The End of a Tragic Error, Fifty Years Later

Much as what Trump doesn't know about economics is leading us towards catastrophe now, what American leaders in the 1950s and 60s didn't know about Vietnam led to catastrophe then.

“I guess they just wanted the damned place more than we did.”

– American officer, April 30, 1975

A half-century ago today, North Vietnamese troops took control of Saigon, ending one of the worst misadventures in American history. The scenes of Vietnamese who had sided with the United States trying to get aboard the final helicopters leaving for American vessels offshore and American helicopters being pushed off the decks of aircraft carriers symbolized that the United States had lost a war. Technically, it wasn’t the first time, but who knows from the War of 1812?

I have not been able to find it anywhere on the internet, but I distinctly remember reading a quotation from a high-ranking American military officer on that day: “I guess they just wanted the damned place more than we did.”

“Duh” was not yet “a thing,” but it is the only appropriate response. Of course they did. It was their damned place. Except that, while it was a damned place to so many of the Americans sent there, it is a beautiful land with wonderful people, as I was to find when I began to make frequent visits there about fifteen years ago.

Having had asthma my whole life, I did not have to face the decision so many other young Americans did in those years: In the later words of the Clash, “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” That question applied in various ways: Should I, as Bruce Springsteen put it in 1984, let the government “put a rifle in my hand / Sen[d] me off to a foreign land / To go and kill the yellow man,” or should I stay by refusing to be drafted to fight in a senseless war? Should I stay in the United States or go to Canada—a question many people are again asking themselves in 2025.

[An important aside: Had it not been for the ignorance of Vietnamese history in the upper ranks of the United States government in the 1960s, along with the pressure the rightwing was putting on American leaders who knew better to stand up to communist China, and Lyndon Johnson’s masculine insecurity, we would probably not be in the mess we are in now. But that’s a long story for another time.]

Because of my health issue—which was genuine, unlike the current self-styled Ruler’s “bone spurs”—I was able to decline our government’s generous offer in the late 1960s to send me on an all-expenses-paid one-year trip to Vietnam.

---

Welcome back to “Musings & Amusings,” and greetings to those of you who are new.

A Request:

The number of subscribers to this publication is growing rapidly, and I am grateful for that. I know there are many publications on Substack that are “must-reads” and most of us have limited resources. I am very much in that category. I really do need to have a much larger fraction of my growing readership become paid subscribers.

So … I request that those of you for whom it would not be a financial burden upgrade now.

After reviewing a few of my travel journals from my first trip to Vietnam and Cambodia to write this piece, I have decided to offer more of my journals from trips around the world and on other topics, as an extra only available to paid subscribers.

Click here to become a paid subscriber:

---

A Bit of What I Have Learned in Vietnam

Had American policymakers known even the basics of Vietnamese history and the outlook of its people, the immense tragedy that ended fifty years ago would not have happened. I’ll have much more to say about this in later essays, but for this major anniversary, I’ll offer just a few of my observations.

It was not until four decades later that I finally went to Vietnam. My Millsaps College colleague George Bey and I went to Vietnam in January 2009 to determine whether it would we safe for me to take students there for a study abroad course. (It was, and I made eight subsequent trips.) When we got our boarding passes at Tokyo’s Narita airport and saw “HANOI” as our destination, we both swallowed hard. We arrived at about 11 pm and, apart from the somewhat scary Vietnamese military uniforms the passport checkers wore, all went well.

My first daylight view of Vietnam came when I opened the curtain on my hotel room window and saw an American flag hanging from a pole just outside, above the front door of the hotel. That was unexpected!

On our first day in Hanoi, we visited Uncle Ho, who, like Lenin in Moscow, Mao in Beijing, and Snow White in … wherever the land once ruled over by the Wicked Queen may be, is preserved in a glass coffin. I had previously seen Lenin and later Mao, completing my trifecta of dead Communist rulers under glass. It is likely that Trump, who said this week he is the “ruler of America and the world,” envisions Americans—and people from all over the world—reverently filing past his trim 220-pound carcass in a glass coffin in a golden mausoleum, tracing the sign of the dollar or his crypto coin, the $TRUMP across their chests.

Were I a betting man, I would put my money on him winding up instead like Mussolini.

On that same first day in Hanoi, we also visited the “Hanoi Hilton,” which provided no-star accommodations for John McCain and many other of our countrymen in what the Vietnamese call, quite understandably, the American War. On this and subsequent visits to Hoa Lo Prison, we were told how the French tortured Vietnamese prisoners there during their colonial rule, but the North Vietnamese had treated American prisoners well. That was, of course, bull … uh … water-buffalo shit, as the injury that Trump has used to mock John McCain attests.

THE Most Important Point: The Vietnamese HATE China

I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life.

—Ho Chi Minh (1946)

{NOTE: Some of what follows in the next several paragraphs is adapted from my most recent book, The Times They Were a-Changin’ — 1964, The Year “The Sixties” Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn.}

The first and most salient point that emerges from Vietnam’s past is that extraordinarily long periods of Chinese domination both greatly influenced Vietnamese culture and left the Vietnamese people with a deep and abiding dislike and distrust of China.

It takes no more than a day in Vietnam to understand that the most important thing to know that American leaders in the early 1960s did not know: They hate China. An example: We were told that in northern Vietnam, houses are not built with the door facing north, because a north wind brings evil spirits from that direction. In a city, if a small lot offers no alternative to having the front face north, a protective sign is placed over the door to ward off the evil spirits that fly with the wind from the north.

As they would later do with the French and Americans, the Vietnamese adopted from their Chinese rulers what they found useful but rejected them as rulers and still fear them.

American leaders were largely ignorant of this history and the attitudes it has engrained in successive generations of Vietnamese people. Why? In large part because most of those in the State Department who did have such knowledge were hounded out of the government on the basis of allegedly being insufficiently anti-Communist during the McCarthy hysteria of the early fifties. Beginning a decade later, the United States was to pay an enormous price for this ignorance.

Lest any readers miss it, I’ll note how similar that witch hunt was to what the Trump Regime is now doing to people in our government who have knowledge and expertise.

Uncle Ho and Uncle Sam

Ho Chi Minh admired American ideals—much more than Donald Trump does. Ho had expected Woodrow Wilson to support independence from France for its Indochina colonies. Ho was apparently unaware that Wilson was a racist and only saw self-determination as something white people should have.

Ho continued to admire the ideals of the United States, and his Viet Minh worked together with Americans against the Japanese in World War II. At that war’s conclusion, Ho proclaimed Vietnamese independence in a declaration based on Jefferson’s 1776 model. American military officials attended the celebration on September 1, 1945.

The French, though, coming out of their humiliation in the war against Hitler, were intent on reestablishing their colonial empire and the United States, seeing the Soviet threat to western Europe as more important than independence for Asians, did not support Vietnam. Ho reluctantly decided to invite the French back in temporarily because the alternative was occupation by China.

Bac Ho expressed the feelings of his countrymen toward the Chinese when he told colleagues in 1946 why, after years of leading a struggle to free Vietnam from French colonialism, he was inviting the French back in temporarily to replace the Chinese (then under the nationalist Chaing Kai-shek): “You fools! Don’t you realize what it means if the Chinese remain? Don’t you remember your history? The last time the Chinese came, they stayed for a thousand years. The French are foreigners. They are weak. Colonialism is dying. The white man is finished in Asia. But if the Chinese stay now, they will never go.” Ho concluded with a metaphor that nicely captures Vietnamese feelings about China: “As for me, I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life.”

But what about when the Chinese and Vietnamese became communist—wouldn’t that make them natural allies? In a word, No.

The Chinese Communists under Mao were communists, but they were also Chinese. Skipping over a great deal (at some point, I’ll fill in the gap), at the 1954 Geneva Conference on ending the French war in Indochina, Pham Van Dong, the head of the Vietnamese Communist delegation, said Communist China’s Zhou Enlai “has double-crossed us.” In 1963–1964 and later, Mao Zedong maneuvered to have the war continue in Vietnam to weaken the Vietnamese as well as to tie up American power. Mao, Pham Van Dong later said bitterly, “was always ready to fight to the last Vietnamese.”

In 1979, less than four years after the Vietnamese Communists had reunified the whole country under their rule, Communist China invaded northern Vietnam and the “comrades” fought a brief but bloody border war that killed tens of thousands in less than a month.

History and geography eclipse ideology.

WAR! What’s It Good For? In this Case: Absolutely Nothing

One of the principal American rationales for fighting in Vietnam was to block Chinese expansion. In fact, given the fundamental hostility of the Vietnamese toward China—a strong, unified Vietnam under a popular national leader, Ho, would provide the best bulwark against China, irrespective of communism.

In 1967, Cambodia’s Prince Norodom Sihanouk noted that the communism that Washington was trying to destroy in Vietnam was, “in no sense inspired by China, but is hostile to Chinese expansionism.” Sihanouk stated that Vietnamese communism actually constituted “a nationalist barrier between China and the rest of South-East Asia. The truth is that America, by waging war against Vietnam, is playing China’s game.”

No Way-Out Bay Then & Now

After our 2009 adventures In Hanoi, George and I travelled to magnificent Ha Long Bay. I mention this at this time because on the morning after we arrived there, we took a small launch boat into a lake that can be reached only through a rock opening when the tide is low. It is called No Way-Out Bay because when the tide rises there is no exit.

The tide rose rapidly for American forces in Vietnam in the sixties and early seventies, and the leaders, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, saw no way out.

Americans must unite now to stop the rapidly rising tide of dictatorship before it reaches the level at which there is no way out.

A few days later in our first Vietnam trip, we were in Huê, the old imperial capital and the site of horrible fighting during the 1968 Tet Offensive. Our guide there, Nguyen Duc Phu, asked us if we were for Obama and was delighted to find out that we were. He said Obama is “president of the world.” It was again, after the “W” era, nice to be an American abroad.

How long will it take after Trump before that is again the case?