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..