Ten years ago this month, on April 30, 1975, the war in Vietnam officially ended when the U.S.-backed puppet government in Saigon collapsed and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Vietnam assumed power. But, in reality, there were always two Vietnam wars: one waged against the Vietnamese and the other against the opposition on the home front. Ten years later both of those Vietnam wars continue in new guises.
Over the last 10 years, the United States has waged a campaign of unremitting hostility against Vietnam. In the wake of our military defeat, we have continued the war by every available political and economic means. The reconstruction aid and diplomatic recognition promised in the Paris treaty of 1973 have never materialized. A U.S. trade embargo has hampered Vietnam's economic recovery, and the United States has supported China's political and military offensives against Vietnam. The United States has even refused the minimal humanitarian gesture of helping the Vietnamese locate and disarm the tons of unexploded mines and bombs that riddle their countryside.
The continuing war at home consists of brazen attempts to rewrite the history of the Vietnam war with an eye toward proving that the U.S. government was right. This campaign has been most recently in the headlines as a result of Gen. William Westmoreland's now-aborted libel suit against CBS. It has also been noticed in President Reagan's occasional utterances to the effect that the U.S. war in Vietnam was "a noble cause." But the war for history also rages on a somewhat more serious, intellectual level in books and seminars and in the pages of neo-conservative and neo-liberal journals.
There is very little that is new in the revisionist accounts of the war. The rewriters simply take advantage of America's notoriously short collective memory to reassert the old myths that undergirded the war at its origin. The Big Lie at the heart of the whole web of American lies about Vietnam is still the claim that the war was in essence an act of Soviet-backed aggression by North Vietnam against the sovereign, legitimate government of South Vietnam.
THIS VERSION of the Vietnam war can make for a convincing story. But it is no truer now than it was 20 years ago when the United States made its final headlong plunge into the war. Vietnam was, and is, one country. The line between North and South Vietnam was a truce line drawn when the French colonial forces withdrew in 1954. According to the Geneva agreement signed at that time by all parties involved, including the United States, the demarcation line between North and South was to be removed in 1955 when nationwide free elections were scheduled to choose a national government for an independent and unified Vietnam.
It was the United States and its client dictator, Diem, who abrogated the terms of the Geneva accord, refused to hold elections, and insisted that the partition of Vietnam was permanent. This course was taken because it was obvious that Diem would lose a free election. Even in the South, the Viet Minh, later reconstituted as the National Liberation Front (NLF), enjoyed enormous popular support. The only other significant political force was in the Buddhist church, and the Buddhist activists also opposed the imposition of Pax Americana.
Our war in Vietnam was not initially against the North. It was to prop up a corrupt and unpopular military regime against the resistance of its own people in the South. There was no significant infiltration of fighters from the North until after the full-scale U.S. invasion of 1965. The Vietnamese, with comparatively small amounts of Soviet and Chinese aid, were fighting a war for national independence. The only outside aggressor was the United States.
But political history doesn't really get at the whole truth of the Vietnam war. It tells us little of the horrendous suffering of the Vietnamese people or the awful moral degradation of the United States. Politicians' claims to the contrary, the U.S. military men who conducted the war quickly realized that the NLF enjoyed the active or tacit cooperation of a large portion of the civilian population. So the U.S. war effort came to concentrate on Vietnamese civilians.
Saturation bombing destroyed irrigation dikes and leveled entire villages. Aerial defoliation destroyed crops and rendered much of Vietnam's arable land useless. Entire sectors of the country were labeled "free-fire zones," opening them up for indiscriminate bombing and shelling aimed at driving out the civilian inhabitants. The CIA's Operation Phoenix, intended to eliminate the leadership infrastructure of the NLF, resulted in the murder of at least 10,000 Vietnamese civilians. Beginning in 1965, the carnage extended to the North with savage aerial bombing. All told, an estimated 1.7 million Vietnamese were killed in the course of the U.S. war along with 56,000 Americans.
LIFE IN INDOCHINA has been difficult and bloody in the 10 years since the United States was forced out. An estimated two million Cambodians died from mass executions and hunger under the communist government of Pol Pot. Vietnam has invaded and occupied Cambodia, placing the government in the hands of its favored Cambodian communist faction. Vietnam's obsession with the Chinese threat from the North and the Chinese-backed threat from the Khmer Rouge has kept the country on a constant wartime footing since 1978, sapping badly needed resources from the task of reconstruction and accelerating the already-present momentum toward a highly centralized and repressive state.
The Vietnam revisionists often play the condition of postwar Indochina as their trump card against the anti-war movement. But it is hard to see how even another 10 years of U.S. bombing and counter-insurgency atrocities would have made the Indochina of 1985 any better. And it is often easy to imagine how Vietnam and Cambodia might be better off today if the United States had left them alone in the first place.
Pol Pot's massacres in Cambodia have to be seen within the context of the 1970 U.S.-engineered military overthrow of Prince Sihanouk's neutralist government and the subsequent three years of cruel and intensive U.S. bombing of the Cambodian countryside. Both of these events gave momentum to the Khmer Rouge guerrillas and to the most extreme factions within that movement.
The U.S. role in Cambodia was only one of several factors leading to the horror of the Pol Pot years. And no set of historical circumstances can justify mass murder or silence in the face of atrocities. But, especially in view of our role in Cambodia since 1970, there is reason to question the sincerity of official U.S. tears shed for Cambodia. U.S. sympathy for Cambodia is even more suspect in view of the fact that we extend diplomatic recognition to a provisional coalition government of Cambodia in which the Khmer Rouge is the dominant partner.
Cambodia's very real postwar bloodbath has been the focus of so much revisionist recrimination partly because the bloodbath long predicted for a communist Vietnam never happened. But while Vietnam's human rights record bears no resemblance to that of the Khmer Rouge, and even compares favorably to that of many close U.S. allies, there is still much to question and criticize.
Freedoms of speech, press, religion, and association are all severely restricted, and there are thousands of political prisoners. Most of the political prisoners are former collaborators with the United States, and Vietnam has offered a deal to release most of them into U.S. custody. But there are also prisoners of conscience in Vietnam, some of whom fought against the United States but have run afoul of the postwar regime.
Vietnam has also acted in the way of other nations with its move into Cambodia in December 1978 and subsequent occupation. It is true that Vietnam was under persistent attack from Cambodia throughout most of 1978, attacks fueled by a combination of Khmer nationalism and Chinese manipulation. And shortly after Vietnam invaded Cambodia, the Chinese came down into Vietnam with a major offensive that killed about 20,000 Vietnamese. China, along with the United States and its allies in Southeast Asia, continues to aid the Khmer Rouge and two smaller guerrilla groups in their drive to retake Cambodia. According to the Vietnamese, this is why their presence in Cambodia has lasted so long.
The pressure on Vietnam from China is real, and the Vietnamese fear of domination by China is deeply rooted in regional history. That partly explains the occupation of Cambodia. But there is also the familiar matter of national pride and ambition. Like the United States in El Salvador or the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Vietnam considers Cambodia to be within its historical sphere of influence.
Like all such geopolitical rivalries, the ones currently tearing Indochina are ultimately a hollow waste of human life and resources. But the fact remains that they are problems of Southeast Asian history and politics. They will never be solved by military force, and especially not by military force from a distant U.S. government that is still woefully ignorant of anyone's affairs or interests other than its own.
Our current rewriters of history are no more concerned about the people of Vietnam or Cambodia than were our rulers during the war years. The real target of Vietnam revisionism is the phenomenon in U.S. domestic politics known as the "Vietnam syndrome." Ever since the Vietnam war, the American people have been wisely reluctant to enter into other imperial adventures. In the circles of official power and opinion-making, this syndrome is held responsible for the success of revolutions in Angola, Iran, Nicaragua, and, for a while, Grenada. By convincing the American people that the wrong lessons have been drawn from the experience of Vietnam, the propagandists hope to prepare the way for further adventures in Central America, the Middle East, southern Africa, or wherever duty calls.
DESPITE ALL THE obfuscation, the primary lesson of Vietnam is still clear. And it is not a lesson about ill-informed strategies, phony enemy troop counts, or misplaced free-world idealism. The lesson is that the United States cannot indefinitely impose by brute force a world order that serves our economic and strategic interests at the expense of the world's poor majority and in the face of long-simmering anti-colonial nationalism. That is why we lost the Vietnam war. If we try again, we will lose again, or else unleash upon the earth unspeakable horrors.
In the "up with America" atmosphere of the Reagan era, those who hold to this analysis of the Vietnam war are often caricatured as whining, self-hating, nay-sayers—the ones who "always blame America first." But another important lesson of Vietnam is that the U.S. ruling elite, despite current claims to the contrary, is not America.
We should recall that by 1968 a majority of the American people opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam. That majority continued to grow throughout the rest of the war. Millions of Americans of all ages, races, and classes took to the streets in protest against their own government in a time of war. Hundreds of thousands of young men resisted the draft, while U.S. soldiers laid down their arms and deserted in unprecedented numbers. This public uprising against the war placed serious limits on the scope of U.S. aggression and finally helped force the government to give up.
The movement of U.S. citizens against the war in Vietnam was, despite its many flaws, one of the truly great moments in our nation's history. As we face into the rest of the Reagan era, it stands as a legacy, a challenge, and a reminder of what America can be and could become.
Danny Collum was an associate editor of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.
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