Agence France-Presse
NHA TRANG - Doctors aboard a US Navy hospital ship anchored in a Vietnamese harbor Friday started treating local patients in a show of medical diplomacy with the former enemy nation.
Staff from the US military, charities and partner countries were planning to treat hundreds of patients aboard and onshore during the 10-day stay of the USNS Mercy off the southern resort town of Nha Trang.
The converted supertanker, painted white with large red crosses, was docked off Nha Trang, near Cam Ranh Bay, which was a major US military base during the war that ended with the 1975 fall of Saigon.
"Not since 1975 have we worked alongside like this with the Vietnamese government," said naval communications officer Lieutenant David Bennet during a ship visit. "This is a huge step in creating a new partnership."
Among the first patients aboard was Ngo Kim Hung -- an 82-year-old veteran of Vietnam's wars against the French and the Americans, and himself a medical doctor -- who had checked in for gall bladder surgery.
"The war is the past now and the people of both countries are looking to the future," he said. "The medical cooperation between the two countries is a good thing and I think it should continue."
US diplomats say the visit is part of forging closer ties since the 1995 normalization of relations with Vietnam, whose Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung is next week due to meet US President George W. Bush in Washington.
"We're hoping to build capacity to perhaps be able to respond to a natural disaster in the future, and it's also part of our overall effort to deepen our relationship with Vietnam," said John Aloisi, US deputy chief of mission.
On Thursday the medical aid project brought Cindy McCain, wife of the Republican Party's presumptive presidential nominee John McCain, to Vietnam, where she visited the charity Operation Smile, of which she is a board member.
The Virginia-based group performs corrective surgery on children born with facial deformities such as cleft lips and cleft palates, and its surgeons were planning to start operating at the weekend on over 90 children.
The USNS Mercy, designed to support troops in war and provide disaster relief, has a trauma facility, X-ray and CAT scan units, a dental surgical suite, an optometry and lens laboratory, a burn care centre and a blood bank.
Before docking in Vietnam -- where its US medical teams were due to work with counterparts from Vietnam and several other nations -- it visited the Philippines and is later due to sail on to East Timor and Papua New Guinea.