The war ended in early 1973 for American soldiers — but not for Vietnamese. The program of reconciliation outlined in the Paris peace accords collapsed into renewed fighting between the forces of Hanoi and Saigon. In early 1975 the PAVN launched a carefully prepared offensive in the Central Highlands. Caught off guard, then confused, and finally badly outmaneuvered, ARVN units panicked and fled south. In April PAVN tanks rolled into Saigon. As the long war came to an end, most Americans looked away, while Vietnamese who had fought for national unity exulted and many on the losing side fled the country.
The guns had fallen silent, leaving Vietnamese and Americans to grapple with difficult questions. In both countries, anxious nationalists went to work either to preserve the memory of a glorious victory or to redeem the shame of defeat. Just as determined and increasingly vocal were the veterans on both sides whose lives were shadowed by the private memories of war. They became in time implacable public witnesses to what they and their comrades had experienced and to the special ways those experiences had marked them.
For Vietnam the postwar turmoil was manifold and profound. The wounds of war on the land and people were deep and widespread. Le Duan and his colleagues faced the tasks of political reunification and reconciliation as well as economic reconstruction. Heavy-handed assertion of Hanoi’s rule in the South created political disaffection, while clumsy efforts to integrate the country’s two long-separated economies resulted in disruption, shortages, and hardship. In what amounted to a referendum on the new order, many Vietnamese voted with their feet. Saigon loyalists, anticipating the worst, had been the first to flee. They were followed by ethnic Chinese dispossessed of their businesses as part of Hanoi’s imposition of a state-directed economy on the South. Ethnic Chinese were also suspected of disloyalty as tensions rose between Hanoiand Beijing. Postwar refugees of all kinds totaled well over 1 million, perhaps close to 2 million.
International rivalry added to domestic difficulties as former revolutionary allies turned on each other. The new Cambodian regime installed by the Khmer Rouge and headed by Pol Pot proved a serious thorn in Hanoi’s side, with its oppression of Vietnamese residents and its armed incursions into Vietnamese territory. With patience at last exhausted, Le Duan dispatched forces to end Pol Pot’s bloody rule and set up in early 1979 a government of Khmer Rouge defectors that was friendly to Hanoi. The price was substantial: the costly burden of the occupation itself, international condemnation and isolation, and China’s retaliatory invasion of northern Vietnam.
Against this troubled backdrop, three kinds of postwar Vietnamese perspectives emerged. Soul searching was the order of the day among those closely tied to the Saigon government. They had lost all — position, honor, country — and many faced uncertain futures either as exiles or as inmates in Vietnam’s “reeducation centers.” The Communist Party leadership clung to its well-honed and deeply ingrained patriotic picture of the war as a just cause in yet another heroic Vietnamese struggle against outsiders. This picture was reflected in popular celebrations, public memorials, and literary mythmaking. Finally, soldiers who had fought the good fight began expressing their own, less positive views of what war meant. Veterans organized to demand better care, and they insisted on communicating their wartime experiences. Their dark narratives were at odds with the upbeat government orthodoxy and thus encountered official disapproval and censorship.
For Americans, Saigon’s fall represented a challenge to national narratives of righteousness and great achievements. In what amounted to a national psychic ordeal, the ghosts of the lost war kept coming back — on Veterans Day, on the campaign trail, in debates over the use of U.S. forces abroad, in the design of memorials, and in literary and historical polemics. Retrospective views divided along three main interpretive lines, each rooted in positions developed during the wartime controversies.
Some, echoing Stennis, Nixon, and Agnew, saw in the war primarily a betrayal of a good cause. The U.S. mission in Vietnam had been to stop human oppression and promote freedom. The blame for failure rested on decision makers who had been reluctant to bring American power fully to bear and on elites who had sowed public doubt and disunity. Those determined to avoid another betrayal called for giving a free hand to thepresident as commander in chief and to the military as the agent of the president’s will, for mobilizing public support, for controlling dissent and the media, and for offering troops in the field unwavering support.
The more critical perspective, harking back to Potter, Morgenthau, Fulbright, and King, roundly denounced the war as a criminal act of aggression, as a betrayal of U.S. values, as immoral and racist, as fundamentally misconceived, and as ultimately foredoomed. What all these charges have in common is the conviction that avoiding other Vietnams would involve effecting profound changes in American society and attitudes.
The middle ground sought to transcend wartime acrimony by embracing the notion of a no-fault tragedy. Americans and Vietnamese came to blows because of who they were and how as a result they misunderstood each other. Their experiences and their convictions, however well or ill intentioned, set them at odds, with terrible results. The impulse to draw lessons was here turned into a search for patterns of miscalculations and misperceptions that might make future policy makers wiser and more prudent.
In the postwar period, two groups of Americans loomed especially large. One was veterans who spoke out in an extraordinarily creative stream of memoirs, oral histories, novels, and poetry. Like the accounts of their Vietnamese counterparts, what they had to say coexisted uneasily with political retrospectives and at once inspired and transcended the entertainment industry’s vision of the war. The other, more practically consequential group consisted of policy and political types bent on drawing lessons. Their pronouncements perpetuated a long-standing tendency to imagine the war as a largely if not exclusively American affair. Hawks still proclaimed their faith in the decisive role of force while seldom looking carefully at the will and capacity of the foe whom American power was meant to compel or persuade. Doves continued to profess sensitivity to the costs of intervention while failing to question whether the Vietnamese case could in fact be generalized.
Readers now have a chance to reflect on the close of the war and the diverse assessments offered in its aftermath.
• How did Le Duan conceive victory and Gerald Ford defeat in the closing phase of the Vietnam War?
• In the estimate of those aligned with the Saigon government, what was the decisive element in their defeat? How much blame did they put on the United States?
•What memories did Vietnamese and American veterans carry from the war? How different were their memories from each other?
• Of the divergent lessons drawn by American and Vietnamese leaders, which are the most compelling in light of the evidence presented in earlier chapters?
With U.S. combat forces gone by early 1973, Hanoi went through a period of posturing over political reconciliation stipulated by the Paris peace agreement and, in 1974, worked out plans for a final campaign in the South to extend over 1975 and 1976. PAVN had some 400,000 troops there with a good logistical network behind them. The Saigon government had been weakened by diminished U.S. support and afflicted by war weariness and economic crisis. Nixon had been immobilized by the Watergate scandal and had resigned. The hands of his successor, Gerald Ford, were tied by a popular and congressional aversion to Vietnam. The DRV’s Pham Van Dong whimsically predicted in December 1974 that “the Americans would not come back even if you offered them candy.”1
In early October the Politburo gathered to consider plans formulated under Giap’s supervision for a new offensive. Le Duan’s letter, based on his speech on that occasion, provides insight not only on military calculations but also on Hanoi’s view of the Paris accords and its concerns over U.S.-China collusion.
[T]he US still entertains the hope that its henchmen in the South can hold out thanks to one million puppet troops, 20,000 US advisers and a huge amount of US aid, and will be able to control the cities and a large part of the countryside. Thus, the Americans entered South Vietnam because they thought they were strong and we were weak, that they would win and we would be defeated. Now the Americans have to pull out because we are strong and they are weak, we have won and have made a big stride forward; they have been defeated and have to back down. …
What was our strategic intention when we signed the Paris Agreement?
While saying that the Americans had to pull out because they were defeated, we knew that the us still had great potentials and many wicked schemes. We never indulged in wishful thinking and never said that they were “out of steam”. Though we had won repeated victories and had gained in strength, we still met with many difficulties. At that time, the aid from our camp [China and the Soviet Union] was not sufficient and timely as we had expected. The compromise and collusion between the US and China has rendered our war of resistance more complicated. In that conjuncture, we had to create for ourselves a posture for steady advance and for certain victory. It was for that reason that we signed the Paris Agreement.
For us, the importance of the Paris Agreement does not lie in the admission that there are two administrations, two armies and two areas of control, the future formation of a three-faction government, but essentially in the fact that US troops have to pull out while our forces can stay on, that the North-South corridor remains open, the great rear is firmly linked to the great front, that our offensive battle array is imposing. …
… Our main task now is to topple the puppet regime, and in concrete terms, to overthrow the Nguyen Van Thieu clique, who represent the interests of the feudal class, the compradores, bureaucrats and militarists.
We are resolved to enlist the greatest efforts of the whole Party, the whole army, the whole nation in both zones in order to launch the last general offensive and uprising, bring the revolutionary war to its climax, wipe out and disband the whole puppet army, occupy Saigon — the central den of the enemy — and all other cities, topple the puppet administrations at all levels, seize all the power for the people, completely liberate South Vietnam, complete the people’s national democratic revolution in the whole country and proceed to reunify our homeland. From now on preparations should be made with a sense of urgency, thus creating the best material basis for a powerful and rapid offensive to win brisk and complete victory in the years 1975 and 1976.
The major offensive anticipated by Le Duan and named in honor of Ho Chi Minh began in March 1975. Much more quickly than the Communist leaders hoped and the American leaders feared, the Thieu regime collapsed. With defeat looming, Thieu abandoned his office and fled the country — but not before taking a final swipe at the Americans who had let him down. His long, extemporaneous parting remarks were delivered before the National Assembly in Saigon and broadcast over national television.
The Americans have asked us to do an impossible thing. … You have asked us to do something you failed to do with half a million powerful troops and skilled commanders and with nearly $300 billion in expenditures over six long years. If I do not say that you were defeated by the Communists in Vietnam I must modestly say that you did not win either. But you found an honorable way out. And at present, when our army lacks weapons, ammunition, helicopters, aircraft, and B-52s, you ask us to do an impossible thing like filling the ocean up with stones. …
Likewise, you have let our combatants die under the hail of shells. This is an inhumane act by an inhumane ally. …
The United States is proud of being an invincible defender of the just cause and the ideal of freedom in this world. … I asked [a visiting U.S. congressional delegation]: Are U.S. statements worthy? Are U.S. commitments still valid? Some $300 million is not a big sum to you. Compared to the amount of money you spent here in ten years, this sum is sufficient for only ten days of fighting. And with this sum, you ask me to score a victory or to check the Communist aggression — a task which you failed to fulfill in six years with all U.S. forces and with such an amount of money. This is absurd.
With U.S. Vietnam policy reaching its dead end and with a longtime client facing imminent demise, Ford publicly suggested that the best response was to look away.
Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished [enthusiasticresponse by a heavily student audience] as far as America is concerned. As I see it, the time has come to look forward to an agenda for the future, to unify, to bind up the Nation’s wounds, and to restore its health and its optimistic self-confidence. …
I ask that we stop refighting the battles and the recriminations of the past. I ask that we look now at what is right with America, at our possibilities and our potentialities for change and growth and achievement and sharing. I ask that we accept the responsibilities of leadership as a good neighbor to all peoples and the enemy of none. I ask that we strive to become, in the finest American tradition, something more tomorrow than we are today. …
We, of course, are saddened indeed by the events in Indochina. But these events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America’s leadership in the world.
Unlike American leaders, Le Duan had a glorious victory to celebrate. His stress here on national reconstruction provides a reminder that the war was not just about political unification; it was also about an international system in which capitalism was faltering and about Vietnam’s development along socialist lines. At the same time, this speech looks back, invoking the spirit of the early resistance treated at the outset of this volume.
Viet Nam became the testing ground for the power and prestige of US imperialism. Viet Nam became the area of the fiercest historic confrontation between the most warlike, the most stubborn aggressive imperialism with the most powerful economic and military potential on one side, and the forces of national independence, democracy and socialism of which the Vietnamese people are the shock force in this region on the other. The victory of Viet Nam, therefore, is not only a victory of national independence and socialism in Viet Nam, but has also a great international significance, and an epoch making character. It has upset the global strategy of US imperialism. …
Our people have made countless sacrifices and overcome untold hardships and difficulties to recover our country. … Let us prove ourselves worthy of being the real masters of the country. Let our compatriots in the North step up socialist construction. Let our compatriots in the South unite and strive to build there a fine national democratic regime, a prosperousnational and democratic economy, a progressive and healthy national and democratic culture. In the spirit of national reconciliation and concord, our people have shown leniency to all those who have strayed from the right path and who are now returning to the people, no matter what their past was. Provided they sincerely mend [lend?] their abilities to the service of the homeland, their place among the people will be guaranteed and all the shame put on them by criminal US imperialist[s] will be washed away. …
In the four thousand years of our nation’s history, the last hundred years were the hardest and fiercest period of struggle against foreign aggression, but they were at the same time the period of our most glorious victories. Our people have overthrown the domination of the Japanese fascists, defeated the old colonialism of France and have now completely defeated the neo-colonialism of the United States. By those splendid exploits, our nation has joined the ranks of the vanguard nations of the world and has won the affection and esteem of the whole of progressive mankind. A nation which has recorded such splendid exploits deserves to enjoy peace, freedom and happiness. Such a nation surely has enough determination and energy, strength and talent to overcome all difficulties and reach the great heights of our times, to turn a poor and backward country heavily devastated by war, in which US imperialism has perpetrated so many crimes, into a civilized, prosperous and powerful country, an impregnable bastion of national independence, democracy and socialism in Indochina and Southeast Asia. …
Long live the Viet Nam Workers’ Party!
President Ho Chi Minh will live forever in our cause!
The losers in a war generally get written out of the historical record. The following interviews provide often neglected insights on Vietnamese tied to the Saigon government — why they lost and what they felt in defeat.
Ky was born in the North in 1930 into a scholar-official family, which moved south in 1954 when the Communists gained full control north of the seven-teenthparallel. Trained as a pilot by the French, Ky participated in the coup against Ngo Dinh Diem and was made head of South Vietnam’s air force. An outspoken and flamboyant figure, Ky served as premier between 1965 and 1967 and then as vice president under the shadow of the increasingly powerful Nguyen Van Thieu. Ky withdrew from politics in 1971 and, after the fall of Saigon, settled in Los Angeles. In this passage he reflects on Saigon politics and the U.S. role.
I always thought that my responsibility was to build a strong Vietnam, to stop Communist aggression, and second to bring to the people happiness and justice, social justice. …
… Myself and my family, we are not Catholic, but I really encouraged all my family to go and vote for [Ngo Dinh Diem]. Before he came to power, he was very popular, he had a very good reputation as a nationalist, and I think we really respected him. … But then … in 1963, after five years in power, absolute control, I think Mr Diem thought that he was God. At least he believed that he had some message from God to stay there and govern the way he thinks was God’s policy. …
… [I]t was a big turn of history, whether the overthrow of Mr Diem was wrong or right. But right after that you see a big big enthusiastic atmosphere among the population. … [W]hat was wrong was that you eliminate Diem and replace him by a bunch of generals who were more dumb than Mr Diem himself. I still believe that at least Mr Diem had some ideal to serve, but the group of general officers who replaced him had no ideals at all. …
… I think most of them, the Vietnamese generals, had the feeling that they owed something to America. And … there is no way that they could go against the rule of the Americans because they will be eliminated right away. Even Thieu, Thieu after he became President. … Every time he discussed a problem with me, … he only asked me what the Americans think about it. Thieu always worried about America. He believed that the Americans could do everything. That’s why most of the time he tried to please America. …
… After I become Premier I have many meetings with American officials — including President Johnson on many occasions — and on each occasion I told him what I think was the right way to deal with the war and to deal with the Communists and to deal with South Vietnamese people. Most of the time the Americans just smile, and very politely, but the problem is they never listened to me. They never did the things that I asked. …
… I remember I mentioned to Ambassador Cabot Lodge when he asked me: “What is your government program [or] policy?” and I told him just two words. I said: “Social revolution”. After the session he said to me, he said: “Well you know, I don’t think it is good to mention the word ‘social’ and the word ‘revolution’ to the Americans. They are reluctant about ‘revolution’; and about ‘social’ because it sounds like Communism.” … So you see that is, in my opinion, the basic difference between Americans and we, the Vietnamese. I see the need of a complete change in South Vietnam in everything, but the Americans didn’t see it or they saw it a different way. …
… [The war gave rise to] a lot of profiteers, particularly among the officers in the government. So what happened to the Vietnamese society at that time was a minority on the top profit everything from war while the vast majority, particularly the military, had nothing. So when you see a captain going to the front and leaving behind a big family and knowing that his wife, his children didn’t have enough to eat you can’t expect him having a high spirit for fighting; so my idea at that time was to give the best to those who deserve it. I mean the military, the fighting soldiers. …
… [I]t was true when the Communists’ propaganda condemn[ed] us as not nationalists but “a puppet and lackey of America”. The way that the Vietnamization was implemented was the wrong way. When they handed the fighting responsibility to the Vietnamese, they handed [it] to the people that they felt comfortable with. One general officer, Vietnamese, he was well known among the Vietnamese as the most corrupted and incapable officer. Every American who came to me said: “Oh, he is a real tiger”. That is the reason why at the end [in spring 1975] within 30 days the whole army of a million men collapsed, not because the poor soldiers are less courageous than the North Vietnamese but because all the commanding officers at that time were cowardly and corrupted.
General Ba spoke from long experience with the Vietnamese army created by the French and sustained by the Americans. Born in 1931, this southerner attended the French-run military academy in Dalat. Commissioned as an army officer in 1952, he began his service in the Red River Delta fighting the VietMinh and rose to command an ARVN division in the heavily contested territory northwest of Saigon.
The soldiers of the ARVN by [1975] … had a kind of sickness, a mental sickness. … The soldiers of the ARVN in the end believed that they had been lied to. Look, they were in a bad situation. To fight a good war, they could not be led by a man like Nguyen Van Thieu. The Americans were not helping them any more and their own government was not helping them, either. They were fighting and dying, and for what?
Some of my soldiers finally started to run. The sickness got them. And when I saw that, I could not do anything else. The Army was finally gone. I decided to walk back on foot from Cu Chi to Saigon. …
… The commanders’ mentality was not a fighting mentality. When the fight became tough, they didn’t want to fight any more. They wanted to depend on America, and when they could not depend on America they ran away. That was the sickness that they had caught. …
I fought for my country. I did my duty. I did the best I could. And I lost. Yet I am proud, still. When I could not perform my job any more I still tried to fight. I lost my army, but I was never defeated. I just did my job for Vietnam. And when the [PAVN] General that I fought against said to me, “What do you think now?” I said, “I am Vietnamese. I want to see Vietnam rich and the people happy and free.” …
… Vietnam lost many good citizens in the war and now look at the country. I must say that we got nothing from the war. … I still say to the leaders of the country, “I did my part. You won and I lost. And now you do what you wanted to do. If you do good, if the people become free and prosperous, then I have nothing against you. …”
… [T]he new regime has [this sickness] in the way that the old regime had. Corruption — a sickness that eats away at the people. If you don’t like someone, or if you don’t like what he says, then today they put him in prison.
Here the daughter of an apolitical ARVN officer offers the perspective of a less prominent Catholic family. She recounts the confusion surrounding the occupation of Saigon and the transition to northern rule as she experienced it as a teenager.
I am very proud of my dad. He had retired before 1975. After he fought in 1968 he received many certificates and awards from Nixon and Westmoreland, because he was the one who took back Binh Duong province [just north of Saigon] and opened the road for other troops so the Communists were defeated. He was a very brave man. After that he retired. It was too political, he thought. …
When we heard rumors about the Communist victories in 1974 and 1975 my father wasn’t concerned, so we didn’t worry either. Even when they came close to Saigon, we didn’t worry, because my father believed that the Communists would never win.
… This was at the beginning of April [1975]. Even after the twenty-first we didn’t think there was a way we could lose; we had a strong army and a strong military. Even though we did not like the Thieu government, we did not like the Communists, either. … But we were tired of the war. We were afraid that if the Communists took over, our family and our lives would be in danger. The problem was, after mid-April, all the important people in the government started to become refugees, and it made everything chaotic at that time. Everybody got scared. After the first wave of refugees left the country, many people panicked. …
After April 30 you could still leave Vietnam easily. … My parents tried to pay a boat to take our family. But on the way they met some Communist soldiers who were hitchhiking and my parents talked to them, and they said that everything would be all right and there would be no bloodbath. My parents asked them about being sent to concentration camps if you were in the Army, and they said, “No, no! Everything will be all right.” They told us about how beautiful the North Vietnamese girls were and how much nicer they dressed than the South Vietnamese girls. They said that there would be no revenge: “Don’t make us out to be monsters, because we aren’t.”
But the first day of May was a very sad day. The day was very heavy and sobering. The electricity was out and the Communists could not fix it. We heard on the radio the voice of a Northerner, very high-pitched and loud, and he condemned America and the people who cooperated with them. He humiliated us by saying that we had been the servants and the dogs of the American government because we had worked with them and against the Communists. We were very hurt to hear that. …
At that time if your family had someone who worked for the government in the North, even just a regular soldier, you could feel safe at last, and say, “Oh, we have somebody who fought against South Vietnamese!”
… Everybody was suddenly wearing the Vietcong flag. The flag was security or a credit card that could save your life. Everybody had one. …
After a week they divided us into sections and we had a political guy on our block. He told us about Marxism and Leninism and we had to discuss it in a meeting. What was humiliating about this was that they made us criticize ourselves. Even my father at these meetings had to criticize his own behavior. He had to say that he killed innocent people. But I knew he didn’t kill innocent people, because if he hadn’t killed them they would have killed him. But he said that he was a guilty man and asked for forgiveness for killing what he called “innocent people.” And I watched him cry in front of them. It was the first time I had ever seen my father cry. I had to do the same thing. … So I said that I hated people like my parents who did what they did. I said that to survive.
In this war as perhaps all others, veterans carried their own perspective, carved by the sharp blade of combat. At its most psychologically severe, that perspective was manifested in post-traumatic stress dis-order (PTSD), a diagnosis formally recognized by psychiatrists in 1980. We know a good deal about the postwar perspective of U.S. soldiers from oral histories and memoirs. But perhaps more important for them and more important still for Vietnamese veterans has been fiction. It has allowed former soldiers on both sides to speak eloquently about how they have grappled with memories and about how they have felt not so much rejected or dishonored as disconnected from and neglected by the society for which they fought.
The seventeen-year-old Clodfelter enlisted in the army in 1964, and by July the next year he was in Vietnam. After spending his first year with an artillery unit, he volunteered to stay on and serve as an infantryman in the 101st Airborne Division. A punji stick wound in December 1966 finally ended his Vietnam career. Mounting disillusionment with U.S. policy pushed him into the antiwar movement. Here he reflects, as many veterans did, on the powerful and painful memories he carried home.
Fifteen years later I still have trouble dealing with that old man [whom Clodfelter had seen killed by fellow soldiers angry over their own losses]. He confronts me sometimes in my dreams, his face always ill-defined. … But I haven’t forgotten his final expression, the one frozen on his face and in my soul, the one that he carried with him out of this world of the living when that M-79 buckshot round shattered his back.
But the old man’s image comes and goes, just as the guilt comes and goes. Sometimes I have to remind myself of it; sometimes I have to hide from myself because I can’t get away from it. That’s because part of me, the part that made me question the war, that made me turn against the war, that made me work against the war, that part of me finds me guilty, an accessory to the crime of murder, guilty through inaction, through acquiescence, through acceptance. But another part of me, the part that loved the thought of war, that even kept a little bit of that love for the experience of war, that part excuses my act of non-action, buries the guilt, tells me it’s all understandable and forgivable, given the circumstances of war, given the savagery of war, given the strange but special loyalties of war.
Back then, when it happened, something bright and burning inside me flickered and went out, leaving not even a warm cinder, leaving only a pile of cold cold ashes.
I went home four months later. It was not a happy homecoming. I suppose I would have come out of any war disillusioned. Even when fought for the most glorious cause, even when resulting in the most magnificent victory, war can never be the creature of dash and daring, of adventure and admiration, that young minds might imagine. And to the misfortune of our egos and aspirations — though probably ultimately to the good fortune of our souls — the only war offered our generation was Vietnam, surely the most disillusioning war ever fought by Americans. Had it been World War II or Korea maybe we could have salvaged some scrap of our former favorable opinion of war; maybe we could have looked back as middle aged vets sitting in VFW [Veterans of Foreign Wars] clubs and recalled some higher purpose to our sacrifices and proposed a toast to the good fight, to “our war.” But ours was not WWII or Korea; ours was Vietnam, and it would have required a far greater leap from reality—and a dishonest one at that — than that of our adolescent fantasies, now that our opinion was no longer based on ignorance, for us to bless a war that could bear no blessing.
Though separated geographically, the war stayed with me downthrough all the following years. In all that time, in all those years while I was either fighting in the Vietnam War or against it,. … I could not fathom how Vietnam could be anything to all Americans but the central concern of their lives; how it could be anything less than the dark sun around which we were all in unbreakable orbit as its doomed and somehow hopeless satellites. But I had to face the fact, the appalling fact, that to the vast majority of Americans, even those of my age, families and homes and careers, and even cars, cocaine, connections and the next piece of ass, were greater concerns than all that muck and madness in Southeast Asia.... For most of my family, friends and acquaintances, the war had an impact upon them similar to that made by a pebble dropped into the depths of the ocean.
But for me and for most of the men who fought there, the war was everything. It had been the worst experience of my life and it had been the best. I never wanted out of any place so bad as I wanted out of Vietnam. But after I left I felt an immediate and overwhelming sense of loss for Vietnam and its war. After all these years, this nostalgia, this strange yearning to return to it all, still persists, still haunts me. Looking at it in terms of good or bad is all wrong. It was simply the most awesome experience of my life and will probably remain so to the end of my years. It is a mountain range rising up abruptly and sharply from the more or less level plains that make up the topography of the rest of my life. These are heights desolate and depressing, more like the mountains of the moon than some snow-capped range, magic and majestic. They are there, undeniable and unscalable, and though time and fading memory may erode them to foothills, they will never entirely disappear from my life’s landscape until the gray glacier of death wears everything down to dust.
The novel The Sorrow of War conveys one PAVN veteran’s melancholy perspective. Hanoi-born Bao Ninh uses his hero, Kien, to carry readers into a world of hardship and death. His account is at odds with the official version that celebrates the heroic war of resistance and that has no room for battlefield reverses, personal trauma, and generational sacrifice. His novel became a best seller in vietnam following its publication in 1991, but censors struck back and banned the book. However much it evokes the specifically Vietnamese experience of war, this novel eerily parallels accomplished U.S. veterans’fiction such as Tim O’Brien’s The Things We Carried (published just a year after Sorrow). Both men are haunted by memories of lost comrades, see writing as a way to appease their ghosts, and highlight the fractured, quicksilver quality of memory.
[Ghosts of lost comrades:] It was here [in the Central Highlands], at the end of the dry season of 1969, that [Kien’s] Battalion 27 was surrounded and almost totally wiped out. Ten men survived from the Unlucky Battalion, after fierce, horrible, barbarous fighting.
That was the dry season when the sun burned harshly, the wind blew fiercely, and the enemy sent napalm spraying through the jungle and a sea of fire enveloped them, spreading like the fires of hell. Troops in the fragmented companies tried to regroup, only to be blown out of their shelters again as they went mad, became disoriented and threw themselves into nets of bullets, dying in the flaming inferno. Above them the helicopters flew at tree-top height and shot them almost one by one, the blood spreading out, spraying from their backs, flowing like red mud.
The diamond-shaped grass clearing was piled high with bodies killed by helicopter gunships. Broken bodies, bodies blown apart, bodies vaporised. …
In the days that followed, crows and eagles darkened the sky. After the Americans withdrew, the rainy season came, flooding the jungle floor, turning the battlefield into a marsh whose surface water turned rust-coloured from the blood. Bloated human corpses, floating alongside the bodies of incinerated jungle animals, mixed with branches and trunks cut down by artillery, all drifting in a stinking marsh. When the flood receded everything dried in the heat of the sun into thick mud and stinking rotting meat. … After that battle no one mentioned Battalion 27 any more, though numerous souls of ghosts and devils were born in that deadly defeat. They were still loose, wandering in every corner and bush in the jungle, drifting along the stream, refusing to depart for the Other World.
[Writing to exorcise postwar nightmares:] [Kien] became bored with his university studies. One morning he simply decided he wouldn’t attend. From that point on he ended his easy student life, quietly, and for no apparent reason. He stopped reading newspapers, then books, then let everything go. He lost contact with his friends, then with the outside world in general. Except drink. And cigarettes. He couldn’t care less that he was penniless, that he drank and smoked almost non-stop. He wanderedaround outside, pacing the lonely streets. When he did sleep, it was a heavy, drunken slumber.
… Horrible, poisonous nightmares brought back images that had haunted him constantly throughout the war. During the twilights of those cold nights the familiar, lonely spirits reappeared from the Screaming Souls Jungle, sighing and moaning to him, whispering as they floated around, like pale vapours, shredded with bullet holes. They moved into his sleep as though they were mirrors surrounding him. …
It was that spring [1979] … when something moved within Kien’s heart, taking him from turmoil to peace. Something inside him, powerful and urgent, pumped life back into his collapsed spirit and snapped life back into him. It felt like love. Perhaps it was recognition of some wonderful truth deep inside him.
That same chilly dark spring night Kien started to write his first novel. …
… In [his] derelict room he wrote frantically, non-stop with a sort of divine inspiration, knowing this might be the only time he would feel this urge.
He wrote, cruelly reviving the images of his comrades, of the mortal combat in the jungle that became the Screaming Souls, where his battalion had met its tragic end. …
One by one they fell in that battle in that room, until the greatest hero of them all, a soldier who had stayed behind enemy lines to harass the enemy’s withdrawal, was blown into a small tattered pile of humanity on the edge of a trench.
The next morning rays from the first day of spring shone through to the darkest corner of his room.
[Victory for whom, for what:] After 1975, … [t]he wind of war had stopped. The branches of conflict had stopped rustling. As we had won, Kien thought, then that meant justice had won; that had been some consolation. Or had it? Think carefully; look at your own existence. Look carefully now at the peace we have, painful, bitter and sad. And look at who won the war.
To win, martyrs had sacrificed their lives in order that others might survive. Not a new phenomenon, true. But for those still living to know that the kindest, most worthy people have all fallen away, or even been tortured, humiliated before being killed, or buried and wiped away by the machinery of war, then this beautiful landscape of calm and peace isan appalling paradox. Justice may have won, but cruelty, death and inhuman violence had also won.
Just look and think: it is the truth.
Losses can be made good, damage can be repaired and wounds will heal in time. But the psychological scars of the war will remain forever.
A conflict as long and costly as the Vietnamese-American war has cried out for lessons and conclusions — and observers, pundits, and political leaders of all stripes have eagerly, insistently obliged.
Reagan’s comments encapsulated a view of the Vietnam War with broad appeal. Like Hollywood filmmakers, this former actor was bent on redeeming the war by holding up the soldiers as models of sacrifice and patriotism. Like many others in the Republican Party, he thought the war a just cause fought in the name of freedom. The lesson he drew, popular among the military and armchair strategists, was beguilingly simple: any war, once begun, had to be fought all out and to a successful conclusion. He spoke against a backdrop — Maya Lin’s recently completed severe black marble slabs naming the dead in row after row — that carried a more ambiguous message.
[We] embrace the gentle heroes of Vietnam and of all our wars. We remember those who were called upon to give all a person can give, and we remember those who were prepared to make that sacrifice if it were demanded of them in the line of duty, though it never was. Most of all, we remember the devotion and gallantry with which all of them ennobled their nation as they became champions of a noble cause.
… Unlike the other wars of this century, … there were deep divisions about the wisdom and rightness of the Vietnam war. Both sides spoke with honesty and fervor. And what more can we ask in our democracy? And yet after more than a decade of desperate boat people, after the killing fields of Cambodia, after all that has happened in that unhappy part of the world, who can doubt that the cause for which our men fought was just? It was, after all, however imperfectly pursued, the cause of freedom; and they showed uncommon courage in its service. Perhaps at this latedate we can all agree that we’ve learned one lesson: that young Americans must never again be sent to fight and die unless we are prepared to let them win.
But beyond that, we remember today that all our gentle heroes of Vietnam have given us a lesson in something more: a lesson in living love. Yes, for all of them, those who came back and those who did not, their love for their families lives. Their love for their buddies on the battlefields and friends back home lives. Their love of their country lives. …
… [T]his place … reminds us of a great and profound truth about our nation: that from all our divisions we have always eventually emerged strengthened. Perhaps we are finding that new strength today, and if so, much of it comes from the forgiveness and healing love that our Vietnam veterans have shown.
… [A]s I approach the end of my service and I see Vietnam veterans take their rightful place among America’s heroes, it appears to me that we have healed. And what can I say to our Vietnam veterans but: Welcome home.
Ever since leaving the Pentagon, Robert McNamara had been intensely preoccupied with identifying missed opportunities that might have averted what he called a tragic war. To explore this isue, he arranged meetings with high-level Vietnamese leaders in the mid-1990s. What he discovered was not missed opportunities but an understanding of the war that was fundamentally at odds with his own. His first meeting was with the eighty-four-year-old Vo Nguyen Giap at the Ministry of Defense in Hanoi in November 1995. In a follow-up conference in June 1997, McNamara sat down with Nguyen Co Thach. Part of the anti-French resistance in his early teens, Thach had become Giap’s close aide right after World War II. As a foreign affairs specialist, he had kept an eye on U.S. policy between 1962 and 1968 and participated in the Paris peace talks between 1968 and 1973.
[Exchange of views in November 1995:]
ROBERT MCNAMARA: General, I want us to examine our mindsets, and to look at specific instances where we — Hanoi and Washington — may each have been mistaken, have misunderstood each other. …
GEN. VO NGUYEN GIAP: I don’t believe we misunderstood you. You werethe enemy; you wished to defeat us — to destroy us. So we were forced to fight you — to fight a “people’s war” to reclaim our country from your neoimperialist ally in Saigon — we used the word “puppet,” of course, back then — and to reunify our country.
ROBERT MCNAMARA: … Were we — was I, was Kennedy, was Johnson — a “neoimperialist” in the sense you are using the word? I would say absolutely not! Now, if we can agree on an agenda focused on episodes like Tonkin Gulf, where we may have misunderstood each other, then —
GEN. VO NGUYEN GIAP: Excuse me, but we correctly understood you. …
ROBERT MCNAMARA: … [W]e need to reexamine each other’s misunderstandings — for two reasons. First, we need to identify missed opportunities; and second, we need to draw lessons which will allow us to avoid such tragedies in the future.
GEN. VO NGUYEN GIAP: Lessons are important. I agree. However, you are wrong to call the war a “tragedy”— to say that it came from missed opportunities. Maybe it was a tragedy for you, because yours was a war of aggression, in the neocolonialist “style,” or fashion, of the day for the Americans. You wanted to replace the French; you failed; men died; so, yes, it was tragic, because they died for a bad cause.
But for us, the war against you was a noble sacrifice. We did not want to fight the U.S. We did not. But you gave us no choice. Our people sacrificed tremendously for our cause of freedom and independence. There were no missed opportunities for us. We did what we had to do to drive you and your “puppets”— I apologize, Mr. McNamara, for again using the term “puppet”— to drive you and your puppets out. So I agree that you missed opportunities and that you need to draw lessons. But us? I think we would do nothing different, under the circumstances. …
ROBERT MCNAMARA: … [I]t seemed obvious to us [in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations] that the communist movement in Vietnam was closely related to the guerrilla insurgencies being carried on in the 1950s in Burma, Malaya, and the Philippines. We viewed those conflicts not as nationalistic movements — as I think they were, with hindsight — we viewed them as signs of a unified communist drive for hegemony in Asia.
[NGUYEN CO THACH’s comments in June 1997:]
I want to thank Mr. McNamara … for giving us such a clear pictureof the U.S. mindset toward Vietnam — toward the government in Hanoi I mean, after the country was split into two parts at Geneva in 1954. …
In my way of thinking, the principal problem in the evolution of these mindsets was that — especially in the 1950s and 1960s — the U.S. seemed to want to become the world’s policeman. Mr. McNamara correctly quotes President Kennedy’s inaugural address [calling for Americans to “pay any price, bear any burden”] as evidence of a certain anticommunist mindset — a fear that communism would overrun the U.S., or something of the sort. Actually, it seemed to us that in Kennedy’s inaugural, he was asserting that the U.S. wished to become something like the “master of the world.” In this way, the U.S. would replace the British and the French, who had previously based their policies on such a wish. In our part of the world, this “fear of falling dominoes” was joined to the “threat of the yellow skin” [yellow peril] — so those were two reasons, or excuses, really, why the U.S. felt justified in taking over as the new imperialists.
Now, where did the war come from — from what did the American War emerge? The answer is not difficult to find. In Geneva in 1954, other countries — large and powerful countries [alluding to the Soviet Union and China], not only the U.S. — decided that Vietnam should be divided into two countries. The U.S. installed Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon and decided to keep him in power at all costs, because of the fear of the communists in the North, ignoring the fact that many, many people in the southern part of Vietnam did not want Diem, would not have voted for Diem, in fact feared Diem. When Diem, backed by the U.S., became increasingly brutal, the people in the South organized themselves, at last, to fight Diem, because they were given no alternative by the U.S.-backed dictator. And so, beginning with the struggle against Diem, the conflict grew, as the U.S. gradually took over Diem’s functions, including the military ones, eventually, and the southern resistance — the NLF — turned to its northern allies for assistance in their struggle. That is more or less how the war came about, I think. There is no big mystery about it.
Therefore, I would say, with all due respect to Mr. McNamara, that the U.S. mindset, as he says, was incorrect, but also that the Vietnamese mindset — our assessment of the U.S. — was essentially correct.
The blunt, matter-of-fact Vietnamese indictment of the United States, articulated at the end of the last selection, may wound some readers, but the charge may seem less preposterous after exposure to the evidence in this documentary survey. Gaining a historical perspective — knowing an event in a deeper and more rounded way — can turn narrow, fixed, reassuring, reflexive judgments into more complex and contingent (and, yes, less comfortable) ways of thinking. In this sense a genuinely historical view of the war is a long way from the popular conceptions reflected in the Hollywood films and polling data discussed in the introduction. It now goes without saying that the war was long in the making and that it was as much a Vietnamese story (or stories) as an American one. U.S. soldiers are no longer simply victims but more complicated characters in a larger drama. However readers may now choose to construct their own particular version of the Vietnam War and whatever evaluation they may place on it, the result is very likely to be far more profound and revealing than the lamentable distortions and shallow awareness that appear in what usually passes for the history of this war.
Now is the time to return to the big, controversial questions that opened this volume. Seven major issues call out for special attention:
• The problem of dates: Usually wars have clearly defined beginnings and ends — but not this one. Is July 1965 the starting point, or do we have to look to an earlier moment (such as Hanoi’s 1959 decision on the South or the Gulf of Tonkin episode) to make sense of this conflict? When did the war end: With the Paris peace agreement in 1973, by which time the U.S. public and Congress had turned their backs on the war effort? Or with the fall of Saigon in April 1975?
• The search for fitting labels: Which of the general appraisals offered by prominent Americans works best: The Vietnam War as an aggressive, counterrevolutionary effort driven by a “self-righteous moralism” (SDS leader Paul Potter)? As a morally justified struggle to defend freedom (President Ronald Reagan)? Or as a “tragic mistake” made by well-intentioned leaders (Robert McNamara in retrospect)?
Looking at the war from the Vietnamese perspective, should we describe the conflict that raged between 1945 and 1975 as fundamentally a civil war, a revolutionary war, a war of Communist aggression, or a war for national independence or unification?
Is there one label that captures the nature of the conflict across its whole sweep and encompasses the experience of both sides?
• The inevitability issue: Were the aspirations of Vietnamese Communists and U.S. policy makers so at odds that war became virtually unavoidable? Were there no major turning points, only a large number of minor, incremental decisions leading to an ever greater likelihood of a violent collision? Did decisions on one side or the other do more to drive the two countries toward war?
• The responsibility question: Does a judgment on blame for the war clearly emerge from the evidence? If so, is that blame to fall on one side or the other, on a particular leader or group, or on some abstraction, such as the political culture of one country or the pressures generated by international rivalry? Alternatively, does a forgiving, no-fault approach make more sense in light of what we now know?
• An explanation for the military outcome: Should we focus on the motivation and techniques that enabled relatively weak NLF and PAVN forces to take on and outlast their stronger U.S. opponent? Should we look for some defect in the approach of the stronger party? Or was it the relative weakness of the ARVN that was crucial, at least in the origins and the last stage of the war?
• The function of misperceptions: How well did Vietnamese and Americans understand each other? How large does misperception loom in any explanation for the origin and conduct of the Vietnam War?
What did the Americans overlook or misconstrue that might help account for their going to war and for their subsequent difficulties? It may be worth considering in particular their general view of Vietnamese, the appeal of communism and nationalism, the conflict for control of the countryside, and the roles of China and the Soviet Union.
Were there serious misconceptions of a comparable nature on the Vietnamese side — for example, the perception of the United States as an exponent of self-determination in the 1940s or later as an exploitative, calculating, and doomed capitalist power?
• The lure of lessons: Does the Vietnam War carry any practical implications for dealing with other conflicts? Are the circumstances of this case so unique that parallels are likely to prove problematic, making any resulting lessons dangerously misleading?
In wrestling with this set of questions, more is at stake than a better understanding of one war, however important it may be. Historical engagement, a sensitivity to cultural differences, and a cultivated international perspective bear important implications for all peoples, not least for Americans: Under what circumstances should a country go to war? What values are important enough to justify organized, state-directed violence? What is known of the risks and the possible outcomes? And who should bear the chief sacrifice? History done with a pronounced international bent cannot supply easy answers to these questions. But without the perspective and sensitivity afforded by this sort of history, any answers are more likely to be superficial, to lead to dubious conclusions, and ultimately to do unanticipated and perhaps terrible harm. History does matter!
1. Dong quoted in William J. Duiker, Sacred War: Nationalism and Revolution in a Divided Vietnam (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995), 244.