After the Fall
Vietpundit has been my stop this past week for articles about the Vietnamese experience, on the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.
The news wires have been giving me plenty of pictures of triumphant and happy Vietnamese commemorating the day, and stories about the last Americans out. But it seems you have to dig a while through the "reaction" stories to find voices of Vietnamese who got out of the workers' paradise.
Much of what VP found is online, but in Vietnamese. He gives some helpful summations, like this:
Let that sink in for a minute. Another article he links ponders the cold attitude of modern Vietnam toward its citizens who fled the communists, and asks, "How is it that Vietnamese and Americans can now shake hands, but Vietnamese continue to refuse to offer a hand to their fellow Vietnamese?"
I don't know, exactly, but I thought about that this weekend when Amy, Luke, and I ducked into the local Vietnamese grocery to get a bottle of a type of hot sauce I favor. Everyone else there was Vietnamese. But we all were Americans.
It's the tritest observance you can make, but the core of truth is in it. American Indians and many blacks aside, we're all immigrants here. That sets us apart from whatever we came from. The Vietnamese woman on the business side of the check-out conveyor has something in common with me, and with my Welsh-German-Irish-Jewish ancestors, that neither of us shares with the assored old contries where our roots lie. That Welshman who sailed with William Penn was a different breed from his older brother, who stayed in Cardiganshire.
They risked everything to get here. The timid never came and the weak died on the way.
The question comes from this translation of an article by Vietnamese writer Pham Thi Hoai.
I wrote about my memories of following the fall of the South in 1975 by reading it in the newspaper during April 1975. A front-page map each day showed the provincial capitals, one after another, changing from white to gray. I remember it began with the three big jungle provinces of the central highlands -- Pleiku, Khontoum, and Ban Me Thuot, was how we spelled them then. Then the gray curtain moved down the coast, though Da Nang held out. Then there was talk of a big attempt to hold the line at Xuan Loc, northwest of Saigon and perilously close to the capital. It failed, and the end came.
I didn't want the south to fall, but personally I was detached from the story. I was 14. I had only begun to think in adult terms. The older guys I knew, my Scout troop leaders, were draft age and they were more concerned. But it hardly touched me where I lived.
Pham Thi Hoai, as a schoolgirl in North Vietnam, had an experience similar to mine, but a world apart, and more intimate, emotional, direct.
The "Mayaguez incident" closed the book on it, as far as we were concerned. Life went on, except for the veterans and those who loved them. But their struggles largely were hidden for years. Vietnam joined the list of Historical Things We Argue About, like whether the Civil War was about slavery or the Hollywood Blacklist or the Lindbergh Baby.
The memories of "The American War" were not buried in Vietnam, of course. But according to Pham, the victory spawned its own delusions and warping dislocations. For starters, "It took the winners ten years to realise that victory was not something that could be eaten."
Meanwhile, American Future, via Stephen Morris, introduces me to some archival material from Moscow, suggesting that, "until 1974, Soviet military intelligence analysts and diplomats never believed that the North Vietnamese would be victorious on the battlefield." Nor would they ever have conquered the South, had the U.S. used its power to protect Saigon in 1975 when the attack began. But given the political climate here at the time, that just wasn't going to happen.
The news wires have been giving me plenty of pictures of triumphant and happy Vietnamese commemorating the day, and stories about the last Americans out. But it seems you have to dig a while through the "reaction" stories to find voices of Vietnamese who got out of the workers' paradise.
Much of what VP found is online, but in Vietnamese. He gives some helpful summations, like this:
Nam Dao was born and grew up in South Vietnam, in an anti-Communist family. In the 60’s, he got a scholarship to study in Canada, where he became active in the anti-war movement. In the essay, he mentioned how the portrayal of the war by the media and academics influenced his thinking about the war. Of course, he was very happy the day Saigon was “liberated”, April 30, 1975, and thought that peace had finally come to his homeland. He came back to Vietnam in 1977, to hostility from his own family. Disillusionment began to set in. Three years later, he saw with his own eyes: his sisters took birth-control pills when preparing to escape Vietnam by boat, in case they were raped by Thai pirates, as many Vietnamese boat-people women and children were.
Let that sink in for a minute. Another article he links ponders the cold attitude of modern Vietnam toward its citizens who fled the communists, and asks, "How is it that Vietnamese and Americans can now shake hands, but Vietnamese continue to refuse to offer a hand to their fellow Vietnamese?"
I don't know, exactly, but I thought about that this weekend when Amy, Luke, and I ducked into the local Vietnamese grocery to get a bottle of a type of hot sauce I favor. Everyone else there was Vietnamese. But we all were Americans.
It's the tritest observance you can make, but the core of truth is in it. American Indians and many blacks aside, we're all immigrants here. That sets us apart from whatever we came from. The Vietnamese woman on the business side of the check-out conveyor has something in common with me, and with my Welsh-German-Irish-Jewish ancestors, that neither of us shares with the assored old contries where our roots lie. That Welshman who sailed with William Penn was a different breed from his older brother, who stayed in Cardiganshire.
They risked everything to get here. The timid never came and the weak died on the way.
The question comes from this translation of an article by Vietnamese writer Pham Thi Hoai.
I wrote about my memories of following the fall of the South in 1975 by reading it in the newspaper during April 1975. A front-page map each day showed the provincial capitals, one after another, changing from white to gray. I remember it began with the three big jungle provinces of the central highlands -- Pleiku, Khontoum, and Ban Me Thuot, was how we spelled them then. Then the gray curtain moved down the coast, though Da Nang held out. Then there was talk of a big attempt to hold the line at Xuan Loc, northwest of Saigon and perilously close to the capital. It failed, and the end came.
I didn't want the south to fall, but personally I was detached from the story. I was 14. I had only begun to think in adult terms. The older guys I knew, my Scout troop leaders, were draft age and they were more concerned. But it hardly touched me where I lived.
Pham Thi Hoai, as a schoolgirl in North Vietnam, had an experience similar to mine, but a world apart, and more intimate, emotional, direct.
With the liberation of Buon Ma Thuot in mid-March 1975, morning lessons began with “progressive” students undertaking the honourable task of affixing to the map of the country a small red flag with a single yellow star, right at the spot of the most recent liberation. Hue, 26 March; Danang, 29 March; Phan Rang, 16 April; Xuan Loc, 21 April ...
The colour of red was overwhelming. It swept through the south so quickly that I worried I would not get my turn. On 27 April, holding a paper-and-toothpick-flag poised over Ba Ria, I cried like everyone else. But mine were not tears of victory. I knew nothing of the price of victory. My tears were tears of farewell. The war had known me. Now it was my turn to get used to its departure.
The "Mayaguez incident" closed the book on it, as far as we were concerned. Life went on, except for the veterans and those who loved them. But their struggles largely were hidden for years. Vietnam joined the list of Historical Things We Argue About, like whether the Civil War was about slavery or the Hollywood Blacklist or the Lindbergh Baby.
The memories of "The American War" were not buried in Vietnam, of course. But according to Pham, the victory spawned its own delusions and warping dislocations. For starters, "It took the winners ten years to realise that victory was not something that could be eaten."
The result of the Vietnam war was a complete victory for the communists. The war was the mother’s milk, the school and the testing-ground of Vietnamese communism. It provides historical justification for the indispensable leadership of the Communist Party, endowing it with the “mandate of heaven”. Communism found a special route to the Vietnamese throne through this remarkably bloody mandate. The war is gone, but the claim it represents remains. To this day, the legitimacy earned thirty years ago is constantly reiterated, repeated, reaffirmed, validated and deified. War-era heroes continue to monopolise peacetime authority; war-era military leadership is reborn as totalitarian control.
The Communist Party knows well that while many things can change, the myth of its “mandate of heaven” must remain intact, especially because every other element of its ideology has been betrayed unapologetically or been revealed as bankrupt. How can the war be consigned to history while the mandate derived from that war endures?
Thirty years after the war, all of our foundational cultural values have lost their validity and the noblest ideas of communist ideology have become a joke. No space has emerged for basic western democratic values or for the positive dimensions of modern globalisation.
Instead, Vietnamese people face a morass of social problems: rampant corruption; violation of the rule of law; perversion of morality and dignity; the collapse of medical and educational systems; the dizzyingly rapid increase in social inequality; the ticking time-bomb of ethnic and religious conflict; the danger of chaos in a huge and neglected countryside; a destroyed and polluted environment; the impoverishment of spiritual life; the impotence of the intelligentsia; the prevention of cooperation between different social groups; the crisis of belief and of hope.
Meanwhile, American Future, via Stephen Morris, introduces me to some archival material from Moscow, suggesting that, "until 1974, Soviet military intelligence analysts and diplomats never believed that the North Vietnamese would be victorious on the battlefield." Nor would they ever have conquered the South, had the U.S. used its power to protect Saigon in 1975 when the attack began. But given the political climate here at the time, that just wasn't going to happen.
