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On 50th Anniversary of Fall of Saigon, the Lessons from Vietnam Unlearned [1]
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Date: 2025-04-30
By Karen Rubin,
[email protected], news-photos-features.com
Vietnam is marking the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon today with the grandest Liberation Day parade of its short history as a unified, sovereign nation.
The iconic image of a Vietnamese child, Kim Phuc, running down a road after a napalm attack is known as the "Napalm Girl" photo. It was taken by Associated Press photographer Nick Ut on June 8, 1972, and is widely considered one of the most powerful and enduring images of the Vietnam War. The photograph depicts Kim Phuc, then 9 years old, running naked after ripping off her burning clothes, on display at the War Remnants Museum where it continues to evoke horror © Karen Rubin/news-photos-features.com
I recently returned from Vietnam, where I was surprised at how welcomed Americans are – “bygones, be bygones,” so to speak, or, as I was told simply, “It’s the Buddhist way.” In addition to the absence of resentment and animosity, or desire for vengeance, there was not even the gloating one might expect from a tiny, impoverished peasant fledgling country defeating the mightiest war power on Earth (much like our Revolutionaries defeated the British Empire, though the residual resentment seems to be between North and South, much like our own ongoing rift between Union and Confederacy, the parade intended to be a show of unity).
Young people sending off their comrade to mandatory military service pass by an industrial park under construction on the side of a modern highway© Karen Rubin/news-photos-features.com
I see remarkable development on an astonishing scale – rice paddies cleared for massive industrial parks that will employ 250,000 people. In the markets, the products we purchase at home for 10 times as much – North Face, Columbia, Cotopaxi', to list a mere few. The evening downtowns packed with people enjoying restaurants with carefree pleasure.
It is such a contrast from those years after the war and the 1990s, when Vietnam entered alliance with the United States (I find the memorial statue to John McCain in Hanoi, erected after he visited Hanoi in a gesture of reconciliation, extremely touching), when rice was rationed and our guide in Hanoi recalls that all they would want for Christmas was a full belly.
I recognize this when I read a plaque at the Morning Glory restaurant in Hoi An’s Old District:
Did you lose your rice [ration] book?
When considering Vietnam’s cuisine on the global stage, it was no surprise that we were late to the table. We were decades behind even our neighbors in Southeast Asia and it was clear that we had a lot of catching up to do.
By the time the American War ended in 1975, the people of the north had already endured 30 years of rationing, since the end of the Second World War in 1945. In central and southern Vietnam, rationing came into effect following the fall of Saigon and the southern regime in 1975, at which point the counry was unified under the Communist system. Rationing then continued until almost 1990.
Hue, an early capital city and once the place of brutal fighting, is a magnet for young people to enjoy an evening out and to celebrate a birthday © Karen Rubin/news-photos-features.com
The trade embargoes which followed meant that almost every commodity was in short supply. The new government issued ration books to cover the most basic essentials, but even having ration coupons didn’t guarantee that you would get what you were entitled to. Everything was scarce, and everything was rationed, from food and cooking oil, to fabric and gasoline. However, on many occasions, it had already run out before we could redeem our coupons at the store. These stores were often scenes of chaos, with people jostling for position next to the counter.
Vietnamese, like our Trans Viet guide, Nguyen Hong Phong, who recall the hunger and deprivation they suffered as children, now say they enjoy “peace and prosperity” that came after Vietnam formed alliances with the United States, France, Russia, and in 1986, introduced free enterprise and open markets into their otherwise Soviet-style controlled economy.
The Mekong Delta, site of Vietnam War battles, is now a tourist attraction © Karen Rubin/news-photos-features.com
“Before, we only did business with Russia, Chinese, East Europeans, Cuba - now we can shake hands with our former enemy to improve the future,” Phong says. “We have more freedom than in China. There, they block media but here, they block the BBC but we can get CNN, and if they block anybody, people get curious. Society improving for local people. We feel more freedom, peaceful country - only short time since 1988. We are a friend of Russia, Ukraine, EU, USA - one of 7 strongest friends. It’s good for people, good for the country. Peace [Tourists] come to peaceful country.”
The USA was deservedly making amends for its war crimes (3 million were killed in the Vietnam War which they call “The American War,” of which 2 million were civilians, use of Agent Orange and napalm). We justified launching the war against North Vietnam, with the pretext of the Domino Theory that China would take over Southeast Asia (North Vietnam was as interested as shedding the yoke of Chinese control as the South was throwing out the French imperialists). More accurately, as we learn in the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, it was President Lyndon Johnson’s concern that Vietnam’s “tin and tungsten” resources would be lost to the US (that smacks of Trump’s obsession to take over Greenland because of its rare earth minerals, and extort Ukraine for mining rights.)
What I don’t find in the War Remnants Museum, though, is any mention of how LBJ had negotiated a peace deal in 1968, but Nixon nixed the deal in order to win election. Between 1968 and 1975, most of the 58,000 American soldiers who died, and the hundreds of thousands injured, and most of the 3 million Vietnamese who died and hundreds of thousands injured, would have been spared. I ask Phong, whose father fought for the North Vietnamese on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, if he knew about that, and he said no, but our guide in Saigon, Mr. Lee, whose father fought for the South, told me was aware, most likely informed by an American veteran. The most despicable realization about the Vietnam tragedy is that it was all political, having little or nothing to do with the claimed “national security.”
In the Museum, we see the generational impacts of America’s use of Agent Orange – and along Vietnam’s modern highways, we visit stunning craft enters – subsidized for-profit enterprises - that employ disabled who embroider, paint, carve.
Trump’s shutdown of USAID and foreign aid generally has created a dire situation in Vietnam, at the largest Agent Orange spill in the country, Propublica reported.
Trump’s shutdown of USAID and foreign aid generally has created a dire situation in Vietnam, at the largest Agent Orange spill in the country © Karen Rubin/news-photos-features.com
“When Trump and Marco Rubio cancelled foreign aid, froze funding and began dismantling USAID, those who were cleaning up the Bien Hoa air base had to halt work. That left exposed enormous pits of soil contaminated with deadly chemicals. Now, after losing several weeks of work, the contractors are scrambling — at their own expense — to secure the Bien Hoa air base before the rainy season starts. Hundreds of thousands of people live around that air base, with some homes just yards from the contaminated soil. And less than 1,500 feet away is a major river that flows into Ho Chi Minh City, population 9 million. With enough rain, soil contaminated with dioxin could flood into nearby communities and poison their food supplies, according to a letter U.S. officials in Vietnam wrote to Washington in mid-February.
“Simply put," the officials said, "we are quickly heading toward an environmental and life-threatening catastrophe." They received no response from Washington, according to three people familiar with the situation, Propublica reported.
“Halting a project like that in the middle of the work, that’s an environmental crime,” said Jan Haemers, CEO of another organization that previously worked in Vietnam to clean up Agent Orange in the soil. “If you stop in the middle, it’s worse than if you never started.”
(See: Trump Halted an Agent Orange Cleanup. That Puts Hundreds of Thousands at Risk for Poisoning)
You would think that wasn’t charity but an obligation for the tragedies the US caused. Indeed, American soldiers and their descendants were also affected.
Instead, Trump’s trade committee has put Vietnam on a Watch List with 18 trading partners who “merit bilateral attention to address underlying IP problems: Algeria, Barbados, Belarus, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, Guatemala, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Türkiye, and Vietnam.
Rice paddies being cleared for Industrial Parks where some 250,000 workers will be employed. What will the impact be of Trump’s trade war? © Karen Rubin/news-photos-features.com
Now Trump is threatening to impose 67% tariffs on Vietnam (the amount is not yet clear), and is extorting Vietnam, if it wants lower tariffs, to by the way, grant the Trump Organization a $1.5 billion resort.
Whether or not Trump’s actions are so extreme, the likelihood is that Vietnam – along with the rest of Asia, Latin America and Africa- will be pushed closer into the economic embrace of China, India and Japan, just as Canada has realized it must secure its economic independence from the United States and can no longer trust any trade agreement or alliance.
Similarly, the reason the USA granted China favored nation status as the Cultural Revolution was overturned and replaced by the Four Modernizations, was to incentivize a similar transition from Communist economy (not political structure) to a capitalist one, and turn China from an adversary into a partner.
It is Trump that has made the relationship adversarial, as Time Magazine reported, “50 Years After the War, Trump Undermines U.S.-Vietnam Reconciliation.”
Visiting Vietnam, I realized that Ho Chi Minh, who up until then I only saw as an enemy dictator, was a true liberator – no different than our Revolutionaries from 250 years ago – freeing his nation from the yoke of colonial rule. The North, living under a 1000-year old feudal system put in place by Chinese overlords, and the South living under a corrupt puppet regime controlled by French, then American, imperialists.
Vietnam celebrates its independence of colonial rulers © Karen Rubin/news-photos-features.com
When Vietnam finally threw the French and the Americans out, the people lived in deprivation under the harsh control of a Communist regime – but frankly, there was no other choice to rebuild from nothing.
An authoritarian regime, true, but one that still was working for the people, and steps up from what they had before.
By 1986, the government saw that the people would do better with free enterprise and international trade, and by the mid-1990s, had formed alliance with its previous oppressors.
The United States’ encroachment of Trump’s authoritarianism is completely different. While autocracy in Vietnam was a step up for people who had been living under feudalism and imperialism – at least it was their autocrat who did have the best intentions for improving lives of the people, and could finally shape their own destiny.
Americans are giving up our freedoms to be under the yoke of authoritarians whose only interest is their own power and profit.
These are realizations that come with international travel – and the freedom to engage with other countries.
The monument to John McCain, at the site of his capture and subsequent imprisonment in the “Hanoi Hilton,” honors his role in reconciliation © Karen Rubin/news-photos-features.com
You would think that Trump would issue a proclamation congratulating Vietnam on its 50th anniversary of Liberation (he only recently declared his own Liberation Day, meaning decoupling with the rest of the world), and gave some sense of conciliation for the death and destruction America caused the Vietnamese people (who surprise us with how gracious and welcoming they are to Americans, or even acknowledging the sacrifice of the 58,000 Americans who died. (Read President Biden’s 2022 Proclamation, “Commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War”
Nah.
The extent of his “conciliation” was at first forbidding U.S. diplomats from attending the parade, and then changing his mind and allowing them to attend.
With his tariff wars, cancellation of foreign aid, tearing up of alliances and treaties, threats against Greenland, Panama and Canada, and cozying up to Putin on Ukraine, Trump takes the wrong lesson from America’s criminal actions in Vietnam.
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