ESCONDIDO —— Ruben Rojas couldn't wait to revisit Vietnam, the place that had scarred him.

In 1970, he had returned home from his tour of duty, a 21-year-old with a Purple Heart and a lot of rage.

"As I saw my friends either being killed or wounded, I had this tremendous hate for those people," Rojas said. "I hated that country and I hated the people."

Those feelings have finally evaporated, he said last week.

Rojas, now 55, returned April 17 from a seven-day tour of Vietnam and its historic cities. He joined 11 other Purple Heart vets, who were selected by the Veterans of Foreign Wars in a nationwide lottery. Rojas, an Army veteran, was the only member of the group from California.

He said he got news of his selection on Dec. 1, the anniversary date of his original return from Vietnam.

Like so many other young people in 1970, Rojas had been a student and anti-war protester. He said he took off a semester from Mesa College in San Diego to earn enough money for a car —— and was immediately drafted and sent to Vietnam.

Thirty-five years later, he says he was eager to join the VFW trip.

"The fact that I could hate that much always bothered me. One of the reasons I wanted to go back was to get a chance with the Vietnamese people on a better level," Rojas said, sitting in his Escondido home last week

"And I found that. They were so nice to me."

The anger Rojas felt dissolved, he said, after seeing that the Vietnamese people have apparently moved beyond the conflict that killed more than 58,000 Americans in action and 5 million Vietnamese. Saturday marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) and the collapse of the South Vietnamese government.

Rojas found that his memories no longer fit reality. Somehow, that was a relief, he said.

"Almost everywhere I went, young people would come up to me and ask if I'm American," Rojas said. "And I said yes. And they said, 'Would you mind if I practice my English with you?' Nowadays everyone is speaking English, and they all want to come to America."

"Invariably, the next question they would ask is, 'What state are you from?' And I would say California. And they all went crazy and started calling their friends over."

Rojas said he practiced his Vietnamese, too, learning to say things like "hello" and "thank you."

"The words I knew before in Vietnamese were, 'Stop, show me your ID or I'll kill you,'" he said. "You see the difference. The words before were only commands and always yelled."

For the first time, Rojas said, he befriended people who had once been his enemies. He recalled meeting a man and a woman who used to be Viet Cong guerrillas. They showed him their wounds, some of them the ghastly results, they said, of torture by South Vietnamese soldiers.

The show-and-tell was in the spirit of camaraderie, he said, not bitterness.

"She told us through an interpreter that the people consider the war is long over," Rojas said. "She said we should take a message back to the U.S. that they have genuine affection for us."

Rojas said Vietnam was a foreign world at times —— not because it lies 8,000 miles from San Diego (the trip took 26 hours), but because it didn't resemble the country he remembered.

The touring veterans first stayed in a lavish, Western-style resort in Ho Chi Minh City —— nothing like the dense, isolated jungles Rojas once fought in. He dined on platters of seafood, noodles and fresh fruit.

"Everything was five stars about it: the food, the landscape, everything," he said of the hotel. "But it's all surrounded by a wall. As soon as you walk outside it's poor, dirt poor."

He saw a strange mix of new and old, of healing and wounded, of ultramodern and primitive.

"There are Internet cafes as you walk down the street. Some of it is so modern and up-to-date," he said. "Some people working next to that were working with tools that were thousands of years old."

For Rojas, the visit to Vietnam concluded a healing process that took nearly two-thirds of his life.

As a young man, Rojas returned home to an angry America, he said. He was surrounded by college students opposed to the war, so he didn't tell anyone he was a soldier.

"I basically turned my back on it," he said. "I think because I didn't mention it or process it, it just kind of cooked inside of me."

Ten years later, Rojas had his first conversation about the experience with his brother, he said. Ten years after that, the nightmares came.

"They would be more vivid and more violent, and that's when I started to 'medicate' myself," he said. "Whether it was alcohol or drugs, I was medicating myself not to feel those feelings or dream those dreams —— which only made my life worse."

His wife, Bev, begged him to see a counselor. She had watched him suffer a long "spiral downward" that left him isolated from everyone but his wife and their twin daughters.

"Because of my wife's suggestion and my wife's love for me, I went," he said. "It was probably the best thing I ever did for myself."

He finished therapy a year later and visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington for the first time. He sobered up and became a born-again Christian.

During his trip, the veterans' group toured various battle sites, now overgrown with vegetation, that evoked emotional stories from the men. It was a bonding experience, Rojas said, for a dozen veterans who started the trip as strangers.

Stops included places such as Danang, once home to a huge U.S. military base; the city of Hue, nearly destroyed during the war and later rebuilt; and China Beach, where soldiers were sent for a little relaxation.

Rojas' most memorable moment, he said, was standing in the once-forbidden demilitarized zone of North Vietnam and thinking: "The war happened. It's over."

"The last of all that I carried from that time has been processed," Rojas said last week, "and it's like I've been made whole."