Vietnam: Fifty years since ’75
The tides of history, the tears of remembrance: Fifty years ago, on April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese military units surged into Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, forcibly reuniting the country and ending 20 years of conflict.
Scenes of North Vietnamese T-54 tanks crashing through the gates of the Doc Lap Independence Palace were among the poignant closing episodes of the Vietnam war.
Soon, the massive outpouring of refugees from helicopters on Saigon rooftops and the boat people became a searing reminder of the fast ending conflict.
The original U.S. plan of limited counterinsurgency to thwart communist attacks morphed into a full-scale war. For the United States, the cardinal error was to depose nationalist South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. The coup d’etat orchestrated by President John F. Kennedy and the CIA deposed Diem’s government on Nov. 1, 1963, putting the country on a perilous trajectory with a dozen incompetent military governments over the next decade.
The U.S. massively reinforced troops from 1965 until 1971, when there were 535,000 Americans in Vietnam. President Richard Nixon began a process of “Vietnamization” whereby the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) would transition to do the fighting to defend their country. The U.S. military commitments would be reduced; the last American combat troops left the country in March 1973.
During the conflict, the Americans were not alone in supporting the South Vietnamese. There were military units from Australia, Thailand, and amongst the best, more than 50,000 South Korean combat forces. A decade of war cost nearly 58,000 thousand American lives with more than 2,500 missing in action. Millions of refugees fled. More than 2 million Vietnamese died on both sides.
Significantly, deep political divisions in the U.S. during the war continued for decades.
Now, half a century later, is not the time to refight or relitigate the war but rather to revisit it to assess the lingering “What ifs?”
Henry Kissinger’s flawed 1973 Paris Peace negotiations produced an agreement whereby communist North Vietnam and reasonably democratic South Vietnam would coexist as separate entities, as they did since 1954 following the French colonial period. But the North Vietnamese army (NVA) and their local Viet Cong proxies gained military advantage through the “ceasefire in place agreement,” allowing the North an unquestionable foothold, considering their forces already controlled substantial territory.
This fact offers an eerie echo with plans for a Ukraine ceasefire, with a ceasefire-in-place for Russian troops. An international settlement ensured that the status quo of North and South Vietnam, divided by the DMZ at the 17th parallel, would legally form the dividing line between the two, much as the 38th parallel has separated both North and South Korea since 1953. Both sides pledged not to attack the other — at least on paper.
The collapse in 1975 came like dominos; NVA probing attacks in February from Boun Me Tout and Pleiku in the central highlands proved surprisingly successful. The Soviet-supplied Hanoi communists gambled on a major offensive with 30 divisions of regulars, during which South Vietnamese towns and ARVN units crumbled, often ineffectually and without a fight. By April, the NVA were near the gates of the capital of Saigon. The rest is history as NVA tanks and units captured the city on April 30. The curtain fell on the Indochinese wars.
Contrary to popular myth, the U.S. military was not retreating from an embattled Saigon in the last days; rather the formidable logistics and economic support apparatus in South Vietnam was being hastily evacuated. American combat forces were withdrawn two years earlier.
But as I have mused many times, Vietnam is not a war but a country of 100 million people. Let’s say the status quo held as in Korea. Even in 1974, South Vietnam’s economy outshone the communist North. The forcibly reunified Socialist Republic of Vietnam suffered under a corrupt and incompetent socialist economy until 1986 when Do Moi market reforms began to replace the moribund Marxist system. China, the U.S. and the European Union are major trading partners. Foreign investment has flourished in recent years.
The former South Vietnam would likely have emerged as a Southeast Asian “Tiger Economy” by the late 1970s, a moderately prosperous export economy with an upward trajectory.
Today, Vietnam boasts 6 percent GDP growth and per capita income is near $5,000. Vietnam is a top ten trading partner of the United States with $149 billion in two-way trade, yet Washington faces a $123 billion trade deficit.
Nonetheless, 50 years after a united Vietnam, the country is reasonably prosperous but retains a communist authoritarian system. Who would have thought?
John J. Metzler (jjmcolumn@earthlink.net ) is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of Divided Dynamism: The Diplomacy of Separated Nations; Germany, Korea, China.