Vietnam suffered mass near starvation after the war thanks to misguided communist economic policies. Go travel around the country like I have and tell me how much the average working class Vietnamese feels the current economic "boom".
It's hardly surprising that the communist government went crazy-anti-capitalism after having half the country turned to mush by the Americans, but things are getting better. After the war, the communists didn't even allow privately-owned shops, and the economy was awful. They started reversing that and the economy started recovering.
But just because somewhere else is doing better doesn't mean that a place hasn't improved significantly in recent years. That's a boom.