Bien Phu and Khe Sanh; now, at 80, a classic, aging warrior, spouting clunky wisdoms about his former enemies and their failures.

“Your casualties were a waste of lives,” Giap says, “Ours were martyrs to a cause. I don’t think Westmoreland understood that.” Initially, Giap sounds like a wise and inscrutable Asian patriot. (On second reading, his thoughts are nearly as turgid as some of Westmoreland’s.

Safer has a gift for vignette, no doubt the product of years of trying to get a point across between laxative ads. He sketches scenes of the children in Hanoi who still play in the wreckage of American airplanes in a place called the Park of the B-52s. On shortwave, he hears Oral Roberts Jr. promising Vietnam that, “something Good, something Really Good is going to happen to you . . . today!” And in Danang, he stops at a vast junkyard of American trucks, Jeeps and other war waste, piled up and rusting; tanks and helicopters left like “Ozymandias in camouflage.” Not as much of it left now, explains the junkyard manager. He tells Safer:

“The Japanese ships come every month. They take it back to Japan and melt it down. I don’t know what they do with it after that.”

Well, we know. Just like the last war--from here to infinity.

In between the present-day scenes, Safer remembers the past. He pays a visit to the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, where he once lived in Room 206, now occupied by the Hungarian Embassy.

At the bar at the Caravelle, Safer recalls people he met there during the war--Sen. Barry Goldwater (before his reincarnation as a harmless curmudgeon), drunk and bloodthirsty, railing profanely at reporters; William F. Buckley, flitting lightly among the tables; most notably, Dan Rather, in his formative years, friendly but incipiently odd, sporting a leather holster and a nickel-plated Smith and Wesson .38 revolver. “I could not imagine whom he might have to shoot in the Caravelle.” Safer writes: “The service was always quite good.”

People left over from the war are still to be seen everywhere in Vietnam, painfully so. Veterans on the South Vietnamese side, abandoned by the Americans, are equally orphaned by the Hanoi government. In postwar Saigon, “the Northerners are regarded as another invader, another usurper.”

When word gets around that a CBS VIP is in town, two hapless Vietnamese in their 50s, Mr. Suu and Mr. Tu, show up seeking an audience with Safer. They were cameramen for CBS in May of 1975. They have a letter that complains: “. . . we two persons had not got pay yet.” They have all the paper work, now 15 years old, to back their plea: “Please, dear sir, Mr. Morley, we are desperate. . . .”

Safer assures the reader that, even as we read this, the check is in the mail.

The big excitement of the book is presumably that an important Time magazine reporter and source, Pham Xuan An, was a colonel in the North Vietnamese army all the while he was reporting on the war for the magazine. An had joined the Viet Minh years before the United States was ever in the war, and never quit. Safer goes to visit him, now in comfortable retirement.

An’s loyalties were split between the Communist side and the American friends he had in the press. An arranged for his family to escape to the United States when Saigon fell, but remained behind himself, he says, because his mother was too old to travel. An gets more of a glowing report from Safer than I would think he deserved, and I doubt Random House will be quoting Time’s reviewer.

Safer is a strong writer and pretty fearless, at least by today’s standards, but he should have put more detail in the book. It does read in spots as if it were being timed as a voice-over. I had the feeling that there’s more of legitimate interest he could tell us, particularly of news coverage of the war.

Safer, you may remember, earned Lyndon Johnson’s wrath for his reports on the torching of Vietnam villages by American troops, the images that made L.B.J.’s claim that he wanted to win hearts and minds sound like the lie it was. And Safer steps right up with actual, real-life criticism of the CBS management, calling it a “Comintern” and deriding current television journalists as “contract-crazed chorus girls and boys.” Connie Chung, call your lawyer.

Obviously, the Vietnam War was for Safer, as for so many other journalists now at the height of their craft, the defining and refining experience of their lives. Unlike the previous generation of reporters, whose expectations were formed by World War II’s victory and reconstruction, the reporters in Vietnam saw defeat and confusion. And in the confusion, the press was blamed, to a large extent, for the loss. Safer, and other reporters who can write analytically, should be re-examining what happened with even greater incisiveness or this charge will stick.

Truth is, after all, war’s first casualty, and the victors get to bury it. We were not the victors in Vietnam. And the truth is still out there, wandering around somewhere.