Unhappy anniversary: 50 years since the fall of Saigon
To the present-day Vietnamese it’s a happy anniversary, according to NPR:
Large, cheerful crowds of flag-waving people had been gathering in central Ho Chi Minh City since early Wednesday morning, many of them having camped here overnight.
The city became a sea of red – the color of Vietnam’s national flag. …
“It’s a grand celebration and I see in the Vietnamese a tremendous pride. They are proud to have defeated the French, the Americans and the Chinese,” said Jim Laurie, a veteran American journalist, who witnessed the fall of Saigon and who has returned to Vietnam many times over the years. …
“It’s a celebration of what they, the Vietnamese, have become and not what they were,” he said.
Fifty years is a long time. Most of the Vietnamese weren’t around back then, and to them it’s ancient history and the Communist Party and its “socialist-oriented market economy” is all they know. The bloodbaths are over.
To me, and I assume to most older Vietnamese who came to this country after the fall, and their descendants – it’s a sad reminder of an ignominious end to a long struggle against Communism. I’ve written about Vietnam many many times on this blog – in fact, it’s an entire category of posts numbering over a hundred, some of them personal including parts of my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series. Here’s one of those posts.
My Vietnamese neighbor is a refugee, along with his wife and all his siblings. He knows what Communism did to the country of his birth, and to his parents. He takes the time to thank anyone he sees wearing a “Vietnam vet” hat or shirt for having tried to save his country.
Capitalism Won the Vietnam War
https://archive.md/HP8do
There is a large Vietnamese ex-pat community in SoCal. Many work at the UCI Medical Center, where I spend too much time. I have spoken to many who escaped, and many born in the United States children of escapees.
None will be celebrating today; although many have told me how they celebrate their American liberty.
I have reported before on the conversation with a former Army Officer. He and his wife escaped in a small boat. Picked up after days at sea by an Israeli freighter and taken to Israel, where they lived for five years. Children born in Israel. I asked, “did they not treat you well? “. He responded; “very well, but we had a burning desire to reach the greatest country in the world”.
A young woman told of her father’s experience in a re-education camp. The Communists dictated that every South Vietnamese male go through re-education before adulthood; so the family made their escape as her brother approached his 18th birthday, because survival in those camps was problematic.
I never hear rancor due to the manner of the U.S. abandonment.
What would the world be like today if the politicians of those days had the same commitment to win they wanted everyone else in the country to have? The damage to this country and perhaps the world from the way that war was conducted was far greater that that handed to Vietnam. Vietnam has more or less recovered; the US still suffers the consequences.
Why even bother fighting a war if you have no intention of winning?
A long and deep topic far too much for blog comments.
I’ll give Billy Jeff a lot of grief but I have to recognize something good he did. He helped win the Vietnam war for the US without firing a shot.
Many of neo’s readers were adults during the Vietnam War and many of you knew the impact of American casualties firsthand. Looking at your High School yearbooks, College classmates, co-workers, family…
About 58,000 U.S. casualties in approximately 8 years.
Fentanyl deaths in the U.S. were over 80,000 in the most recent 12 month period with available data (10/23 – 9/24). 114,000 in the 12 months prior.
Both are terrible tragedies, but it boggles the mind what little attention is focused on the latter.
@Oldflyer: I never hear rancor [from Vietnamese ex-pats] due to the manner of the U.S. abandonment.
From occasional news stories I read, the Vietnamese in Vietnam bear little ill-will towards Americans. Generally, they seem to like Americans. Perhaps that is economic pragmatism.
Then there are the tearful stories of American vets and Vietnamese vets meeting decades later.
I can’t say I understand the Vietnamese. They seem to be a remarkable people.
58,000 dead. Typically deaths are about 1/3 of casualties in war, so three times that in dead and wounded. That is nothing to be taken lightly but, as usual, Rufus T. Firefly makes an interesting point.
Fentanyl deaths in the U.S. were over 80,000 in the most recent 12 month period with available data (10/23 – 9/24). 114,000 in the 12 months prior.
Both are terrible tragedies, but it boggles the mind what little attention is focused on the latter.
Amen, Brother Firefly.
My little sister overdosed on fentanyl in 2023. She collapsed in the lobby of her apartment building and turned blue. They called an ambulance, the EMT’s did CPR, cracked some bones and brought her back.
A few months later she died in her sleep at the age of 61.
I’m not forgetting how the Biden administration left the border open to fentanyl and how many other Americans are now dead.
Vietnam was so big in my life and how it turned out, I should have written a book. 🙂 Well, I did write it down, but it’s never been published. 🙁
Dong that helped me come to terms with it. Although, I can say the subject still stirs anger. As well as a foreboding that few have recognized that the anti-Vietnam War protestors of the 1960s/70s are very close to changing this nation into a “people’s republic.” Thankfully, Trump and the MAGA deplorables have slowed their march. How long will it last?
“Why even bother fighting a war if you have no intention of winning?” – DT
Yes, exactly. When Saigon fell, it suddenly hit me that all the lives lost (some were my close friends), all the billion$ spent, and all the heartache were all for NOTHING. It was an anger that ate at my guts, and other than going to D.C. and assassinating some Congressmen, there was no way to express it. I’ve written before on this blog about how it almost ruined my marriage. Thankfully, I got help and learned to handle my anger without violence.
Now, I’m just a toothless old lion roaring at the stupidity and mendacity of those who believe in the myth of an egalitarian paradise where no one wants for anything because the wise, all-caring government will take care of all.
I visited Vietnam in 2009. I was happy to see that the country was doing pretty well – at least tin the south. Those Vietnamese that would talk to me uniformly said they hated the government in Hanoi. None that I met were alive during the war and bore no ill will against the U.S.
They are an industrious people, and very resilient. Had we succeeded in helping their quest for democracy, they would probably be an economic success on a par with South Korea or Taiwan.
US Army vet 1966 – 1970
I was a spy against the Communists back then and I still hate Communism to this day in Vietnam and in the US (Democrats) – in fact anywhere.
Communism is based on envy and hatred, It only destroys. It builds nothing.
Communist China and Vietnam are more like National Socialism or Fascism where industry is semi-private but financed by and directed by government.
I pray every day that the people in all totalitarian countries are free some day. That includes about 50 Muslim countries.
I taught computer programming at a community college in the late seventies. Two of my outstanding students were sisters, ethnic Chinese refugees from North Vietnam. Both had been teachers there, and I don’t know their escape story, but they were interesting to work with.
I suspect they did well in their careers.
In re capitalism: In about the same era of the early eighties, I was reading a magazine article about investing where a number of people were asked what they would do with $10,000 (it was a lot of money at the time).
Everyone touted one industry or another, but the answer that sticks in my mind was the guy who said he would give it to some Vietnamese refugee and let him do whatever he wanted.
Depending on your definition–what doesn’t depend on definitions?–we had “won” the war.
The South was taking care of business on the battlefield. Few Americans were there and none in combat. Even the air power necessary was provided by the South Vietnamese Air Force.
They needed money and material support.
The dems cut them off without a penny.
A hideous betrayal, but it is in the dems’ DNA.
Buckley mused–a hypothetical–wondering what would happen if the war was won, peace flowed like a river, all was well….because the South won absolutely and without question and no conceivable effort from Hanoi could overturn that.
His guess was that the peace lovers would be disappointed to their innermost soul. Presuming they actually had one, I mean..
yes in point of fact, the ARVN had neutralized the militia by 1972, but the Soviets continued to supply the NVA, its arguable re Mark Moyar, that the war needed to fought at all on this time table, events after 1965 had us on our backfoot, the terror campaign which was countered somewhar by CORD.Phoenix, continued to have use,
its arguable this wasn’t really true in Afghanistan, two generations later, the circle of authority had receded to Kabul’s outskirts, in large part, and Pakistan was serving as the sanctuary
Message to NPR – it is Saigon, not HCM city.
Even now in VN, it is Saigon.
Yes, it did shape me. Grad college in 1968. Few choices, but for me only one – I enlisted in the Navy. A friend in college, Virgil Williams from Eastern CO, died there. A Farm Boy. I know HS classmates came back terribly maimed, and they eventually died because of the wounds. I visited the Memorial. very controversially when it was unveiled, but is very powerful. When I visit the traveling one and when in DC, I find Virgil.
We visited VN several yrs ago. The young people like us, and the govt has talked about the US Navy coming back into Cam Ranh Bay. We should. Twitch China
Not even going to fact-check you SHIREHOME, is that true? It would warm my heart if that were true, which is the only reason I question it – on guard against wishful thinking.
Valid points Richard Aubrey. Despite a feckless war strategy (using the term strategy very loosely), which cost the U.S. so dearly, all was not lost until the contemptible failure to provide the SVN the resources they needed, and were promised.
To my knowledge, no one has ever been required to explain that.
Metaphorical rugs were invented to sweep such questions under.
Following up on JJ’s comments. Every school child in the United States should walk past the Vietnam memorial; and listen to an honest adult explain the awful waste of lives when Politicians commit the country to war without a clear vision of the objective, or when lacking the will to achieve it. Sadly, such basic principles are habitually ignored.
yet they never do that do they say, I’m not saying warren starr, was right, but the way wars have been planned equipped and executed in the last half to three quarters of a century, has been deeply flawed,
Much of the war was fought in terms of “gradual escalation”. Or, in other terms, proportionality. They increase, we increase. Keep it up.
Ran into a Navy captain (O6, not like other captains O3, iow pretty good rank) in intelligence. Asked what he thought of “gradual escalation”. Best way to get young Americans killed to no purpose yet invented.
Two sides stand next to the wood chipper, throwing in their troops at equal rates. The guy who runs out first loses.
That’s not the way you win a freaking war, and anyway it doesn’t mollify those who want you to lose it. May as well get it over with and let them mutter into their marijuana.
I was a college student – junior year. I was heartbroken at seeing the pictures of Vietnamese escaping any way they could from Saigon.
I worked as a volunteer in a local effort to resettle Vietnamese refugees in my original home town. One of our sponsored refugees, who was only 17 at the time, actually lived with my family for a couple of years. (Our group had enough funds to rent three tiny apartments for the three family groups we committed to sponsor – but the three teenaged boys went to live with local families.)
I will never forget the stories they told, of how they escaped.
That experience had a big part in me deciding to join the Air Force, when enlisting in the military was really not very popular at all. I decided that no one that I loved should ever have to abandon everything and run for their lives, not if I could do anything about it.
we didn’t understand the enemy, even when our efforts were playing out, in the pre escalation period, and in the subsequent years, halberstam to take one example, amplified the category error, same with sheehan and co, even 30 years later, the ones making policy like McNamara, Bundy et al, were never held account sufficiently, the loss in Vietnam wasseismic in our culture in our identity, so those who were sent to fight, were made into pitiful wretches, Coming Home, First blood, Deer Hunter Black Sunday, for nearly a decade it took shows like Magnum to portray them as men of ourpose,
we didn’t really understand our islamic adversaries anyways, in te first years of this expeditionaty effort, success like the fall of the Taliban govt were illusory, the events in Iraq were confusing, and hence
demoralization set in,now nearly a quarter century after bin laden’s dispatching, within two years, iraq had been overrrun, by the islamic state, another head of the islamist hydra, of course they were made 10 feet tall after Bataclan and Malbeek, yet they were put in their place for a time, of course most of the signs that I identify islamism have been purged from the security services, as they found easier targets among their own countrymen,
The USSR was composed of about 16 or 17 quasi-independent communist republics.
When the USSR fell apart, NONE of these republics, upon independence, decided to form a new government that was communist.
Of the about 8 nations that formerly comprised the communist Eastern Bloc, none of them maintained a communist govt., after the demise of the USSR.
East and West Germany was the perfect real world laboratory that allowed for a very good comparison of the economic and social progress each nation made post WWII. The results speak for themselves.
East Germany was not forced to reunite with W.Germany; they chose to do so.
The former had the choice of maintaining a communist govt., but they opted not to.
All of this, one would think, would disabuse any normal person of promoting the communist ideology.
But, I would be wrong.
One must conclude that despite communism’s perfect record of misery ( and mass murder) there must be an element of malice, contempt for the common person, in those that promote this ideology.
because communism doesnt automatically need to violent revolution, that really only started with the Soviet Union, and mostly due to the self inflicted wounds of the czars men,
there was a brief groundswell for Zyuganov the Communist candidate, in 95-96, but there is no appetite for that at least not in the short term, the latter may have though the accumulation in the immediate post soviet era, as the
Putin is not a Communist but a Russian nationalist, in so far as alliance with former proxies like Yemen are useful to his goals,
now was the by the same standard Ho Chi Minh a sincere communist or a nationalist, who used the latter as a rallying cry,
similarly for Mao, who thought the 100 year cycle,
regardless between Stalin Mao and Ho Chi Minh, to use three examples, they racked up a butchers bill of 100 million lives,
An American fighter pilot meets some Vietnamese former adversaries:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/nguyen-van-bay-and-the-aces-from-the-north-1606486/
he was echoing some thoughts
https://substack.com/@jameshowardkunstler/note/p-162324721
Oldflyer, J.J., John Galt III, Richard Aubrey, SHIREHOME, Sgt. Mom, and all other veterans reading this – thank you for your service to our country!
Green, what you wore and the color of the country!Dax, it’s your job!
US Democrats refusal to honor our 1973 Peace Agreement commitments led, very directly, to millions Asians being murdered.
Fighting against communist evil was good—but war is hell. Innocents are killed by both sides.
Good write up here.
https://www.rodmartin.org/p/fifty-years-after-saigon-remembering?r=faen9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true
The Vietnamese who escaped from their homeland and resettled in the US call April 30th “Black April”.
I live a few miles from “Little Saigon” which is flourishing and is the unofficial host of the annual Tet Parade.
Find yourself a good purveyor of Banh Mi, a very tasty Vietnamese sandwich on French bread.
I remember that sad day very well. I was about to graduate college when it collapsed. I do recall the Democrats withholding arms support from South Vietnam – something that does not bode well for Israel with the current Far Left Democratic Party..