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Vietnam – 50 Years Since The End Of The War
The liberation/fall of Saigon on April 30 1975 marked the end of the Vietnam War. I was in my teens in those days and had followed the war by reading, in German, various weekly magazines. It found it fascinating and abhorrent. The reporting was not pro-American. But neither was it pro-Vietnam. It in fact often failed to depict the Vietnamese side of the war.
Today Vietnam marked the 50th anniversary of the 'Day of the Liberation of the South and National Reunification' with a parade (vid).
The Trump administration, in a very childish gesture, has ordered U.S. diplomats in Vietnam not to attend the ceremonies.
The iconic picture of the emergency evacuation of the last U.S. personnel from Saigon was shot on April 29 1975.
The war in Ukraine is the first drone war – the war in Vietnam was the first helicopter war. The U.S. deployed nearly 12,000 choppers. Some 5,000 were shot down. I remember that nearly every magazine story I had read was accompanied by a picture of helicopters – flying or crashed on the ground. The late Colonel Pat Lang had a remarkable story to tell about a failed operation in Vietnam. Helicopter played a large role in it.
An early frequent commenter at Moon of Alabama, anna missed – also known as Jack Chevalier, had been a U.S. soldier in Vietnam. When we were discussing the war in Iraq he often mentioned the reality on the ground, as he had experienced it. Jack was an artist. He has died four years ago.
Years before he had sent me one of his pictures. It is an oil painting on a thick piece of raw wood with small glass pellets sprinkled into it.
notebook #1
2008
9"x 16"x 1"
oil paint and glass pellets on wood
by anna missed
bigger
The slab with the chopper is now hanging in my living room. It is a daily reminder of the horrors of war. I myself, luckily, never had to experience them. Looking at the picture I would neither want to be (in) the helicopter nor the person on ground holding the hand up against(?) it.
War is always abhorrent. But for the Vietnamese it was necessary to wage it for the independence and unity of their country.
They paid a very high price but did win and for that I congratulate them.
50th Anniversary of the End of the Vietnam War
by Michael K. Smith / April 30th, 2025
After two decades of savage U.S. efforts to impose imperial control over South Vietnam, the effort collapsed in April 1975.
Columns of refugees and routed troops packed the roads twisting out of the hills and rubber plantations toward the marshy flatlands around Saigon. Barefoot villagers, band of soldiers with their boots rotting off, lost children wailing for their parents, parents screaming for their children, wounded men caked with dried blood and filthy bandages, creeping trucks, buses, and herds of water buffalo, oxcarts lumbering along on wooden wheels, all paraded past the wreckage of burned-out tanks and scattered corpses rotting in the fields by the roadside, fleeing the advancing bombs and shellfire announcing Ho Chi Minh’s imminent victory.
At the U.S. Embassy, a desperate crowd of Vietnamese interpreters, army leaders, bartenders, colonial bureaucrats, and stool pigeons rushed the gates waving letters from American employers, stateside lovers, or distant American acquaintances who used to know someone in their extended family.
Saigon was no more.
To General Thieu and his henchmen, President Ford offered sanctuary in the United States. To the young Americans who had not been able to bring themselves to kill for such gangsters, he offered the choice of permanent exile from the U.S. or imprisonment. On the Vietnamese people, he imposed a trade embargo, a veto on their entry into the United Nations, and a refusal to negotiate the unresolved issues of the war.
The imperialist credo was thus fulfilled: those who have been arbitrarily punished are punished anew.
After two decades of Western terror, retributive deaths were near zero. The much-predicted Communist bloodbath did not materialize, and Hanoi created nothing worse than re-education camps for those who collaborated with the U.S. in killing millions of their fellow Vietnamese.
This remarkable display of restraint passed unnoticed in the U.S. media, which preferred to denounce Communist indoctrination methods. Those whom Washington employed to engage in wholesale torture and massacre of their countrymen were portrayed as innocent victims forced to endure the agony of political lectures.
The hundreds of thousands of orphans, junkies, prostitutes, and maimed survivors the U.S. left in its wake, whom the Vietnamese somehow had to rehabilitate as they struggled to overcome a shattered economy, devastated ecosystem, and demolished social order, were ignored and quickly forgotten.
As for the meaning of it all, the New York Times remained utterly clueless:
“There are those Americans who believe that the war to preserve a non-Communist, independent South Vietnam could have been waged differently. There are other Americans who believe that a viable, non-Communist South Vietnam was always a myth … A decade of fierce polemics has failed to resolve the quarrel.”
Of course, while the war raged, Americans surged into the streets in record numbers to protest that the U.S. had no business meddling in the internal politics of Vietnam, regardless of the prospects for “success.” This position, reiterated endlessly at rallies, protest marches, and teach-ins, was never heard in official circles, nor was it ever given a hearing on the editorial pages of the New York Times.
U.S. hands off other countries.
To the Times‘ editors, these words were incomprehensible.
U.S. military and government leaders were no more insightful. A U.S. Air Force general said that the important lesson of the war was that “We could have won the war if political factors had not entered in,” perhaps a reference to the failure to use nuclear weapons, which both the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations had considered doing. Secretary of State Dean Rusk blamed the “loss” of Vietnam on the “impatience” of the American people, adding that a future Vietnam-style war would require censorship. “You can’t fight a war on television,” he lamented. General Maxwell Taylor contended that success required the banning of dissent, counseling that any president would “be well advised to silence future critics by executive order.”
With millions killed and Indochina in ruins, President Ford urged Americans to forget. “The lessons of the past,” he implausibly advised, “have already been learned … and we should have our focus on the future.
https://dissidentvoice.org/2025/04/50th-anniversary-of-the-end-of-the-vietnam-war/
Posted by: Menz | May 1 2025 2:40 utc | 141
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