What a difference 40 years makes! I was a struggling actor/director in New York City, twice divorced and two-and-a-half years sober, when sobbing in a rage I did not understand, I obsessively watched as much news as I could about the Fall of Saigon during April 29th and 30th of 1975. I was glued to the screen of a small B&W TV set in the W. 71st Street apartment of my then actress girlfriend, Barbara. In 1975, there was no CNN or 24-hour cable news channels, but I was able to watch the nightly news on ABC with Howard K. Smith and Harry Reasoner, CBS with Walter Cronkite, and NBC with John Chancellor and David Brinkley, which followed one another in the early evening. I also watched local late night news and got up early in the morning to watch Today on NBC and the Morning News on CBS.
The chaos in Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City, was most disheartening to witness on the flickering B&W TV set, as dusklight fell and the sun rose upon New York City, bursting forth in the new life of another splendid Spring. Oblivious, eyes glued to the searing scenes, I instead obsessively watched agitated reports about the shelling of Tan Son Nhut airfield, the pushing of Huey helicopters into the South China Sea, the scrambling of thousands of Vietnamese frantically trying to get rides on evacuation vehicles — helicopters, planes, ships, even ancient landing craft, and finally T-54 Russian tanks smashing through the gates of the Presidential Palace.
The week before — or maybe the week after, I can’t remember which — Barbara and I saw the documentary, Hearts and Minds, which had won the award for Best Documentary at the 47th Academy Awards the previous April 8th. I choked back sobs through much of that as well, remembering again too vividly the year I spent in that strange, and most devastated, third-world foreign country, South Vietnam, during 1967-68, before and after the brutal Tet Offensive, which was the turning point for the hearts and minds of a sizable portion of the American public, regarding the senseless loss of precious blood by American soldiers and the billions of dollars of military expenditures, supposedly to prevent the communists from invading San Francisco.
Though our relationship only lasted several months longer, I’m most grateful for the compassionate care and comfort Barbara provided me during that most traumatic and depressing time for me.
It is now forty years later. I’m an elder, still sober, living in contented retirement from a career not the theatre, but in the treatment of addictions, with my fourth wife, Jill, on the seacoast of Oregon. Last week on American Experience broadcast on PBS stations, we watched the spurious documentary, Last Days in Vietnam, by Rory Kennedy, niece of assassinated 1968 anti-war Presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy.
As colleague Michael Uhl effectively explicates in this review, Last Days is a highly emotional distortion of the 30 year history of miscalculations the clusterf**k that South Vietnam would always prove to be for the United States. At the end of the Second World War, Vietnam became a major contested hotspot in the ensuing Cold War between Communist Bloc nations and the West. Under the rationale of stopping godless communism, America allowed itself to be drawn into a thirty-year-long quagmire, which resulted in the killing of 3-5 million Southeast Asians and the expenditure of vast sums of monies and materials. As well, some 58,303 Americans lost their lives and countless others were wounded, not only physically, but also mentally and emotionally from moral injury.
In Last Days, Kennedy mentions the ruthlessness of advancing Communist forces, while she totally ignores decades of genocidal behavior towards the people of Southeast Asia on the part of the US and its allies, South Vietnam and the nations of SEATO , rationalized as necessary to contain communism. This behavior included:
- massive carpet bombing of North Vietnam, as well as bombing and forays into Cambodia and Laos,
- extensive use of napalm and white phosphorus throughout Southeast Asia,
- Agent Orange contamination throughout the countryside of Vietnam,
- the dubious metric of body counts in search and destroy missions, mostly innocent Vietnamese civilians, as an indication the US was winning the war,
- numerous documented massacres of civilians, the most notorious being My Lai on March 16, 1968,
- free-fire zones and strategic hamlets, which forced Vietnamese to move off their ancestral lands and be relocated in primitive camps for displaced persons,
- the notorious Phoenix Program, which assassinated thousands of alleged Viet Cong officials and supporters,
- the seeding of countless numbers of anti-personnel mines throughout Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos,
- a cruel 19-year embargo of Vietnam which drastically impacted its ability to rebuild until relations were normalized in 1994.
Last Days does, however, effectively portray the ignominious defeat of the vastly superior military forces of the US and its ally, South Vietnam, against the combined military forces of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong, who were supported by nations of the Communist Bloc, but who had no air power. The US was soundly defeated in Vietnam by the guerrilla warfare tactics and resiliency of the NVA and Viet Cong. They were, after all, fighting for their country’s independence. We, after all, like the French, Japanese and Chinese had previously done for centuries, had invaded their homeland.
In a word, Last Days is the consummate propaganda antidote to Hearts and Minds, which poignantly portrays the negative impact the Vietnam War had throughout its sordid history on the common people of Southeast Asia. Last Days, therefore, becomes an appropriate set piece to kick off the Pentagon’s 50th Anniversary Commemoration of the Vietnam War, which seeks to reframe — to ennoble even — this hapless misadventure in militarism and nation-building as another grand and glorious example of American military prowess comparable to our victory in World War II.
My Experience with Russian T-54 Tanks
Watching the T-54 Russian Tanks crash through the gates towards the end of Last Days, I fondly remembered my visit in 2002 to what is now known as Reunification Palace as part of the first healing return trip back to Vietnam. Formerly, it was the Presidential Palace during the Vietnam War. In November of 1975, it was dedicated as a Memorial to Ho Chi Minh and the victory of the NVA and Viet Cong. Here’s a memoir piece I wrote about the visit several years ago:
Two of the most significant of the many wonderful gifts I’ve experienced during the first decade of the 3rd Millennium is that I’ve been able to return twice to Vietnam, where I fought in the American War during 1967–1968.
Both trips yielded innumerable incidents of incredible meaning and healing for me, but one of the most memorable events occurred on my first day back “In Country”. We landed at Tan Son Nhut Air Base fairly early in the morning, seeing some of the same berms built by US forces in the 1960’s, now protecting MIG fighter-bombers instead of Phantom F-4s. After being processed through customs, a rather daunting affair, confronting again under much different circumstances, the uniforms of our former enemy, we checked into the Rex hotel in downtown Ho Chi Minh City. During the American War, the Rex Hotel was one of several BOQs for American officers in what shall always be for me Saigon. In January of 1968, I had stayed in the Rex Hotel on TDY duty just before the Tet Offensive, which proved to be the turning point of the ill-conceived invasion and long occupation of Vietnam by US armed forces. It was, indeed, most moving to be returning to the Rex Hotel as a veteran civilian, where I had stayed as a young citizen soldier and US Army officer.
Later that afternoon, we went to see the former Presidential Palace. During the war, this is where Ngo Dinh Diem and Nguyễn Văn Thiệu ruled the Republic of South Vietnam and lived with their families. Today, it is a memorial to Ho Chi Minh and the victorious Vietnamese communist forces. The tour was somewhat interesting, but after awhile the party spiel from the guide about the corruption of the past and the glorious purity of the present regime began wearing somewhat thin, so I broke away from the formal tour and went outside onto the palace grounds.
There were two of the Russian T-54 tanks that knocked down the gates and came roaring into the Palace grounds on April 30, 1975, signaling the end of the long American War, as helicopters airlifted the last remaining Americans from Saigon to ships out in the South China Sea.
Taking pictures of the tanks with me was a young Amerasian man in his mid-30s with an older Vietnamese woman close to my age, nicely dressed in Western clothes with short-cropped hair. The man in halting English told me that his mother wanted a picture with me standing in front of one of the T-54 tanks. Would it be okay for him to take our picture. “Sure,” I said, and naturally put my arm around her. It struck me, as the young man was focusing his camera, that he was old enough to be my son, that perhaps his father had been an American like me. The picture was taken, and the woman turned to me with a sad smile, saying, “Hello GI. Nice to see you again.”
I was speechless, dumbstruck with emotion, and before I could recover and say something back to them, thank them, thank her, they had disappeared. I do so wish that I had taken a picture of them. As well, I also wish I had had someone take a picture of the three of us.
Did We Learn from the Debacle of Vietnam?
On December 14, 2014, President Obama formally announced the end of combat missions in Afghanistan against Taliban insurgents. But a New York Times article recently noted both drone and Special Ops missions have increased of late. The security forces of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani have steadily been losing ground to Taliban units. Negotiations are presently taking place to delay the planned drawdown of American troops in Afghanistan.
In 1975, after the revelations of The Pentagon Papers, the scandals of Watergate, and the well-organized, pervasive anti-war movement, neither Congress nor the general public were in any mood to authorize more monies to aide the failing South Vietnamese government nor the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, which offered little resistance to the advancing communist forces despite billions of dollars the US had spent to equip and train them.
Forty years later, I wonder if this will be the case in Afghanistan. What will happen if the government of Afghanistan is again threatened to be overwhelmed by the Taliban, such as happened in 1996, when they took power in Afghanistan and instituted strict Sharia law? What will President Obama and Congress do? These are much different times than 1975, when propaganda for military solutions is today much more acceptable by a majority of Republicans and Democrats in both the Senate and the House. I suspect that there’ll be considerable support to continue, if not double-down, on our present day quagmire in the seemingly endless war on terrorism in Afghanistan.
This saddens me, but in my elder years, looking out my window as spring again graces the land, what real choice do I have, but to accept the things I cannot change? Nevertheless, I am immensely grateful that I survived the war of my generation in Vietnam and continue to heal from the moral injury I suffered as a result of what I experienced 47 years ago as a young US Army officer.
