America came home in 1973. lts troops came home. Its prisoners of war came home. Its thoughts came home. America forgot about Vietnam and became gripped with “Watergate.” The scandal had begun with what was correctly described as a “third-rate-burglary” of a Democratic Parry office during the 1972 presidential campaign. It became a minor scandal when it was learned that persons close to President Nixon had approved the plan, which included the break-in. It became a major scandal when it was learned that persons close to the president had worked to cover up the White House involvement. It became the biggest scandal of the century when it was learned that the president himself had supported the cover-up effort.
Americans had rightly had faith in the strength of their armed forces, the goals for which those forces had been used, and the strength and honesty of their national government. Within a few short years their belief in all three was destroyed.
From almost the moment the Vietnam War ended for Americans, until the late summer of 1974, Watergate captured the nation. In a sense this was an easier problem to deal with, because Vietnam was the first great failure of American arms, while Watergate was one of the great successes of American law. Success is always easier to deal with than failure.
Within a year of becoming vice-president, Gerald Ford was the president of the United States. Richard Nixon’s resignation and Ford’s skilful handling of the first few months of his presidency had done much to return a feeling of normal life to America. Most Americans, understandably, wanted to forget Watergate and had forgotten Vietnam.
But the war in Vietnam had not ended. In fact, in the eighteen months between the end of American combat in Vietnam and the resignation of Richard Nixon, the peace treaty had collapsed. There were no major campaigns, no Tet offensives, but tens of thousands of Vietnamese had been killed or injured in the regular fighting that continued.
With Nixon’s resignation, the North Vietnamese may have felt that the American commitment to South Vietnam had ended. Or they may have needed the two years of relative peace and freedom from constant bombings to build up their strength. Whatever the cause, by January of 1975, they felt that the time was right to launch a new offensive in South Vietnam.
In that month, three hundred thousand North Vietnamese troops moved down the Ho Chi Minh Trait and quietly assembled in the area of Ban Me Thuont, north of Saigon. That was not where they had been expected to attack. The South Vietnamese had expected that the attack would come from farther north, directly across the Demilitarized Zone. The North Vietnamese had created some activity in that area to support that belief and the South Vietnamese had responded by placing a major part of their troops at Pleiku, some forty miles to the north of Ban Me Thuout. The North Vietnamese troops were between the South Vietnamese Army and the South Vietnamese capital, and nobody knew it.
The North Vietnamese attacked Ban Me Thuout on March 10, 1975. The South Vietnamese were taken by surprise and the city was taken in three days.
President Thieu met with his military advisors at Cam Ranh Bay and decided to bring all of his troops from the northern part of South Vietnam to the provinces surrounding Saigon. This decision was like the one the French had made a century before. If Saigon and the ports in the south could be held, the South Vietnamese could rebuild their strength and hope for American help while holding on to the most important part of their nation.
There was a major difference between the French experience and the South Vietnamese effort though. The troops withdrawn from Pleiku and Hue and other northern areas quickly ran into North Vietnamese and NLF units and even more quickly began to panic. What was to have been a slow and careful retreat ended up as a wild race for safety. Hundreds of thousands of troops rushed down highways that were badly in need of repair. There they were met by an even larger number of civilians also heading for the safety of the south. When the two groups ran into enemy fire, any hope of an orderly and disciplined response to the North Vietnamese attack ended.
Now the North Vietnamese were faced with a problem. They had no idea that they would be as successful as they had been. Their plan called for bringing a large force to South Vietnam, taking some important places, and waiting out the monsoon season. The major attack would come after the monsoon had ended.
Now, though, total victory seemed possible, but such a victory might be expensive. So the North Vietnamese offered a deal. They would agree to a coalition government that would combine, they said, all the many groups in South Vietnamese politics if President Thieu would resign. Thieu refused to do this and the North Vietnamese started the second part of their attack.
Hue fell to the North Vietnamese on March 25. Da Nang was taken on March 30. The huge American-built base at Cam Ranh Bay fell a few days later, The South Vietnamese forces, outnumbered now by three to one, were pushed back to a small area around Saigon. Their final defensive line was centered at Xuan Loc, just thirty-eight miles from the capital city.
In one short month the situation had grown desperate. President Ford asked the Congress to pay for great amounts of military aid. Even if the Congress had been in the mood to do that, the aid would have been far too late in arriving, for the end was already at hand.
The South Vietnamese Army made its best showing of the war at Xuan Lac, holding out against superior forces with no real chance of victory. The battle raged for twelve days, but when defeat came on April 21, the road to Saigon was open. President Thieu resigned and flew out of South Vietnam with what some claim was a small fortune.
The North Vietnamese circled Saigon with thirteen divisions of troops. At this crucial moment there was no leader in Saigon, for when Thieu resigned the remaining officials of the government spent several days arguing about who would take his place. This would almost be funny if it were not so much like the events of the past few years. A debate about who led South Vietnam at that point was like having an argument over who was the captain of the Titanic after it hit the iceberg.
The picture of a sinking ship is a good one. The United States had started to bring its diplomats home in March. By mid-April the American airlift included thousands of South Vietnamese who had worked with the government and whose lives were in danger if and when the North Vietnamese captured Saigon. Tens of thousands of others were left behind because Saigon fell very quickly. The formal surrender took place on April 30, 1975, and the nation, for good or evil, was one again.
Strangely, in the same week as the North Vietnamese won their final victory of Saigon, the Cambodian communist forces, the Khmer Rouge, won control of the Cambodian government. One of the basic ideas that had led the United States into war in Southeast Asia was the concept of monolithic communism. A “monolith” is a large slab of stone, A belief in monolithic communism was a belief in the idea that the communist movement was unified; that one communist held the same basic beliefs and values as any other and operated under one common plan. But the Khmer Rouge were mainly backed by the Chinese communists while the North Vietnamese ended up being backed by the Russians.
The Russians and Chinese had been arguing for years about what form of Communism was the right one. Their rivalry had increased over the years. By 1972, the Chinese had begun to warm toward the United States. This worried the Russians greatly. One result of this Chinese-American relationship was that China slowed down its support of the North Vietnamese, while Russia began to give more and more aid to them. Russia and China had been traditional, historical enemies (just as China and Vietnam had been) and the forces they supported in Vietnam and Cambodia would soon be fighting each other-though both were “communist.”
Such combat is often called “proxy” fighting and that idea is an important one to understand in a dangerous world. There are only a few nations in the world that have usable nuclear weapons (that is, both the weapons and a system to use them well--either missiles or very modern airplanes,) If those nations were to come into direct combat against each other, the danger that nuclear weapons would be used would be very great.
At the same time, those nuclear nations are so powerful that they have allies all over the world, even though their contacts with the other nuclear nations are not always friendly. Because nuclear nations cannot fight each other (because of the danger of nuclear war) and because they come into conflict so often, they have relied on proxies (substitutes) to do their fighting for them.
The Korean War was basically a proxy war. The Vietnamese War was certainly one. Smaller military efforts in Africa and Central America can also be described as proxy wars. But all of these were proxy battles between East and West, between communism and the democratic states. What would soon occur between Cambodia and Vietnam was a proxy war between the two communist giants-the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. We will see some of that conflict shortly. For the moment though, let us return to Vietnam itself and see what effects the North Vietnamese victory had.
The North Vietnamese at first adopted the theory that there were still two Vietnams, which would only be reunited when the South Vietnamese government (the heirs of the NLF) agreed to do so. That government found it necessary to “reeducate” hundreds of thousands of its citizens. These people were forced into camps in the countryside where they listened to political lectures and did manual labor (including searching for land mines by hand) until they agreed to support the new rulers.
A large, but unknown, number of others were forced to move to the north, where they were never heard from again.
The myth of two Vietnams ended in the summer of 1975. Both countries applied for membership in the United Nations. The United States voted against this and they were not admitted. The North Vietnamese announced that the American action was a violation of the Paris agreement. They did not explain why an invasion of South Vietnam was any less of a violation. Since the agreement was broken, they argued, that part that called for two independent states was no longer in effect.
Ho Chi Minh’s dream had come true, though he did not live to see it. Saigon was no longer Saigon, but Ho Chi Minh City. Vietnam was one nation and free from foreign countries. Centuries before, the Vietnamese had struggled co unite their nation, and when they had succeeded, they turned to the west and looked at Cambodia. The Cambodians themselves had launched a series of border raids against Vietnam in the time following the collapse of the Thieu government. They claimed that they were only seeking to get back territory that had been theirs before. The Vietnamese responded by taking the Paulo Wai Islands in the Gulf of Siam, territory that had been ruled by the Cambodians.
The border war with Cambodia was interrupted, though, by trouble at home. The communists had never been more than one major group among the Vietnamese nationalists. Because of their unity and their foreign allies, they had been the strongest. But there were many Vietnamese nationalists who hated the communists as much as they did Diem and Thieu.
Chief among these were the Buddhists, and in 1976, that group began passive resistance to the communist government. Passive resistance means taking peaceful action that disrupts the government. Streets may be blocked, people may refuse to go to work, marches may be made against the government. But the protestors do not use weapons or fight the police. Gandhi used this tactic in India and Martin Luther King did so in the United States.
A number of Buddhist monks and nuns set themselves afire in the streets of Vietnam. Of course, this time there were no television cameras to record the awful scene. Hundreds of thousands of other Vietnamese showed their dissatisfaction by fleeing the country by boat. These were dangerous journeys across the sea in small boats that were overcrowded and likely to be sunk by typhoons. Untold numbers of Vietnamese died in these escape efforts. Many more made it safely to friendly nations, from where they were resettled around the world.
Vietnam was not only troubled by internal dissent, it was also having difficulties with its neighbor to the north-China. As is traditional in communist nations, the Vietnam government was opposed to private businesses. Industry and commerce were to be run by the state. In 1978, the government began a crackdown on private business. In Vietnam, and in many other parts of Asia, private business meant Chinese-run businesses. Over the centuries hundreds of thousands of Chinese had moved to the various parts of the world and had started small colonies and many successful businesses.
When the Vietnamese began to harass the Chinese business population, tensions with China grew and a number of small battles broke out in the border area. In mid-1978 China cut off all aid to Vietnam, and in November of that year the Vietnamese signed a treaty with the Soviet Union. The seeds of a Vietnam-China conflict had been sown again.
On Christmas Day in 1978, one hundred thousand Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia in support of the ten thousand-member Kampuchean National United Front for National Salvation. The Khmer Rouge forces were completely defeated. The Vietnamese captured or killed one-half of the Khmer Rouge Army and overthrew the government headed by Pol Pot. On January 11, 1979, the new Republic of Kampuchea was declared.
The Chinese had backed the Khmer Rouge and were greatly concerned that the Vietnamese actions meant a new wave of Russian-Vietnamese imperialism in Asia. To stop this, the Chinese invaded Vietnam in February with one hundred thousand troops, making rapid progress in the north. The Vietnamese gathered their forces and slowed the Chinese attack. The Chinese pulled back after having reached their main goal-letting the Vietnamese know that China would not allow expansion by an Asian state supported by the Soviet Union.
This story then ends where it began. Vietnam was one nation again, under attack by China, and eyeing Cambodia as a potential victim of its own. One expert has described the history of Southeast Asia as a “Turning Wheel.” It turns and returns like the monsoons of spring. After each destructive season, a time of rebuilding takes place, only to be followed again by an era of death.
It is as though these peoples were characters locked into a theater, forced to perform the same play over and over hopelessly. Real actors do that all the time, of course. But most plays, like most stories, have a happy ending. In Vietnam, the happy ending has not yet been written.