50th Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon
A few lessons.
“After America was shamefully run out of Vietnam, people lost their conviction about almost everything.”
— Bob Dylan, opening line of Scorsese’s documentary Rolling Thunder Revue about Dylan’s mid-1970s “Tangled Up in Blue” era tour. For some reason, there doesn’t appear to be an online video of Dylan saying this.
Some random thoughts on the Vietnam War, which ended 50 years ago on April 30, 1975.
When Henry Kissinger first visited Hanoi, to get over jet lag before sitting down to negotiate, he scheduled an initial day touring North Vietnamese museums to learn about their culture. They were all devoted to war.
Uh-oh, Dr. K. thought, we picked the wrong side to back.
When I jumped up to ask Henry Kissinger a question when he spoke at Rice University about 1978, I thought about asking him what he would have done different in Vietnam in 1975 without the Watergate-era Congress, but I wimped out and asked him about the current fashion for Eurocommunism. He replied with a hilarious recounting of the French Communist Party’s craven Breshnevism, which wasn’t fair to the Italian Communist, but had 3,000 spectators roaring with laughter. (Kissinger was really funny).
The northern Vietnamese had finally stopped the vast Chinese surge south from the Yellow River around the 900s AD. They remained more of a border lord warrior culture (like Prussia in Europe) than the insulated southern Vietnamese.
Paywall here.
A general problem that the U.S. ran into after WWII is that in most of East Asia there were two main types of locals who knew how to get things done in the modern world: those who had collaborated with the colonizers, whether the Japanese in Korea or the French in Vietnam, and the Communists. We were against the Commies, so that left the collaborators to be our pals.
A theory I have that I’ve never seen any quantitative evidence about pro or con is that American officials in the early 1960s were over-optimistic about our popularity with the South Vietnamese peasantry because a sizable number of Americans in Vietnam spoke French (the US military had been heavily involved in France since June 6, 1944), as did a lot of pro-Western Vietnamese, who assured us that everybody in South Vietnam hated the Communists as much as they did. But a lot of Buddhist peasants despised French-speaking Catholics as colonial collaborators with the foreign devils.
I’ve never quite grasped why the Domino Theory of the spread of Communism fell into such ill-repute. Noam Chomsky thought it made sense.
When Vietnam fell in 1975, so did Laos and Cambodia. But at that point it stopped. Was that because next-in-line Thailand was one of the two countries in East Asia, along with Japan, to maintain independence during the European colonial age, so the appeal of Communism was less strong? Or was it because the Cambodian Khmer Rouge were insane lunatics?
Similarly, should the US have figured out that the Domino Theory was less likely to occur to the southeast of Vietnam after the 1965 genocide in Indonesia of Communists and Chinese and Chinese Communists?
Indonesia, with its huge population and oil was the main domino to the southwest. On the other hand, Indonesia is a remarkably non-influential country for its size.
American air power appeared to undergo a quantum leap in 1972 with the introduction of the smart bomb.
Before 1972, America was clearly the world’s leading air power, but US air forces also lost a huge number of aircraft and failed to strike targets. Suddenly in 1972 the age of US air supremacy began to arrive, which has more or less endured for decades ever since.
Thus, Nixon’s policy of Vietnamization worked strikingly well:
In 1972, when the North Vietnamese armored units invaded South Vietnam, the U.S. lost only 739 combat fatalities.
Democrats in Congress, however, didn’t much notice and, once Watergate got going in 1973, banned American air support. This didn’t make much sense, much like Republicans currently seem intent on causing Ukraine to lose to Russia.
What a discordant finish. Should the Ukraine lose to Russia, it will not be because the US caused it: Allowed it, perhaps, but certainly not caused it. It isn’t our war in any way, shape, or form, no more than was Vietnam.
In the early nineties, I was in California for a stint on Steve’s favorite game show. My host threw a little pool party one evening. Among the guests were a handful of Russian doctors, visiting after the Soviet collapse in hopes of improving their own health care system. Also invited were several young Vietnamese women. ( They looked much better in their bathing suits than did the Russian doctors.).
It was the most interesting party I’ve ever attended.
The doctors were completely overwhelmed by LA, laughing at the thought that the Soviets ever attempted to compete with a country of such casual affluence.
The Vietnamese girls had a darker view of communism. They had been on a boat leaving South Vietnam after the fall. Commies had intercepted their boat, boarded it, threw all the men and little kids overboard, raped all the women, and left them to their fate.
I’ll never forget that warm California night, the pool glowing blue and the palm trees waving. Loud Russian laughter and the girls quietly talking about the murder of their families.
I hate commies without reservation.
I’m not sure about the ending. What’s the actual probability Ukraine “wins” the war in any sense, a land war in Asia against a much larger opponent with nuclear weapons? It has to be pretty low.
And same with Vietnam, how likely was it the South Vietnamese would “win” in 1975, 15+ years into a civil war where, as Steve implies, most sympathies lay with their countrymen over foreign “armed missionaries” as Rosseau might have put it (who he noticed, nobody liked).
Enjoyed the piece, but my impression of both these foreign entanglements, not to mention our nation building failures in the Muslim World, is that America should stop playing games it can’t win.