Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War – April 30, 1975. Depending on where you stood, the “American War” had ended with the liberation of Saigon, or the “Vietnam War” had ended in utter disaster. Event a half century later, our memory of the war and the name we give to it depends on where one stood 50 years ago.
It is likely that some acknowledgment of this anniversary will penetrate the torrent of media coverage about Trump and his antics. As someone who was a minor participant in the antiwar movement, beginning as a college student in the early ‘60s, the Vietnam war profoundly changed my life, even though I was never in the military. Here are some thoughts/memories about the war that may be of interest to participants in “the movement,” or for those who were too young for Vietnam and learned about it only later.
April 30, 1975
As for the fall/liberation of Saigon, we have reports from the journalists who stayed behind after the US officials, US troops, and those Vietnamese who could get on the US planes and ships had fled. One of the reporters who got the story was The Guardian’s [UK] reporter Martin Woollcott, who in 2015 wrote “Forty years on from the fall of Saigon: witnessing the end of the Vietnam war.” According to Woollcott:
The day after the North Vietnamese took Saigon, the city was woken by triumphal song. During the night the engineers of the victorious army had rigged up loudspeakers, and from about 5am the same tinny liberation melodies were incessantly played. It was 30 April 1975, and sharp early sunlight illuminated Saigon’s largely empty streets, at a time when the city’s frenetic traffic would normally have already begun to buzz. But hardly anybody knew what to do – whether to go to work or not, whether there would be anything to buy in the market, whether there would be petrol, or whether new fighting might break out. It was, of course, not just Saigon’s daily routine that had been utterly disrupted. Its established role as the capital of non-communist Vietnam had vanished overnight, its soldiers had disappeared, and many of its generals, politicians and civil servants were at that moment bobbing up and down on the decks of warships in the South China Sea, with US Navy blankets pulled round their shoulders. Read More]
The Antiwar Movement
Why did the American project to stifle and role back the liberation movement in Vietnam fail? The story of the war is long and complex, but one question of importance to peace activists is whether and how the antiwar movement played a role in ending the war. If we think of “the antiwar movement” as not just students, but also the US soldiers at home and in Vietnam, and the growing public opinion opposition to the war, especially after the “Tet Offensive” of early 1968, we’re talking about a very large number of people protesting the war in different ways. But was the antiwar movement effective?
Carolyn Eisenberg, once an antiwar protester herself who went on to become a history professor at Hofstra and the author of an award-winning history of the later stages of the Vietnam War, “Fire and Rain,” addressed questions about the effectiveness of the antiwar movement on the war in a talk two years ago with our friends at Massachusetts Peace Action. Here is a link to her talk and a brief summary:
(Video) Impact of the Antiwar Movement on Vietnam War Policy
From Massachusetts Peace Action [February 27, 2023]
---- On January 27, 1973, the Paris Peace Conference agreed to U.S. withdrawal of all troops and advisors from Vietnam, withdrawal of all foreign troops from Laos and Cambodia, and a ceasefire throughout Vietnam. It was the culmination of a failed US project that cost vast sums of money and millions of lives. For years a vibrant antiwar movement challenged the direction of US policy. Focusing on the Nixon years, Carolyn Eisenberg has drawn upon thousands of declassified documents to illuminate the impact of the antiwar movement on the Nixon Administration. In looking back at the Vietnam experience, do those events have implications for the present? [See the Program]
The Liberation Movement in Vietnam
The liberation of Vietnam from the Americans and from the regimes they put in place in Vietnam depended on Vietnamese military power and the support given to the Vietnamese by Russia and China.
With casualties in the millions and much of their country destroyed, a critical question is, “Why and how did the Vietnamese refuse to give up?” Similar questions are asked today about the Ukrainian resistance to Russia and the Palestinian resistance to Israel: why do apparently “defeated” peoples refuse to surrender? American political and military leadership from Eisenhower to Nixon/Kissinger were reluctant to ascribe to the Vietnamese who fought the US so hard anything other than puppetry/brainwashing by “the communists.” Few US policy intellectuals or commentators would admit that Vietnamese could be motivated by patriotism or revolutionary nationalism.
One of my favorite pieces of Vietnamese writing from the war for liberation is the diary of a nurse from Hanoi, working with a North Vietnamese military unit. It is called Last Night I Dreamed of Peace. The story of how it was found on the body of the young woman after she had been killed in an American assault, how it had been miraculously preserved and then translated back in the States, and then eventually returned to the nurse’s mother in Vietnam after the war, is in this NPR Program from 2006. The introduction to the book, written by historian Frances Fitzgerald, and including some excerpts from the diary, can be heard in this audio book. Millions of Vietnamese people undoubtedly shared this heroic woman’s dream of peace.
After the War
As mentioned above, one of the most important elements of the US antiwar movement was the active-duty Gis who protested and disrupted “the war effort.” A good introduction to this resistance can be seen in the 2006 documentary film, "Sir. No Sir." The complicated story of the post-war experiences of Vietnam soldiers – suicides, Agent Orange “syndrome,” homelessness and poverty, and much – was one of the “costs” of the Vietnam War often unrecognized.
Some Vietnam veterans eventually returned to Vietnam, perhaps for complex reasons, but many of them found healing in living in Vietnam and attempting to heal the nation and people from the war in which the Gis had participated. One of the stories in this mix is that of Chuck Searcy and his Project Renew. A PBS piece from 2017 A PBS short docuomentary from 2017 focuses on Searcy’s return to Vietnam, what he found there, and his efforts to clear the land in which he was living from unexploded cluster bomb. More of Searcy’s story can be found on the Project Renew website. For millions of Gis, their “war” lasted far beyond April 30, 1975.
After 50 Years, What Did It All Mean?
During the height of the Vietnam War, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was perhaps the most important leader speaking out against the war. His most famous speech in this mode, the one at the Riverside Church (NYC) on April 4, 1967, marked a break by King from the more cautious positions of the leadership of the civil rights movement who feared that combatting President Lyndon Johnson on the war might mean losing Johnson’s support for civil rights issues. And when King went ahead and announced his opposition to the war, he was vilified by much of the US liberal leadership, including the New York Times and most of the mainstream media.
Three weeks after his Riverside speech, King gave a sermon at his Ebenezer Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He called it "Why I Am Opposed to the War on Vietnam." It is shorter and in some ways imo better than his Riverside speech. This is what he said:
This sermon is not addressed to Hanoi, or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Nor is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in a successful resolution of the problem. This morning, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans, who bear the greatest responsibility, and entered a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents. [Hear the Sermon].
Some nations at have set aside a time and place to discuss great issues in their history and to reflect on what was coming to be seen, at that time, as a great moral failing. In the mid-16th century, for example, the court and the intelligentsia of the Spanish Empire became engaged in a great debate about whether the Conquest and subsequent slaughter of the New World and its indigenous inhabitants was “moral” or “Christian.” The great humanitarian Bartolomé de las Casas argued that indigenous people were fully human and should be/have been treated as such. Those benefiting from the Conquest (its land, slaves, gold, and silver) disagreed. The debate went on for decades, but at least they had one. Will the USA ever have a serious reckoning with the Vietnam War? After 50 years, not yet.
