Fifty years have not eclipsed the tragedy of April 30, 1975, the day on which Saigon and all South Vietnam fell to invading communist forces. Most recently, it was invoked in comparison to the calamitous departure of American troops from Afghanistan, which also had the appearance of a rout. Were the two events points along the same continuum of folly?
What follows is not an attempt now to play armchair general by someone who lived in that time, and did not serve. It is merely a brief reflection on the causes and historic significance of what occurred, befitting, it is hoped, the present moment of remembrance.
The fall of Saigon, following hard upon the entry of Khmer Rouge forces into Phnom Penh, Cambodia, two weeks before, marked the final defeat of an American military effort stretching a dozen years (we omit the sending of advisors under Eisenhower).
It was, however, the great buildup of American troops in 1965 et seq. under President Johnson that marked the beginning of the “Vietnam War” in all its significance. The quantitative difference between 17,000 troops under Kennedy and an eventual 550,000 was by its magnitude qualitative. A projection of force that could have been withdrawn without great consequence gave way to a war that neither Johnson nor his two successors could end. The end was effected by Congress in 1975 when, ignoring President Ford’s anguished protest, it cut off the means for South Vietnam’s continued resistance and assured capitulation.
This was a terrible moment: terrible for any South Vietnamese who had been our allies and could not get out, for those who would perish in reeducation camps or the Cambodian “killing fields,” for those who would take to the seas as “boat people,” for American families whose men had perished in a war that we finally elected not to win, for the standing of the United States in the world, and for the prestige of its armed forces. Henry Kissinger would write, “For the first time in the postwar period, America abandoned to eventual communist rule a friendly people who had relied on us. The pattern once established did not end soon” (Years of Upheaval, Little Brown & Co. p. 369).
The tumult of war was matched by discord in American society. Demonstrations (peaceful and not), bombings, blood poured on the steps of the Pentagon, and student strikes proceeded with growing frequency.
In the end, the outcome of the war was determined significantly by domestic events in America—the scandal called “Watergate” that destroyed Richard Nixon’s Administration. For after his resignation in August 1974 came the overwhelming Democratic victory in the November congressional elections and a legislative majority unwilling to enforce the terms of the peace agreement that had been negotiated with North Vietnam.
The morality tale told by the Left was that the downfall of Richard Nixon reflected his long-overdue comeuppance and that of South Vietnam the just demise of its avaricious officialdom, a bunch of corrupt malefactors, the lackeys of Western imperialism. Loudest in the repudiation of Nixon and his efforts to extricate the nation from the quandary bequeathed him were such men as Hubert Humphrey and Clark Clifford, who had been respectively Vice-President and Defense Secretary in the Johnson Administration, but who now leapt with the agility of gazelles to the peace movement.
Why the catastrophe in Vietnam, one that would become archetypal by the time of America’s subsequent Iraq and Afghanistan interventions? Did America ever decide to wage the war in which it found itself? There was no declaration of war, but instead the “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,” spawned by a brief 1964 naval engagement between North Vietnamese torpedo boats and an American destroyer and aircraft. It authorized the President to “use…armed force” in defense of allied states in Southeast Asia.
The nation was never prepared for the decade of carnage that followed, in the jungles and cities of Vietnam, on its rivers, and in the deadly skies over enemy territory. Indeed, there was an attempt at the outset to deny that it was a war (it was instead a “police action”). Anti-war songs such as Tom Paxton‘s “Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation” (“And even though it ain’t really war, they’re sending 50,000 more”) supplied the ironic response.
Did the war have a strategy, an overall plan by which the bloodletting eventually would result in the enemy’s surrender? It was decided a priori that no invasion of North Vietnam could be contemplated, President Johnson and his subordinates fearing a reprise of the Chinese intervention in Korea (November 1950) that sent the American forces reeling.
Instead, our commanders relied on tactical engagements of all sizes in South Vietnam, and eventually Cambodia, expecting that the enemy’s ability to fight would be worn down by his greater casualties. These were announced in the press as “body counts,” occasioning a certain cynicism, as the endless “big scores” appeared never to diminish the other side’s determination.
To this was added the strategic bombing of North Vietnam, which without a forward line advancing upon the enemy’s capital, also did not bring victory. For the American public, its most visible result was captured American fliers paraded before the cameras.
Most ominously, the war aims increasingly were defined in terms of benefitting a foreign people, of bestowing the blessings of democracy upon it, of affording the South Vietnamese the choice, at the expense of American blood and treasure, of whether or not they wanted to be communists.
Our forces in Vietnam were supposed to “win the hearts and minds of the people,” a task that might be thought appropriate to a certain domestic business, commonly associated with Madison Avenue in New York City. Of course, when an army at war is tasked with conducting a political campaign, its tactics must be tailored so as not to make the voters mad.
General Douglas MacArthur famously observed, “Once war is forced upon us, there is no alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end.” For “war’s very object is victory, not prolonged indecision.” And, “in war there is no substitute for victory.”
But in the major conflicts after Vietnam, the pursuit of victory was diverted. The immediate search for an “exit strategy,” which is something different from victory on the battlefield (the pipe dream of the unsophisticated), the constraint of tactics so as to avoid civilian deaths, even at the cost of American casualties, the blind assumption that war is waged for the benefit of some foreign people, whose gratitude will surely be forthcoming, the idea that just landing troops somewhere (“boots on the ground”) constitutes a strategy—these lamentable notions are in some degree the legacy of Vietnam.
If there is a “lesson of Vietnam,” it is that there can be no half-waging of war, for it guarantees “prolonged indecision.” The brutal acts that victory requires are why war must be absolutely the last resort. Furthermore, the American people can only be asked to make the sacrifice of war in their own vital interest, not as an act of benefaction to someone else. Identifying that interest may not be simple, in the absence of actual attack on the United States, but it is the first prerequisite.
The legacy of the Vietnam War, for all its tragedy and folly, lies also in the example of heroism and devotion set by fighting men, under the most unfavorable circumstances and without the recompense of ultimate victory. “Was there a man dismayed?/ Not though the soldier knew/ Someone had blundered.” Let the devotion of those who fought in a noble cause as much as the awful result be remembered a half century later.
American Thinker
Jesus Christ is King
