It felt a little odd, even a touch irreverent, swinging a Callaway driver in the land of "Apocalypse Now," Khe Sahn and Ho Chi Minh. And yet there I stood on a carpet of manicured grass outside Hanoi, looking toward a small flag in the distance.

My wife, Diana, and I needed a break from the traffic-choked cities of Vietnam, where we were spending a few days last October, and so we had booked a round of golf with a tour company and hopped into the back of an SUV with a driver partial to symphonies. With soaring violins to soothe us, we drove from the capital's cacophonous streets to its outskirts, where Vietnam's rural past and booming present stand side by side.

First, we saw a towering glass apartment complex shadowing a field of grazing cows; then a factory belching smoke over neighboring rice fields; and, finally, Kings' Island Golf Club — northern Vietnam's first course, opened in 1993, when the country began to trade communism for managed capitalism.

The club's 36 holes are wonderfully remote, accessible only by a boat ride from the club's main parking lot. Surrounded by misty mountains with poetic names, the area felt at times like a Buddhist retreat.

Until, that is, we reached the clubhouse, which was painted peach. Not just any peach — the peach usually reserved for posters of Florida. A "monster burger" also stared up at us from the lunch menu, and our caddy, though she wore a classic Vietnamese cone-shaped hat, seemed perfectly trained in the English of American duffers.

When my drive sliced right over the trees, she said "sit, sit" — a phrase that became far too familiar during our time together. Or my favorite, when the ball splashed into the water: "What-a-pity."

We visited three golf courses in Vietnam on this trip, and at each we found varying degrees of the same American-Vietnamese mix. Perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised. Golf there has always been an import.

The French built a handful of small courses in the 1920s and 1930s for colonial leaders near Saigon. Only a portion of the Vietnamese elite followed their lead — none perhaps more than the Francophile emperor Bao Dai, who famously picked up the game while studying in France. So much did he love the game (and his French patrons) that he even built a small eight-hole course in Da Lat, a mountain retreat favored for its temperate weather.

And when the Americans arrived a few decades later, this was where they often played. Da Lat was the Switzerland of the war; it mostly remained peaceful because of an agreement among the warring sides to set the area aside for rest and relaxation.

Perhaps as a result, many Vietnamese came to see golf as a mark of imperialism, a pastime of the idle or exploitive rich. Ho Chi Minh was reportedly not a fan. Indeed, when the last American officials left in 1975, his followers — Vietnam's victorious Communists — effectively banned the sport, making it clear that such bourgeois pursuits were no longer acceptable. Golf essentially disappeared. Weeds grew over holes. Nine irons rusted.

It took the collapse of the Soviet Union to revive the game. As the country opened to international commerce in the early 90s, a trickle of foreign businessmen began flowing into Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. Demand for the links came with them, leading to the reopening of a few old courses and the construction of new ones. But Vietnam was still a long way from becoming a golf destination on par with Indonesia or other Pacific countries where the game had taken off.

Part of the problem was infrastructure. Arrivals to the nascent golf scene recall flying to places like Da Lat on old Russian Yak-40s or driving on roads with potholes the size of coffins.

Then, just as improvements were beginning to appear, the Asian financial crisis hit.

"For a while, there were a lot of going-away parties," said Jeff Puchalski, a former golf pro at Wilshire Country Club in Los Angeles, who has been managing golf courses in Vietnam for more than a decade.

Eventually though, he said, golf seemed to reach critical mass. Nick Faldo visited and in 2001 Congress ratified the U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement, normalizing relations with its former enemy. And while the SARS outbreak in Asia in 2003 once again threw the golf industry for a loop, this time it recovered and kept growing.