The image was heartbreaking
writes
Benny Huang of a war that ended 40 years ago, with
out the stars and stripes flying high
—soldiers and Marines crowding together
atop the final American outpost in a country that wouldn’t exist the
moment they lifted off.
Historian Dominic Sandbrook summed up the mood:
“For the Americans who fled Saigon in those desperate hours, there were
no words to describe the grief and shame they felt that morning. In two
weeks, they had supervised the evacuation of six thousand Americans and
more than more than fifty thousand Vietnamese: a heroic effort under any
circumstances but one that fell short of an honorable exit. ‘The rest
of our lives, we will be haunted by how we betrayed those people,’ one
diplomat said on the USS Okinawa. ‘It made me cry when I got here. There
were lots of people who were crying when they got here.’”
… Just two years prior, Henry Kissinger
had negotiated the Paris Peace Accords which essentially solidified
everything that the United States had been fighting for. North Vietnam
agreed to accept South Vietnam’s existence while the United States
promised to return if Hanoi did not honor the deal. It was an agreement
both sides were destined to break.
While brave military men cried and those loyal to the Republic of
Vietnam were killed or deported to “reeducation camps,” the mood here at
home was starkly different. Among certain segments of the population it
could only be described as elation.
On May 11th fifty thousand jubilant revelers staged a
celebration in New York’s Central Park. One reporter described it as a
“joyous all-day carnival of songs and speeches in the perfect sunshine.”
One person in attendance told a reporter: “There’s a lot of lumps in a
lot of throats. It’s unbelievable. Today is the first day I finally
realize the war is over.”
“Over” was such a strange word. For Americans, the war had already
been over for two years, when the last combat troops left Vietnam. But
that was not enough for the most strident activists who would not rest
until the country we had bled so much to protect was washed away like a
sand castle on the beach. Not surprisingly, Congresswoman Bella Abzug,
who belonged to at least one communist front group, delivered a rousing
speech that day. She had been instrumental in cutting off aid to our
flailing ally and opposing any effort to enforce the terms of the
treaty. It would not be an overstatement to call her Hanoi’s best
friend.
But for the South Vietnamese the war wasn’t really over even on April 30th.
Their war had just begun, as they were murdered, tortured, and sent to
the regime’s 150 “reeducation camps” to be indoctrinated in the virtues
of Marxism-Leninism. Some people didn’t emerge from those camps for
seventeen years, and 165,000 never left at all. But even then it wasn’t
over. In present day Vietnam, those who resisted communist rule are
segregated into ghettoes and officially discriminated against, as are
their descendants, for the “crime” of having been puppets of the
“imperialist” Americans. As if the victors had been anything other than
puppets of China and the Soviet Union.
A reasonable person would be able to forgive the revelers if they had
been merely marking the end of an acrimonious war that had inflicted so
much pain on their generation. They were probably ignorant of the
bloodbath on the other side of the world and, in their defense, the
American press didn’t spill much ink reporting it. But the imaginary end
of hostilities is not what made that day so sweet for them. America had
been humbled, even humiliated, and they threw a party.
They perceived their country as a bully on the world stage and no one
frets when a bully gets his nose bloodied because it teaches him a
lesson. For a while it seemed that we had really learned that lesson, as
“Vietnam Syndrome,” a phrase coined shortly after the war, caused us to
shy away from conflict. No longer would we oppose the expansion of
communism anywhere it reared its ugly head, as President Truman had
outlined in the doctrine that bears his name.
The much maligned “Domino Theory” was
at least partially vindicated when neighboring Cambodia and Laos fell to
communism. In Cambodia, the victorious Khmer Rouge murdered about a
quarter of the population. Noam Chomsky, the world’s most (in)famous
intellectual and idol of the Far Left, denied the existence of any such
massacre before denying that he’d denied it.
Even today those who opposed the war snicker at the Domino Theory
because only two other countries toppled. Yes, “only” two. A few more
dominoes could be found if we looked a little farther afield. During and
immediately after the Vietnam War eight additional countries fell to
communism: South Yemen, Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Grenada,
Nicaragua, and Afghanistan. The free world was thrown back on its heels
and the Soviets seized the momentum.
None of which seemed to bother the Left. Nor were they bothered that
our military limped out of Vietnam rife with indiscipline, drug abuse,
and racial conflict, problems which persisted into the 1980s. While
Americans had once considered soldiering to be a noble profession, in
the aftermath of Vietnam many people saw servicemen and veterans as
pitiful creatures, and those were the generous ones. Others considered
them lowlifes and deranged would-be killers waiting to snap.
Didn’t any of this nag at their consciences? Not a bit. A “Mission
Accomplished” banner might as well have hung in Central Park that day. A
weaker America coupled with a global red wave was what they had always
wanted.
And they got it.
