The fall of Phnom-Penh to the Khmer-Rouge on April 17, Saigon to the communists of North Vietnam on April 30, and Vientiane to the Pathet-Lao on August 23, 1975, marked the end of the Indochina War—or the Second Vietnam War. The whole of Indochina was made communist under their total control, especially the communists of Vietnam. In America, some said that since the last American combat unit had left Vietnam almost three years prior to the fall of Saigon, the United States was not militarily defeated by the North Vietnamese Army. This was true. However, the war was lost and a majority of Americans felt that the United States had lost its pride and honor, especially after the last American ambassador to South Vietnam, Graham Martin, with all of his embassy personnel, left Saigon in a hurried evacuation in Operation Frequent Wing just a few hours before communist tanks and troops arrived to take over on April 30, 1975.
That ironic day marked a turning point in American war history. Researchers and historians in America have tried to understand the root causes of this fatal reality. Many media articles, comments, and analyses, and a large number of books, memories, and symposiums discussed the Vietnam War and its outcome, but it seemed that none completely satisfied public opinion. Thus, the “Vietnam trauma” or “Vietnam syndrome” lingered on for years with pains, sorrows and resentments among the American people, particularly among those who had fought in Vietnam. The search for the truths of the Vietnam War has continued.
In my research, I tried to retrace the realities and the superficial lost causes of the war, since I could not reveal the truths, which were deeply covered under many layers of political secrecy of the time. However, while engaging in this comprehensive work, it would have been too ambiguous if we had said that the United States lost the war. It is better for me to say that, for some reason, the American leaders of the time did not want militarily to defeat the communists of North Vietnam and win the war. A military victory would create more problems because the United States would then have to defend Vietnam and the other prosperous countries in Southeast Asia. Although South Vietnam was lost to the Vietnamese communists, the United States achieved its long-term goal of deterring Chinese aggression toward the other countries in the region.
Various important Americans attempted to explain these reasons for losing the war, including Walt W. Rostow, the Vietnam-era national security adviser; Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., the ex-chief of U.S. Naval Operations; and other U.S. generals and admirals. For example, in a symposium on Vietnam at Hampden-Sydney College in the fall of 1993, Rostow opined: “If you assume that the purpose was to keep Southeast Asia independent, then it can be argued that we accomplished our objective. Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore—all of which were absolutely up for grabs in 1965—emerged with confidence, with strong economies. Do you think these countries could have kept their independence without help from us? No way.” Then, he added, “It was not a narrow political crisis in Vietnam. It was a crisis in Asia.”1 Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., in a conference on McNamara’s book In Retrospect at the Army and Navy Club in Washington, on November 9, 1995, echoed this view: “In a strategic sense, we did win, because our commitment in Vietnam ‘made it possible’ for countries such as Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia not to go communist.”2 More specifically, as noted by Marc Leepson, a columnist for Vietnam Magazine: “The United States actually did win the war in Vietnam. That’s because the eight-year American military effort in Vietnam gave other Asian nations time to build up their forces to fight communism. While the communists triumphed in Vietnam in 1975, except for Laos and Cambodia, no other Asian ‘dominoes’ fell.”3
I completely agree with the conclusion of these distinguished American figures, that the United States actually did not lose the war in Vietnam. However those in America who assert this controversial position are like “a grain of sand in the desert,” because the claim is not evidenced or proved by a U.S. military success, a concrete exploit, or a visible victory. In my mind, logically I see no sense of an American failure in Vietnam but rather, a successful defeat politically over the communists, both Chinese and Vietnamese. With a step back in Vietnam and the abandonment of South Vietnam in the first half of 1970s, American leaders solved several crucial problems, immediately and down the road.
In America, they instantly satisfied an American public that had ardently turned against the war in Vietnam, and saved the internal politics and economies, all of which were going to degenerate. In East and Southeast Asia, they temporarily appeased communist China and evaded a larger war that might lead to a nuclear war, and saved the peace for other Asian countries. Finally, in Indochina, with a long-term view of transforming the whole of Vietnam into a stronger fortress to permanently deter the Chinese communist aggression toward other Southeast Asian countries, they created more favorable conditions for the Vietnamese communists to unify the country. The latter solution would be the prime cause for the United States to abandon South Vietnam.
Acquiring a more solid fortress (than South Vietnam) with less expense constituted a perfect success by the United States in its long-term policy toward Southeast Asia. If the communists of Vietnam had established any political, diplomatic, or economic relations with the United States, they would have fallen into the American trap. This would be a potential political victory by the United States over the Vietnamese communists. The sooner the communists seek access to the wealthy American pockets through-economic aid, loans, investments, or commercial dealings the sooner they will become submissive to and dependent upon the United States in Southeast Asia. To defeat an enemy by a peaceful process is always better than by a military victory.
The above assumptions, however, are hypotheses. Practically, most American authorities, especially those in the armed forces who had fought in Vietnam, felt fully responsible for the loss of South Vietnam. The last message from the U.S. Embassy in Saigon on April 30, 1975, proved that bitter outcome: “It has been a long and hard fight. The battle is over…. We have lost. Let us hope we have learned our lessons.”4 The Vietnam War was one of the longest and costliest in the history of the United States. The unexpected loss of the war seriously affected the nation and the armed forces, both physically and spiritually. The war’s costs afflicted the Americans on many issues for years after the war.
According to U.S. Marine Colonel James A. Donovan, American casualties during the war in Vietnam ranked fourth in number of battle deaths and the third costliest in number of servicemen wounded in action in American war history. From the death of the first American serviceman in action on December 22, 1961, to March 28, 1973, when the last U.S. combat unit left Vietnam, the United States had engaged directly in the war for 11 years and one month and suffered 211,318 in total casualties of servicemen, including 58,015 deaths, 153,303 wounded in action, 766 prisoners of war (POWs) officially listed, and another 1,913 considered as missing in action (MIA). Because of the short one-year term of duty, more than 3.74 million Americans served in Vietnam. At its height, the American force ceiling was 525,000 men in August 1967, under the command of General Westmoreland.5 According to Colonel Donovan in an article in the April 1996 issue of Vietnam Magazine, “Assessing the War’s Costs,” the loss of U.S. equipment and supplies in Vietnam exceeded that of any previous war. Some of the costliest items were:
• High-cost equipment such as strategic and tactical aircraft were lost in large numbers. A total of 8,612 aircraft of all types were destroyed, including 3,744 fixed-wing jets. Of these, 1,646 were lost in action and 2,098 were due to accidents and other non-hostile causes; 4,868 helicopters were lost, of which 2,288 were destroyed in combat action and 2,588 by other causes. The total costs of all aircraft lost amounted to $12 billion or more.
• Consumable munitions for U.S. and Allied forces expended in the battlefield were some 15 million tons that cost between $30 and $35 billion. Particularly, during the seven years of air combat in Indochina, the U.S. Air Force dropped 7.35 million tons of bombs, twice the tonnage dropped in all theaters of World War II. The costs of the bombs were estimated to be $7 billion.
• Strategic and tactical jet fuel, gasoline, and naval fuel consumed by the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy and allied armed forces averaged a million barrels per day, which was an enormous drain on the United States and led to a “national fuel crisis” in 1973, especially after an oil embargo was declared by the Arab League of 11 Arab nations on June 5, 1973.
• Other heavy modern equipment lost in Vietnam, such as tanks and artillery howitzers were not mentioned in Colonel Donovan’s assessment of war costs, but everyone would agree that the cost of this equipment would add up to several billion dollars.
In sum, the dollar costs to the United States for the war in Vietnam were difficult to total, as Colonel Donovan writes. However, he estimates that the U.S. military expenditures in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia reached $97.9 billion, not including the considerable funds expended for military aid to South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which would amount to $10.7 billion. The war’s total costs may be estimated at about $108.5 billion. On the other hand, Nixon’s defense secretary Melvin Laird estimated the war’s monetary costs in Vietnam to be $236 billion, or $100 billion greater than the official estimate and more than double the estimate of Colonel Donovan.
Donovan points out:
The high cost of the Vietnam War forced the nation to postpone spending for many sorely needed domestic projects—hospitals, schools, roads, transportation systems and sewage plants. Also, while the nation focused its resources, skills and energies on the war, it experienced increasingly stiff business competition from abroad. At the same time, American productivity began to decline. But the greatest economic impact of the war may have been that it caused the nation to be less willing to commit military power and dollars to influence the world’s stability and peace.6
According to Donovan, the costs of the war in Vietnam created serious problems for the United States, both internally and externally. However, the internal impact was clearer than its impact overseas. The bedrock of U.S. global policy at the time was to contain the international communist expansion and this prime purpose was indeed realized after the end of the Vietnam War. There was no room for blame regarding U.S. external affairs. Therefore, the effects of the war’s losses on America itself became the major subject of study. In terms of “physical losses,” the United States obviously lost tens of thousands of lives and a great deal of money during the Vietnam War. But the losses of the Vietnam war could not only be examined in terms of lives and money; but also the “spiritual losses.” Any physical loss may lead to a psychological or spiritual loss that will more gravely affect a person, a community, or a nation for a certain period of time. The United States was no exception to this common rule during the second half of the 1970s.
In the political domain, most Americans felt a loss of national honor after South Vietnam was lost to the Vietnamese communists. Most American generals, officers, and soldiers, especially those who fought in Vietnam, felt a loss of pride for not defeating a small country’s army. This heart-rending sorrow and resentment extended day after day and became the “Vietnam syndrome,” which existed in the U.S. armed forces for years; the largest and longest psychological wound for the armed forces in America’s history.
Second, American civilian leaders lost the respect and trust of the American people and the armed forces. Many U.S. generals, admirals, and officers complained that their civilian leaders lacked the will to win the war or applied flawed policies and indecisive strategies in Vietnam. The American public and the media blamed the government for concealing the realities while conducting an unnecessary war in a faraway country. As a result, many important political figures that were responsible for the loss of the war were “out” of the U.S. executive and legislative branches afterward.
Third, intellectuals expressed open suspicion about America’s power. Some said that the United States should not be omnipotent and its power should be limited when resolving problems in remote countries of the world, because American dollars and guns are not the most effective weapons for winning the “hearts and minds” of other nations and achieving peace or freedom for them. Finally, the general public suspected that America’s power was not used by American leaders to serve the interests of the American people during the Vietnam War. Regardless of whether or not this is true, this opinion appeared in the United States after the war.
In the social domain, assessing how deeply the war’s losses affected American society was difficult. First, the enormous financial cost of the war spawned inflation and the devaluation of the dollar, which seriously agonized Americans both materially and mentally. Americans suffered the gradual siphoning off of America’s wealth during the war. Second, the vast expenditures for the lost war created tension and disorder, corruption, and national guilt among the American people. Social unrest, confusion, contradiction, and discontent increased as Johnson’s Great Society and other national plans to revitalize the growing social, ecological, and economic needs were undermined or canceled due to the war’s vast cost.
Third, the war itself divided the nation. The ironic outcome aggravated the situation: difficulties between races, gaps between generations, disputes about responsibilities between the executive and legislative branches and between administrative organizations and media networks. American youth in particular were disrupted by the war. During the war most students accepted conscription but a significant number of university students avoided the draft by leaving the country to live abroad, or opposed the draft by engaging in anti-war movements and demonstrations. After the war, irrational, uncooperative, and illegitimate violence and riots on campus and in the streets, rooted in anti-war movements, surfaced in every corner of American society. The American social order drastically changed. The lost war and its aftereffects were the root causes of the growing counter-culture movement that turned away from the heroic traditions and courteous practices of the “World War II generation” and turned instead to bad manners, drugs, violence, free law and free love.
Finally, the national armed forces suffered the most from the lost war. The emotional feeling of “being defeated” haunted the armed forces’ servicemen, particularly those who had fought in Vietnam. The failure in Vietnam seemed to damage everyone’s psyche. Everyone felt a sense of loss to self-reliance, pride, and honor. The biggest wound of the armed forces was the sacrifice of soldier lives for nothing, neither for the interests of the United States nor for the freedom of South Vietnam, an allied country. The wound was serious. The Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., with more than 58,000 names of the dead and 2,000 more of the missing were tragic marks or unforgettable blurs in the minds of the American soldiers for decades.
After the resonant victory of the U.S. armed forces in the Gulf War in 1991, president George Bush declared, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.”7 We hope so. However, many U.S. generals, officers and soldiers did not think so, because Vietnam did not go away and remained an experience we must learn from for many more years. War is the disgusting outcome of political and diplomatic failure; but, should we decide to go to war, we must be determined to win it.
After the war, many notable American politicians, military experts, and historians pointed out hundreds of reasons for the American failure in Vietnam. The main causes may be summarized as follows:
First, the U.S. foreign policy toward Vietnam formulated by five consecutive presidents was inconsistently followed from the beginning to the end (1954–1975). Objectives varied, not only by presidential philosophy, personality and conscience, but also due to the drastic changes to the domestic and worldwide situation during every period of the Cold War era. This inconsistency of U.S. policy in Vietnam was the prime cause of the failure.
Second, the United States did not want to win the war militarily; so, the White House and the Pentagon were unwillingly to formulate determined and convincing strategies with clear objectives to defeat North Vietnam. Had the United States wanted to defeat this small country it could have done so.
Although many military experts have described several different strategies the United States followed in Vietnam, including the “air offense” strategy against the North Vietnamese territory, American forces were solely attached to a “defensive war” strategy throughout the war in varying degrees, “low profile” to “high profile,” to defend South Vietnam. That defensive strategy gave North Vietnam the necessary time and space to gain initiative to develop its revolutionary war. The United States only escalated the war in accordance with the increasing intensity of enemy strength and activities on the battlefield. The will to win the war was never mentioned by any U.S. administration.
Third, there was a lack of candor between the United States and South Vietnam at the high echelons on political, diplomatic, and military issues, all of which were necessary for any alliance to defeat the common enemy. The U.S. lacked confidence in the fighting competence of the RVNAF which hampered the combined efforts of the allied forces on the battlefield. This resulted in a huge credibility gap between the United States and South Vietnam in working to attain the goal of defending the advanced fortress of Southeast Asia. The loss of South Vietnam was the typical example of failure of alliance in any ideological war. Nowadays, the United States has faced the complicated war in Iraq which has similarities to the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1966. I hope American leaders will learn from the above problems of the Vietnam War in order to: (1) consolidate the Iraqi government and its armed forces; (2) let them fight the war by themselves; (3) strongly support them, but withdraw U.S. forces from that land of different culture and life. These three important measure should be considered among dozens of others.
Fourth, according to U.S. Army Lt. General Phillip B. Davidson, once chief of American military intelligence in Vietnam, there were several reasons for the loss of the war. One of these was North Vietnam’s “Superior Grand Strategy” which, from the beginning to the end of the war, harnessed all facets of national power to achieve the sole national objective: “the independence and unification of Vietnam, and eventually of all of French Indochina.” Their most brilliant strategy was the “Strategy of Revolutionary War.” American leaders did not grasp this important strategy. Instead of considering the communist revolutionary war as a total war and selecting appropriate strategies, the United States “reacted timidly by limited half measures.” That was the “confusion of concept, counter-measures, organization, strategy, and above all, confusion of American people—this last by far the most critical,” General Davidson wrote in his book Secrets of the Vietnam War.8
In the meantime, Norman B. Hannah, a former U.S. State Department officer, in his book, The Key to Failure, identified the United States’ failure “to take decisive action on the ground to block North Vietnamese infiltration through Laos as the U.S. government’s single greatest strategic error of the Vietnam War.”9 This observation of Norman is the most astute of all observations about the Vietnam War. I, myself, have thought that if the Ho Chi Minh Trail did not exist, there would not have been a Second Vietnam War.
The problem of cutting off the Ho Chi Minh Trail south of Laos was the main but most frustrating concern for General William C. Westmoreland in his military life. In June 1997, American Legion magazine asked the general, since he was retired, what had frustrated him the most about the war. He answered, “certainly the failure to follow my recommendations to cut off the flow of supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail was one of the biggest frustrations. I would have liked to see us able to go into Laos and Cambodia to get that job done more effectively with ground troops but politicians didn’t want us to for a number of reasons they deemed sufficient.”10
Fifth, the war could not be won because U.S. civilian leaders had no confidence in U.S. commanders and tied their hands while fighting the war with politicians and bureaucrats, expert or mediocre. Many feared the Chinese would intervene, which would widen the regional war to a world war. With such confused estimates provided by politicians and bureaucrats, American leaders would not permit the use of ground forces to invade and attack the communists in North Vietnam or to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. As a result, the cradle of the communist revolutionary war and the vein of subsistence for NVA forces fighting in the South were never destroyed. All measures proposed by U.S. Army, Air Force and Navy generals and admirals that might produce a tangible victory were rejected by American leaders, and thus the communists were not defeated in the North or the South.
Finally, because of the above factors, the war could not be ended sooner but was prolonged to the point it confused and demoralized the American people, and eroded their support for the (continuous) conflict in Vietnam. Consequently, by the time the American people decided not to pursue the war any longer, their civilian leaders had to listen to them. Thus, South Vietnam was abandoned and the war was lost. After the war, some knowledgeable Americans asked: “How could the United States have won the Vietnam War?”
Many U.S. political and military experts have articulated measures the United States might have taken to win the war. In my opinion, I believe that we lost the war because it lasted so long that it shocked and discouraged the American people. The communists of North Vietnam were able to prolong the war only after being heavily supported by the Soviet Union, China, and the communist bloc, with equipment and supplies. They then could conduct their revolutionary war in the South by exploiting the Ho Chi Minh Trail at full length to continuously supply their forces in this theater and in Cambodia.
Had the United States decided to win the war, they might not have needed to use ground forces in North Vietnam. Instead of approaching it as a limited war with a defensive strategy, after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, it should have been framed as a war of limited offensive strategy. In other words, the United States might have adopted a combination of U.S. commanders’ measures. In the North, it might have applied Air Force General Curtis LeMay’s proposition to conduct an air war without limited objectives and Navy Admiral Thomas Moorer’s proposition to blockade the Hai-Phong Harbor. In Laos, it might have used Army General William Westmoreland’s plan to block the Ho Chi Minh Trail by ground forces. In South Vietnam, it might have pushed firmly CIA expert William Colby’s Phoenix Program, or the “Pacification Operations” to eliminate the communist infrastructure. These measures should have proceeded at the same time in a combined plan. Within two years, such a limited offensive strategy with combined actions would have made the North Vietnamese communists kneel in surrender. U.S. ground forces would not be used in the North and the Chinese would not be provoked to intervene in Indochina.
However, such an American victory would create burdens for the United States. General Phillip Davidson described these:
But—as it was the case—the victory would have brought with it onerous problems. If the Korean experience furnishes an example—and it does—the United States would have to keep residual military force in South Vietnam for at least two decades. The American force would have been harassed by minor North Vietnamese forays over the DMZ and by small, but frustrating, ambushes and land mining operations carried out by communist guerrillas. The needs of the South Vietnamese government for economic and military aid would surely grow into significant fiscal burdens. To paraphrase the old adage—the price of liberty [for a Southeast Asian ally] is not only eternal vigilance, but the assumption of long-term and painful obligations as well.11
General Davidson’s supposition was clear and concise. Based upon these realities and suppositions, the problems of the United States in resolving the war in Vietnam becomes clear. One final truth emerges from asking the question: “Did the United States lose the war or did it win the war politically over the communists of Vietnam?” We must affirm that “those who really lost the war were the South Vietnamese people.” We suffered deeply from the effects of the loss because we were betrayed by our ally. That was the real fact of history.
After the last president of South Vietnam, General Duong van Minh, declared the disbandment of the South Vietnamese regime and the surrender to the communists, the peace of all Indochina seemed promising. In America, most people thought the war in Southeast Asia had ended. The Pacific Stars and Stripes appeared on Thursday, May 1, 1975, with a sharp headline, that read, “IT’S OVER! The Saigon government surrendered unconditionally to the Viet-Cong Wednesday, ending 30 years of bloodshed.”12 Other newspapers carried the same image and pointed out that there was no bloodbath in Saigon. However, if the bloodbath did not happen in Saigon, it did in Phnom-Penh. And bloodshed continued all over Indochina for years after the war. More wars, more killings and more deaths were reported in the following years.
In comparison with the 20-year Indochina War, that ended in the deaths of 1.8 to 2 million people, the number of Indochinese killed in the post-war era—from 1975 to 1979—would reach 2,200,000. Pol Pot and his fellows were accused of inhumane manslaughter for the massacre of 1.5 million Cambodians. Vietnamese communist Party leaders should be considered as leading masters of the chaos in Indochina and the hideous creators of a massive exodus of three million South Vietnamese, who tried to flee their motherland during the two decades after the war. Among them, fewer than two million reached the free-world nations. The Vietnamese exodus was historically one of the largest and the most pitiful migrations of human beings since ancient times.
In addition, Vietnamese communist leaders proved themselves among the most ambitious, greedy and harsh dictators as they resolved post-war problems in Indochina and in South Vietnam. Several thousand-page books would be needed to report adequately their endless foolish, perilous, and venturesome attempts to solve these problems. The following provides but a few succinct glimpses of their “ideological revolutions” and their vindictive measures applied in South Vietnam, and their ambitions in Indochina, particularly in Cambodia.
After successfully violating the Paris Accords of 1973 by a full-scale attack on South Vietnam, seeing the last Americans leave Saigon, and accepting Duong van Minh’s unconditional surrender, Vietnamese communist leaders might believe they accomplished their first and long-term strategic purpose of the “nation’s liberation,” or the liberation of the people from foreign domination to gain national independence. Their second strategic purpose was the “social class liberation,” or the liberation of the proletariats and the peasants from the “domination” of the other social classes.
These “ideological purposes” were rooted in the communist dogma of Marx and Engels, which Lenin and Mao Tse-Tung had successfully applied as they struggled to establish communist regimes in their countries. Their disciples in Vietnam had carried out the “revolutionary war” for more than twenty years to realize these dreams. To establish a solid communist regime in Vietnam, the second objective “social class liberation” needed to be carried out, certainly in South Vietnam. The South had experimented with freedom and democracy for two decades. Therefore, it was not easy for the communists to achieve their goals. To destroy a free regime would not only mean demolishing its government and its armed forces, but also uprooting every source that nourished freedom for the people and their liberal perspective.
For these reasons, the Vietnamese communist leaders strictly applied the so-called “Social Revolution of Socialism” (Cách-Mạng Xã-hội Xã-hội Chủ-Nghĩa) all over South Vietnam only weeks after their victory celebration in early May 1975. This “revolution” that pretended to liberate poor people in reality was targeted to uproot all vestiges of the former society in all domains, both spiritually and physically. In other words, the communist leaders employed fierce measures to reform the society by targeting their revenge on all classes of people associated in any form with the old regime.
The “Social Revolution of Socialism” proceeded under several separate concurrent revolutions: ideological revolution, educational revolution, literary revolution, economical revolution, industrial revolution and agricultural revolution. Each revolution had prime objectives to be realized and subjective targets to be eradicated from their spheres. This social revolution was the most crucial scheme of the communists to completely degenerate a free society into a socialist society.
In the ideological revolution, the first and foremost targets to be eliminated or separated from the populace were RVNAF personnel, governmental officials, and those who had been associated with the former regime at all levels. All RVNAF officers with the rank of second-lieutenant to general, and high ranking officials, about 200,000 in number, were concentrated into “re-education camps” in remote areas around the country, from the peninsula of Camau to the northwest forests of North Vietnam to be brain-washed. Their families, were concentrated in different remote “new economic sites” (Khu Kinh-tế Mới) around South Vietnam to endure their new lives cultivating and developing the lands which had been devastated by the war. Millions of families were relocated from cities and towns to these new economic sites.
After “liberating” Saigon on April 30, 1975, the Communists brainwashed most RVNAF officers in “re-education” camps around the country. Officers’ wives were relocated to remote “new economic sites” and forced into hard labor. This photograph shows one of these unfortunate women at Le Minh Xuan Site. Courtesy Nguyen Cau and Sao Bien.
Children of RVNAF officers were forced into hard labor. This photograph shows children in Bien Hoa Province forced to smash rocks at Buu Long Mount for minimal food. Courtesy Nguyen Cau an Sao Bien.
The second and most important targets were the leaders of Buddhist, Catholic, Christian, Cao-Dai and Hoa-Hao sects, and the leaders of nationalist parties. After the concentration of RVNAF officers, most of these sects and parties’ leaders were soon being concentrated into re-education camps for different terms. All pagodas, temples and churches were closed to believers. Any public worship, celebration, or reunion at these religious places was forbidden. In a society of old traditions and customs based upon the teachings of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, all western lifestyles were attacked by communist magazines, newspapers, and propaganda services day after day. All of these means were used to indoctrinate the people from cities to rural areas in “socialism” and “communism.” A public fear emerged in every corner of South Vietnam: fear of doing, fear of saying, fear of being accused of being anti-regime, and so on.
In the educational and literary revolutions, the targets were intellectuals in the world of letters, writers, poets, novelists, university professors, theoreticians, philosophers, and, people of the press circles, owners, publishers, editors and journalists. Many were arrested put in jails, or concentrated in re-education camps. Establishments of production and publication such as printing-houses, publishing houses, editorial offices were seized. All spiritual works, old magazines, newspapers, novels, short stories, poems, books—including academic books—were confiscated and burned. All national libraries and all private bookstores were closed to the public. To be sure that the literary works of several liberal authors of the former regime could not be circulated and read, the communist government issued a first decree forbidding the people from reading or circulating under any literary form the writings of 56 authors (the name of this writer was on this fearsome decree).
A new and restrained educational system replaced the liberal one in school at all levels. The new system produced a mediocre standard of obedient, block-headed, and blind generations of youth. It also introduced many new, ridiculous, and funny words into the vocabulary of the Vietnamese language. There is a long list of these grotesque words that the communist Vietnamese lexicographers may not have the courage to put into their dictionaries.
After the re-unification of the country under the “Socialist Republic of Vietnam” (SRVN), Hanoi leaders immediately extended their revolutionary measures to their South Vietnamese comrades. The “Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam” (PRGVN) and the “Liberation Army,” or Viet-Cong, were dissolved. Many PRGVN ministers and cadres were eliminated from all SRVN’s organs. Some fled the country to exile abroad. Truong Nhu Tang, a PRGVN minister, fled to France and wrote a book criticizing the communist regime and its leaders for their cruelty, inhumanity, and lack of loyalty. Many Viet-Cong or southern-born military cadres, who were considered “little capitalists,” were forced to retire. Some later wrote petitions, protestations, or books blaming the communist leaders for being narrow-minded, ambitious, and arrogant and the regime for being incompetent, rigid, corrupt and lawless. They implored “reforms.”
In the economic, agricultural and industrial revolutions, Vietnamese communist leaders closely put into practice the theories of socialism, advocating that a country’s land, transport, natural resources and chief industries should be owned and controlled by the whole community or by the State, and that wealth should be equally distributed. In reality, they confiscated all private lands, industrial factories, means of production, commercial establishments and stores, and properties of landowners, merchants, and rich people around South Vietnam, then transformed all of these into state properties and state factories to direct all production and manage all distribution. All smaller shops, stores, and factories were closed except those of the State. The monthly quantity of food or aliment was fixed for citizens, based upon each person’s labor performance, new social class, and family members. People who were not associated with any government organization would purchase food at the lowest standard of quantity. Free market production and consumption ended only six months after the “liberation” of South Vietnam. The impoverishment of the South Vietnamese people peaked between 1976 and 1980. Tens of millions of people in more than twenty provinces did not have enough food and were at risk of starvation. Social activities seriously stagnated after millions of people lost their properties and tens of millions more lost their incomes, because of unemployment and the prohibition of practicing free commerce, business, and wholesale or retail trade. In some provinces the children were forced to hard labor.
In rural areas collective farms and in urban sectors state-enterprises were incapable of producing food and furnishing commodities enough for the people. The stagnation of the national economy was inevitable. In addition, the Communist Party’s policy of eradicating the “capitalists” (Tư-sẚn) and “sellers” (Mại-bẚn), and especially the discrimination against indigenous Chinese created more problems for the regime. Rob Paschall, in an editorial letter in Vietnam Magazine, wrote: “Two years after the Saigon regime fell, rumors of border skirmishes between China and Vietnam emerged. Much of this armed dispute revolved around a Hanoi-inspired pogrom directed at its own 650,000 indigenous Chinese citizens. As accusations flew, some 263,000 Chinese began fleeing Vietnam. Then, a few months after Hanoi’s victory in Cambodia, China invaded Vietnam.”13
In short, the vindictive measures of the Vietnamese communist leaders in their “Social Revolution of Socialism” would result, in first, the exodus of nearly 3 million South Vietnamese, including the Chinese-Vietnamese. One-third of them lost their lives in the Pacific. Dictionaries of advanced nations became enriched with the term “boat people.” Second, these measures resulted in the stagnation of the national economy and the poverty of the Vietnamese people, all of which would retard the development of the nation for decades.
Later, after 1986 and the transition from the “Socialist Economy to Market Economy,” and after many changes in the Party’s leadership, the Vietnamese communists believed that their “economic renovation” would bring modernization to the nation and prosperity to the people. On the contrary, after studying their “renovation,” many international observers predicted that the Vietnamese economic reforms would only create a new class of rulers in Vietnam, who were “trying to consolidate the devastated communist regime in Vietnam while attempting to exploit its geographic position in Asia-Pacific and its human and natural resources for their own greed of wealth, property, and power. Their economic reforms have set up a new class of Red-Capitalists in Vietnam.”14
From early 1952, during the First Vietnam War, the French Second Bureau in Indochina knew that the ultimate aim of the Vietnamese communist leaders was to install a communist regime not only in Vietnam, but also in Laos and Cambodia. To accomplish this, Ho Chi Minh and his disciples organized the Indochinese Communist Party (the forerunner of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party), trained and encouraged several Laotian and Cambodian communist leaders, supported them, and led them in the struggle for the independence of their countries. The relations between these three countries’ communist leaders were close throughout the long war.
After the Second Vietnam War ended, their relations changed little. In Laos, the Laotian communist leaders continued to answer to Hanoi and legitimized the presence of 40,000 Vietnamese troops already stationed in Laos by the “Friendship and Assistance Treaties” with Vietnam, signed July 18, 1977. In Cambodia, Pol Pot and other Khmer-Rouge leaders planned to slip out from the influence of Hanoi to determine their own path to rule the country. Unfortunately, this narrow path led them to destruction. In effect, after the seizure of Phnom-Penh and national power, Pol Pot and other Khmer-Rouge leaders immediately orchestrated a brutal, repressive and inhumane policy to eradicate the traces and subjects of the late regime. That policy resulted in the mass execution of more than 1,500,000 Cambodians and mass starvation in Cambodia.
Common opinion apparently says that Pol Pot’s homicidal policy and the Khmer-Rouge’s barbarity of slaughtering the Cambodian civilian population, including thousands of indigenous Vietnamese citizens, were the main reasons Hanoi invaded Cambodia. A closer examination reveals that the Khmer-Rouge’s refusal to submit to Hanoi was the true cause. In addition, the Vietnamese communist leaders sought to dominate Cambodia in order to extract its wealth, exploit its natural resources and suck its cream to nourish the 1,500,000 men in the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), a task that could not be met by their national weak economy. With these Hanoi leaders’ ambitions, war was inevitable.
The Vietnamese strategic plan to occupy Cambodia proceeded in several phases:
• From 1975 to 1977, PAVN units repeatedly conducted small attacks against the Khmer-Rouge along the borders to test their resistance and fighting ability.
• From November to December 1977, PAVN large units crushed a Khmer-Rouge division at Snoul on Road 13, twenty miles north of Loc-Ninh, then conducted an advance 70 miles deep into the eastern territory of Cambodia.
• On December 24, 1978, Hanoi leaders renewed their invasion of Cambodia. Several PAVN large units crossed the borders and quickly smashed Khmer-Rouge units in six eastern provinces of Cambodia. On January 7, 1979, these Vietnamese communist units captured Phnom-Penh and established a socialist “Puppet regime” led by Heng Samrin, a Khmer-Rouge division commander (later, he was replaced by Hun–Sen, the subject most loyal to Hanoi). Pol Pot’s units were almost crushed by the PAVN force but they had enough force to resist the Vietnamese in several pockets in the countryside and in the borderline areas with Thailand.
During a visit to Singapore in November 1978, Chinese Communist Party leader Dang Xiao-ping had declared: “Those ungrateful people must be punished. We gave them $200 billion of aid, Chinese sweat and blood, and look what happened.” He swore to “teach Vietnam a lesson.”15 On February 17, 1979, a Chinese force of 225,000 men, composed of infantry, artillery, and armored units, crossed the northern frontier of Vietnam and attacked Vietnamese positions at Lang-Son, occupied it, and advanced 15 to 20 miles deep into the Vietnamese territory. But the PAVN resistance was fierce. Both sides suffered serious casualties. The war lasted less than a month. In the first week of March, the war slowed. It was “unclear whether the Chinese slowed their offensive because of effective Vietnamese resistance or because of Chinese deliberately stopped their advances [as they claimed].”16 The Chinese proclaimed that they had accomplished their mission and began to withdraw. The withdrawal was completed on March 15, 1979. After this, relations between these two communist countries were rocky for years. Later, Communist Vietnam had to pay a very high price to normalize relations with China.
The most serious offenses by the Vietnamese Communist Party’s top leaders to their fatherland were the horrible crimes of selling lands and seas to Red China for secret reasons. Notable foreign media recently disclosed their acts of treason toward their country. According to these sources, on December 30, 1999, the VWP’s leaders signed a secret agreement with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to cede China a vast portion of borderlands of about 789 square kilometers (305 square miles) along Cao Bang and Lang son Provinces. Historical heritages such as the Nam Quan frontier pass, the Ban-Doc Falls, and the Ho Dynasty’s Citadel are now lost to China. Another top secret agreement was signed in December 2000 at Beijing in which Vietnam lost about 11,000 square kilometers (4,250 square miles) territorial waters to China in the Gulf of Tonkin and the South Sea. French journalist Sylviane Pasquier, in an article published by the prestigious weekly L’Express in France, describes these so-called top secret agreements to sell Vietnamese lands and seas by the VWP’s leaders as “Marchandage Odieuse, Haute Trahison”—horrible haggling, high treason.17
After the end of the Vietnam War, the most sensitive and emotional issue for the United States was the American personnel deemed missing in action (MIAs). More than 2590 Americans were MIAs in Indochina, of which 1,913 were believed to be in Vietnam, 567 in Laos, and 107 in Cambodia. During the late 1970s and the entire decade of the 1980s, although perceiving the seriousness of United States’ concerns about this issue, Vietnamese communist leaders pretended to ignore the American proposition to talk on that subject until the early years of the 1990s.
In 1991, the Vietnamese communist leaders changed their opinion. Reconciliation with the United States might help save their national economy that was on the road to ruin. Indeed, the destruction caused by the war, the socialist economy, the American trade embargo, and particularly the cessation of Soviet economic aid in 1990 had blunted all efforts of the people to rebuild the country so that the communists could maintain their regime.
Looking back to the period that followed the Vietnamese communist force’s withdrawal from Cambodia in November 1989, we can see several indicators of the grave deterioration of the Vietnamese economy, such as partial starvation in the northern and central provinces, poor crops production, a population increase, a high level of unemployment and underemployment, a high rate of inflation and deficits, a chaotic distribution system and short life expectancy, and the deterioration of national resources and potential. Among the basic issues facing Vietnam in that period, poverty was the most devastating.
In the previous years, the Vietnamese economy stood dependent upon the economic aid of the USSR and its allies in Eastern Europe. After the war with China, separately, Soviet economic aid to Vietnam was estimated about $1.5 billion a year. Although aid was provided by the USSR and Eastern European countries, Vietnam had to relinquish some of its sovereignty in exchange. The Vietnamese communist leaders agreed to the USSR setting up a naval base at Cam-Ranh Bay and were forced to “export labor” to these nations to repay debts which added up to $8.4 billion. In 1990, the Vietnamese economy verged on a total collapse when Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev based upon his 1988 declaration of “Unilateral Convention Force Reduction,” ordered the Soviet navy force to withdraw from Cam-Ranh and cut off 80 percent of the economic aid to Vietnam. Then, after the communist regime in Russia collapsed, Vietnam was nearly isolated and became one of the three poorest countries in the world.
The only hope of the Vietnamese communist leaders for the survival of their national economy and their regime was the crucial necessity of reconciling with the United States, so that it would lift its trade embargo, and normalizing diplomatic relations between the two countries. However, skillful negotiating meant approaching these issues indirectly. Instead, they turned to the issue of MIAs of both American and Vietnamese servicemen. They discussed with the American delegations this as the first and foremost issue among their “humanitarian concerns.”
In 1991, at the Seventh Congress of the Vietnamese Communist Party, the problem of North Vietnamese troops missing in action was deliberated along with other important problems. There were about 300,000 NVA troops missing in action among more than 840,000 killed in action (KIAs). MIA issue became a crucial part of Vietnam’s new policy to reconcile with the United States.
In mid–1992, basic agreements of mutual efforts to resolve the MIA issue for both sides were acknowledged at meetings of several middle-level delegates. At higher levels, in June of 1993, three very important persons of the SRVN government, prime minister Vo van Kiet, deputy prime minister Phan van Khai, and foreign minister Nguyen Manh Cam, at different places and on different occasions, raised the issue of the importance of U.S. government assistance to solve the problem of the missing Vietnamese service personnel in return for their efforts to find American MIAs. Specially, Nguyen Manh Cam appealed to Washington to “concretely pursue cooperation” with Vietnam to find its enormous number of MIAs. On the Vietnamese side, the MIA issue was only a “reason” or a first step to approach the United States for more political and economic purposes.
Assuredly, all of their proposals were joyfully received and appreciated by the United States.
During late 1993 and early 1994, Vietnamese communist leaders proved that the MIA issue was merely a vehicle for the two countries to “reconcile” when they began to ask for the release of the American trade embargo against them which had been in place since the end of the war. The process of lifting the embargo encountered a little difficulty in the United States, but it was finally done in March 1994. The second step of their strategy of “reconciliation” was satisfactorily accomplished.
After that, Hanoi leaders requested a normalization of diplomatic relations with the United States. This was also satisfied in August 1995. U.S. congressional representative Douglas “Pete” Peterson, a former air force pilot who had been imprisoned as a prisoner of war in Hanoi for six and half years, was assigned by president Bill Clinton in September 1995 as U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam. His confirmation was delayed for almost two years; finally he arrived in Hanoi in late 1997 to do something “positive” as he said, “I have seen the negative, I look forward to the positive.”18 Following him were representatives of 400 business corporations, educationalists from 22 universities, and humanitarian people of 300 non-governmental organizations. All of these Americans came to every part of Vietnam to positively help the Vietnamese communist regime, its economy, and its people.
Billions of U.S. dollars poured in Vietnam from the U.S. government, private organizations and corporations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The “socialist economy” had not yet disappeared but the “market economy” had largely emerged from all corners of Vietnam. The Vietnamese economy was saved. The third step of the Vietnamese Communist Party’s policy of “reconciliation” with the United States was perfectly accomplished. But, remember, any profit gained was at a price. The Vietnamese communist leaders had to ask themselves: What price would Vietnam have to pay to the United States? Had Vietnam become a U.S. satellite in Southeast Asia—like an advanced fortress deterring Chinese southward aggression? What would need to be done in this important region to pay its debts to its new benefactor? Money from the rich is a dangerous weapon.
More recently, sensitively perceiving they were “holding a double-sided knife,” Hanoi leaders hesitated to accept proposals of U.S. “military relations” between Vietnam and the United States. The Honolulu Advertiser, on March 14, 2000, commented: “Leaders of the Vietnamese communist regime are wary that stronger ties with other foreign nations and the global economy could destabilize the country and loosen their grip on power. In addition, they are highly sensitive that any hint of U.S.—Vietnamese military alliance might arouse Chinese fears on encirclement.”19 Hanoi leaders would later reconsider the question of a “military alliance” with the United States. However, Red China would not let them do that.
Now, Vietnam surely is caught between the two strongest powers in the world, the United States and Communist China. Which path might Vietnam follow: continue on the communist trail or change in direction toward the free-world avenue?