Ky, who was given permission last month by Hanoi to return home to celebrate next week's the Lunar New Year festival of Tet, was expected to fly in to Ho Chi Minh City's Tan Son Nhat international airport from Bangkok.

Perhaps eager to prevent any scenes of jubiliation in the former South Vietnamese capital that could embarrass the communist regime, the foreign ministry refused to reveal his arrival time and has downplayed his visit.

"I am very happy that he is returning. It is time to forget the past and get on with the future," said a Saigonese motorbike taxi driver and ex-South Vietnamese marine who spent 10 years in a labour camp after the war.

Ky's last glimpse of Saigon -- subsequently renamed in honour of the Vietnamese Communist Party's founding father -- was from an American helicopter on April 29, 1975, the day before the city fell to North Vietnamese forces.

Hanoi has previously rejected the 73-year-old's requests to return but in July last year Vietnam's ambassador to France, Nguyen Dinh Bin, approached him and proposed the trip.

"Bin told me that now is the time to put the past behind us, to not make an issue of the past and bring Vietnam together for the future," the 73-year-old Ky told Radio Free Asia last week from his home in Los Angeles.

"The war ended 30 years ago, but it still divides us into two camps. So I want to put aside the past hatred, and just sit together and talk to one another face-to-face," he said.

Around 2.7 million Vietnamese live overseas. Many left for the West following the end of French colonial rule in 1954 and after the Vietnam War.

Hanoi has tried to tap the professional skills and wealth of the exile community for more than a decade. But it was only in January last year that the ruling Communist Party formally called for an end to discrimination against individuals with an unsavoury "personal history".

But Ky, one of the most senior officials of the defunct US-backed South Vietnamese regime to return, is no ordinary tourist.

After spending two years at a military aviation college in France, he returned to Vietnam in 1954 and held a series of commands in the South Vietnamese air force following the division of the country.

He was a key player in the overthrow of President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 and after the 1965 military coup became prime minister. Ky was elevated to the vice-presidential ranks with the 1967 elections, a post he held until 1971.

Since the communist takeover in 1975 the former general has lived in California.

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