There have been thousands of histories of the Vietnam War, but none assigns a pivotal role to international law. Research nevertheless indicates that, more than any history has acknowledged, both state actors and outside observers looked at the war through the prism of international law, whether it came to the legality of American intervention in the first place or to the constraints both sides adopted over the long years of struggle.

Perhaps the most important fact about international law, however, is that it never became a primary focus of how choices were made – not in the hallways of power, not on the fields of battle. Even in garnering public support for opposition to America’s intervention, international law played a small role. “It is a humbling realization of no small moment,” observed Richard Falk in 1973 – at the time the most energetic figure to try to bring the field’s materials to bear on the war – “to acknowledge that only international lawyers have been paying attention to the international law arguments on the war.”Footnote ¹ And yet the aftermath of Vietnam showed that it was indeed a pivotal event in the history of international law. In the long run it changed forever how war is fought and how it is talked about.

This chapter offers a synthetic overview of the range of issues in international law that arose during the course of the Vietnam War, especially as Americans took over from the French after Điện Biên Phủ in 1954 and moved, seemingly inexorably, toward massive escalation between 1964 and 1973. The chapter begins by seeking to discern what law applied to the conflict, emphasizing the points of agreement between actors on both sides and observers of different political sympathies concerning the legal status of South Vietnam. The chapter then asks – relying on the prevailing understanding of prior diplomatic events, as well as evolving notions of statehood – what claims were possible and plausible when it came to the legality of American intervention in the war. Next, the chapter addresses the different kinds of warfare in which the United States engaged, from its bombing campaigns over North Vietnamese territory and waters to the changing forms of its counterinsurgency in the South and, later, across the Cambodian border. Finally, the chapter concludes by examining the legal impact of Vietnam: not only how it led to the most significant substantive development of the laws of war since the Geneva Conventions, but also, and equally importantly, how it ensured that international law would play (for good or ill) a central role in debate over and analysis of all future conflicts – particularly those in the current era, in which the United States has returned to counterinsurgent warfare abroad.

However peripheral they may have been alone, or even together, a great many actors addressed international law issues as the war unfolded: governments, the most relevant obviously being those in Hanoi and Saigon, along with Washington; international lawyers around the world, including ones who joined antiwar movements over time; and ordinary people, both those who opposed the war and those who supported it.

All told, concern with the legality of the Vietnam War was at its height in two distinct periods: 1966–7, during which the debate revolved around the legality of the war itself (the jus ad bellum); and 1969–71, when it revolved around the legality of how the war was fought (the jus in bello). Given the impossibility of a full-scale survey (especially of North Vietnamese and non-American legal and public opinion), it will help to introduce at the start the primary actors on whom this chapter focuses. The first and perhaps most significant, in part because it was formed so early after the American escalation, was the Lawyers Committee Concerning American Policy in Vietnam. Organized in 1965 after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and founded by lawyers in private practice in New York, the Lawyers Committee was important not least because it forced the US government to respond. Soon after its inception, the group attracted prominent international lawyers, such as Falk and John Fried, to argue and refine its positions. On the other side of the legal divide, in the early years of the escalation it was Leonard Meeker, the legal advisor of the US State Department, who publicly clarified his government’s views on central legal questions – around which debate then ensued. And there were other important voices, as well. From a very different direction, the eponymous Russell Tribunal, created in 1966 by the elderly British philosopher Bertrand Russell, stood out in the early years. The twenty-two–person tribunal, which included a number of international legal experts, made its own claims about the legality of the war. Indeed, it anticipated the tremendous debates over atrocities that were to consume attention after the revelation of Mỹ Lai – when an enormous number of activists and groups joined the fray.

Contested Statehood: Was Vietnam One State or Two?

The threshold legal issue in the early period of the war was the status of the territory constituting Vietnam. Was Vietnam one state temporarily divided in two as a result of the Geneva Accords of 1954 ending French colonialism in the region, which brought a nervous peace by drawing a provisional boundary across the country at the 17th parallel? Or was there no “Vietnam” at all, but instead two independent states – the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) in the North and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) in the South? It is difficult to overstate the importance of this question. The answer determined, in large part, three critical and interrelated legal issues: whether US support for the Saigon government and the DRVN’s support for the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF, or Viet Cong) violated the principle of nonintervention; whether US bombing campaigns against the DRVN could be justified as collective self-defense of the RVN; and whether, in terms of the applicable rules of the jus in bello, the conflict was international or noninternational. If the RVN was not a state under international law, the United States was illegally intervening in the affairs of the DRVN; without the predicate of the South’s statehood, there was no legal justification for Operation Rolling Thunder – the massive bombing campaign initiated in 1965 – and later bombing attacks on the North; and unless the conflict was international, the conduct of hostilities was governed by almost no rules at all.

Under international law, a political entity qualifies as a state only if it satisfies the four criteria set out in the Montevideo Convention of 1933: (1) a permanent population; (2) a defined territory; (3) a government exercising effective control; and (4) the capacity to enter into relations with other states.Footnote ² The Montevideo Convention’s focus on the factual conditions of statehood helps clarify the status of Vietnam prior to the Geneva Accords. Neither the DRVN’s Declaration of Independence in September 1945 nor France’s formal recognition of the “Republic of Vietnam” as a free state under Hồ Chí Minh in March 1946Footnote ³ was necessary to establish Vietnam’s statehood. On the contrary, Vietnam existed as a state because Hồ Chí Minh’s provisional government had by that time established its effective control over the entire territory of Vietnam.Footnote ⁴ Even the Pentagon Papers acknowledge that “when the allies arrived, the Việt Minh were the de facto government in both North and South Vietnam.”Footnote ⁵

The DRVN lost much of its control during the French Indochina War. Once established, though, a state does not lose its statehood simply because it (temporarily) fails to satisfy the Montevideo criteria. The disputed issue during the French Indochina War was instead whether the legitimate government of Vietnam was the Việt Minh in Hanoi or Bảo Đại, the head of the Associated State of Vietnam (ASVN) that France had recognized in September 1949, in Saigon.Footnote ⁶ That issue was moot by the time of the Geneva Conference, because the Việt Minh had reasserted its control over nearly all of Vietnam. It is thus not surprising that Hanoi claimed to participate in the conference as the government of the unitary State of Vietnam – a state of affairs that the other participants implicitly acknowledged by “summarily ignor[ing]” the ASVN during the negotiations.Footnote ⁷

Critically, none of the participants in the conference intended the Geneva Accords to divide Vietnam into two states. The Ceasefire Agreement consistently referred to “Viet-Nam” as a single entity, deeming the two sides of the provisional military demarcation line “zones,” not states, and Article 14 specifically granted administrative authority to the parties “[p]ending the general elections which will bring about the unification of Viet-Nam.” The unsigned Final Declaration was even more explicit: Paragraph 6 insisted that “the military demarcation line is provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary,” while Paragraph 12 stated that “each member of the Geneva Conference undertakes to respect the sovereignty, the independence, the unity and the territorial integrity of” Vietnam.

Given the clarity of the participants’ intentions and the text of the accords, it is not surprising that, in the immediate aftermath of the Geneva Conference, the United States, the DRVN, and the RVN each asserted that Vietnam was one state – to quote the US government – “temporarily divided against its will.”Footnote ⁸ But that in no way precludes the possibility that the RVN eventually achieved statehood by establishing the permanent population, defined territory, effective government, and capacity for external relations required by the Montevideo Convention.

A comprehensive factual analysis of that issue is beyond the scope of this chapter. But there is reason to question whether the RVN ever became a state – especially as not even its primary supporter, the United States, ever explicitly took that position. To begin with, it is not clear whether the government led by Ngô Đình Diệm – or by any of his successors – ever exercised the necessary effective control over the territory south of the 17th parallel. Scholars were divided over that question throughout the war. In 1966, for example, Quincy Wright, one of the intellectual leaders of the Lawyers Committee, claimed that South Vietnam lacked “sufficient governmental authority” to qualify as a state.Footnote ⁹ Seven years later, Eugene Rostow, who had served as Lyndon Johnson’s under secretary of state for political affairs from 1966 to 1969, insisted that South Vietnam exercised its authority “at least as effectively as most governments, and more effectively than many.”Footnote ¹⁰

The effective-control issue does not admit of an easy answer. Saigon’s control of South Vietnam was at its apex in 1955 and 1956, when Hanoi was preparing for the reunification of Vietnam through general elections, and then steadily declined thereafter. That might be legally sufficient to establish South Vietnam’s statehood; after all, the Việt Minh also only effectively controlled Vietnam for a short time. But Diệm’s control was likely far more tenuous than the Việt Minh’s. In his classic 1966 article “The Faceless Viet Cong,” for example, George Carver, Jr. wrote that “[i]n the aftermath of Geneva, the area South of the 17th parallel was in a state of political chaos bordering on anarchy,” because Diệm “had only the shell of a government.”Footnote ¹¹

An even more serious issue is whether the Saigon government was so dependent on the United States that the RVN lacked the actual independence necessary to satisfy the Montevideo Convention’s “external relations” requirement. Simply put, “[a]n entity, even one possessing formal marks of independence, which is subject to foreign domination and control on a permanent or long-term basis is not ‘independent’ for the purposes of statehood in international law.”Footnote ¹² The Saigon government’s independence from the United States was questioned as soon as the ink was dry on the Geneva Accords, with the French referring to Diệm in 1955 as nothing more than an “American puppet.” More importantly, the US government itself appears to have recognized that the case for South Vietnam’s statehood was anything but iron-clad. The State Department’s formal response to the Lawyers Committee – the Meeker Memorandum (or Memo) – never unequivocally asserted that South Vietnam was a state under international law. On the contrary, it acknowledged that South Vietnam lacked “some of the attributes of an independent sovereign state” and consistently referred to South Vietnam as a “recognized international entity” instead of as a state.Footnote ¹³

Although it stopped short of asserting the RVN’s statehood, the Meeker Memo emphasized – as did scholars more convinced of the statehood argument – that approximately sixty other states recognized the RVN as a state and that the RVN had been admitted to a variety of United Nations (UN) agencies.Footnote ¹⁴ The recognition argument, however, is problematic. The Montevideo Convention affirms that a qualifying entity’s existence “is independent of recognition by the other states,”Footnote ¹⁵ what is known as the “declaratory” theory of statehood. That theory has always enjoyed more support – both legal and scholarly – than the “constitutive” theory, which holds that sufficient recognition by other states is an equally necessary condition. In any event, the constitutive theory views recognition as an additional requirement, not one that can compensate for a political entity’s failure to objectively satisfy the Montevideo criteria.Footnote ¹⁶

Furthermore, it is simply not the case that “South Vietnam” enjoyed widespread recognition by other states. The number of states that formally recognized the RVN was actually about twenty-five; the other thirty-five recognitions – including those by the United States and United Kingdom – took place before Vietnam was divided. By definition, predivision recognitions (like memberships in UN agencies) could not support the idea that South Vietnam was an independent state or even, as Meeker maintained, a “recognized international entity.”

The Legality of Intervention (jus ad bellum)

Debate raged during the war over whether the Geneva Accords of 1954, agreed by the DRVN and France, allowed for US intervention. Although Articles 16 and 17 of the Ceasefire Agreement prohibited the parties from introducing new soldiers and military equipment into Vietnam, neither the RVN nor the United States signed the agreement. Whether the RVN and the United States were nevertheless bound by the two articles is an exceedingly complex legal question. Notably, however, the Meeker Memorandum did not argue that the RVN and United States were free to violate the Ceasefire Agreement. Instead, Meeker claimed that America’s (ostensibly) minimal assistance to the RVN before 1961 was consistent with Articles 16 and 17, which permitted the replacement of military forces and equipment, while Washington’s much more significant assistance after 1961 was justified by the DRVN’s prior “material breaches” of the two articles.Footnote ¹⁷ But it is almost impossible to say with any certainty which party, the DRVN or the RVN/United States, breached Articles 16 and 17 first. Indeed, the International Control Commission, set up to monitor the accords, routinely concluded that both sides had breached the Ceasefire Agreement without taking a position on that issue.

For this reason, controversy quickly turned from the accords to the international law governing external involvement in a conflict. Two legal principles were of cardinal importance: the principle of nonintervention and the prohibition of the use of force. The principle of nonintervention is based on the “Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty,” which the UN General Assembly adopted unanimously (with one abstention – the United Kingdom) in 1965. According to that principle, “[n]o State has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatsoever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State.”Footnote ¹⁸ The Lawyers Committee pressed nonintervention very hard, insisting that the principle, “fundamental in international law,” prohibited the United States from intervening in what it described as the “civil war” in South Vietnam.Footnote ¹⁹

The meaning of the principle of nonintervention, however, was (and is) deeply contested, especially in a situation of internal conflict. The term “civil war” has never had a formal legal meaning. Instead, international law has traditionally distinguished between three different levels of conflict within a state: rebellion, insurgency, and belligerency. Domestic violence is a “rebellion” if the threatened government’s police forces are capable of maintaining order. An “insurgency” exists when a rebel group and the government are engaged in armed conflict that requires additional pacification efforts by the government. And a “belligerency” exists where there is general armed conflict within the state, the insurgents are hierarchically organized under responsible command, and the conflict affects other states.Footnote ²⁰

Assuming the RVN qualified as a state, the basic rules concerning intervention in an internal conflict indicate that US assistance to the Saigon government was almost certainly legal. The traditional view at the time was that a state was free to assist a government facing either a rebellion or an insurgency. Indeed, even the Lawyers Committee’s own Richard Falk accepted that rule. The situation was more complicated when hostilities escalated into a belligerency – as was clearly the case in South Vietnam – because at that point the rebels were entitled to the same rights and privileges as the de jure government. But the principle of nonintervention only prohibited a state from assisting the government if it formally recognized the rebels as belligerents and declared itself neutral in the conflict – a discretionary act, and one the United States never contemplated concerning the NLF.

Perhaps recognizing the weakness of its argument that states could not assist a government involved in a civil war, the Lawyers Committee also argued that Saigon was so dependent on the United States that it could not legitimately consent to US assistance: “[t]he present junta in Saigon, and its predecessor ‘governments,’ are appropriately viewed as client regimes of the United States; at no time have they been capable of making an independent ‘request’ to their patron.”Footnote ²¹ That was a canny argument, because the rule that only an independent government could lawfully request foreign assistance was accepted by both the United States and the Soviet Union – the latter even though the UN had invoked it to condemn Soviet assistance to the Hungarian government in 1956. Whether it was factually justified, however, is difficult to assess.Footnote ²²

The Lawyers Committee also vociferously argued that the United States’ direct military intervention in Vietnam – both introducing combat troops into the South and engaging in aerial bombing in the North – violated Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, adopted in 1945, which provides that all members “shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” The Charter’s prohibition on interstate violence is categorical and admits of only two exceptions: authorization by the Security Council (as in Korea) and individual or collective self-defense against armed attack.Footnote ²³

In the early days of the escalation, American officials vacillated concerning the legal justification for attacks across the 17th parallel. After the Gulf of Tonkin incident in early August 1964, a State Department legal advisor described the US attacks against four torpedo-boat bases and an oil storage depot in the DRVN as self-defense, while US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said they were acts of “retaliation” – a colloquial way of describing the doctrine of armed reprisal. Not long thereafter, American officials inconsistently described Operation Flaming Dart I – a series of February 1965 air attacks and bombing raids launched in response to NLF assaults on Camp Holloway, near Pleiku – as “appropriate reprisal action” and (before the UN) as “measures of self-defense.”Footnote ²⁴

By the time of the Meeker Memo, March 1966, the United States no longer referred to its actions as reprisals. In part, that was because there was an emerging consensus in the era – by states and scholars alike – that armed reprisals were inconsistent with the monopoly on legitimate force established by the UN Charter. In fact, during the Security Council debate concerning the Tonkin Gulf, the Czech delegate had pointedly reminded the United States that it had previously condemned both reprisals and “retaliatory raids.” Moreover, with regard to Pleiku, American officials did not even attempt to explain why the NLF’s actions were attributable to the DRVN, a necessary condition of using force against the DRVN regardless of whether the response was styled as an armed reprisal or as self-defense – as the Lawyers Committee pointed out. Any such argument would have been difficult to make in both fact and law.

The Meeker Memo thus sought to shoehorn all US direct military intervention in Vietnam – North and South – into the category of self-defense. The very first sentence of the memo stated that “[i]n response to requests from the government of South Vietnam, the United States has been assisting that country in defending itself against armed attack from the Communist North.” That attack, according to Meeker, consisted of the “infiltration” of “40,000 armed and unarmed guerrillas” into South Vietnam, including “elements of the North Vietnamese army.”Footnote ²⁵

The Lawyers Committee rejected Meeker’s argument on multiple grounds. Most broadly, seizing on his acknowledgment that the RVN might have lacked “some of the attributes of an independent sovereign state,” they argued – extending their argument about nonintervention – that the Saigon regime was so dependent on the United States that it could not legitimately ask Washington to act in its “collective” self-defense. “The relevant question is whether, even granting the widest possible interpretation of self-defense under both the Charter and general international law, a regime that does not possess political autonomy with its own society enjoys a legal right to request military assistance from a foreign country.” That right, the committee insisted, “must be denied.”Footnote ²⁶

The Lawyers Committee also challenged Meeker’s claim that the RVN had been the victim of an armed attack. First, the committee argued that the United States significantly overstated the number of soldiers that had “infiltrated” South Vietnam from the North prior to the initiation of Operation Rolling Thunder and the arrival of US combat forces. In defense of that position, they cited Senator Mark Mansfield’s 1966 report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which had concluded that infiltration was generally limited to “political cadres and military leadership” until the end of 1964 and that subsequent infiltration of People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) regulars was a “counterresponse” to Saigon’s request for direct military assistance.Footnote ²⁷ The size and timing of the DRVN’s actions, according to the committee, indicated “some intervention by North Vietnam in the civil strife or ‘insurgency’ in South Vietnam, but they do not establish an armed attack within the accepted meaning of Article 51 of the Charter.”Footnote ²⁸

The merits of that argument were inextricably bound to the Lawyers Committee’s insistence that South Vietnam was not a state and thus could not consent to US intervention in the war. If Saigon was capable of consent, the arrival of US combat forces in South Vietnam was lawful and could not justify infiltration of PAVN regulars even as a “counterresponse.” Perhaps recognizing that problem, the Lawyers Committee seized upon Meeker’s frank acknowledgment in his memo that “[i]n the guerrilla war in Viet-Nam, an ‘armed attack’ is not as easily fixed by date and hour as in the case of traditional warfare” and that “[t]here may be some question as to the exact date at which North Viet-Nam’s aggression grew into an ‘armed attack.’”Footnote ²⁹ Those concessions were fatal to Washington’s collective self-defense claim, the Lawyers Committee argued, because they meant that its direct military involvement in the war was a form of anticipatory self-defense prohibited by the UN Charter. This was a sophisticated argument, because the committee did not try to limit self-defense – as many states still did – to situations in which an armed attack had already occurred, which was the most natural reading of Article 51. Instead, they accepted, quoting the classic formulation of imminence in the Caroline case,Footnote ³⁰ that a state could also act when the “necessity of self-defense [was] instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation.” As the committee pointed out, though, the gradual accretion of Northern soldiers in the South over a number of years hardly satisfied the Caroline standard.

The Lawyers Committee also questioned the proportionality of the US bombing campaigns across the 17th parallel, noting that “these air attacks have from the outset vastly exceeded in destructiveness the Pleiku incidents, and have escalated into a massive, ever-growing war against North Vietnam.”Footnote ³¹ The committee did so, however, only in the context of whether the United States could justify the campaigns as armed reprisals.Footnote ³² Their narrow emphasis is revealing, because although questions about proportionality now routinely feature in debates over individual and collective self-defense, little attention was paid in the mid-1960s to that principle. Indeed, the Meeker Memo assumed almost carte blanche justification to respond in collective self-defense to “communist aggression,” failing to note any limits at all on the relationship between the predicate attacks and the US response.

Precisely because the United States’ earlier interventions caused a modicum of public debate about their legality under international law, Richard Nixon’s initially secret decision in March 1969 to use air power across the Cambodian border in order to attack NLF “sanctuaries” and to interdict traffic along the Hồ Chí Minh Trail eventually did too. The enormous outcry over the news in March 1970 that Cambodia was being bombed led the US government to elaborate its legal rationale for doing so. The main problem Nixon’s lawyers (including future Chief Justice William Rehnquist) faced was domestic: namely, the lack of congressional approval, as required by the US Constitution’s war powers provisions. But the intervention also appeared legally problematic under international standards insofar as it violated the sovereignty of a state that had formally declared itself neutral in the war.

In a speech to the Dag Hammersköld Forum in New York, John Stevenson, Meeker’s successor as legal advisor to the State Department, addressed that issue. He argued that the bombings were legal because Cambodia was not fulfilling its obligation as a neutral power to prohibit the NLF’s belligerent use of its territory. Stevenson acknowledged that the UN Charter prohibited all force other than in self-defense against an armed attack by a belligerent – and Cambodia had never launched such an attack. But he insisted that the right of self-defense nevertheless justified the United States’ violating Cambodia’s sovereignty, because “a belligerent may take action on a neutral’s territory to prevent violation by another belligerent of the neutral’s neutrality which the neutral cannot or will not prevent.”Footnote ³³ This argument neatly solved the attribution problem that had plagued US self-defense arguments since Operation Flaming Dart I by simply not requiring a nonstate actor’s attack to be attributed to a state. But it also directly contradicted the central limit on self-defense that both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had accepted. Indeed, Abram Chayes, the legal advisor under Kennedy, was so incensed by the Nixon administration’s decision to jettison the attribution requirement that he publicly denounced the Cambodian bombings as illegal under international law.Footnote ³⁴

Figure 20.1 Demonstrators call out the USA for violating the Geneva Accords (1954) during a rally in London (July 6, 1967).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

The Conduct of Hostilities (jus in bello)

As the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War deepened, and especially after the Mỹ Lai massacre was revealed in 1969, attention to the jus ad bellum, the rules governing the use of interstate force, declined – in part because the intervention had already gone on so long. By 1970, for example, Stevenson could defend the Cambodian operation simply by referring to the prior five years of debate on the legality of the war. Correspondingly, the jus in bello, the rules governing the conduct of hostilities, came to the fore.

Applying international law to the conduct of hostilities, however, presupposed classifying what kind of conflict it was – which again began with whether there were one or two states in Vietnam. The two primary treaty-based sources of law in force at the time, Hague Convention IV of 1907 and the Geneva Conventions of 1949, applied only insofar as the hostilities in Vietnam qualified as an international armed conflict (IAC) – one between two or more states. Insofar as the conflict involved hostilities between a government and an organized armed group, a noninternational armed conflict (NIAC), only one provision applied: Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

Hostilities between the DRVN and the United States – for example, bombing campaigns across the 17th parallel – obviously qualified as an IAC. Although the United States refused to acknowledge the existence of an IAC when US soldiers were serving in South Vietnam only in an advisory capacity, it accepted that qualification once it began to bomb North Vietnam.Footnote ³⁵ For its part, the DRVN never denied that it was involved in an IAC with the United States.

Hostilities between North Vietnam and South Vietnam are more difficult to qualify. The DRVN never publicly articulated a position on that issue, because it always denied that its forces were formally engaged in South Vietnam. (Northerners fighting below the 17th parallel were “volunteers,” Hanoi maintained.) By contrast, the United States viewed the conflict as international once large numbers of American, Australian, New Zealand, Korean, and Thai soldiers began to engage in combat in South Vietnam, and eventually convinced the RVN to (reluctantly) accept that qualification.Footnote ³⁶

The most complicated issue – and the most important, because it determined the legality of many US practices during the war – is whether the hostilities in South Vietnam between the NLF and the RVN were part of the larger international armed conflict or were best understood as a NIAC. The parties themselves took the former position, though for very different reasons. In the DRVN’s view, the NLF was engaged in a war of national liberation against the RVN and thus, in keeping with communist legal theory at the time, the conflict was international.Footnote ³⁷ The United States and the RVN denied that the NLF was a national-liberation movement, but they nevertheless insisted that the hostilities in South Vietnam qualified as an IAC because they believed the DRVN both created and controlled the NLF, making the NLF’s hostilities part of its larger conflict with the DRVN.Footnote ³⁸ Interestingly, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) – custodian of the laws of war for more than a century – concluded that the hostilities were an IAC via yet another path: in its view, any “civil war” in which either the legitimate government or the rebels received military support from a foreign state qualified as international.Footnote ³⁹

It is difficult to credit any of these rationales. The ICRC’s theory was inconsistent with state practice at the time, which as noted made clear that foreign states could assist a legitimate government without internationalizing a conflict. Indeed, when the ICRC later formally proposed its position in 1971 during the negotiations that led to the two post-Vietnam Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions (1977), states overwhelmingly rejected it.Footnote ⁴⁰ The US/RVN position was legally stronger: if the NLF was nothing more than an extension of the DRVN, the conflict between the NLF and the RVN was indeed international. It is anything but clear, however, that the NLF was created and controlled by the DRVN.Footnote ⁴¹ If not, the DRVN’s assistance would not have sufficed to internationalize the conflict. The DRVN’s position, in turn, was both legally and factually questionable. Legally, there was no agreement among states at the time that wars of national liberation qualified as IACs – although the First Additional Protocol would ultimately, and controversially, adopt that position. Moreover, as discussed earlier, it is far from self-evident that the NLF was fighting a war of national liberation against the RVN.

US practices whose legality was questioned can be divided into four categories: (1) violations of the principles of distinction and proportionality; (2) use of prohibited weapons of war; (3) mistreatment of POWs; and (4) mistreatment of South Vietnamese civilians. Bombing of the DRVN aside, US practices generally complied with the jus in bello, although individual military units undoubtedly engaged in unlawful behavior.

The principle of distinction, which categorically prohibits the intentional targeting of civilians and civilian objects, is at the heart of international humanitarian law (IHL). Closely related is the principle of proportionality, which prohibits attacks on legitimate targets when the anticipated military advantage is outweighed by the expected collateral civilian damage.Footnote ⁴² Critics of US involvement in the war questioned whether a number of common practices complied with these principles, which applied in both the North and the South regardless of whether hostilities there qualified as international or noninternational.

A significant amount of criticism was focused on Washington’s bombing campaigns between 1965 and 1968 and again in 1972 (Operation Linebacker and Operation Linebacker II). Critics often denounced the very existence of the campaigns, but they also expressed skepticism about whether they were conducted in accordance with jus in bello principles, particularly distinction. How, critics asked, could such intense bombing of the North – several times the tonnage of bombs the United States dropped during all of World War II – have targeted military objectives alone? It was a natural question, given that counterinsurgency against anticolonial uprisings had long taken the form of using massive air power against civilian populations to destroy morale, including by Americans during World War II (as celebrated Air Force General Curtis LeMay reminded Americans in 1965).Footnote ⁴³ Moreover, early reports of Western journalists in North Vietnam, especially Harrison Salisbury’s articles in the New York Times in the winter of 1966–7, suggested civilian death that was difficult to describe as permissible collateral damage. (Salisbury’s reporting was later scrutinized heavily, including allegations that he relied on DRVN propaganda, but the initial impact of his reporting was enormous.)Footnote ⁴⁴

The truth was, however, that very few specific rules governing aerial bombardment existed at the time – and as former Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor noted in his enormously successful 1970 book Nuremberg and Vietnam,Footnote ⁴⁵ no one had been punished for deliberately bombing civilians at Nuremberg, in part because all parties to World War II had engaged in it.Footnote ⁴⁶ Customary principles surely prohibited directly targeting civilians, but state practice – equally surely – did not rule out strategic bombing of areas populated by civilians. And in any event, no cities were razed by the US Air Force in Vietnam in the way that had occurred a quarter-century before across Europe and in Japan. Moreover, while it was clear that a great deal of bombing of the Northern landscape was difficult to justify (like close air support or village bombings in the South on minimal suspicion of danger), it was equally difficult to disprove the US government’s routine insistence that it bombed only military targets. The factual disputes involved in allegations about indiscriminate bombing even allowed one prominent revisionist historian to claim that “the application of American air power was probably the most restrained in modern warfare.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Even though the US Air Force occasionally demolished civilian objects – such as the Bach Mai hospital during Operation Linebacker II – the Cornell Air War Study Group was likely correct to assert in 1972 that “the central legal defect” of American bombing in the North and South (as well as in Cambodia and Laos) was not that it violated the principle of distinction, but that it “generally failed to comply with the rule of proportionality.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Even that conclusion was contestable, given the difficulty involved in comparing military advantage to collateral damage. By the end of the war, though, a number of lawyers, including Taylor himself, were willing to raise serious doubts about American aerial targeting, mainstreaming what had from the beginning been the preserve of marginal critics. In the winter of 1972–3, Taylor traveled to Hanoi with folk singer Joan Baez in order to deliver holiday mail to POWs and happened to be present during the wrath of Linebacker II. When he emerged from the bomb shelter near his hotel, reporters asked him whether DRVN authorities had deliberately shown him Bach Mai and devastated residential areas. He responded: “We might not have seen some things that we would have liked to have seen, but nonetheless we did see the things we saw.” Instead of saying that such aerial fury was tragic but legal – as he had in his book two years earlier – Taylor now claimed that American conduct, though still not comparable to the destruction of cities during World War II, incontestably ran afoul of the cornerstone principles of the laws of war.Footnote ⁴⁹

A number of other controversial military practices took place in the context of counterinsurgency in the South. A particularly notorious practice was the United States’ liberal use of “free fire” (artillery) and “free strike” (air) zones. Critics alleged that such zones violated the principle of distinction because they permitted US forces to presume that anyone found within a zone following Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) efforts to remove the civilian population was a combatant who could be lawfully attacked. It seems likely that a number of individual military units acted in the manner the critics decry, killing any person they encountered without attempting to distinguish between combatants and civilians. Army regulations concerning “free fire” and “free strike” zones, however, did not permit such callous disregard for the principle of distinction. On the contrary, they specifically stated that “the conduct of fire must be in accordance with established rules of engagement,”Footnote ⁵⁰ which included the requirement that US forces make “every effort … to avoid civilian casualties.”Footnote ⁵¹

Critics also focused on the systematic use of “body counts” as a measure of military success. There was nothing per se illegal about asking American combat soldiers to keep track of the number of PAVN and People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF, the armed wing of the NLF) troops they killed, nor even to encourage them to kill as many as possible, as long as they were required (as they were) to respect the principle of distinction. Body counts are “a necessary feature of war.”Footnote ⁵² It seems clear, however, that commanders throughout South Vietnam pressured their subordinates to kill unreasonable numbers of PAVN and PLAF forces. Such pressure was bound to lead American soldiers to ignore the distinction between combatants and civilians and simply kill indiscriminately. After all, one ear looked like any other.Footnote ⁵³

Third, critics decried the widespread use of defoliants and herbicides to destroy crops that South Vietnamese civilians needed to survive. Article 23 of the Hague Regulations deems it impermissible “[t]o destroy or seize the enemy’s property, unless such destruction or seizure be imperatively demanded by the necessities of war.” Under Article 23, US soldiers could lawfully destroy crops that were limiting their ability to engage in combat (such as rice paddies PLAF fighters used for cover) or crops that were – to quote the Army Field Manual – “intended solely for consumption by the armed forces.”Footnote ⁵⁴ But they could not intentionally destroy crops that were not being used for military purposes and that they knew were designated for civilian consumption. That is a fact-specific determination, but the sheer scale of the army’s crop-destruction program – Operation Ranch Hand – makes it difficult to believe that US soldiers did not intentionally target civilian crops.

Critics did not simply allege that the United States was using lawful weapons in unlawful ways, such as using herbicides to destroy civilian crops or flamethrowers to burn villages. They also routinely claimed that the weapons the United States used in Vietnam were themselves unlawful – no matter how they were used.

No weapon aroused as much horror as napalm, which – as reflected in the iconic 1972 photo of Phan Thị Kim Phúc – causes terrible suffering when it comes in contact with human skin. The strongest argument for napalm’s illegality was based on Article 23(e) of the Hague Regulations, which prohibits the use of “arms, projectiles, or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering.” The key to Article 23(e), however, is the qualifier “unnecessary,” which requires balancing the suffering a weapon causes against that weapon’s military utility. Given states’ widespread use of napalm for various purposes – such as attacking fortifications and providing flak suppression – prior to Vietnam, it is difficult to argue that napalm itself violates Article 23(e).

Critics also argued that the use of napalm violated international law’s prohibition on asphyxiating or poisoned weapons. That argument was complicated by the fact that the United States had not yet adhered to the Geneva Protocol of 1925, which prohibits the use of “asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids materials or devices.” Moreover, even if that prohibition had passed into customary international law – a question that divided experts at the time – it was not clear that napalm even qualified as an asphyxiating or poisoned weapon. Indeed, the ICRC concluded in 1969 that “napalm and incendiary weapons in general are not specifically prohibited” by customary international law, a position seconded by the United Nations Group of Consultant Experts on Chemical and Bacteriological (Biological) Weapons.Footnote ⁵⁵

Criticism of Washington’s use of lachrymatories faced similar problems. Even if the Geneva Protocol could be read to prohibit all gaseous weapons – which the United States denied – the United States was not bound by the Protocol. Moreover, as argued by the United States, customary international law likely prohibited only tear gas that was capable of killing or at least causing lasting damage to health. Most lachrymatories in the American arsenal, such as “ordinary” CS (tear gas), were legal under that standard. The case against defoliants and herbicides, such as the notorious Agent Orange, was weaker still. Because such weapons were rarely used in conflict situations prior to Vietnam, it was difficult for critics to argue that either the Geneva Protocol or customary international law prohibited their use. That said, the use of defoliants prompted more pioneering calls to revise the laws of war than area bombing or “free fire zones” ever did, reflecting a dawning age of ecological consciousness.Footnote ⁵⁶

Finally, critics took issue with the use of cluster munitions, particularly the CBU-24 (“guava”). Guavas were the “darling of the aviators,” to quote a high-ranking Pentagon official at the time, because they were extremely effective – better even than napalm – at neutralizing anti-aircraft weapons.Footnote ⁵⁷ Of course, the fact that guavas could disperse explosive fragments over a radius of several miles also made them particularly likely to cause civilian casualties. Regardless, their use was not prohibited by any treaty, and all scholars agreed at the time that there was no customary prohibition of their use.

Throughout the war, detained individuals were mistreated by all of the parties to the conflict. The applicable legal standards were rarely debated: the Geneva Conventions obligated the parties to treat all detainees humanely, regardless of whether they were POWs or civilians. Any kind of violence against detainees was absolutely prohibited. There was significant debate over the distinction between POWs and civilians itself, however, because that distinction mattered in other ways, such as whether a detained person could be prosecuted for actions ostensibly violating IHL. POW status was particularly important concerning the DRVN’s detention of captured American soldiers. Although the DRVN acknowledged that the Geneva Conventions applied to its international armed conflict with the United States, Hanoi insisted that captured American soldiers – particularly downed American flyers like John McCain – were “pirates” who were not entitled to POW status and could be prosecuted in the DRVN’s domestic courts. That claim, which infuriated America, received as much attention during the war as any other legal issue.

On the surface, the DRVN’s claim had no merit: the DRVN acknowledged that it was engaged in an IAC with the United States and that all of the captured pilots were uniformed members of the US Navy or Air Force. But there was one complication: when the DRVN adhered to the Third Geneva Convention in 1957, it submitted a reservation to Article 85, which provides that a POW does not lose his status simply because the detaining state convicts him for violating IHL. According to the reservation, the DRVN did not have to continue treating an individual as a POW if he was “prosecuted for and convicted of war crimes or crimes against humanity.” Going beyond even the Soviet Union, which (like all the communist states) filed the same reservation to Article 85, the DRVN read the “and” disjunctively, insisting that a POW would lose his status as soon as he was charged with an international crime: conviction was not necessary. That reading of the reservation was manifestly incompatible with the object and purpose of Article 85 – to ensure that POWs were provided due process of law when charged with misconduct – because it would permit a state to remove POW status simply by accusing a POW of committing an international crime. The DRVN’s reading of the reservation was thus invalid under normal principles of treaty law.

The United States engaged in no such sleight of hand. It took the position that all PAVN soldiers captured in South Vietnam were entitled to POW status as a matter of law – a straightforward application of the Third Geneva Convention.Footnote ⁵⁸ The more significant legal question for the United States was the status of captured PLAF fighters who, as insurgents, did not fit easily into any of the recognized categories of POWs. Given that Washington viewed the NLF as created and controlled by the DRVN, it could have extended POW status to the PLAF forces on the ground that they were, to quote the Third Geneva Convention, part of an “organized resistance movement belonging to” the DRVN. Meyrowitz made that case during the war,Footnote ⁵⁹ but there is no evidence that the United States considered the possibility – likely because the PLAF did not fulfill the Third Geneva Convention’s requirements for such “irregular” armed forces, particularly wearing a fixed and distinctive sign and complying with the laws of war.

Because of the PLAF’s shortcomings, the United States could simply have denied the group POW status, treating them in accordance with Common Article 3 instead of the Third Geneva Convention as a whole. General Westmoreland nevertheless ordered his forces to treat all detained PLAF members as POWs, unless they were captured while engaged in acts of terrorism, sabotage, or espionage.Footnote ⁶⁰ That was a policy decision, not a legal one – yet it earned widespread praise. Indeed, a delegate of the ICRC called the relevant directive one of the most important “in the history of humanitarian law.”Footnote ⁶¹

There is little evidence that US forces regularly mistreated detainees. The same cannot be said, however, of the ARVN. On the contrary, from the moment Americans arrived in South Vietnam as advisors, the United States received reports that the ARVN routinely tortured and mistreated captured PLAF fighters. The United States had no direct legal responsibility for the mistreatment of PLAF troops that the ARVN had captured, but Article 12 of the Third Geneva Convention prohibited it from turning its own detainees over to the ARVN unless it ensured their humane treatment. The United States consistently ignored that prohibition.

South Vietnamese civilians were also mistreated during the war. Two practices drew particular opprobrium from critics. The first was the United States and RVN’s mass relocation of civilians from their homes to specially created “strategic hamlets.” More than 8 million South Vietnamese civilians were relocated between 1961 and 1963, ostensibly to deprive the NLF/PLAF of necessary resources and to win civilians’ “hearts and minds” by providing them with increased security and living standards. The overwhelming majority of civilians were, however, relocated against their will – and conditions in the hamlets were, according to a Senate Judiciary Committee report, almost invariably deplorable. At first glance, therefore, the Strategic Hamlet Program would seem to have violated Article 42 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits interning or assigning residences to civilians unless “the security of the Detaining Power makes it absolutely necessary,” as well as Article 85, which requires living conditions far better than the South Vietnamese actually received. The problem is that those provisions apply only to “Protected Persons”: civilians who are “in the hands of a Party to the conflict … of which they are not nationals.” Under that definition, the South Vietnamese civilians forcibly relocated by the RVN were not Protected Persons. The Strategic Hamlet Program thus did not violate IHL, however ill-conceived and deplorable it might have been.

The second practice was more problematic: the wanton destruction of civilian property by US forces, particularly burning to the ground or massively bombarding entire villages suspected of harboring PLAF fighters. Such collective punishment – holding civilians accountable for the actions of the NLF/PLAF – is categorically prohibited by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Moreover, no Protected Person issue arose in this context, because the South Vietnamese civilians collectively punished were not nationals of the United States.

Mỹ Lai, War Crimes, and Accountability

Interventions that are illegal under international law are not necessarily crimes of war. But it did not take long for critics to accuse the United States of committing aggression against the DRVN. In the aftermath of Mỹ Lai, however, critics de-emphasized aggression in favor of focusing on war crimes committed by US soldiers.

Although members of the Lawyers Committee occasionally accused the United States of committing aggression against North Vietnam – most notably Richard Falk during a Columbia University roundtable on the war in 1971 – the most strident allegations of aggression were leveled by the Russell Tribunal. The work of the tribunal, whose participants included Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Stokely Carmichael (Che Guevara and Herbert Marcuse declined invitations), was greatly facilitated by the DRVN, which financed the tribunal’s fact-finding trips to North Vietnam and hailed it as “the first international tribunal of the masses to try the crimes of aggression committed by US imperialism in Vietnam.”Footnote ⁶² The United States, by contrast, alternated between denouncing Russell’s politics and ignoring the tribunal completely. After hearing eight days of testimony in May 1967 concerning questions of international law and the impact of Operation Rolling Thunder, the Russell Tribunal issued its verdict that December: the United States was guilty of aggression toward North Vietnam, and its allies Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea were guilty of complicity in aggression.

From a narrowly legal perspective, the Russell Tribunal was difficult to take seriously. No less a critic of the United States than Richard Falk himself condemned the tribunal as a “juridical farce”Footnote ⁶³ – a fair description, given that it had no official status, made almost no attempt to comply with basic principles of fairness, and did not even address the criminal responsibility of specific individuals. Moreover, although the judgment made reference to such legal sources as the UN Charter, the tribunal’s legal analysis was cursory (Russell did not believe in “rigorous adherence to formal definitions”) and its verdict almost impossible to defend. Even if Operation Rolling Thunder violated the UN Charter’s prohibition of the use of force – itself far from obvious, as noted above – it was not necessarily criminal. No treaty in force during the Cold War specifically criminalized aggression, and customary international law – reflecting the Nuremberg Charter, and even sources the Vietnam War itself produced, such as the 1970 Friendly Relations Declaration and the 1973 UN Definition of Aggression – criminalized only “wars” of aggression: namely, those designed to bring about regime change or permanently acquire another state’s territory in order to control its natural and human resources. The bombing of North Vietnam obviously did not fall into that category, which is why even former Nuremberg prosecutors like Telford Taylor and Benjamin Ferencz were skeptical at the time that the United States had committed aggression.

Whatever its legal failings, though, the Russell Tribunal contributed significantly to the public’s understanding of the Vietnam War. The tribunal’s work was widely covered by media around the world and spurred considerable discussion both inside and outside of academia. It also cemented a parallel between the American-instigated trials of major Nazi and Japanese war criminals and the later events, which was fateful after Mỹ Lai, and led many to take more seriously the necessity of individual accountability for other war crimes – especially atrocities. Most prominently, Telford Taylor insisted that, while aggression was off the table, Americans should certainly consider prosecuting war crimes.

Indeed, allegations that all of the parties to the conflict were responsible for war crimes are more difficult to dismiss. The Geneva Conventions require parties to a conflict to apprehend and prosecute persons suspected of committing “grave breaches” of IHL – acts that give rise to individual criminal responsibility. That obligation applies regardless of the suspect’s nationality.

Despite acknowledging that they were bound by the Geneva Conventions, however, the DRVN made no attempt to prosecute its own soldiers who committed war crimes, such as the torture or murder of captured American soldiers. Nor did it ever prosecute the American flyers it shot down over North Vietnam, despite having the legal right to do so – and despite keeping the world on edge for nearly two weeks in July 1966 by announcing that such trials were imminent.

The United States defined war crimes much more broadly than the Geneva Conventions, criminalizing every violation of IHL, not simply the grave breaches.Footnote ⁶⁴ Nevertheless, no soldier of any nationality was ever convicted of a war crime during the Vietnam War. The United States never prosecuted PAVN soldiers or NLF fighters who committed war crimes, despite creating a procedure for investigating them in 1968.Footnote ⁶⁵ Moreover, although it could have prosecuted American soldiers in military tribunals for war crimes, as a matter of policy it always court-martialed them instead for violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

In general, the US decision to charge American soldiers with violating the UCMJ was not problematic: Article 18 of the UCMJ incorporated all war crimes into military law. There was, however, one important absence from the UCMJ: command responsibility. Under IHL, a military commander is criminally responsible for his subordinates’ crimes as long as he either knew or should have known the crimes were being committed. The UCMJ, by contrast, did not (and still does not) contain a general provision on command responsibility. Instead, commanders had to be charged with a form of complicity by omission, a lesser degree of homicide (such as involuntary manslaughter), or – most commonly – dereliction of duty. None of those alternatives, however, were functionally equivalent to command responsibility. Complicity by omission could also be committed negligently, but it required the commander to be present at the scene of his subordinates’ crimes, which excluded in practice all but the lowest-level military commanders. Involuntary manslaughter required the commander to have actual knowledge of his subordinates’ crimes. And dereliction of duty, which could be negligently committed, was punishable at the time by a maximum of three months’ imprisonment.Footnote ⁶⁶

The difference between IHL and the UCMJ concerning command responsibility was imperfectly understood at the time, leading to widespread confusion concerning the most notorious acquittal during the Vietnam War: that of Captain Ernest Medina, who commanded the units involved in the Mỹ Lai massacre. Numerous scholars, including Telford Taylor, faulted the military judge advocate for instructing the jury that it could not convict Medina unless it believed he had actual knowledge that his soldiers were killing innocent civilians – a much more exacting mental state than IHL’s “knew or should have known” standard for command responsibility, which had been articulated by the American-run Nuremberg Military Tribunals in the aftermath of the more famous Nuremberg trial. Command responsibility, however, played no role in Medina’s court-martial. He was instead charged with involuntary manslaughter under the UCMJ after the judge advocate concluded that complicity in premeditated murder was not available because Medina had not been present during the Mỹ Lai killings. Having reduced the charges to involuntary manslaughter, the judge advocate’s instruction that Medina had to have actual knowledge of the killings was legally correct.Footnote ⁶⁷

Command responsibility, in short, was never addressed either within the system of military justice or in any other legal forum – a fact that critics of the war after Mỹ Lai hammered tirelessly into the consciousness of the American public: Taylor himself, for example, went on the widely watched Dick Cavett show and suggested that the US commander in Vietnam through 1968, General William Westmoreland, and perhaps even President Lyndon Johnson, were criminally responsible for subordinates’ crimes. Taylor’s suggestion outraged many Americans – starting with Westmoreland himself – but the issue was never adjudicated.Footnote ⁶⁸

Medina’s lenient treatment was unfortunately typical of the Mỹ Lai defendants. Of the more than two dozen soldiers – enlisted men and officers – charged with criminal offenses concerning the massacre, Lieutenant William Calley was the only one ever convicted. Charges against most of the soldiers were quietly dropped; the remaining few were acquitted by court-martials. Despite high-ranking officers like Mỹ Lai acquittee Colonel Oran Henderson openly acknowledging that “every unit of brigade size has its Mỹ Lai hidden someplace,”Footnote ⁶⁹ impunity for war crimes was the norm, not the exception, throughout the war. It is impossible to know precisely how many American soldiers were convicted of acts qualifying as war crimes, because the army was the only armed service that kept track of its court-martials – and many of its records are either missing or incomplete. The statistics we do have, however, are striking. Between January 1, 1965 and September 25, 1975 – just over a decade – the army formally registered only 241 formal allegations of war crimes. Of those allegations 163 were dismissed as unsubstantiated, and only fifty-six of the seventy-eight substantiated allegations ever resulted in a court-martial. Thirty-six of those fifty-six court-martials resulted in acquittal, and only twelve of the twenty convictions involved a serious office such as murder, manslaughter, or rape.

The sentences served by the small number of American soldiers convicted of war crime–like acts are also troubling. Records exist concerning twenty-seven marines convicted in court-martials of murdering Vietnamese noncombatants. Although fifteen were originally sentenced to life imprisonment, the longest any of the convicted marines actually spent in confinement – Private First Class John Potter, who had murdered five civilians, including executing a wounded woman from point-blank range with a burst of fire from his machine gun – was twelve years and one month. The actual confinement of the fifteen averaged far less, a mere six and a half years. Indeed, only four of the twenty-seven convicted marines served his original sentence, none of which was longer than five years; the twenty-three other sentences were significantly reduced on appeal by the soldiers’ commanding general, the Navy–Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeal, the US Court of Military Appeals, or by clemency and parole boards. Overall, the reductions were so significant that even Guenter Lewy, the great revisionist historian, condemned them as being “so light as to eliminate any deterrent effect.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Conclusion

The Vietnam War’s effect on international law was profound and transformative. In both of the main areas in our survey – the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello – the war led to agitation to change international rules. More importantly, though, the war raised the stakes of international law. Indeed, it was in large part because of Vietnam that international law became, unlike in any prior era, such a contested terrain of political struggle and even a dimension of war itself. As a result, more recent conflicts have mutated into an inherently legal struggle – a fight not merely over who wins, but also over what fights are permissible and how they are allowed to proceed.

It is an extraordinary fact that the United States did not have even an internal legal rationale – much less a publicly articulated one – for escalating the Vietnam War until it was forced to do so by external critics such as the Lawyers Committee. And while those critics made little difference (the war had, after all, already been initiated), others moved to side with them. The Vietnam War took place in the era of decolonization, a process that had already given “new states” (as they were called in the era) extraordinary power to define and redefine international law. International law had once justified the expansion of global empires, but postcolonial states tried to make international law a tool of the decolonization process itself. Vietnam did as much as any other event to prompt an attempt to make international law friendlier to anticolonial struggle.Footnote ⁷¹ The results, however, were mixed – especially viewed from the perspective of our own day, when international law coexists with ongoing war in a world that still features profound global hierarchy.

To be brief, the most useful landmark to assess the early success of the anticolonial campaign is the storied UN Declaration on Friendly Relations, negotiated at the height of the Vietnam War and approved by the General Assembly in 1970. Much of its rhetoric, as its name indicates, emphasized peace. But the hard-fought declaration – adopted by consensus after being saved at the last minute from disaster by a series of compromises on contentious points – consecrated the right of self-determination of peoples as an international legal obligation. It also gave novel legality and legitimacy alike to national liberation movements. During the negotiations, the United States and other Western powers had hoped to reserve to states their traditional authority to suppress insurrection and to intervene in support of states facing insurgencies fought under the banner of “self-determination.” New states nevertheless succeeded in having the declaration interpret the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force to cover “any forcible action which deprives peoples … of their right to self-determination,” as well as to interpret “nonintervention” to bar such action. What this meant was that, while leaving some matters within the domestic jurisdiction of states, the international legal order in principle approved uses of force by national liberation movements and recognition of those movements by other states. Had the Vietnam War not been raging at the time, it is doubtful that such breakthroughs would have been possible.Footnote ⁷² And like the declaration’s prohibition on reprisals and criminalization of wars of aggression, they made international law a newly significant hurdle for hegemonic states to clear.

It would nevertheless be false to suggest that such breakthroughs were clear and uncontested, or that Vietnam did not leave legacies that have unexpectedly served the United States in the very different era of the global war on terror. The most vivid example of how the Vietnam War licensed future American force, and not merely imposed limits on it (or vindicated uses of force seen to fit with decolonization), comes from the resurrection of the justification for the Cambodian incursion after 9/11. In spite of the vast disparity of circumstance, counterterrorism has recently renewed the desire to use force against nonstate actors who launch transnational attacks that cannot be attributed to the territorial state. And almost overnight, a doctrine has arisen – with citation to the American interdiction of the NLF/PLAF’s Cambodian sanctuaries – that permits forcible intervention if and when a state is “unable or unwilling” to prevent nonstate actors from using their territory for belligerent purposes. For example, the Cambodian episode, though enormously controversial at the time, has been invoked in support of the proposition that state practice permits the United States to attack the Islamic State (ISIS) on the territory of Syria without the Syrian government’s consent.

Whatever its complex and spotty legacy for international rules governing the resort to force, the Vietnam era more clearly transformed rules for the conduct of hostilities. Indeed, those rules were not widely understood as primarily humane in intent until Vietnam and other wars of decolonization prompted the creative rebranding of the field as “international humanitarian law.”Footnote ⁷³ What this involved was of major significance, quite apart from the rewriting of the rules of war – largely sponsored by the postcolonial states – through the adoption of the Additional Protocols in 1977. Not only did the United States not bother with the jus in bello until required by Vietnam’s opponents, they assumed that it would satisfy the world to announce their scrupulous adherence to the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Since Vietnam, by enormous contrast, American policymakers have routinely tried to exempt the wars to come from the ever-accreting rules of IHL.

The fate of Additional Protocol I itself is a case in point. The US delegation, led by George Aldrich, a longtime State Department lawyer who had served as Kissinger’s legal advisor for the Paris Peace Accords, played a key role in negotiating Protocol I and was generally satisfied with the end result. Nevertheless, although the United States signed the Protocol in 1977, President Ronald Reagan ultimately accepted the recommendation of the Department of Defense a decade later to not submit it to the Senate for ratification. The department objected to a number of provisions in Protocol I, particularly those that made it easier for irregular armed forces to qualify for the combatant’s privilege to kill and the prohibition on means and methods of warfare (such as Agent Orange) that could cause widespread and long-term damage to the natural environment.Footnote ⁷⁴ The straw that broke the camel’s back, however, was Article 4(1), which deemed international – and thus subject to IHL in its entirety – “armed conflicts in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their self-determination.” The United States categorically rejected Article 4(1), which had been written with such groups as the African National Congress (ANC) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in mind, because it wanted “to deny these groups legitimacy as international actors.”Footnote ⁷⁵

The result of these changes and controversies was fateful for the future. In the decades after Mỹ Lai, and in direct response to the public relations disaster it represented, the United States’ military self-legalized. In particular, the Judge Advocates General Corps in all the armed services immediately assumed a vastly expanded role. During the Vietnam War, it had been an outfit for processing criminal allegations against American service members – a role that was largely insignificant before Mỹ Lai because so few war crimes were reported. By the time of 9/11, by contrast, a new body of “operational law” was central to even the targeting decisions of the most powerful states (including the United States) in an historically unprecedented manner.Footnote ⁷⁶

To be sure, the tremendous inflation of legal awareness and the proliferation of international jus in bello rules has not necessarily made war more compliant, let alone more humane. It is nevertheless due to the transformation that Vietnam wrought that debate on the war on terror since 9/11 has so often taken the form of jousting about whether counterterrorism efforts are both humane and legally compliant. No American intervention abroad since 9/11 has led to debate over the legality of intervention itself (the jus ad bellum) with the intensity of the years after 1965. Nevertheless, in seeming compensation, there is now almost permanent debate about whether the United States is conducting hostilities in a legal manner (the jus in bello). It is important to ponder whether the world is better off, all things considered, where constraints on the use of force have weakened even as rules on the way states fight receive both preeminent and unprecedented attention from professional lawyers and the general public alike. But there is no doubt that the war in Vietnam and its aftermath make the question necessary to consider.

The environmental history of the Vietnam War is unique in the twentieth century for the unprecedented scale of aerial bombing and use of incendiaries such as napalm, as well as the United States military’s use of tactical herbicides to destroy forest cover in combat zones. The most widely used herbicide was called Agent Orange, named after the orange stripe on drums containing the herbicides 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D. Specially equipped US Air Force cargo planes covered about one-third of South Vietnam’s forests with some 21 million gallons of the herbicide. When reports surfaced in 1969 and 1970 suggesting that a dioxin contaminant in it caused birth defects, environmental and antiwar activists joined forces, labeling this intentional destruction of Vietnam’s forests and widespread toxic exposure “ecocide.”Footnote ¹ The Hanoi government repeatedly decried the herbicide-spraying as a war crime violating the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning the use of chemical weapons. After the war, as more veterans reported strange illnesses, class-action lawsuits erupted that held American public attention in the 1980s until, in 1991, the US Congress passed an Agent Orange Act guaranteeing funding for independent scientific research and health care for veterans, at least for US veterans. For the 3–4 million Vietnamese who were exposed to the toxic hotspots where tactical herbicides had leaked into the ground, there was minimal medical support and little in the way of cleanups, until very recently. These two issues, responding to health claims and remediating hotspots, remained top level for over thirty years of US–Vietnam relations, and only in the past decade have both sides reached new agreements as the United States has committed more than $300 million for remediation efforts at its former bases.Footnote ²

The Agent Orange story is unique for many reasons, and it is addressed in more detail below, as well as in several dozen books and documentaries, but this was just one of a broad spectrum of the war’s environmental legacies. Drawing on recent trends in environmental and military history, this chapter aims to provide a more comprehensive sketch of the environmental legacies of the Vietnam War. Besides the effects of bombing and herbicides, these include inquiries into the “footprints” of warfare in urban and industrial development, in ethnic and demographic shifts in former war zones, in the dispersion of invasive species, and even in the creation of wilderness or conservation areas. Historians have only recently begun to grapple with a set of military processes called “militarization” that includes not only following events on the battlefield, but also looking at the ways military activity and occupation affect political systems, logistics networks, cultural affairs, tourism, and migration. Feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe’s studies on militarism, masculinity, and gender relations, especially in the peripheries of American bases in the Philippines and Okinawa, extends analyses of the American military’s influence far beyond the battlefield and the base, exploring military legacies in advertising, sex work, and tourism.Footnote ³ This chapter considers the Vietnam War’s legacies in a similarly wide-ranging manner but with respect to landscapes and ecosystems. The term “landscape” is used to recognize natural and built environments that are understood in both physical and social or cultural terms. Ecosystems describe mostly physical phenomena, including human activities, and they describe larger webs of environmental events connected to human and nonhuman life, geologic activity, and climatic stimuli.Footnote ⁴ This chapter considers the environmental legacies of the Vietnam War with respect to a wider set of military processes, the varied landscapes of Vietnam, and rapidly changing ecosystems.

The environmental legacies of the Vietnam War extend far beyond areas scarred by bombing or toxic chemicals. Military activities such as base operations, road construction, and population resettlement remade landscapes, from the Chinese border to Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and the Mekong River Delta. War left indelible footprints on Vietnamese cities, from Soviet- and East German–designed housing blocks built in the North to airports, highways, and deep-sea ports built in the South. The war accelerated new trends in agriculture, and it dramatically reworked the ethnic landscapes of Vietnam’s Highlands. From an historical perspective, the challenge in studying the Vietnam War’s environmental legacies begins with the problem of contextualization. How might one tease out specific impacts from the 1960–75 era versus decades of military conflict that preceded it or events that followed in the Third Indochina War? How did legacies differ from one regional context to another? Many impacts, including those of Agent Orange, were targeted to specific locales, so how can we assess environmental legacies without losing these local particularities of place and ecology?

Timescapes

In environmental history, establishing the temporal boundaries of an environmental event is an important starting point for any study, especially a war, as it concerns agency. Agency in environmental history concerns both human and nonhuman actors, from governments and militaries to plants and animals, geology, weather, and climate. There is often a presentist bias in military environmental history that assumes prewar landscapes and environments were stable, for example such tropes as the eternal Vietnamese village or views on preconflict forests as pristine wilderness. Vietnam’s early modern history shows that villages and forests were far from stable in this sense and were repeatedly subjected to volatile political and environmental changes. Civil conflicts like the Tây Sơn Rebellion (1778–1802) erupted in part because rural communities in central Vietnam had disintegrated under a mix of ecological and political pressures.Footnote ⁵ This social, economic, and environmental volatility continued in the 1800s, and it contributed to France’s military successes in creating the colony of Cochinchina in 1862 and Indochina in 1884. The colonial government targeted newly acquired “empty” spaces, such as delta swamps and the terres rouges forests, for “reclamation” and conversion into rice and rubber plantations. These plantation belts shattered traditional, ethnic landscapes as millions of ethnic Vietnamese migrants from the north moved into them. Such spaces became “engines” of the modern, colonial economy, and in the 1930s communist activists targeted them in order to attract thousands of supporters from the working poor.Footnote ⁶ The Việt Minh and, later, the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF, or Viet Cong) led military assaults on these spaces in the French Indochina War and the Vietnam War, culminating in devastating battles such as Operation Junction City (February–March 1967) that involved tens of thousands of troops and became one of the largest airmobile assaults in modern warfare. Returning to the question of agency and temporal boundaries, the prewar environmental history of such places as the Michelin Rubber Plantation, located some 45 miles (75 kilometers) north of Saigon, mattered greatly in shaping the place of the 1967 offensive. This rubber-plantation landscape possessed a type of agency in drawing communist military units and held a key strategic value to them and their American adversaries.

Attention to environmental prehistory is important when studying the legacies of the Vietnam War, because it establishes longer-term patterns of urban and rural development in Vietnam that ebbed and flowed beyond the staccato disruptions of military events. In the example above, prewar activities such as the colonial-era development of rubber plantations and the rise of communist cells among plantation workers in the 1930s played formative roles in attracting NLF cadres to the area in the 1960s. This dynamism was also important to postconflict legacies; communist cadres saw the rubber plantations as key to their nation-building ambitions, too. American military actions such as widespread bombing and defoliation had the short-term effect of destroying thousands of hectares of rubber trees, but these violent “openings” also accelerated the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRVN)’s effort to reestablish rubber plantations by clearing forests and opening up thousands more hectares. State-owned and later private companies took advantage of the war’s disturbances to expand the industry, as indigenous communities were shattered and thousands of People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) veterans agreed to settle there. At the same time that these new migrants settled in the terres rouges, they also were unwittingly exposed to the residues of toxic chemicals and unexploded bombs, so the “legacy” of the war here was mixed. Now, almost fifty years since the war’s end in 1975, the effects of chemical exposure and unexploded ordnance have largely subsided and given way to a decades-long process of “re-greening,” where wild forests of dipterocarps and other old-growth species have given way to endless, green rows of rubber trees.

The term “timescape” is a relatively new invention introduced by scholars interested in the long-term effects of toxic accidents, but scholarly interest in this issue of temporal agency between war and the environment goes back more than a century.Footnote ⁷ Historians of the Roman empire, for example, noted that military occupations such as the Emperor Claudius’ troops camping around a strategic bridge crossing the River Thames in 43 CE gave rise to a nucleus of markets outside the camps that grew into the City of London. On the Red River in northern Vietnam, a similar urban polity grew up around a series of Chinese citadels located on both banks of the Red River in what is now downtown Hanoi. However, it was only in the early twentieth century that historians and social scientists began to consider how wartime disruptions might stimulate major economic and environmental shifts. German economist Werner Sombart published in 1913 a sort of prowar book titled Krieg und Kapitalismus that pointed to the destruction of forests in Prussia’s 1870 war with France as key to the postwar rise of industrial society in the Ruhr Valley and the creation of the German state.

Sombart and his German “historical school” colleagues, however, were unprepared for the scale of destruction that swept the Western Front from 1914 to 1918; but one idea that Sombart cribbed from Friedrich Nietzsche, creative destruction, lived on in economic circles, especially after World War II. This term is especially useful for exploring issues of war’s agency in reshaping environments and economies. The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter popularized the term in 1942 to explain how disruptions of capitalist business cycles that periodically laid waste to outmoded industries were necessary. American development economists pointed to the economic miracles of West Germany and Japan in the 1950s as confirming the net-positive gains wrought by the United States aggressively investing in the rebuilding of German and Japanese cities and industries. In the 1960s, American economists like Walt Rostow drew from these examples of creative destruction to create what historian Michael E. Latham describes as a modernization ideology. Especially during the Vietnam War, hundreds of American social scientists joined the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to support nation-building in South Vietnam. Even as most of these individuals turned against the war, a few – like the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington in 1968 – continued to argue that the increasingly horrific scale of aerial bombing, unprecedented in the history of warfare, would in the end produce a new, more urban society. He infamously justified American practices of carpet-bombing in South Vietnam for causing this “forced draft urbanization.”Footnote ⁸

Figure 21.1 Four US Air Force Ranch Hand C-123s spray a communist jungle position with defoliating liquid (September 30, 1965).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

This attention on war’s agency in shaping postwar environments and concerns about the relative timescapes of these changes are also tied to another relatively new concept in global environmental history: what some have termed the Great Acceleration. The Great Acceleration refers to dramatic surges in growth rates for a wide variety of human activities that, in turn, have affected global climate and advanced social processes called “globalization.” Major factors in this acceleration include the shift in energy regimes from relying on manual labor, animal draft power, and foot travel to reliance on fossil fuels, internal combustion engines, and motorized transport.Footnote ⁹ Historians of the Vietnam War have yet to analyze the war within this framework of the Great Acceleration. One of the most impressive constructions by communist forces, the network of trails and supply lines called the Hồ Chí Minh Trail, offers a unique site for examining this Great Acceleration in Vietnam. US President Lyndon B. Johnson’s call for bombing of the North in Operation Rolling Thunder in 1965 was a calculated effort to thoroughly demoralize North Vietnam’s leaders and people by showing the modern, destructive capabilities of the American military. While the bombing cost thousands of lives and inflicted unprecedented damage, it also bolstered the decision of the ruling Politburo to engage in a “total war,” in which hundreds of thousands of young men and women joined in efforts to expand the Hồ Chí Minh Trail.Footnote ¹⁰ From 1964 to 1975, the nature of the fighting, especially the bombing campaigns, accelerated the construction of a Vietnamese network of trails, roads, and small cities into the Highland areas of Vietnam, as well as in eastern Laos and Cambodia. While communist forces may have traveled by foot in the early years, by the late 1960s they had developed ingenious methods to disguise trucks, distribute radio and wired communications, and even to supply petrol through plastic pipelines.

The environmental history of the Hồ Chí Minh Trail is still largely unexamined; but a more multisided examination of the Great Acceleration here suggests that the unimaginable intensity of American military activity, from bombing and defoliation to large-unit battles, had devastating impacts on ecosystems, but also spurred on a response from communist forces. This response continued after the war’s end, as veterans of the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF, the armed wing of the NLF) and the PAVN migrated to Highland areas; and they and their descendants have continued to play central roles in the development of these areas through a mix of military and privately owned companies engaged in forestry, mining, and infrastructure development and tourism. Only when a top-secret unit of the US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), the Special Operations Group, noted the networks of plastic fuel pipelines running hundreds of miles along these trails in 1968 did the most senior American military planners finally grasp these accelerating effects of bombing on Hanoi’s “total war” strategy. In this sense, the Vietnam War accelerated what had before 1945 been a very slow process: the Vietnamese state’s expansion into Highland regions.

Environmental Legacies in the Many Spaces of the Vietnam War

Another pitfall in assessing the environmental legacies of a war is a certain “geobody bias,” whereby the environmental impacts of such actions as bombing are considered uniformly across a country despite incredible diversity in its geography. Barry Weisberg’s 1970 book, Ecocide in Indochina,Footnote ¹¹ is a good example, for it emphasizes American military operations, such as the use of napalm and Agent Orange, but shows little comprehension about where these events took place. Wars are not fought uniformly across a country but are instead concentrated on strategic spaces, lines of communication, and politically important terrains. Map 21.1, showing every American bombing mission undertaken during the war with a total tonnage over 10,000 lbs, highlights this fact, with the majority of heavy bombing missions targeting key routes of the Hồ Chí Minh Trail, especially the major staging areas in Laos and Cambodia.

Map 21.1 US bombing missions 1962–75.

Source: Map by author.

The environmental legacies of the war, whether American bombing or communist mobilizations, had very different effects depending on the terrain and location. Thus, it is incredibly difficult to consider the environmental legacies of the Vietnam War in any comprehensive sense across Vietnam’s entire territory; it makes far more sense to consider the impacts of war in specific regions or terrains.

The Mekong Delta, stretching south and west of Saigon, was a key back-theater of the war that saw comparatively little bombing but was vital to American attempts at nation-building and counterinsurgency. This region was South Vietnam’s rice bowl, roughly 5 million hectares of marshes, river branches, and arroyos crisscrossed by almost 6,000 miles (10,000 kilometers) of canals. Even within the delta, there was extensive ecological variation, from giant, bowl-like depressions such as the Plain of Reeds, which was a major base area for the NLF, to riverside cities like Mỹ Tho, which were vital centers for commerce and new initiatives like the introduction of high-yield or “miracle” rice. One of the war’s biggest impacts here in the 1960s was a revolution in mechanization. For the first time since the American civil war, the US Navy, along with the army’s 9th Infantry, mobilized a brown-water fleet to conduct amphibious operations along the delta’s canals and rivers. Until 1970, they operated a giant floating base near Mỹ Tho on the Tiền Giang River. However, the impact of mechanization was felt most by the concurrent import of millions of small motors as part of the United States’ economic initiatives. Mỹ Tho became a major center of shops offering 4- and 6-horsepower engines, especially Kohler engines, for use as boat motors or irrigation pumps. Enterprising local mechanics found ways to modify the engines for dual use as “shrimp-tail” outboard motors or, when attached within a water pipe, as a pump for lifting water. The result was a quiet revolution of sorts. A Dutch team visiting the delta in 1975 estimated that as many as 1 million engines were in use, and veterans of the NLF noted the extraordinary impact that these small motors had for their mobilization of troops across the delta’s marshes and swamps.Footnote ¹² While the war left few scars from bombing here, the introduction of small motors radically altered water regimes and the expansion of farming into flood-prone areas.

Vietnam’s cities, especially Saigon, Đà Nẵng, and Hanoi, experienced major environmental shifts as a result of the war. The dominant disruption in Northern cities was American strategic bombing. Architecturally, heavy bombing of Northern cities such as Vinh produced openings postwar for new residential designs by East German and Soviet architects. Socialist-style housing blocks popped up in the ruins of devastated urban quarters. Anthropologist Christina Schwenkel’s Building SocialismFootnote ¹³ highlights the intricate ways that these new urban spaces, created in the wake of American bombing, in turn produced new social identities, new urbanisms. Especially in the present, as Vietnamese cities look to raze these old quarters to build high-rises, many urban historians and activists are reconsidering the legacies of socialist-inspired housing blocks.

Vietnam’s third-largest city, Đà Nẵng, mushroomed in size in direct response to American-funded base construction that actually began during the French Indochina War. Following the establishment of the US Operations Mission in 1950, American military officials at the embassy in Hanoi and consulate in Saigon began looking for a new airbase that would fall outside the range of Chinese bombers. Indochina’s northern bases at Hải Phòng and Hanoi were well within range of Chinese bases on Hainan Island. Americans began funding base development at Tourane (Đà Nẵng) in 1952 as deliveries of US aircraft to French forces increased. After 1954, this aid continued under the guise of “civil aviation” support, so that by 1965 Đà Nẵng’s dual runways could handle the largest military and civil aircraft. The commitment of US ground forces in March 1965 commenced with marines landing on the beach at Đà Nẵng, and US military construction battalions or “Seabees” set to work building a deep-water port, communication facilities, and depots essential for the storage of everything from munitions and chemical agents to frozen meats and Budweiser beer. Anthropologist Heonik Kwon’s Ghosts of WarFootnote ¹⁴ follows the history of the communities that grew up on the fringes of this city of bases around Đà Nẵng. Ethnically it was quite complex. Besides interactions between Vietnamese and American troops, thousands of South Korean troops operated on the periphery of Đà Nẵng and other cities.

Similar expansions of military facilities along the coast of South Vietnam created new urban and port infrastructure in coastal towns, including Quy Nhơn, Phan Rang, Nha Trang, and Saigon. Quy Nhơn and Phan Rang were until 1960 relatively tiny ports that, for most of the French Indochina War, were controlled by the Việt Minh. US forces in 1964–5 took control over large swaths of land outside these towns, and built airports and shipping terminals. Nha Trang was South Vietnam’s center for its Marine Corps, and nearby Cam Ranh Bay was selected by US planners for construction of a major, deep-water port servicing large ships and submarines. American military construction commenced in Saigon at the river terminal and around Tân Sơn Nhất Air Base in 1965, but after the 1968 Tet Offensive, American forces and the US military command moved north of the city into sprawling bases and logistics hubs in neighboring Đồng Nai province. As in Đà Nẵng, this spate of urban–military expansion has had dramatic environmental legacies with respect to urban environments in Vietnam. Đà Nẵng eclipsed Huế as the commercial center of central Vietnam, and especially in Vietnam’s present-day economic boom, it plays an important regional role in Southeast Asia as a logistics hub connecting Laos and northern Thailand to sea terminals. After 1975, the Soviet Union moved its ships into the Cam Ranh Port, and this legacy of the Soviet naval presence has helped to make Nha Trang a favored destination today for Russian tourists. Meanwhile, former American base areas north of Saigon, like the US Army’s post at Long Bình, now host some of the world’s largest industrial parks and air-cargo facilities. Hồ Chí Minh City will open its new international airport at another former base here, Long Thành, in 2025.

As depicted in most of the literature and movies on the Vietnam War, the Central Highlands and adjacent areas in Cambodia and Laos feature as the primary backdrops for the war’s main battles. Still, the Highlands region is incredibly varied in ecological and social terms, and every valley has its own unique social and ecological features. There are 54 recognized ethnic groups in Vietnam and 109 distinct languages, and the majority of this ethnic and linguistic diversity is concentrated in the Highlands of northern and central Vietnam. One of the most important defining features for many upland valleys was the relationship between “headwater” (nguồn nước) or “upland” (miền thượng) peoples and their “lowland” (miền hạ) neighbors. While much attention is placed on the north-to-south movement of troops on the Hồ Chí Minh Trail, east–west links following rivers were equally important. These upland–lowland relationships existed long before the war or the colonial era, and they feature in a number of works on ethnic Kinh/Vietnamese state relationships with the Highlands.Footnote ¹⁵

Similarly, scholars of Laos and Cambodia such as Vatthana Pholsena, Oliver Tappe, and Jonathan Padwe have analyzed these north–south and east–west relationships in the war-torn highland areas outside Vietnam.Footnote ¹⁶ Historic transit routes linked the Vietnamese coast with the interiors of Cambodia and Laos, and they followed rivers and traversed key mountain passes. As key lines of communication for communist troops, they were primary targets for much of the American military’s bombing and defoliation. During the war, these routes facilitated the mass migrations of lowland peoples, especially Kinh/Vietnamese, along with ethnic Khmer and Lao peoples, into Highland communities. During and after the Vietnam War, many soldiers settled here permanently, with many marrying indigenous peoples and establishing new towns. Many communist base areas, such as Nam Đông and A Luôi in Thừa Thiên Huế province, have since developed into towns because they were not only important logistics points during the war, but also ever since. One of the most embattled highways of the war, Highway 9, was an ancient route connecting the Se Pon River and the Mekong River in Savannahket province with the Thạch Hãn River and the South China Sea in Quảng Trị province. This east–west “road” ran just south of the demilitarized zone (DMZ); the US marine base at Khe Sanh guarded the eastern half, while PAVN forces established depots and base areas on the western half in Laos.

Finally, with respect to the spaces of the war, they not only included regions of Vietnam and contiguous areas across the border, but also a number of rear areas that have received comparatively little attention. One of the most important external areas in Southeast Asia was northeast Thailand, where US airbases at Udorn, Nakhon Phanom, and Ubon Ratchathani supported much of the bombing missions along the Hồ Chí Minh Trail. US forces also operated around the Thai capital at Bangkok, where the US Embassy was an important nerve center for coordinating military efforts in the larger region. Offshore from Vietnam there were also important maritime anchorages for military forces. Communist forces maintained a north–south “sea trail” for ferrying troops and supplies in and out of estuaries along Vietnam’s sinuous coast; and throughout the war, US Navy aircraft carriers and support vessels anchored about 90 miles (145 kilometers) offshore from North Vietnam and used the spot as a base for launching airstrikes.

Finally, the Vietnam War had environmental consequences on the homefront in the United States, especially at sites where logistical support for the war was concentrated. US Seabees managed much of the base construction work in Vietnam, and three NCB centers at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, Gulfport, Michigan, and Port Hueneme, California coordinated much of the logistical support for one of the largest base construction programs of any military force in modern history. The Vietnam War transformed many local economies in the United States and abroad as demands for supplies and support created thousands of military and civilian jobs. This was especially true around naval shipyards, aircraft manufacturing plants, and on the peripheries of large bases such as the US First Marine Division’s headquarters at Camp Pendleton. Some 200,000 soldiers trained at this base before deploying to Vietnam, and in 1975 Pendleton was the first American base to receive thousands of Vietnamese refugees.

The American closure of bases in Vietnam beginning in 1971 and ending in 1973 had major environmental consequences for base landscapes in Vietnam as well as overseas. In Vietnam, the sudden closure of once-sprawling bases such as the army’s Camp Eagle near Huế in 1972 left the formidable base city, which had hosted five helipads and some 15,000 troops, in ruins. The South Vietnamese government responded with alarm at the condition of these newly transferred bases, noting the ruins of wrecked machinery, hastily covered waste dumps, and largely unusable infrastructure. American contractors responsible for everything from water and electricity to perimeter lighting systems pulled out their equipment with the troops.Footnote ¹⁷ The abandonment of the bases, first by Americans and then in March 1975 by South Vietnamese troops, left several dozen ghost towns mostly lining the coastal Highway 1, from the DMZ south to the Mekong Delta. The end of the Vietnam War also affected base environments and local economies in the United States. Thousands of workers were laid off as the US government mothballed ships and transferred base properties like Quonset Point to economic development authorities.

Bombing Legacies

No place in history endured as much concentrated bombing as did Indochina in the Vietnam War, especially along the deeply contested Highland trails. Out of 1.5 million recorded bombing missions, more than 800,000 involved conventional or general-purpose bombs, which produced roughly 50 percent of the total tonnage of all bombs dropped, 7.5 million tons. Of the conventional bombs, roughly 75 percent were dropped in high-altitude bombing strikes carried out by the long-range strategic B-52 bomber. Each plane was capable of carrying up to 70,000 lbs of bombs, and most missions involved five or six bombers taking off from a US base in Guam or, later in the war, from Thailand. For given targets, usually key logistical points along the Hồ Chí Minh Trail, the planes collectively could drop between 200,000 and 400,000 lbs of bombs, with 500- and 750-lb bombs being the most common. These were unguided bombs filled with various compounds containing trinitrotoluene (TNT) and ranged in weight from 250 to 2,000 lbs. As with aerial bombing in previous wars, one of the biggest drawbacks to these munitions was the collateral damage caused as they drifted beyond specific military targets. Average accuracy for high-altitude bombing missions was roughly 50 percent. The practice of saturation or carpet-bombing along the Hồ Chí Minh Trail and on certain North Vietnamese cities turned forests, fields, and towns into cratered moonscapes. The Vietnam War was exceptional for the scale of conventional bombing.Footnote ¹⁸ Roughly 3.5 million tons of conventional bombs fell over Indochina, compared with about 2 million tons dropped in all theaters of World War II. Exploding bombs pulverized the ground into craters ranging 50–200 meters in size, and they sent deadly shrapnel flying up to 400 meters from the blast point.Footnote ¹⁹ Conventional bombing was most concentrated on the major supply routes for the PAVN and at such key junctions of the Hồ Chí Minh Trail as Xepon in Laos. Women volunteers serving in logistics units like the PAVN’s 559th Transportation Battalion suffered especially high casualties because they camped at fixed locations along the trails. Director Lưu Trọng Ninh’s popular 1997 film, Ngã ba Đồng Lộc (The Girls of Dong Loc Junction), tells the story of ten women aged 17–24 years who were killed when a single bomb struck their cave in 1968.

Besides conventional bombing, antipersonnel munitions or cluster bombs left some of the most pernicious legacies of the war in rural communities, especially in the hills of Indochina. Whereas unexploded, conventional bombs in the 250–2,000 lb range were large-sized and therefore relatively easy to detect, antipersonnel cluster bomblets were tiny and easily missed. One cluster bomb contained hundreds of tennis ball–sized bombs designed to spread far on impact and then detonate, each spreading enough shrapnel to kill several people. American forces used these munitions along the supply routes of the Hồ Chí Minh Trail, especially in the mountains of Laos, and an estimated 80 out of 270 million bomblets did not explode on impact. Again, considering the issues of scale and time, the fruit-sized shapes of these tiny, unexploded bomblets laying buried over several million acres of hillside have proven most difficult to remove, and because of their shape they especially appeal to children.Footnote ²⁰ Similar to antipersonnel cluster bombs, land mines were ubiquitous in the war and used by all sides, usually deployed by ground forces to secure perimeters and no man’s lands around camps. Land mines presented less of a postwar hazard than bomblets along the former Hồ Chí Minh Trail, but when the Third Indochina War broke out between the Khmer Rouge and the PAVN, landmine use escalated in Cambodia’s northwest provinces.

Chemical Legacies

The chemical legacies of the war not only included the highly controversial herbicide Agent Orange, but also two very common chemical agents: incendiary bombs known as napalm and helicopter-dropped barrels of highly concentrated tear gas. Napalm was invented by chemists at Harvard University in 1942 and became an ideal munition for Allied airstrikes in Europe and Japan, with one single night’s strike on Tokyo March 9–10, 1945 killing an estimated 100,000 civilians. Napalm is made from relatively common ingredients: gasoline fuel and a gelling agent made from a combination of a petroleum distillate (naphthenic acid) and palm oil (palmitic acid). In the Vietnam War, besides US jets dropping napalm munitions, the US Army Chemicals Corps employed a tactic called a “flame drop,” where cargo helicopters dropped a dozen or more 55-gallon drums of napalm over a suspected enemy base or encampment.Footnote ²¹ As an incendiary, napalm burned off on impact and left relatively few physical remains. Images of napalm strikes, especially a photograph of an accidental South Vietnamese strike hitting a village north of Saigon in 1972, became some of the most recognizable images of the war. Nick Ut’s photograph of that strike, especially an image of napalm burning 9-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc, was titled “The Terror of War” and won a 1973 Pulitzer Prize.

While the use of napalm has figured prominently in images and debates since the early 1970s, another major chemical munition, CS gas, has remained largely absent. This is no doubt due to a widespread understanding that tear gas, in most circumstances, is nonlethal, a riot-control agent. However, American troops used it in such massive and concentrated forms that it did cause death by asphyxiation; and after the war, buried caches of CS in metal drums remained a toxic legacy for communities that often had no knowledge of their existence. During the war, US Army Chemical Corps units arranged bulk drops of CS in its powdered, concentrated form to penetrate underground bunkers and tunnel systems. They prepared “smoke drops” similar to “bulk flame drops,” where a “Chinook” CH-47 cargo helicopter dropped a dozen or more 55-gallon drums filled with CS and connected to small explosive fuses that detonated the barrels just before impact, spreading the dust into a giant cloud. Communist forces hiding in tunnels reported that soldiers who couldn’t escape in time died of asphyxiation, as the powdered concentrate stuck to tunnel walls, their clothes, and their airways.Footnote ²² Even fifty years later, buried drums of CS are still found intact at waste sites in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

Of all chemical agents used in the war, Agent Orange, together with two other herbicides, Agent White and Agent Blue, has received the most attention not only for its targeting of ecosystems, but also for the dioxin contaminant associated with dozens of illnesses. Agent Orange comprised the bulk of the US military’s tactical herbicide program known as Operation Ranch Hand. The term “tactical” is important, because what most differentiated these herbicides from commercial ones available throughout the United States and the West was not their chemistry but their intended end use. Agent Orange was a 50/50 blend of two commercially popular, broadleaf herbicides: 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D. The term “broadleaf” meant that they were designed to kill plants with broad leaves such as tree saplings and weeds, but to spare grasses, including bamboo and grain crops such as rice. This feature made both herbicides very popular in the 1950s for use on golf courses, roadsides, and farms.

Even though scientists working for the military first tested these herbicides during World War II, they didn’t scale up production in time before the atomic bombings in Japan. Just weeks after the Japanese surrender, one worker from a Philadelphia-area chemical company filed a patent for “herbicides,” and after much legal wrangling and the passage of national legislation governing pesticide use in 1948, companies such as Dow, Monsanto, and Dupont began manufacturing herbicides. The two herbicides in Agent Orange became the most common and most popular herbicides on the market by 1960. Against this background of a boom in “commercial” herbicides, part of the Green Revolution, the US Army commenced studies on the “tactical” uses of herbicides in Vietnam to reveal enemy lines of communication and deny them forest cover. In 1963, military researchers created a specification for a 50/50 blend of these two herbicides, naming this specification “Agent Orange” after a requirement that chemical manufacturers paint an orange stripe on the drummed chemical to distinguish it from two other herbicides, Agent White and Agent Blue. White was, like Orange, a broadleaf herbicide but, instead of the dioxin-laced 2,4,5-T, it blended 2,4-D with a different herbicide made by Dupont called picloram.Footnote ²³ Agent Blue was designed specifically to kill grasses, meaning bamboo and especially rice fields, and its active ingredient was an arsenical herbicide. All of the color names for tactical herbicides derived from the army’s military specifications, or “milspec,” as a means to tell them apart.

Because these otherwise commercially available herbicides were, like napalm, CS gas, and bombs, destined for tactical or combat uses, their entire history, from initial production at American factories to shipping, storage in Vietnam, use in combat zones, and disposal, was documented separately from nontactical chemicals, including the very same herbicides destined for conventional uses. In other words, the same, dioxin-contaminated herbicide, 2,4,5-T, was being used in the 1960s by homeowners, farmers, and groundskeepers. American military forces used commercial herbicides containing 2,4,5-T at air bases such as Andersen AFB in Guam. What this labeling difference means with respect to environmental legacies of the Vietnam War is that a highly detailed paper trail exists for the dioxin-laced Agent Orange, documenting every mission and the location of almost every barrel produced, while records detailing the decades-long use of commercial 2,4,5-T herbicides along runways, roads, and golf courses are largely absent. This uncertainty about associations of the highly toxic 2,3,7,8-TCDD dioxin to either Agent Orange or a commercial source continues to surface in such places as Okinawa, South Korea, and Guam, where the US military denies using Agent Orange, and records detailing commercial herbicide use are largely absent.

The legacy of Agent Orange and the tactical herbicide program is so well covered in books, documentary films, and ongoing scientific studies that it greatly overshadows all other stories of the war’s legacies. An active dialogue about ecocide and the toxicity of Agent Orange accompanied the program throughout the war, as scientists, military experts, and public groups studied their effects. After the war, Vietnamese and American scientists and policymakers continued a series of studies and dialogues, while American veterans experiencing clusters of cancers and children born with severe birth defects joined a class-action lawsuit suing the chemical companies.Footnote ²⁴

Besides herbicides, American troops introduced large quantities of insecticides, including the synthetic organic compound Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT). Like the phenoxy herbicides in Agent Orange, DDT began as a product of American military research in World War II. It proved extremely effective in stopping insect-borne illnesses such as malaria, dengue fever, plague, and typhus by killing insects.Footnote ²⁵ The US Army’s Chemical Corps platoons, the same units tasked with preparing napalm and CS drops in combat zones, also coordinated regular spraying of bases and “showers” for routine decontamination. Sprayer planes and trucks routinely fogged American base cantonments, and US aid programs introduced DDT and other insecticides to South Vietnam as commercial imports.

Conclusion

Besides these multiple elements and approaches to the environmental legacies of the war, consideration is due to the ways in which public responses to news of saturation bombing, incendiaries, and herbicides have contributed to global environmental movements since the early 1970s. The Agent Orange issue in many respects catalyzed public attention in 1970 because it merged public interests in two previously unrelated issues: anger over the war in Vietnam and public concern about oil spills, toxic waste, and the environment. On January 1, 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act took effect, establishing requirements for all federal agencies to produce environmental assessments, and over the summer of that year the administration of US President Richard Nixon worked out plans with Congress to form the Environmental Protection Agency. On April 15, 1970, Nixon ordered a partial ban on the use of the herbicide 2,4,5-T at home; the next day, he ordered the US military to cease flying all missions using Agent Orange in Vietnam. One week later, the first Earth Day became the United States’ largest-ever protest, with over 20 million people participating at sites nationwide. The organizers of Earth Day included prominent critics of the war, such as US Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisconsin) and student activists like Denis Hayes, who had led antiwar protests since the mid-1960s. Meanwhile, US bombing in Indochina continued to escalate, especially bombing in Laos and Cambodia, and antiwar protests erupted at American university campuses. The May 4, 1970 protest at Kent State left four students dead and nine wounded when Ohio National Guard troops fired live rounds into the crowd. Five days later, more than 100,000 protested in Washington, and for the remainder of 1970 anti–Vietnam War protests coincided with environmental protests and legislative action, including passage of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.

During that same year, a growing coalition of scientists, especially plant scientists and geneticists, brought long-brimming concerns about Agent Orange to public attention. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) had, since 1966, supported a herbicide commission tasked with more scientific research on Operation Ranch Hand and the long-term impacts of herbicides in Vietnam. After a graduate student leaked a 1969 report suggesting that 2,4,5-T caused birth defects in mice, AAAS scientists persuaded the US government to support an investigative mission in Vietnam. In August 1970, they toured defoliated areas of South Vietnam, and months later they published reports calling for an end to the United States’ use of herbicides as weapons. David Zierler’s The Invention of Ecocide details how these scientists worked with sympathetic politicians and antiwar activists to force the end of Operation Ranch Hand in 1971. It also notes that Nixon used the opportunity to score political points by urging the US Senate to finally commit the United States to the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning use of chemical weapons.Footnote ²⁶ Over successive years, this organization of scientists galvanized a broader movement of scientists and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) concerned at the proliferation of chemical, biological, and radioactive weapons. Scientists such as Yale botanist Arthur Galston, one of the first to coin the term “ecocide,” forged international connections with scientists in Europe, the Soviet Union, and China to raise public attention about the threat of these unusual weapons. Ultimately, these efforts helped spur the United States and most other nations to sign on to a new treaty, a convention banning environmental modification tactics in warfare, in 1977.

In the last two decades since the US Congress passed the 1991 Agent Orange Act, and with the restoration of diplomatic ties with Vietnam in 1994, both governments have increased their cooperation on a host of lingering environmental problems, especially the removal of unexploded ordnance and the remediation of sites affected by Agent Orange. Besides these formal exchanges, many NGOs such as Peace Trees Vietnam have channeled support, especially from American veterans of the war, to locally focused projects, including the removal of mines and unexploded ordnance, as well as the planting of thousands of trees.Footnote ²⁷ The American philanthropy Ford Foundation was a major nongovernment player in supporting dialogues between Vietnamese and American experts over Agent Orange from the establishment of its office in Hanoi in 1991 until 2011, when another philanthropy, the Aspen Institute, took over leading this US–Vietnam dialogue.Footnote ²⁸ Because of these long-term reconciliation efforts and mostly open American records, the Vietnam War presents historians with many opportunities to explore the long-term environmental consequences of war.

There was not one Vietnam, argues Christopher Goscha, but many.Footnote ¹ In a similar fashion, one could view the postwar experiences of overseas Vietnamese to have consisted of multiple diasporic formations, if not multiple diasporas. Most communities in Australia, Western Europe, and North America were begun by refugees from the former Republic of Vietnam (RVN). They joined an earlier and smaller number of Vietnamese who migrated to France during the 1950s or earlier. During the Cold War and under bilateral agreements, thousands of Vietnamese, mostly from the North, traveled to the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany for study, training, and labor. Many stayed on after their contracts were over, especially after 1989, or returned to help form communities there. In addition, there were Vietnamese who went to other Asian countries, both before and after 1975, such as Cambodia, China, Thailand, and the Philippines. Closer to the present were a number of Vietnamese, mostly women, who migrated to South Korea and Taiwan for marriage. The Vietnamese diaspora has never been simple or static. This point is especially true about the postwar era, whose alterations reflect twentieth-century experiences of national division, warfare, and postwar developments.

This chapter privileges the history of diasporic formation that originated from the fall of Saigon, especially among the refugees and immigrants in the United States.Footnote ² Vietnamese who left the South in 1975 and the years following shared a cultural and political identity with the defunct RVN, and they created the largest portions of the Vietnamese diaspora today. Having resettled in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe, they constructed an exilic identity during the 1970s and 1980s, before legal immigration from the late 1980s on led to the formation of a more transnational identity. Though not the same, these identities were shaped by the shock of the fall of Saigon, and then by a series of aftershocks caused by postwar policies and developments.

A Diaspora Born Out of Loss and Separation

In the annals of diasporic history, the fall of Saigon continues to stand as the single most dramatic and consequential event. The end of the war brought national reunification and jubilation for the victorious side – and shock and sorrow to Vietnamese whose political allegiance had been to the RVN. The different emotions were heightened by the fact that the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) had planned for a two-year campaign, but total victory came after merely four and a half months. Since the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) had successfully repelled the Easter Offensive in 1972, the RVN had reasons to think that it could withstand another “invasion” across the demilitarized zone (DMZ). As a result, the ARVN’s rapid retreat from the Central Highlands in March 1975 produced a big shock among anticommunists that led to an even greater shock when the PAVN entered Saigon unopposed at the end of April.

Unconditional surrender on the part of the Saigon regime contributed to the numb humiliation among Vietnamese anticommunists. Having fought the communists for years, a few ARVN officers took their own lives in the last days of the Southern republic rather than flee from or surrender to them. Others, soldiers and officers alike, hastened to hide or destroy material evidence of their identity. One officer, for example, forced himself to burn “papers and correspondence with the US Embassy, letters from [ARVN] generals … and letters from [Henry] Cabot Lodge and [Ellsworth] Bunker.” He also got rid of his pistol, rifle, hundreds of bullets, and the field telephone.Footnote ³ From this perspective, the iconic photographs and videos of the helicopter on top of the compound next to the US Embassy (but not the embassy itself, as was often assumed) are deceptive, because they show a seemingly orderly line of Vietnamese getting on the helicopter. Better and more accurate representations would be photographs of military boots and fatigues that South Vietnamese soldiers hastily discarded on streets and highways as PAVN tanks advanced into Saigon. Many threw away their guns and ammunition into rivers, while others destroyed documents kept in offices and private residences. The rush to self-erasure of identity happened out of fear that the communists would begin a bloodbath of reprisals against former enemies. Not being able to leave the country by air or ship, some families even abandoned their homes, left town altogether, and moved to a different city or province to avoid detection and arrest due to their association with the RVN. A woman officer, for instance, moved from Đà Nẵng to the more rural area of Hố Nai to join a small resistance group. A few months later, however, she was arrested by the security police, who secretly tailed her sister from Đà Nẵng to Hố Nai.Footnote ⁴

The fall of the noncommunist RVN also doubled as national loss. Its loyalists had not believed the communists to be legitimate holders of the nationalist mantle. In their eyes, Hanoi’s total victory amounted to a foreign invasion and the erasure of the real postcolonial Vietnamese nation. The shock over national loss led them to place the blame on multiple people. The Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV, the successor to the wartime Vietnamese Workers’ Party [VWP]) was the biggest target, but they also blamed Vietnamese neutralists who might have directly or indirectly supported the communists. They believed that corruption and disunity among the RVN government and the ARVN leadership were among the leading causes of Saigon’s fall. Last but not least, they cast resentful criticism on the United States for having abandoned South Vietnam during the dark months of March and April 1975.

The grief over national loss was coupled with the pain of family separation. Amidst the chaos of war’s end, the majority of Vietnamese refugees departed without their families intact. They found the way to safety on the evacuation fleet of the US Navy by means of helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, ships, and boats. Operation New Life took about 85 percent of some 125,000 Vietnamese to Guam. The island became an overnight and giant center for processing the “evacuees” and “parolees,” as the refugees were technically classified, for entry into the United States. Most were later transported to four other camps in the continental United States for a final round of processing – Camp Pendleton in California, Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania, Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, and Elgin Air Force Base in Florida – that led to the resettlement of all refugees by the end of the year. The US government called for local sponsorship, while hoping to avoid overburdening any particular community. As a result, the refugees were scattered throughout the vast country, including in medium-sized cities with few Asians, such as Fort Smith, Arkansas and Lincoln, Nebraska, that nonetheless received them in the dozens or hundreds. Final resettlement alleviated uncertainty. Yet it compounded the experience of separation as they moved from tens of thousands of fellow Vietnamese in a camp to a community with a very small presence of their coethnics.

Separation was exacerbated by the difficulty in communicating with loved ones in Vietnam. So sharp were the pain and guilt for over 1,500 refugees in Guam that they demanded to be sent back to Vietnam. Upon their return in October 1975, the Vietnamese government arrested the repatriates and accused them of collaboration with the American enemy: an act that confirmed the anticommunist belief among the majority of the refugees. Such news merely reinforced their belief about the foreignness of the communists and worsened the anguish over separation. “It has been 365 days since the day of national loss,” wrote a refugee from California, “[today we are] silent because we remember our wives, husbands, children, fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters, grandchildren, extended relatives, friends, and neighbors on our old street.”Footnote ⁵ “Cry a river,” goes the lyrics of a popular song written and recorded in the diaspora a few years after the war, “I have cried a river, a long river / Missing father, missing mother, missing brother, missing sister.”Footnote ⁶ Even after letters and packages from the United States and elsewhere were allowed to enter Vietnam, diasporic periodicals were replete with ads looking for family members, relatives, neighbors, and friends. Most ads showed a name, age, and an address, but some revealed the double pain of separation and national loss. “Military friends,” reads one in typically tiny print, “who left on the boat from Rạch Giá to Thailand on April 30, 1975, contact NGUYỄN XUÂN PHAN PO Box 154, Plymouth FL 32768.”Footnote ⁷

The anguish over Saigon’s fall was only the first in a series of sorrows among the emergent diasporic communities. As the refugees adapted to new societies, they simultaneously dealt, if indirectly, with postwar developments that proved exceedingly difficult for families of Southern Vietnamese with important political and military positions in the former regime. During the first year of national reunification, the Vietnamese government rounded up tens of thousands of ARVN officers and RVN officials and sent them to “reeducation camps” set up throughout the country. The incarceration came partially from the government’s fear of rebellion among the South Vietnamese and partially from a belief that it could reshape the political orientation among the losers. For the prisoners and their families, however, it was a combination of vengeful violence, violation of human rights, and international communist ideology over Vietnamese nationalism. Economic, political, and educational discrimination against the family members of the incarcerated further exacerbated the experience of incarceration. In their experience, antibourgeois campaigns and the creation of “New Economic Zones” (NEZs, vùng kinh tế mới) were punitive, while the prohibition on and destruction of South Vietnamese cultural productions and artifacts meant further erasure of their postcolonial identities. These reasons and others, including policies against ethnic Chinese after the Third Indochina War, led to the exodus of “boat people” that began in the late 1970s and lasted well into the early 1990s.

The experience of loss and separation also translated into an experience of dislocation, especially during the 1970s. In the United States, whose policy sought not to burden local governments, approximately 125,000 Vietnamese were dispersed across the country, including states with few Asian Americans, such as Arkansas, Connecticut, and the Dakotas, as previously indicated. Geographical isolation, however, proved too difficult, and many moved within a few years to areas with a larger number of Vietnamese. Climate also played a large role. Many refugees who came to the upper Midwest and New England remained there, some to this day. Others, however, relocated to warmer states. Friends and relatives, even distant ones, proved crucial for relocation. A short phone call could be enough to convince a refugee to move to California, Louisiana, Texas, or northern Virginia. The refugees in those states would have hosted their friends and relatives in their houses or apartments for a short time before the newcomers found work and a place of their own. This pattern of relocation continued upon the arrival of the boat-people refugees, who brought a critical mass to and solidified the existence of a number of diasporic communities by the 1980s.Footnote ⁸

How did Vietnamese refugees deal with national loss and family separation? Of utmost importance was the preservation of South Vietnamese culture in alien lands. Contrary to the trope that immigrants came to the United States with only the clothes they were wearing, some refugees brought with them books and records of popular music published and produced in republican Saigon. Copies of these books and cassette tapes were reprinted and then sold by mail by refugee entrepreneurs from places as varied as Fort Smith, Arkansas; Los Alamitos, California; Tacoma, Washington; and Ramer, Tennessee (whose population numbered fewer than 400 souls in 1975). The reproductions gave a measure of comfort over the lost noncommunist culture – a situation heightened by news about the postwar confiscation of South Vietnamese books, periodicals, and records of popular music, and, more generally, a prohibition on “decadent” bourgeois lifestyles by the new communist masters of the region below the 17th parallel. The refugees were hungry for regular reminders of the culture and political system that they had lost. “Please make an effort,” wrote a subscriber to Vӑn nghệ Tiền Phong from Montreal, “to print a photograph of Vietnam (color is best but black-and-white is fine) on the front cover [of each issue] and a song on the back cover.”Footnote ⁹

In the first decade alone of their exile, the refugees produced dozens of periodicals of varying frequencies, subscriptions, and durations. Upon arrival at the four aforementioned processing camps on American shores, they began writing, typing, printing, and circulating newsletters. Not long after sponsored resettlement, they began to churn out dozens of newsletters, magazines, and even dailies, such as Người Việt (Vietnamese People) in southern California, still published today. In comparison with reprints of South Vietnamese works, there were fewer new books at first. But many more were published during the 1980s. The refugee press was most prominent in the United States and Canada, but publications also came from Western Europe, Australia, and even Japan. The continuity of a noncommunist nationalism formed the most prominent political discourse in most publications, including those created by the more youthful refugees. “[We] seek among students,” states the annual magazine of an association of community college students in southern California, “the goal of preserving and developing a nationalist culture.”Footnote ¹⁰

The nationalist discourse enhanced the theme of exile (lưu đầy), and exilism dominated the refugee press and music production for at least ten years after the fall of Saigon. At Fort Indiantown Gap, the government-sponsored newsletter was called New Land (Đất Mới). It was, however, the old country rather than a new society toward which the readers were oriented. “We travel on the road of temporary exile,” open the lyrics of a song written by Phạm Duy, probably the most prominent musician in South Vietnam.Footnote ¹¹ The exilic identity sharpened as the refugees learned more about reeducation camps, political discrimination, and antibourgeois cultural and economic policies against their friends and families in postwar Vietnam. Early refugee songs already alluded to incarceration. “I’m sending father a few sleeping pills,” go the lyrics of the songwriter and singer Việt Dzũng, “so he could sleep while in prison for life.”Footnote ¹² By the early 1980s, the reality of postwar incarceration was well embedded in the consciousness of the refugees. It contributed to support among many refugees for a homeland liberation movement begun by a small number of former ARVN members then living in the United States.

The center of this movement was the United National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam (Mặt Trận Quốc Gia Thống Nhất Giải Phóng Việt Nam). Its headliner was Hoàng Cơ Minh, a former commodore in the South Vietnamese Navy, who now led dozens or, possibly, hundreds of young soldiers at several camps along the borders of Thailand and Laos. Active mostly until 1987, when Minh committed suicide during pursuit by the Laotian military, the Front received support among many Vietnamese in the diaspora, especially in the United States and France. Today, it is remembered for alleged fraud and, possibly, the assassination of refugee journalists who were critical of its fundraising and other activities. Behind this organizational history, still incomplete in the telling, is a larger and deeper story about the longing for homeland among the refugees. Rooted in the sudden loss of the RVN and the harsh postwar experiences, this longing led some refugees to such an illogical and illusionary hope about reunion with their loved ones that they lent monetary support to the Front in blind faith.

The homeland liberation movement had ceased by the late 1980s, when legal immigration began en masse and eased the pain of separation. Still, it was not until the end of the Cold War that diasporic anticommunists accepted the futility of force to retake the homeland. They gave up the illusionary dream and turned instead to the hope that Vietnamese within the country would create and support dissident movements, similar to those in Eastern Europe, to bring down the CPV in the end and bring forth democracy to the country. Time did not completely heal the anguish of national loss, but it offered new perspectives more suited to the realities on the ground.

Diasporic Identity Amidst Vietnamese Erasure and American Indifference

During the 1970s and 1980s, refugee communities were occupied with economic survival: work, education, and supporting people in Vietnam with remittances and gift packages of consumer products. Most engaged in manual labor, at least at first. On the US Gulf Coast, especially, refugees from coastal towns and villages in Vietnam were pursuing fishing and shrimping. In Arkansas, many worked at chicken-processing factories. Whatever their line of work, they recognized that social mobility in the United States was achievable through higher education, especially in the science and technology fields. Many planned accordingly for themselves and, above all, their children. For themselves, they sought vocational and associate degrees to become technicians and engineers at tech companies and factories. They promoted and demanded studiousness among children as a duty to their families and to the Vietnamese people. Newspapers and magazines frequently highlighted the academic achievements of high school and college students, especially news of scholarships and graduations with honor. Even refugees who engaged in manual labor, factory work, or small businesses hoped that their children would earn a college degree followed by a job with a stable income at a company, a corporation, or a hospital. Without knowing the earlier history of Asians in the United States, the refugees pursued a strategy that echoed and, unwittingly, contributed to the “model minority” stereotype that had entered the mainstream during the 1960s.

Economic survival and educational pursuit left only a small amount of time for socialization and community organization. Nonetheless, refugee communities quickly constructed their own spaces for networking and preserving their cultural and political values. In large communities and even some small ones, young adults were tasked with teaching Vietnamese to children one or more hours each weekend. In large communities, former leaders of the Boy Scouts created a local chapter that duplicated the tradition of the Boy Scouts in South Vietnam. Given the great distances in North America, travel and even phone calls were costly. As a result, refugees mailed many letters across the diaspora, and continued to churn out newsletters and periodicals as the main means of communication. The principal concern among those periodicals was twofold: condemning the foreignness of the communist system and fighting to retain Vietnamese traditions while living in very different societies.

They also sought to retain it in other forms. The production of popular music on cassette tape often featured romantic songs from South Vietnam. Then, the company Thúy Nga began producing the cabaret-style and direct-to-video series Paris by Night in 1983. Showcasing new songs, as well as classics, from South Vietnam, the series quickly became the best-known entertainment program in the diaspora. Its copies were bootlegged and pirated in Vietnam, partially for the dazzle of staging and production, and partially because the songs were banned by the government. In this respect, the series was a primary contributor to keeping alive the musical tradition in the RVN, including memories of republican Saigon in particular and South Vietnamese noncommunist nationalism in general. Reflecting the diasporic dominance of the refugee generation in the United States, Thúy Nga relocated its headquarters from France to southern California by the end of the 1980s.

Religious organizations were also active in combining faith practices and the anticommunist and nationalist ideology. This phenomenon occurred among Buddhists, Caodaists, Protestants, and, especially, Catholics. Having left Vietnam in huge numbers, Catholic refugees were privileged by initial access to the local and national resources of the Catholic Church in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe. They further fell back on their tradition to organize their communities for worship, association, and other purposes. As early as May 1975, some 7,000 refugees at the temporary refugee camp Fort Chaffee held a procession honoring a statue called Our Lady of Vietnam the Refugee. Eventually resettled in New Orleans, this statue became a local object of devotion and was occasionally flown to other communities for similar processions. Pilgrimages, too, constituted a combination of religious devotion and political affirmation. The Catholic community in Portland, for example, was led by a Redemptorist priest who had come to the United States two years earlier for studies. Along with a refugee priest from Washington State, he sought permission for the use of the Grotto, a major Marian shrine in the Portland area, for a pilgrimage during the July Fourth weekend in 1976. This regional festival drew Catholic refugees from throughout the Northwest and became an annual event until temporary interruption because of the Covid pandemic in 2020. Larger was the national Marian pilgrimage to Carthage, Missouri organized by the Congregation of Mother Co-Redemptrix (CMC) that originated in northern Vietnam. Begun in the summer of 1978 with about 1,500 pilgrims for an overnight event, this pilgrimage has grown to an annual festival running for four days with the participation of tens of thousands of people. Central to this pilgrimage was highly anticommunist devotion to Our Lady of Fatima that the CMC had promoted since its humble beginnings in the late 1940s. In addition, the 1983 pilgrimage witnessed the dedication of an outdoor 34ft statue of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child while reaching to a Vietnamese refugee. It was among the first major diasporic public artworks to commemorate the postwar experience.

At the secular level, the early refugee communities might not have had enough resources for large-scale activities, but they made sure to organize an annual celebration of the lunar New Year (Tết). This celebration typically included Vietnamese food, homegrown entertainment, and áo dài pageants among young women. Members of a large community might also gather during springtime to honor the Hùng Kings, or during the fall to celebrate children with the mid-autumn festival. Over time, these smaller festivities tended to fade away, owing to the constraints of time and the greater attention paid to the organization of Tết celebrations. These festivities received the backing of all groups of people, but their organization and execution often depended on university students, who possessed a critical mass and the energy to put together an entertainments program, and they also had institutional access to help lower the organizational cost. In the largest diasporic community of Orange County, California, students not only have organized the Tết festival since 1982, but also expanded it from one to two weekends.

A different annual event that only grew in significance was the commemoration of Black April (Tháng Tư Đen). The commemoration occurred across large and small communities alike and became a core symbol of the refugees’ political identity. Centered around the fall of Saigon, it offered the refugees a collective and ritualized articulation of grief over loss and separation. From the late 1970s, when boat people began to arrive in the United States and other countries in large numbers, Black April gradually took on more meanings that reflected the experience of political repression and economic poverty in postwar Vietnam. The refugees began to shift their interpretation of Saigon’s fall as partially a result of American abandonment and poor RVN and ARVN leadership, emphasizing instead the cruelty of the postwar political system and the persistent violation of human rights on the part of the CPV. The exodus of boat people, including the death and suffering during the dangerous journeys, became as much a shared experience as it was a political rallying point in the postwar anticommunist critique.

The postwar critique targeted the Vietnamese government, but, arguably, it was also a reaction to the lack of representation of South Vietnam in many Western countries. This situation was not universal. In particular, the Australian government was more attentive to the history of its involvement with the ARVN and even allowed former South Vietnamese officers to apply for veteran benefits. There were no parallel programs in the United States, and national and local commemorations focused squarely on the American experience, giving little space to their erstwhile allies. While many Americans were sympathetic to the plight of the refugees in 1975 and thereafter, they viewed the former South Vietnamese as, at best, victims of communism rather than autonomous agents of their own – or, at worst, as a burden on the US economy during the 1970s and 1980s. In the meantime, heavily American-centric interpretations of South Vietnam did little to alter the dominant wartime perspectives of the RVN and ARVN as weak, corrupt, and unworthy of US largesse.

Most prominent among those interpretations were the PBS series Vietnam: A Television History (1983) and the journalist Stanley Karnow’s tie-in book Vietnam: A History, whose coverage of the South Vietnamese focuses on their helplessness and corruption. The series shows the South Vietnamese in cities primarily as victims or survivors, and, in the case of ARVN soldiers, young men who searched the pockets of dead civilians for change during the Tet Offensive. For every few seconds of footage showing urban Boy Scouts, there would be half a minute about bargirls and refugees. In Hollywood movies of the 1980s, noncommunist South Vietnamese typically appeared as peripheral or stock characters: prostitutes, pickpockets, pimps, drug addicts, and, again, people on the receiving ends of American largesse. When given more time on the screen, like the principal Vietnamese character in the comedy Good Morning, Vietnam, they would turn out to be members of the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF, or Viet Cong) in disguise. On stage, they appeared in the London and Broadway hit Miss Saigon as exploitative pimps, pathetic prostitutes, and pitiable refugees. Besides the erasure of their history in a unified Vietnam, refugees in the United States found a considerable level of ignorance and distortion about their history within the country of their resettlement.

Yet it was during the 1980s that the refugees had more positive views of the US government and society. The main reason for this reappraisal was the worsening economic and political situation in Vietnam, which provided a prism of contrasts to the experience in North America. An additional reason was renewed moral force stemming from the anticommunist rhetoric of the administration of US President Ronald Reagan. The papacy of Pope John Paul II, who hailed from a communist country, offered another affirmation of their anticommunist ideology. Similar to Americans on the right, a growing number of refugees took the blame for losing the war from the White House and placed it instead on the US Congress and the media. This reaction was partially a result of their wariness toward the media after the unfavorable and shallow characterization of the South Vietnamese government and society on television. It was further amplified as a strong conservative ethos returned to American politics. Lastly, global events in the late 1980s and the early 1990s led to the end of the Cold War and a corresponding triumphalism, which confirmed and empowered political attitudes among the refugees.

The Immigrant Generation and the Shift to a Transnational Identity

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the majority of former refugees had become citizens of the countries of their resettlement by the early 1990s. Motivated by opportunities for social mobility and a patriotic ethos, some of the 1.5- and second-generation members also joined the armed forces in their countries of resettlement. Such outcomes resulted in a more hybrid identity: Vietnamese American, Vietnamese Australian, Vietnamese German, and so on. As families were reunited through legal migration in the 1990s, the exilic identity of the former refugees began to give way to a transnational identity of naturalized citizens who retained some ties with, and returned to visit, the homeland. They continued to celebrate Tết and commemorate Black April each year. Yet now they were endowed with a hybrid and Vietnamese American identity when celebrating the former, and they turned the latter into a remembrance of the difficult postwar experience, as well as the beginning of their lives in an adopted country. In recent years, a Black April ceremony might still include reading aloud the names of ARVN leaders who killed themselves rather than surrender during the fall of Saigon. Yet more often, speeches and music during the ceremony have evoked the deaths of people who escaped by boat, or the incarceration of former officials and officers in reeducation camps. The loss of the Southern republic in 1975 remains the starting point, but it has served as the background to postwar remembrances in the foreground.

Changes in Black April commemoration reflect a broader shift from the refugee generation of the 1970s and 1980s to the influx of immigrants from the late 1980s up to the present. The final era of the Cold War coincided with the beginning of a new and consequential era of Vietnamese immigration to the United States. Starting in the late 1980s and especially during the first half of the 1990s, tens of thousands of Vietnamese came to the United States through one or other form of legal migration. Some came under the Orderly Departure Program (ODP) created by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The ODP enabled many to migrate as former employees of the United States or under the category of family reunification. Most notable was the Humanitarian Operation Agreement of 1989, commonly called “the HO” among Vietnamese, which allowed the legal migration of tens of thousands of former political prisoners and their families to the United States. Having followed the postwar situation closely, the refugees, especially a group of women in northern Virginia, were crucial in the advocacy for this migration well before the program was formally established. In addition, there were thousands of Amerasians and family members on their mothers’ side, who came after Congress passed the Amerasian Homecoming Act. The beginning of this mass migration eventually led to the presence of an estimated 1.4 million Vietnam-born people in the United States in the early 2020s.

The influx of immigrants during the 1990s and 2000s substantially altered demographic, economic, and cultural lives in the Vietnamese diaspora. Because fathers and oldest sons tended to be the first in their families to escape by boat, there had been a shortage of marriageable women in comparison with single men. Legal migration offered a solution to this issue, because it brought many single women to the United States and, consequently, many more marital unions among the coethnics in the 1990s. For single and divorced people, especially men, visits to the homeland might also lead to meeting potential partners for marriage. Already desiring to make up for having no opportunities in postwar Vietnam, the new arrivals were highly motivated by the economic boom of the 1990s. Taking after the refugee generation, the immigrants emphasized education as the primary vehicle of social mobility. They placed heavy expectations on their children’s performance in high school and college, and invested especially in preparation for careers in health care, engineering, and, to a lesser degree, business. By the 2000s, when many former 1.5-generation refugees began having school-age children of their own, the immigrants and former refugees began adopting the educational strategies of immigrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea, and invested in private and after-school tutoring for their children in K-12. Although their history diverged significantly from the histories of these other groups, they have increasingly interpreted the identity of their children in the broader category of “Asian” in addition to “Vietnamese.”

Conversely, a number of immigrants, especially women, entered the nail industry, which had drawn a small number of refugees to California since the 1970s. Similar to the restaurant industry, the nail industry is service-oriented without requiring a high level of oral communication. Thanks mainly to the influx of immigrants, Vietnamese now make up over 40 percent of manicurists in the United States and an astounding 80 percent in California. Except for New York City, whose market is dominated by Korean and Chinese manicurists, there are currently more Vietnamese manicurists than any other ethnic group in virtually all major urban areas. And they have been willing to bring their trade to far-flung towns and cities. Indeed, this occupational concentration has led to a return of the Vietnamese presence in areas that had received refugees in 1975 only to see them move to states that were warmer or had more Vietnamese. Instead of ads looking for relatives and friends, now immigrant salon owners place ads in California and Texas looking for workers willing to relocate for a few years to states with a small Asian population, such as Alabama, Indiana, Maine, and the Dakotas. “Needing female and interstate manicurists with experience,” reads a typical ad, “high tip, high salary, comfortable living space [provided], $800/week winter, $1200/week summer.”Footnote ¹³ The immigrants have done what the US government could not do in dispersing the refugees across the country. This interstate migration has led to the intra-ethnic saying that if anyone is traveling through a remote town and wishes to speak Vietnamese, the best bet is to find a local nail salon. This occupational dominance has extended well beyond the borders of the United States, as a growing number of Vietnamese have become manicurists in Australia and Europe, especially the UK.

The immigrant influx also brought to American shores a new slate of singers and performers who had been born during the Vietnam War but did not have opportunities for professional advancement in the Vietnamese music industry. They were recruited by Paris by Night and a competing series produced by the company Asia Entertainment, both headquartered in the Little Saigon community of Orange County, California – the largest in the world outside of Vietnam. When not recording for these series, they traveled to perform at live shows across North America, Australia, and Europe. Still, the two series were crucial to cultural life across the diaspora. Between 1991 and 2016 they revived hundreds of South Vietnamese popular songs, which were performed on larger stages and given glossier production qualities. A number of shows were programmed to honor particular South Vietnamese and diasporic songwriters. Some shows were organized around themes commemorating the RVN and, especially, the ARVN. The latter emphasis was a response to the humiliation in reeducation camps and the continual erasure of noncommunist South Vietnam. In addition, music companies produced hundreds of new records that were distributed in CD format. Communication entrepreneurs in Orange County also established several television stations that broadcast news and entertainment to the diaspora at large. In the religious realm, Buddhist, Cao Đài, and Christian communities saw a rise in membership that translated into the construction of many new temples and churches, especially during the 2000s. Besides worship, these religious sites have provided diasporic singers a distinctly ethnic space for live performance during festivals and celebrations.

The broad shift in the immigrant generation does not mean that former refugees were no longer active after the early 1990s. Many remained closely involved in political and cultural organizations at the local, national, and transnational levels. Nonetheless, the new arrivals provided an immediate and powerful injection of economic and political energy into Little Saigon communities. Since the refugees had established many professional and other ties, the new arrivals not only came into readymade networks, but also created new ones, such as associations of former political prisoners, alumni of South Vietnamese educational and military institutions, and former members of a Buddhist temple or a Catholic parish in the homeland. They often coordinated regional and national gatherings and activities, especially anticommunist protests. Many immigrants had been incarcerated in reeducation camps or were family members of the incarcerated. The rawness and bitterness of their postwar experience led them to be in the forefront of opposition against the Vietnamese government in various Little Saigon communities. This activism included protests against cultural and entertainment events with participants from Vietnam, and even against ethnic businesses whom they believed to have benefited from dealings with the Vietnam government. They vigorously, if futilely, opposed US rapprochement with Vietnam, including the lifting of the American embargo against the communist government.

It is misleading, however, to suggest that the activism of the immigrant generation was confined to anticommunist protests. For one thing, the immigrants were limited in political and diplomatic capital in the 1990s. In no substantial way could they affect the momentum of US–Vietnamese rapprochement, especially since John McCain, whom they revered on account of his crucial role in the HO program as well as his wartime imprisonment, was a leading advocate of rapprochement. Notwithstanding the energy that they put into antirapprochement discourse, they recognized the limits of their action. More importantly, they actively participated in the fundraising for and construction of memorials, statues, museums, libraries, publications, and other forms of historical preservation about the experiences in South Vietnam and the postwar era. Not surprisingly, veterans were especially interested in Vietnam War memorials that represent the ARVN, while former refugees gathered popular support for boat-people memorials. As a result, the 2000s and 2010s witnessed an array of new war and boat-people memorials across the United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe, especially Germany. A small number of former refugees returned to the original sites of camps in Indonesia and Malaysia to visit the graves of people who died there. Over the diplomatic objections of the Vietnamese government, they erected memorials of their exodus.Footnote ¹⁴ Lastly, many immigrants have seized upon the Internet and social media for an alternative historical record to official Vietnamese representations of South Vietnam and the diaspora.

It is here that we should note the diasporic significance of the flag of the RVN, which, to the surprise of television spectators worldwide, was seen during the rally-turned-riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. During the 1970s and 1980s, the aforementioned erasure in Vietnam and indifference in the United States contributed to the confinement of this flag largely within the refugee communities. Although it occasionally appeared at events outside of the ethnic communities, such as at protests against the violation of human rights in communist countries, the flag was visible mostly in Vietnamese households and businesses, and at annual events. After the arrival of immigrants in the 1990s, however, the flag became ubiquitous in Little Saigon communities. It appeared not only at anticommunist protests, Tết gatherings, and parades, but also at fundraisers, concerts, reunions, and funerals. More significantly, its visibility outside of the ethnic communities grew enormously. It has shown up at nonethnic events such as interracial religious ceremonies, and local and regional parades. It has appeared at city halls, community centers, schools, parks, and other public spaces. A number of municipal governments have recognized the flag as a symbol of Vietnamese American identity. One outcome is that its meaning has shifted from representing the lost state of the RVN to a representation of the postwar experience. Many second-generation Vietnamese, especially those from large communities, have come to view it as the “heritage” or “freedom” flag.

Notably, the meanings of freedom among Vietnamese refugees and immigrants were shaped not so much by American ideas but, again, by postwar developments. For both the refugee and immigrant generations, freedom is the opposite of the postwar incarceration, repression, and poverty that they had experienced or, among 1975 refugees, learned from their loved ones. In this respect, the fall of Saigon was not the end but the beginning – and postwar developments were a series of aftershocks after the fall of Saigon. Because the aftershocks went on for years, they were in some respects more consequential than the demise of the RVN. “Were it not for the HO program,” reflected a former reeducation camp detainee, “[my] corpse might have been underground due to tuberculosis contracted during Communist imprisonment.”Footnote ¹⁵ In contrast, the refugees and immigrants experienced material abundance and social mobility in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and, especially, the United States. “If my grandchildren,” said the mother of an immigrant to the United States in the 1990s, “could have received a proper education, if my child could have been a teacher with a proper wage, if her husband could have lived free … then I’d never have let them leave.”Footnote ¹⁶ The immigrants came to a universalist belief about freedom on the basis of their visceral and searing postwar experiences.

Figure 22.1 A Dong supermarket in Westminster’s Little Saigon with a former South Vietnamese flag and an American flag draped over the front windows (May 12, 2004).

Source: Geraldine Wilkins / Contributor / Los Angeles Times / Getty Images.

This universalist belief has informed their relationship with the homeland, as many diasporic Vietnamese have maintained a highly critical attitude toward the monopoly of political power by the CPV. Yet this relationship has evolved beyond anticommunist protests in Little Saigons. It began in the 1990s when Vietnam’s entry into the global market made it easier for Việt kiều, or overseas Vietnamese, to visit Vietnam and invest in business. Some elderly Vietnamese, including the songwriter Phạm Duy in 2005, have returned permanently to the homeland. The government has allowed most music from South Vietnam, including previously sensitive “soldier music” (nhạc lính), to be recorded and performed, and many diasporic singers have performed in Vietnam, while some Vietnamese singers have done the same in the diaspora, including the United States. Many diasporic television stations, perhaps most, have included entertainment and even news programs from the homeland in their daily broadcast. For decades now, Vietnamese publishers have reissued new editions of works by South Vietnamese authors. Catholic priests and Buddhist monks, meanwhile, have utilized religious networks and traveled abroad to raise funds for organizations in Vietnam. Conversely, Vietnamese in the diaspora have raised money to aid in natural disasters and other charitable activities in the homeland.

Conclusion

Other Vietnamese diasporic formations, including those in central and eastern European countries, followed very different trajectories.Footnote ¹⁷ A treatment of the entire diaspora is difficult to achieve at this time. Nonetheless, we can affirm that these trajectories reflect the multiplicity of Vietnamese history, which has included different visions for a postcolonial nation, divergent state formations, and enormous warfare between Vietnamese and foreigners, as well as warfare among Vietnamese. The history of the diaspora is inextricably rooted in the history of modern Vietnam itself.

Moreover, any convergences among different parts of this diaspora in the present and future would likely depend on developments within Vietnam, including its relationship with its powerful neighbor to the north. The last twenty years have seen a growth in anti-Chinese protests organized by immigrants in communities across the diaspora, not only in those that originated from refugees after the fall of Saigon. People from different parts of Europe have even joined one another on occasion, under different flags or no flags at all, to protest against China’s military and economic activities regarding the Paracel and Spratly Islands. As diasporic Vietnamese, especially first-generation immigrants, continue to adapt and adjust to the societies of their resettlement, there are yet signs that their nationalist belief has significantly diminished. As many have been naturalized in another country, they remain interested in the affairs of Vietnam while inserting their own interpretations of war and postwar experiences into the public sphere whenever possible.

In 1986, just eleven years after the war, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRVN) kickstarted Đổi mới (Renovation) to revive its economy as much as to find for itself a place in the world. In the period leading up to it, the country seemed on the brink of economic collapse. A sense of foreboding already pervaded it in 1978, less than three years after the “guerilla republic” pushed south to unseat the Saigon government.Footnote ¹ By then, galloping inflation, famine, plus “thievery and waste” big and small had exposed the shortcomings of collectivism. Subsidy – a system of rationing and price control set up during the war, when foreign reserves poured into North Vietnam – could now hardly cover basic needs. Aid had slowed to a trickle.Footnote ² With war on the frontiers against China and Cambodia, the Vietnamese everyman had good reason to believe that his people had no more to give. All manner of rumors circulated, forecasting how the socialist state may have been “folding in upon itself.”Footnote ³

And yet the party–state not only stood firm, but grew steadily in the 1980s, becoming absolute, as Alexander Woodside would say, by being “more subtle.”Footnote ⁴ Not about to cede power to market economics, the regime turned its territory into something of a “laboratory” to “redesign Vietnamese behavior.”Footnote ⁵ This would come to mean a great many things. Economically, the people – their enterprising spirit blunted by long campaigns rolled out in the 1970s to teach the socialist way of life – now needed to break out of idleness and take daring steps. The country was opening its doors to foreign investors. To spur them on, the party–state turned to “the science and mystique of management,” retraining its managerial class by putting into place a set of financial incentives.Footnote ⁶ Wealth-creators, beaten down for decades, were given another go.

But market economics, as Woodside writes, “while requiring great trust in the state, does not show how to create it.”Footnote ⁷ So, at some risk to itself, the government set about promoting socialist democracy as a way to broker “authoritarianism in a postcollectivist era.”Footnote ⁸ This concept grants every man the right to ply his trade at the marketplace, so long as he respects the law, which makes the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) the people’s only representative. Long spells of nonproductivity had to end, and socialist democracy gave the people what they needed: “faith in the rightness of rational action.”Footnote ⁹ To that end, a corpus of laws was issued in the 1980s, beginning with the criminal code and bookended by two new constitutions, written in 1980 and 1992. This corpus had several names. Some framers called it socialist law, while others settled on transitional law, carrying forward the Soviet view that “law in the transitional period to true Communism” would be used to crush “enemies of the socialist order.”Footnote ¹⁰

Renovation would set in motion a campaign to teach the Vietnamese their rights and duties as many began to stake their fortunes in commerce. Through mass legal education, state officials sought to remake the Vietnamese into good socialist citizens, living and working by the letter of the law. No sooner was a new code passed than teams of legal advisors moved from town to town, handing out leaflets and unspooling propaganda films. The hope was that the average man would bring home with him a sense of the law, which he would put to use in everyday life. Much like China, which in the 1980s held its own “legal learning” drives to “transform consciousness,” the Vietnamese government would recast its laws to tie the people to the state, and to give commerce a moral and political value.Footnote ¹¹

At no other point, before Renovation or since, was so much wagered on the success of mass legal education. As Woodside explains, the open-door policy needed a native business class for it to take off. Ethnic Chinese merchants, who long dominated Vietnamese trade, had mostly been driven from the country. Persecution and the change in currency in 1975, 1978, and yet again in 1985 sapped them of much wealth and resolve. With little else to lose, they left.Footnote ¹² Soon, it became clear that few among the Vietnamese had the know-how to implement economic reforms, predisposed as they were “to think of economics in terms of either a national planned economy or a family business but as little in between.”Footnote ¹³ Large, private enterprises fell into the hands of state officials and cadres. This class, given a glimpse of changes still to come, was keen on keeping the “quasi-millenarian political consciousness that Hồ Chí Minh and other revolutionaries created fifty years ago.”Footnote ¹⁴

To keep the proud epic of war in times “decidedly unrevolutionary,” these statesmen turned to the commemorative arts. Renovation, it is said, ushered in a “commemorative fever,” expanding the ceremonial practices observed in North Vietnam since 1947, when Hồ Chí Minh’s government first publicly lauded martyrs.Footnote ¹⁵ Then, official ceremonies were nowhere so rich as in the heart of Hanoi. Here at the seat of political power lay the sprawling Ba Đình Square, Hồ’s mausoleum rising in “lonely grandeur” at its center. Built in 1973 and completed just months after North Vietnamese soldiers pushed their way into Saigon for the last time, this complex structure of marble, boasting everywhere a socialist architectural language, exudes the triumphal air of the time.Footnote ¹⁶ From this mysterious marvel radiate roads named after patriots. Phan Đình Phùng Street, much like Nguyễn Thái Học Street, attests to the enduring anticolonial spirit. The path that cuts across Ba Đình – fittingly called Hùng Vương, ruler of a mythical kingdom thought to be the dawn of Vietnamese civilization – links the spartan leader to his earliest ancestors. This street is all the more symbolic with the mausoleum and the presidential palace situated to its left, while to the right stands the National Assembly building. Ba Đình’s spatial layout proclaims the story of an ancient and free people colonized for centuries, then finally lifted out of despair by the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP), the CPV’s precursor. For much of the 1970s, when statecraft was bound up with hero worship, the commemorative repertoire grew on this one narrative.Footnote ¹⁷ Memoirs, shrines, sculptures, paintings, and fiction, each in its own way, lent awe to the revolution. Stories of heroic sacrifice reached unexpected peaks in music, poetry, and drama.

The heady days of Renovation saw the state loosening its control over Vietnamese cultural life, allowing people from all walks of life to claim a piece of the past. It is not clear how the turn to market economics brought about a cultural renaissance that took on a momentum all its own. It may be that, to create the social order for each to test his luck in buying and selling, the state needed a small cultural elite to teach laymen how to use the law in their daily lives. So, as a matter of strategy, the government enlisted the press to translate “the plain text of any law into stories and images.”Footnote ¹⁸ Publishers, writers, artists, producers, and others besides, each acting as middlemen, were left to sort out how to convey the law of the land to its citizens.

Between 1986 and 1990, the campaign seemed to have slipped from government control, spawning far deeper questions about the war. Reportage and fiction took readers back to the dark 1960s, when the party–state used socialist law to attack those thought to stand in the way of revolution. In a cinematic world still struggling to come into its own, newcomers like Đặng Nhật Minh shrank the mighty topic of war into a smaller compass – studying it through the affair of a North Vietnamese soldier with a prostitute. Vietnamese artists heralded Bùi Xuân Phái’s return to the spotlight. Once seen as decadent, as out of keeping with the era’s ethos – nature bending to the will of men – the early paintings of this nonconformist now spoke the deeper, and nobler, sensibilities of an artist grappling with the turbulence of his time. All the while, the state sponsored one project after another to commemorate that inspired and frenzied age. Hero worship carried on at a steady pace. And so, the many highroads to history cut across one another, the private ones sometimes merging with, at times breaking free from, the official one.

Fiction and the Press

The iconoclast Dương Thu Hương was one who did not shy away from saying her piece. She was born in 1947 to a veteran communist.Footnote ¹⁹ Turning 6 years old, she saw the sure-footed republic enlisting young revolutionaries to name and try landowners. Many died. From time to time, when news of the campaign leaked, onlookers may have shuddered to think that here, in a new guise, was Mao’s “jurisprudence of terror.”Footnote ²⁰ Dương Thu Hương’s father was himself a land reform cadre. Her grandmother, a landowner at the time, escaped only just in time to South Vietnam. The budding patriot, much too young to have a sense of how long the fighting would last, remained in North Vietnam throughout the war. She abandoned her studies at the ministry of culture’s art college, even turning down offers to study in the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Bulgaria to lead a women’s brigade in the Central Highlands.Footnote ²¹ There, she performed for the troops, nursed the wounded in make-do hospitals, and buried the bodies of fallen men.Footnote ²² After 1975, to earn her keep, she ghostwrote a book. It was through this lesser task that she would come to learn how the official narrative was so much at odds with what she knew.

Once she stepped into her new role, Dương Thu Hương spent the better part of the 1980s completing Những thiên đường mù (Paradise of the Blind), a novel that would earn her the label of a subversive. The history of land reform drives much of the narrative, which revolves around three women. Hằng, only in her 20s when Renovation kicked into gear, is sent to work in a Russian factory. Quế, Hằng’s mother, had lost her husband during land reform, when her own brother, Chính, denounced him as an enemy of the state. Then there is Tâm, Hằng’s paternal aunt, vowing to exact revenge on those who had disgraced her family. The novel begins with Hằng, already in Russia, receiving a telegram from the sly Chính imploring her to meet him in Moscow. Though she is “loath to travel at his bidding, the pull of family ties propels her onto a long train journey during which she relives her family history.”Footnote ²³ The horrors that took place during land reform then unfold. Everywhere, “guerillas patrol the streets with glinting bayonets, their rifles pointed, ready for battle.”Footnote ²⁴ They look at every passerby, their weapons trained on any who could be called a nationalist, reactionary, or tyrant. Hằng describes how the cadres hunted down men, dragging them one by one before a mob to mete out punishment on the spot.

Paradise of the Blind may have done no more than put into literary form the grievances being aired, ever cautiously, in the magazines and newspapers at the time. For a brief while in 1987, men and women who had been wronged during the land reform wrote to Vӑn nghệ (Literature and the Arts), a newspaper the Vietnamese Writers’ Union ran, to tell their stories. Those who read the December 1987 issue might remember the woman – a widow – who had her ancestral home taken from her. Though curses and threats buffeted her about, for years she called on the authorities near and far to help her reclaim what belonged to her family. The appeal had been only one more that went unanswered. Nevertheless, this woman’s story strikes a blow at Renovation’s new evangelism – to “look truth in the eye” (nhìn thẳng vào sự thật).Footnote ²⁵

It was left to Bảo Ninh to bring alive the later years of the war. Whereas Paradise of the Blind builds into memory the terror of land reform, evoking at last that sense of revolution gone awry, Nỗi buồn chiến tranh (The Sorrow of War) presents a more ambiguous picture of the war. First appearing in 1990, the novel received a prize from the Vietnamese Writers’ Union. It is said that the honor was given less in support of the book than for the autobiographical detail it contains. Like his antihero, Bảo Ninh took part in the Youth Brigade as a foot soldier fielded to conduct reconnaissance during the war and joined the Remains Recovery Team thereafter. He drafted his novel all the while, circulating it at first in mimeograph form. Then, in 1994, when a small publisher had the novel translated into English, the name Bảo Ninh caught on among readers in the West. He came to be known as the voice of the average North Vietnamese soldier, able to break past ideology, soaring above the fractious politics of the Vietnam War to come face to face with its dark legacy. Later that year, Bảo Ninh beat Italo Calvino and Isabel Allende to take home the Independent Award for Foreign Fiction. His name would appear next to Milan Kundera’s.Footnote ²⁶ Thanks to its author’s fame, the novel has since been translated into fourteen languages, reaching far more readers than any other piece of Vietnamese fiction.

The Sorrow of War’s popularity is due in part to its unusual form, in larger part to the way it boldly and searchingly reframes the Vietnam War. It takes the shape of a ruined manuscript, fragments of which have been preserved, sorted, then set to print. The disjunctive quality, the air of straying prose, and the spectral motifs all convey the sense that the work is built as a play of images, a montage reflecting the mind of a war veteran teetering on the edge of madness. Allusions swarm around descriptions of fighting men, showing how each one behaves during the war. The stark details are all there. These formal features, it has been said, “textually give shape to trauma,” mirroring the author’s own “struggle with war memories.”Footnote ²⁷ Others have argued that the storehouse of images and vignettes, taking on the force of fact, gets at the truth of the revolution at a time when Vietnam was not yet ready to examine its past.Footnote ²⁸

Despite its unusual structure, the novel has a coherent storyline. Kiên, the protagonist and narrator, is tough and militant, a literary image of the revolutionary. His childhood sweetheart, Phương, who later becomes a prostitute, is much closer to a social parasite than a patriot. Brought up in the arts, the sensibilities she inherits from her father suggest a certain worldview that Kiên and others see as “bourgeois.” To the young Kiên, her statement that “war crushes everything in its path” breaks with the ethos of his time. He believes in revolution. Patriotism has swept him along, so he volunteers to fight.

Phương, on the other hand, is quickly turned into “a whore type” (loại đĩ).Footnote ²⁹ The Sorrow of War gives the impression that theft presaged her transformation. This is conveyed in an episode in which Kiên and Phương try to board a train heading to the battlefront. It must be the late 1960s, as air raids turn the station into a desolate scene. Kiên, out of an indomitable will to catch up to his battalion, plots with Phương to steal a Phoenix bicycle. Air raids throw the surroundings into chaos, so no one seems to mind. Soon after, the novel introduces an old man exchanging rations, a canister, a gun, a flashlight, and some banknotes for the bicycle Kiên and Phương have just taken. As if completing a purchase, the man rides off while Kiên “calmly pockets the money” without giving the matter much thought.Footnote ³⁰ He then devours the ration.

The transfer of bicycles without permission from the state, so central to this scene in the novel, is in fact a violation of North Vietnam’s property regime at the time.Footnote ³¹ It flouts Directive 217-NT, issued in 1962 to outlaw anyone buying or selling the vehicle and its parts on the open market.Footnote ³² In essence, only the state could produce and distribute this valuable property, which was used not just for postal and communication services, but above all to move military supplies across battlefields, and later into the South, through the Hồ Chí Minh Trail.Footnote ³³ Lê Trọng Hà, a judge on the Supreme People’s Court, made the point in 1967 that violating the policies and laws of the party–state amounted to breaching the revolution’s moral code.Footnote ³⁴ Bicycle theft fell within the range of offenses that could weaken the property system, undermining socialist ethics and party authority all at once. In this light, by establishing Phương and Kiên as economic delinquents, the novel also shows them to be morally corrupt.

Descriptions of theft end abruptly, giving way to a dark account of Phương’s transformation. Unable to catch up to his battalion, Kiên leads her to an abandoned school where they can rest for the time being. He awakens hours later to find Phương bathing in a nearby lagoon. From behind the bushes, Kiên watches, noting how something of her earlier beauty has faded. Before him is “an experienced woman” coming into her own, with an air of “indifference to herself, to him, to the past, to the wretched plight of an entire people.”Footnote ³⁵ To Kiên at that moment, the signs of her callousness have been there all along. He remembers Phương laughing when they took off on the stolen vehicle, as though she found some thrill in the act.Footnote ³⁶ Moments before, Kiên encountered some men who describe Phương as “a seasoned whore” (đĩ thập thành).Footnote ³⁷ By the time Kiên finds her bathing in the middle of a bombing raid, the sexual desire he has long shown for her has disappeared. Kiên resolves in that instance to leave her behind. He joins his battalion and would not know anything about her – whether she was dead or alive – until after the war.

Things take a turn in this scene, so that Phương, erstwhile the symbol of bourgeois sentimentality, embodies the kind of hard-bitten individualism thought to be common among social parasites. One theme that resonates in this scene and that runs subtly through the novel is the conversion of sexual desire into political awakening. In proletarian novels, the hero develops political consciousness when he considers his female companion a prostitute and finally overcomes his desire for her. It does not matter if she is not an actual prostitute: so long as she is coded as such, “she quite seamlessly starts being [one].”Footnote ³⁸ The Sorrow of War appears to borrow this master plot to develop Kiên and Phương’s relationship. Several times it has minor characters describe Phương selling herself, so that Kiên finally believes it to be true. And so he chooses to go to war, assuming the morally superior position as a revolutionary while she functions as “a trope in the literature of men coming into class consciousness.”Footnote ³⁹

Because so much of The Sorrow of War seems to reflect the author’s own experience as a combatant, scholars have tended to see it as a story about trauma. In his book and standalone essay, Heonik Kwon, for instance, identifies Bảo Ninh as someone who uses literary forms to explore the “long-held wounds of war.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Andrew Ng goes a step further. Placing it at the crossroads of spectral aesthetics and trauma theory, he presents The Sorrow of War as a work that edged Vietnamese fiction out of realist aesthetics toward something more postmodern.Footnote ⁴¹ All the same, the novel represents to both a “break with the conventional, official narrative of war based on the paradigm of the heroic revolutionary struggle.”Footnote ⁴²

By pairing the revolutionary with the prostitute, though, the novel does not stray all that far from the official narrative. Already in 1948, Trường Chinh, General Secretary of the VWP, wrote that it would take no other than the revolutionary – defender of the home soil who is committed in every way to global warfare – to restore “the Vietnamese character and soul.”Footnote ⁴³ The prostitute, by sharp contrast, embodies “the superficial, materialistic, artificial, and commercial orientation of the decadent capitalist West.”Footnote ⁴⁴ She stands in the way of the revolution – materially by wasting resources, and symbolically as a reminder of capitalism’s corruptive influence and resilience. In this sense, the revolutionary fighter, supreme defender of socialism, stands outside of the law as an exception. Though both characters commit theft, Kiên effectively redeems himself. Phương, on the other hand, is condemned in the court of public opinion as a prostitute. She symbolizes the baser tendencies of a bourgeois artist, thief, and whore – a criminal virtually impossible to reform.

Where the novel could be said to complicate the official narrative is in a later scene, when North Vietnamese soldiers, the fighting at last behind them, confront Saigon in the figure of a dead whore. They come upon her body as they root through the airport for “antiques” – a euphemism for food, drinks, and commonplace objects they could loot. In a dialogue between the soldiers, one lashes out at “the fucking whore lying sprawled for everyone to see.”Footnote ⁴⁵ He trips over her body while scampering around for his share of the booty. Indignant, this lout throws the corpse out onto the pavement. Meanwhile, others around him get on with looting. Officers and soldiers “run to and fro, looting and plundering, as if on a shopping spree.” With the whore – a metaphor for South Vietnam – out of sight, they “bustle about as if at the market,” sharing in the plunder.Footnote ⁴⁶ No sooner is the very symbol of capitalism tossed out than a new market takes shape. This is the irony that the novel seems to work toward when it shows fighting men putting away what they could find, guessing among themselves the worth of the spoils. Later, by having the girl reappear as a ghost – capitalism in a new guise – the novel drives home the point that it is not possible for Vietnam to do away with capitalism, just as Kiên, the revolutionary, cannot be without the impure Phương. Though it once promoted total revolution, the party–state came to rely on market economics as a lifeline. In this context, The Sorrow of War narrates, as Corey Robin would say, “the struggle of political men and women to get on top of their world, and the economic forces that bested them.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Film and the Visual Arts

On screen, the hapless pair – revolutionary and prostitute – function as metaphor for North and South Vietnam more than anything else. Cô gái trên sông (Girl on the River), a 1987 film directed by the now fabled Đặng Nhật Minh, would turn to these same images to make sense of the war. The movie has hardly begun when Nguyệt, a prostitute who plies her trade on the Perfume River, is found in a hospital. There is an air of hopelessness about her, as though the taste for life has lost its hold, and she is left putting her trust in fate. Before long, Nguyệt begins to reflect on a life that has had little to offer her.

A great deal of the film takes viewers back to central Vietnam during the war. There, living on almost nothing at all, Nguyệt hires herself out on a small boat to men in the South Vietnamese army. She might have carried on in this way if a communist guerrilla, Thu, had not turned up one day, seeking refuge on her boat. He is wounded. Swept up in the pursuit, Nguyệt hides the fugitive from prying eyes, dresses his wounds, and, to throw his pursuers off the scent, takes him downriver. Before stealing away, the fighter recites “Trên dòng Hương Giang” (On the Perfume River), a poem penned by the revolutionary poet Tố Hữu in 1938. On the surface, this poem describes the plight of those in Nguyệt’s lot, working on the sly as ladies of the night. Only in the last stanza does it become clear that the fallen woman stands for South Vietnam – corrupted by the West and thus in need of redemption. The meaning of Thu’s recitation is hardly lost on Nguyệt. She understands, more perfectly than Thu is ready to admit, that he would return at last to free her, helping her to become a proper woman of her day.

By calling into use the highly symbolic image of the prostitute, the film harkens back to a familiar depiction of South Vietnam as a victim of her patron, the United States. This prejudice held sway during the war. Whereas prostitutes during the colonial era worked mostly in secret, their industry driven underground by strict regulations put in place to keep the racial divide intact, socialist discourse on prostitution since the 1950s often registers anxieties about the West.Footnote ⁴⁸ After the war, the same image was used to shore up a campaign to destroy the “reactionary and depraved” culture of the South.Footnote ⁴⁹ The goal, it seems, was to stamp out traces of the ancien régime that still found their way into “the conscious mind, psychology and daily life” of the Vietnamese.Footnote ⁵⁰ Blame was placed not so much on the South Vietnamese government as on “the imperialist West.” The city’s energy, its wealth, all the political one-upmanship and surface bonhomie were dismissed as depraved, still more when compared with the North, which stood tall on ideals.

The 1980s spawned far wider representations of South Vietnam as impure – with her people as lowlifes and scammers, her culture vile, crass, and unwholesome. Built into the militant prose of such official publications as Lao Động (Labor), Nhân Dân (The People’s Daily), and Quân Đội Nhân Dân (The People’s Army), these metaphors serve to highlight a master narrative of revolutionaries as liberators, as guardians of biological and cultural purity. “Thúy họa mi” (The Nightingale), a 1988 story serialized in the newspapers, draws on the usual cast of characters thought to overrun South Vietnam – capitalists, reactionaries, prostitutes, and small-time crooks. Thúy, the eponymous heroine, is a criminal with a pure heart. Pushed by circumstances beyond her control, she drifts into the underworld. She joins Quán Xồm’s circle of highwaymen, grows disillusioned, but continues to work with them anyway. It is not clear how Quán Xồm came into his own as a gang leader, but “he longs for a large sum of money so he could run off to the free world with Thúy.”Footnote ⁵¹ More than once the police arrested him and sent him for reeducation, only to see him rebuild his criminal networks fencing stolen goods. The story in fact opens with Quán Xồm and his men stealing valuable textiles from the state’s warehouse and passing them on to underground dealers.

When Hải Cá Kình – a ruffian Quán Xồm came across in a reeducation camp – devises a money-making scheme, the boss is all ears. Their target is a reputed trafficker of drugs, gold, and dollars; his wife is said to be from a whorehouse. Though bound together by a solemn oath of brotherhood, Quán Xồm and Hải Cá Kình distrust each other all the same and end up in a nasty brawl just as their plan is about to succeed. In the last of eight installments, Thúy emerges as the greater mastermind. She informs the police of the scheme, all the while encouraging Quán Xồm to go through with it so that he could spirit her away to freedom. She has strayed, she has killed, and exposing the gangland head is how she remakes herself. Where Quán Xồm represents anarchy and danger, Thúy is the fallen woman who believes in the revolution’s power to redeem.Footnote ⁵² Through them, the conflict between cultural purity and a certain capitalist–criminal mentality plays out figuratively.

Cô gái trên sông (Girl on the River) at first seems to follow this principal theme, then quickly breaks fresh ground by upending the stereotype. After the war, Nguyệt by chance finds out that the man she once helped now occupies a prominent position as a government official. The system has carried him to the top. On one occasion, she tries to see him at his office but is turned away because her papers show her to have been a prostitute, with time served in reeducation camps. Never expecting to meet him ever again, Nguyệt one day finds Thu sitting in a car, looking past her as she approaches, scarcely paying her any attention. So touched to the quick is she by his treatment that Nguyệt staggers on and is hit by a truck. Coming to in the hospital, she finds herself speaking to Liên, a journalist keen on interviewing her. Presumably acting on no more than trust, Nguyệt recounts her life to Liên, not knowing that Thu is Liên’s husband – and Liên is unaware that Nguyệt and Thu had a brief encounter during the war. Nguyệt certainly does not expect, nor does Liên, that Thu will dog her every step as she tries to have her story printed. At the last moment, when Thu realizes that Liên, without any hope of the story seeing print, has threatened to resign, he reveals that he is the erstwhile fugitive and blames her for putting his career at risk.

Whereas the revolutionary is expected to forsake his personal vanity for the greater good, Thu comes across as a cold, self-serving functionary. In him, the virtue of a revolutionary has all disappeared.Footnote ⁵³ Nguyệt, in stark contrast, turns out to be a “self-sacrificing patriot.”Footnote ⁵⁴ For no gain whatsoever, she saves a resistance fighter when he is in danger, keeping alive his image as a warrior until their very last encounter. Without reverting to type after the war, she marries a former South Vietnamese soldier just released from reeducation. He appears briefly in the background; his face never comes into clear view. The film’s subtle critique of the official narrative of war is nowhere so poignant as in the closing scene. After learning the truth from her husband, Liên tells the trusting Nguyệt that she has been wrong all along. The man Nguyệt helped, she says, died long ago. In the final frame – a scene conveying what Nguyệt believes may have happened – the young Thu, gun in hand, is shown running alone across a battlefield before meeting his death. Through this shade of light irony, the film brings official memory into question, recasting it as out of keeping with the postwar era. With market reforms touching a high-water mark, the party–state, balancing the nation’s economic health against the old ideals of revolution, has its journalist peddle a romance of heroic sacrifice.

Besides films, art exhibits have also met the call to reexamine the war’s legacy. Vietnamese artists who came onto the scene in the late 1980s saw art as having the power to reshape national consciousness. They chose to “remember the past in a new way,” embracing artists who had once closed the door on the political mainstream.Footnote ⁵⁵ The impressionist Bùi Xuân Phái seems to fit this bill. A graduate of l’Ecole des Beaux Arts d’Indochine, this master of landscape paintings briefly taught at the Hanoi College of Fine Art. In 1957, already a prescient critic of the world around him, he took part in the Nhân Vӑn Giai Phẩm reformist movement to call for greater artistic freedom.Footnote ⁵⁶ In no time at all, the authorities spirited him off to a remote town, where he was meant to reform himself through labor. Becoming from then on a recluse, but visionary, artist, this man cut himself from the art world. He withdrew into himself, his studio curtains shut tight against the poets and artists of his day, and there gave over to his palette, driving only shades of brown and gray into his canvases.

This refusal to bend to the cultural wind would come at a cost. For much of his life, Bùi Xuân Phái seemed to carry on as a superfluous man, a dreamer type out of Russian belles lettres. A romantic, a misfit, a dispossessed and rebellious loner, “he wants to, but cannot, play an active role in changing society.”Footnote ⁵⁷ So he resigned himself to depicting Hanoi streets in cold palettes. His paintings from the 1960s and 1970s capture the ancient city as everywhere somber and desolate. Houses and shops appear empty, their canopies hang over sidewalks with no signs of human activity. Just as other artists trimmed their sails – using their brushes to depict the triumphs, hopes, and high spirits of the revolution, as if to step up the pace of history – this outcast’s instinct for gloom roused the government’s ire. Unflaggingly and well into the 1980s, he painted the capital in a range of bleak colors. He kept his artworks from public view until 1984, when, on the cusp of Renovation, the authorities finally allowed a small collection to be shown.

Figure 23.1 A veteran places joss sticks on graves at an official cemetery in Hanoi, on Vietnam’s National Day for war martyrs and invalids (July 27, 2017).

Source: AFP Contributor / Contributor / AFP / Getty Images.

By then, Bùi Xuân Phái had brought Hanoi back to life in a more vibrant palette. Shops and houses are set against a blue sky, their windows a brilliant red and orange. There are in every corner people in colorful clothes, carrying shopping bags.Footnote ⁵⁸ In another artist, this might be mistaken as a tested spirit buckling at last. Bùi Xuân Phái, though, had paid a high price to live as he chose. His paintings, each so hard-won, bear witness to an era as much as to his own place in it. Through them, those who had not been in North Vietnam during the war could now see how that past bore down on the nonconformist.

Conclusion

In the heart of Hanoi, just half a mile from the Hồ Chí Minh mausoleum and a stone’s throw from Lenin Park, a heap of military junk sprawls around the courtyard of the Military History Museum. Engines and fuselages of American war planes, piled upon metal scraps and still more fighter parts, crumble under the weight of a B-52 set upright on its nose. In front of this hulking mass is a photograph of a Vietnamese woman, rifle slung across her back, pulling at the wreckage of an American airplane.Footnote ⁵⁹

This sprawling mound, splayed out in dramatic fashion, has long been the museum’s centerpiece. The rippling story of a people’s revolution unrolls around it. Set up in 1956, two years after the Điện Biên Phủ curtain-fall, the Military History Museum is today one of many sites that lay out the events of twentieth-century Vietnam as seen by the party–state. The meandering galleries in the main building, strewn with objects in glass cabinets, recount the uprisings against French rule. Here, the artifacts are thin, like breadcrumbs. It is the newer wing that teems with exhibits of the 1955–75 period. More than the tanks, more than the jeeps, more even than the helter-skelter collection of images, a diorama of low-tech jungle warfare is what brings home the spirit of the North Vietnamese, who had been made to fight so hard, and for so long.

The War Remnants Museum in Hồ Chí Minh City could just as easily be another Military History Museum. Once named the “Exhibition House for US and Puppet Regime Crimes,” this building first opened its doors in September 1975, only months after North Vietnamese forces swept into Saigon. It took on its current moniker in 1995, when the United States renewed diplomatic ties with the socialist republic. Today, the display of American aircraft – a Huey, a Skyraider, and a Dragonfly, among others – in the courtyard is familiar enough. They will remain there for a long time. In every other way, the museum conveys with a heavy hand a different story, one in which the Vietnamese are victims. Floor by floor, American military vehicles and unexploded ordnance are set beside graphic images of children touched by Agent Orange. Never once judging themselves one-sided, the curators press-gang visitors into a lesson on American war crimes.Footnote ⁶⁰ Only those who had lived through the war can measure what they see against what they themselves know.

Out in Saigon’s hinterland, meanwhile, off Highway 1A, lays untended what used to be the National Cemetery of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). Beaten, neglected, vandalized, the tombstones here are nearly level with the earth, some covered in graffiti, some defaced.Footnote ⁶¹ Many were dug up or razed to make room for a water plant.Footnote ⁶² Despite “all the creaking of [her] old bones,” the SRVN – uniting forevermore her destiny with the rest of the world’s – lays to waste other South Vietnamese cemeteries, replacing them with Isuzu and Mercedes-Benz factories.Footnote ⁶³ How will this shape the Vietnamese psyche – at home and abroad – as the country’s past bears down on its future?

A report from a Vietnam War commemoration committee states that over 500 Vietnam veterans are dying every day.Footnote ¹ The high mortality rate is generational: if a soldier were 21 in 1968, he would be 75 at the time of writing. The prospect of the passing of this generation of veterans has motivated the commemoration committee to redouble its efforts to gather their oral histories while they remain alive. The passage of time also means that we have reached a transitional moment when knowledge of the war passes from the personal experience of those who fought to history and transgenerational memory.

There has never been an absolute distinction, though, between personal experience and received knowledge; they always interpenetrate. Those who went to war do not constitute a pure fount of unmediated recall: no individual observed every battle; the character of the war differed from region to region of South Vietnam, and from year to year. Unlike World War II, when the troops served for the duration of the conflict, in Vietnam most soldiers served for a one-year tour of duty. (The Marine Corps, projecting an image of toughness, required thirteen months.) A truism among veterans is that Vietnam was not a ten-year war but ten one-year wars fought back to back. Eyewitnesses and participants always relied on reports from others for much of what they knew about the war. For those who served and for the members of their generation who saw the war from the homefront, what they believed and knew about the conflict was always in large part the product of ideologically inflected interpretation, of mediated and mass-mediated knowledge and opinion. This chapter examines the way that our understandings and beliefs have coalesced into conventional forms in the decades since the end of the “American War” – how the “common sense” about the war formed and permeated American culture.

By the time the communist victory in 1975 had reunified the country, the interest of many Americans in Indochina was exhausted. The war had divided and disillusioned them. US President Gerald Ford spoke for many when he declared in late April 1975 that the evacuation of the last US personnel “closes a chapter in the American experience.” Days later, at a news conference, he rejected the concept of learning the lessons of the war, saying that they had already been learned. “The war in Vietnam is over. … And we should focus on the future. As far as I’m concerned, that is where we will concentrate.”Footnote ²

Ford planted a poisonous seed in the minds of the public, though, by asking Congress to send emergency aid to the embattled South Vietnamese. The aid would have done no more than to delay the communist victory, even if it had overcome the logistical obstacles to being delivered at all, but it fed into a “stab-in-the back” myth: the United States and South Vietnam had won the war, but Congress lost the peace.Footnote ³ Many veterans were perplexed by the withdrawal. What had all the effort been for, why had they risked their lives, and why had their buddies been wounded and killed, if the United States would allow its ally to sink? Thinking of the South Vietnamese who had been abandoned to their fate, a former POW said, “All of the people who did work for us over there got screwed. We left so many of them behind. American promises meant nothing any more.” “Now it’s all gone down the drain and it hurts. What did he die for?” a Pennsylvania father asked of his son.Footnote ⁴

The strong sense of betrayal and loss suffused all sides. While conservatives blamed a weak-willed Congress, the media, and antiwar protesters for undermining the nation’s will to fight, those who had opposed the war believed that the nation had discarded some of its most cherished values when it had tried to impose its will on the fate of the Vietnamese. Not only political activists but also leading journalists, intellectuals, and entertainers expressed a new kind of skepticism about the American government and the nation’s economic interests. Critiques of militarism and imperialism entered the mainstream of public discourse during the war years. Distinguished writers had come to see the war “as an expression of an imperial, racist, bureaucratic and technological Establishment” that brought ruin on the spiritual landscape of the United States as surely as it had devastated Vietnam.Footnote ⁵ What seemed to be under threat, perhaps lost, was an abiding sense of America’s mission in the world.

The public emerged from the Vietnam War with a profound sense that the nation had done wrong. Whereas in 1967 a substantial majority of the public had thought the United States’ part in the war was morally justified, by the end of the war that had changed. In June 1975, six weeks after the end of the war, two-thirds of a national poll sample said that the United States did the wrong thing in Vietnam. In 1978, almost three-quarters of a sample of the public agreed that “the Vietnam War was more than a mistake, it was fundamentally wrong and immoral.” Up until the mid-1980s, some two-thirds to three-quarters of the public gave similar responses to pollsters, agreeing that the war was wrong, immoral, or both.Footnote ⁶ No wonder: when American soldiers were found to have killed hundreds of unarmed, defenseless civilians at the village of Sơn Mỹ (an atrocity popularly known as the “Mỹ Lai massacre”), only one American soldier, Lieutenant William Calley, was convicted of a crime. Calley, though, led only one of four platoons that conducted simultaneous massacres in two of Sơn Mỹ’s hamlets. When Calley was convicted and sentenced, the public wrote to the White House and their elected representatives in huge numbers asking for leniency, but not primarily because they believed that Calley was innocent: large majorities believed that acts like the one of which he was found guilty were commonplace in Vietnam, and that higher officers were responsible for such crimes.Footnote ⁷

After the war, sensibilities were so raw, and the possibility of recriminations so close to the surface, that the nation collectively turned away from the war. Commentators refer to the late 1970s in the United States as a period of “amnesia” about the Vietnam War. But this willful forgetting added to the veterans’ sense of betrayal, leading many to feel they had been disowned. The United States had sent them to fight in a war supposedly vital to America’s national interests, but when it went wrong, the veterans were left to cope on their own with the legacy of defeat and disgrace. The journalist Myra MacPherson, who interviewed hundreds of Vietnam veterans for her book Long Time Passing, said that they felt “an indescribable rage that they, for so long, seemed to be the only Americans who remembered the war’s suffering and pain.”Footnote ⁸

Confronting the war-induced loss of ideological certainties, the first postwar president, Jimmy Carter, attempted to redefine the nation’s sense of mission and purpose. Grounding a new claim to global leadership on the high-minded concept of human rights, Carter turned away from Cold War orthodoxies and repudiated the support of repressive regimes simply because they were reliable allies in the Cold War. The policies based on this new definition of America’s role in the world unraveled because of international setbacks. While Carter said that the Vietnam War had brought about a crisis of confidence in America, by the end of his presidency, critics blamed Carter himself for the nation’s weakening. They complained about the “Vietnam syndrome”: excessive hesitancy at the prospect of military action, which prevented the United States from projecting its power abroad. Critics charged that the syndrome had made the nation too cautious in its conduct of foreign policy, and that Carter’s moral feebleness had encouraged the nation’s adversaries.Footnote ⁹

Carter’s successor as president, Ronald Reagan, took a frankly ideological route to overcoming drift and uncertainty. Reagan said that the nation had to rearm, both literally and morally, in order to overcome the failings that had emboldened America’s adversaries around the world. His administration embarked on an arms buildup, with massive increases in arms expenditures. It confronted its socialist adversaries in Central America. But Reagan expressed frustration that in foreign affairs, unlike his economic policies, his efforts to appeal to the public over the heads of their elected representatives were insufficient to overcome congressional resistance to his program. Casting a shadow over his efforts were congressional and public fears of fighting “another Vietnam” in Central America. Towards the end of his time in office, Reagan confided to his diary, “Our communications on Nicaragua have been a failure.” Most people, he said, don’t want to send the “contras” – anticommunist Nicaraguans the administration was supporting – money for weapons. Reagan’s explanation: “I have to believe it is the old Vietnam syndrome.”Footnote ¹⁰

Reagan had set out explicitly to overcome the Vietnam syndrome by redefining the Vietnam War as a “noble cause.” What was wrong with the war was not that it was immoral, he asserted, but that weak-willed leaders deprived America’s brave soldiers of the victory their efforts deserved. “For too long,” he said,

The defeat was not the fault of the troops: they had fought as bravely and as honorably as any generation of Americans. The implication of his promise for future policy was clear: the government should not restrain itself in its use of force in the way it had done in Vietnam. Reagan was applauded by veterans for vindicating them, but his wish to redefine the Vietnam War as a “noble cause” was divisive.Footnote ¹² Far from uniting the public, his outspoken redefinition of the Vietnam War threatened to deepen the fault lines that still fissured the country.

The inability of a “great persuader” like Reagan to lead the country toward a new judgment about the war highlights a crisis of hegemony: most of those whose positions of authority or influence might have shaped public opinion were themselves implicated in the nation’s divisions. Politicians, the media, intellectuals, military officers, strategic thinkers: none of them stood above the ideological fray, and none possessed the rhetorical authority to overcome wartime divisions.

Veterans’ Narratives and the Moral Legacy of the War

The task of helping the nation to come to terms with its divided and troubled memories of the war fell, by default, on the nation’s veterans. The troubling memories they voiced coursed through multiple channels of expression and fed into the social rumination on the war. The principal means of addressing the moral legacy of the war would center on the experience of soldiers, the grit and horror of combat, and the burden of troubled emotion they carried with them from the war.

Literary authors and filmmakers struggled to place the American experience in Vietnam into generic and narrative streams consistent with the national myths through which Americans had long made sense of their place in the world. With some notable exceptions, when veterans wrote about their war, they tended to confine the scope of the narrative to the bounds of a single unit, often of company or platoon size. Their rendering of the war was bounded temporally as well as spatially: veterans’ stories were usually confined to a single individualized tour of duty. The veterans’ narratives rarely endow their time in Vietnam with a militarily decisive objective (such as the equivalent of a D-Day landing). The war was fought without “front lines”: the objective was not to capture and hold territory along a line of advance but to grind down the enemy through attrition and bombing. Uncertain of the strategic purpose of their own and their buddies’ sacrifices, the veterans’ narratives center on the fierce loyalties – and the conflicts – among the troops on the American side, the visceral and bloody realities of combat, the moral quandaries involved in fighting a guerrilla war in the midst of civilians, and encounters with primal, existential questions of life, death, and the formation of the self. In the veterans’ accounts, as the literary critic Philip Beidler put it, Vietnam was “the place where Americans would find out who they really were.”Footnote ¹³

Vietnam veterans were living embodiments of the nation’s actions in Vietnam. They had borne the risks of combat; they had lived through moments of terror; they faced life-and-death choices in the heat of battle, and they faced the prospect of a lifetime coming to terms with the decisions of a split second. As they confronted their personal memories of the war, their struggles became the moral ground through which their compatriots faced the nation’s experience. Every doubt and quandary that the veteran storytellers entertained put into play the larger-scale questions that their fellow citizens had once shied away from but could revisit on the terrain of the former soldiers’ memories.

Vietnam veterans’ writings were, in ideological terms, all over the map, but this serves to highlight their commonalities. Let’s take two works written by marine platoon commanders in Vietnam, Philip Caputo’s memoir, A Rumor of War, and James Webb’s novel, Fields of Fire. Philip Caputo goes into military service with John F. Kennedy’s admonition to “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” ringing in his ears. He was not the only one inspired by Kennedy’s call. The words had a special meaning for the troops who volunteered early in the war: in her interviews with hundreds of Vietnam veterans, MacPherson heard many repeat that passage from Kennedy’s inaugural address. “Always they say it with a sense of emotion, as if it were a message meant for each alone, like the lyrics of a love song. It is, they say, the single most memorable sentence of their lives.”Footnote ¹⁴

In Caputo’s rehearsal of the passage, it not only describes his younger self’s belief in Kennedy’s call to action, it also symbolizes a capacity for belief that he and his fellow veterans took to Vietnam but lost in its jungles and paddies. Other symbols at the heart of America’s identity and sense of mission also crumbled: when Caputo, Webb, and other veteran authors mention John Wayne, they not only recall the Westerns and war films that informed their younger selves’ sense of duty and patriotism, they also signal that their experiences in Vietnam rendered obsolete Wayne’s mode of heroism. His was a brand of martial masculinity whose fatal emptiness the war exposed. Wayne’s name becomes a verb: in one war narrative after another, to “John Wayne” is to commit a foolish and often doomed act of valor as though one were acting in a Hollywood film.Footnote ¹⁵ Those who survive are wiser. The master trope of the majority of Vietnam veterans’ narratives, which describes the trajectory of both A Rumor of War and Fields of Fire, is irony, as their central characters move from naïveté to disillusionment.

In 1965, when he landed in Vietnam along with the first contingent of marines, Caputo and his fellow marines believe in their own service myths: “we believed in our own publicity – Asian guerrillas did not stand a chance against US marines – as we believed in all the myths created by that most articulate and elegant mythmaker, John Kennedy.” During a tour of duty in which “everything corroded,” including not just equipment but morals, Caputo becomes disenchanted with the war effort as a whole and discovers the capacity for cruelty and undiscriminating violence of which both he and his men are capable. He concludes that Kennedy is a “political witch doctor” whose “charms and spells” led young men like himself to war.Footnote ¹⁶

The surviving central character in Fields of Fire also has the webs of illusion lifted from his eyes, but his moral trajectory runs in the opposite direction from Caputo’s. A recruiting sergeant conned Will Goodrich into joining up by the promise that he can play his horn in the Marine Corps band. Harvard-educated, he is suspected by his fellow platoon members of being a Criminal Investigation Division plant. He wins the nickname “Senator” and questions the way the war is being fought; he turns in some of his fellow marines for killing two Vietnamese civilians as retribution for the capture and murder of two Americans. By the end of the novel, though, he has seen better men than himself sacrifice themselves for a cause in which they hardly believe, in large part out of their sense of loyalty to the Marine Corps and to their fellow “grunts.” Experience changes him. Having lost a leg in Vietnam, he returns to the Harvard campus where antiwar students invite him to speak at a rally.

The novel’s author, Webb, reserves his greatest contempt for the children of the elite who declaim their opinions based on their own myths and fabrications. Goodrich denounces the crowd of students: “How many of you are going to get hurt in Vietnam? I didn’t see any of you in Vietnam. I saw dudes, man. Dudes. And truck drivers and coal miners and farmers. I didn’t see you. Where were you? Flunking your draft physicals? What do you care if it ends? You won’t get hurt.” What, he asks, do any of them know of the war? Webb was an unreconstructed supporter of America’s war effort in Vietnam who was appointed to high positions in the Reagan administration and, as a Defense Department official, helped organize Reagan’s Central America military exercises.Footnote ¹⁷ His mouthpiece, Goodrich, impugns the right of anyone who was not there to express any political view about the war.

The contrast in the ideological content of the two works highlights their commonalities: the Sisyphean absurdity of long patrols through the South Vietnamese countryside; the indifference or hostility of much of the South Vietnamese population; the insensitivity of higher officers and other rear-echelon personnel to the plight of the troops in the field; the resentment by the troops of their government; and the convergence of the storyline on the primal scenes that lie at the heart of many Vietnam War narratives – instances of “fragging,” when American soldiers turn on one another with murderous violence, and atrocious crimes against Vietnamese civilians.

Both narratives end by explaining away atrocities. Having turned in a comrade for murder, Goodrich has a change of heart. He says,

Facing a court-martial, accused of ordering his troops to kill two civilians suspected of being National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF, or Viet Cong) guerrillas, Caputo says that the “explanatory or extenuating circumstance” that helps explain his actions “was the war. … The thing we had done was a result of what the war had done to us.”Footnote ¹⁹ The war is the subject of the verb and the driver of events, the veteran the malleable creature who suffered and was subject to its drives. The history of the war shifts from the active to the passive voice. The war changes from what we did to what was done to us.

Both Caputo’s and Webb’s works convey a common complaint about the lack of understanding and sympathy in the military and society for those who fought the war – as Webb puts it, the “culture gap” that separated the warriors from those who stayed safely home. The elite in particular became targets of veteran resentment, because their eligibility for draft deferments and knowledge of how to work the system allowed them to avoid conscription or be disqualified from service if they were swept up in a draft call. According to Caputo, the resentment ran in both directions: the elites who engaged in policy debates in the United States “shared a suspicion, sometimes a contemptuousness,” of those who fought, “the children of the slums, of farmers, mechanics, and construction workers.”Footnote ²⁰ Caputo is wrong, however, to distinguish between the working classes and participants in debates about the war: as Penny Lewis has shown, the working class was fully engaged in, and sometimes at the forefront of, antiwar organizing.Footnote ²¹ Accurate or not, Caputo’s comment sums up the barrier of antipathy and incomprehension that divided veterans from their civilian compatriots. It instantiates the predominant feeling tone of postwar discourse by veterans: a voicing of grievance and complaint, demanding attention and understanding.

From the late 1970s to the present, Vietnam veterans never stopped expressing resentment at having been ignored and silenced; one of their principal themes has been the charge that their voices have remained unheard. Caputo echoes Michel Foucault when he says that in the mid-1970s, as he was writing and rewriting his memoir, Vietnam as a subject for literature “was almost as taboo as explicit sex had been to the Victorians.” In the period when his book was published, though, a vast output of talk about Vietnam veterans began to proliferate. The structure of Caputo’s complaint follows that of Foucault’s “repressive hypothesis”: as Foucault argues, the Victorians, supposedly squeamish about sex as a taboo subject, never ceased talking about it, and discourses on sex multiplied in the very space where its suppression was effected.Footnote ²² Likewise, a vast mechanism for understanding Vietnam veterans’ predicaments, for ameliorating their distress and alienation, and for coming to terms with the historical experience they personified was established at the very moment that veterans complained they were being silenced and ignored, sometimes in the same breath.

Post-Traumatic Stress and “Healing” from the War

The network of discourses surrounding veterans’ distress thickened in 1980 when the American Psychiatric Association (APA) validated a new psychiatric label, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The third edition of the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychological Disorders (DSM-III) identified PTSD as a condition characterized by recurrent painful, intrusive recollections or recurrent dreams or nightmares of a stress-inducing event; in extreme cases, sufferers experience dissociative states, popularly known as “flashbacks.” Other symptoms include diminished responsiveness to the external world (or “psychic numbing”), hyperalertness, an exaggerated startle response, sleep disturbances, and avoidance of activities or situations that might arouse recollections of the traumatic event. Recognition by the APA allowed the Veterans Administration (VA), the government-mandated system of support and medical treatment for veterans, to begin to diagnose them for a war-related condition and to compensate those who received the diagnosis. Previously, Vietnam veterans presenting with psychiatric symptoms were often diagnosed with conditions such as depression and psychosis, taking no account of their military service. In the 1980s, the government established a system of storefront Vietnam Veterans Outreach Centers (or “vet centers”) to offer services to veterans put off from visiting VA hospitals because of their poor reputation.Footnote ²³

PTSD affected every subpopulation of veterans, and therefore indirectly influenced how the public thought about veterans, about the war that had damaged them, and about the nation’s obligations to them. The effects of PTSD were particularly marked, however, among African American veterans. Overrepresented on the front lines – and the casualty rolls – in the early years of the war, when they returned from Vietnam they faced the same disadvantages that other African Americans did: higher rates of unemployment and poverty, discrimination, and racism. They also dealt with additional burdens. When in the armed forces, African Americans who committed infractions against military discipline of comparable seriousness received much harsher punishments than did whites. The result was that African Americans had vastly higher rates of less-than-honorable discharges than did their white counterparts. “Bad paper” discharges deprived them of veterans’ benefits and introduced additional barriers to employment. On top of all this, African Americans had higher rates of PTSD than whites did, and the intensity and duration of their symptoms were, on average, greater.Footnote ²⁴ Simply having served in Vietnam was stressful for African Americans, who faced racism both inside and outside the armed forces, and who were sometimes accused of having fought a “white man’s war.” The situation was even worse for Hispanic veterans, who suffered higher rates of PTSD than did whites or African Americans.Footnote ²⁵ Whether or not the public were aware of the differences in the harmful consequences of the war among an ethnically diverse veteran population, the sense that the poor and disadvantaged continued to carry the burden of the war into their civilian lives contributed to the public’s growing sympathy for them.Footnote ²⁶

The recognition of PTSD also gave the public a new way of registering concern and attending to the veterans’ perceived needs. In the 1970s, Vietnam veterans had appeared in media representations as malcontents. Lazy script writers for that decade’s cop shows, such as The Streets of San Francisco, Mannix, Kojak, and Cannon, used the “hair trigger” veteran as an all-purpose villain, whose criminality needed no more explanation than service in Vietnam. PTSD cast veterans suffering emotional distress in a more sympathetic light and placed a degree of responsibility on the public. According to the emerging psychiatric and sociological knowledge about veterans’ PTSD, an important factor that might mitigate or exacerbate veterans’ symptoms was their homecoming and their relations with their neighbors and fellow citizens. If veterans felt accepted by their civilian compatriots, their conditions were likely to be less severe and long-lasting; to the extent that they felt neglected and vilified, their symptoms would be worse. Thus, their fellow citizens began to feel a moral imperative to recognize the veterans in their midst – and, through them, to come to terms with the nation’s vexed memories of the war.Footnote ²⁷

The principal vehicle through which Vietnam veterans led their fellow Americans into a new encounter with the history and consequences of the Vietnam War was the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Led by a former corporal in the US ground forces, Jan Scruggs, in 1979 a handful of veterans incorporated and filled the crucial officer positions in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF).Footnote ²⁸ Their ethos was that the nation had been divided for political reasons during the Vietnam War, and their civilian compatriots had been too long divided from the veterans. By coming together in the recognition of the service and sacrifices of those who served and those who died in Vietnam, Americans could set aside their political differences and reconcile with one another. By embracing the Vietnam veterans, Americans could provide those veterans with comfort and “healing,” simultaneously overcoming the division between veterans and their fellow citizens and helping American society to recover from its war-induced “wounds.”

The VVMF decided that it was crucial to create a memorial that made no political statement about the war. Its leaders said that they wanted the nation to recognize and honor those who fought without honoring the war itself. They were following one of the truisms that had emerged from therapists who treated Vietnam veterans. The psychologist Charles Figley hoped that the country could have “two cognitive notions,” so that even those who were ashamed of the war could be proud of the veterans: the country needed “to separate the warrior from the war.” Although Scruggs, the president of the VVMF, liked to present himself as an ordinary “grunt” (or foot soldier), he was thoroughly immersed in the therapeutic discourses surrounding Vietnam veterans, having trained in psychology and adopted the goal of creating a memorial as a result of this training. The VVMF adopted “separating the warrior from the war” as one of its watchwords and slogans.Footnote ²⁹

The VVMF also adopted a passage from Caputo’s memoir as a kind of manifesto. Grieving for his friend Walter Levy, who died trying to save a fellow marine, Caputo says that Levy embodied “the best that was in us.” His sacrifice, though, had been forgotten. There were no memorials to a war that his fellow citizens would rather forget. Officers of the VVMF arranged for a passage about Americans’ preference for “amnesia” to be read out at organizational events, and President Carter read it when signing the authorizing legislation for the memorial.Footnote ³⁰ The memorial’s goal was to lead the nation away from this amnesia.

A professional jury chose the design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial: a pair of black granite walls inscribed with the names of American military personnel who had died as a result of their service in Vietnam. The names appeared in chronological order, according to when they died. Reflecting the ethnic diversity of the American population, they combined to produce what the designer, Maya Ying Lin, called an “epic poem.” Not everyone liked her design. In particular, rightwing critics disliked the granite’s black color, the absence of a prominent, centrally located flag, and the fact that the ground sloped toward the center of the memorial so that it gradually sank into the earth, rather than rising above it. Critics said that the memorial would be hidden away and buried, suggesting that the country was ashamed of the war and those who fought it. Webb had been a member of the memorial’s National Sponsorship Committee, but he resigned that position and encouraged others to do the same. He wrote a fierce criticism of the memorial, saying it would become a “wailing wall for future anti-draft and anti-nuclear demonstrations.”Footnote ³¹ Webb wanted a monument that would vindicate the cause for which Americans fought and died, not one that he thought was redolent of defeat.

The complaints by Webb and fellow critics led to the addition of a bronze statue of three infantrymen; Webb was one of the members of a panel that approved the sculpture by Frederick Hart, who had a long-standing relationship with the VVMF from before they held a design competition. A decade later, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, another multifigure bronze sculpture, was added to satisfy the demands of female veterans who justifiably complained that Hart’s sculpture sidelined the presence of women in the American forces in Vietnam.Footnote ³² Because most of the uniformed women who served in the US forces were nurses, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial and other such sculptures reinforce the theme of healing that lay at the heart of commemorative efforts in Washington and around the country. The depicted scenes of nurses’ care and nurturance – and similar sculptures in which male soldiers ministered to their wounded buddies – showed the ameliorative language of healing in action.

Many sculptural Vietnam veterans memorials are multifigure statues, demonstrating a felt need to represent the demographic range of the American armed forces, with respect to race, ethnicity, and, sometimes, gender. But whereas female veterans were effective in mobilizing support for the addition of a women’s memorial to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, by and large ethnic minority veterans had little influence on the decision-making processes in the selection of memorial designs. Typical of other memorial efforts around the country, Webb, a white veteran, took credit for ensuring that the Hart statue included an African American figure.Footnote ³³ In such works, ethnicity stands not as a marker of difference but as an emblem of the transcendent brotherhood of those who served together under arms.

Throughout the 1980s and beyond, memorials around the United States took on the same tasks of reconciling the United States with its veterans, and bringing together politically divided camps in a common, veteran-centric program of commemoration. Most of them bring together the two principal components of the national memorial in Washington, DC: walls inscribed with the names of America’s fallen troops, and bronze statuary. Irrespective of whether the memorial designs consist of the wall-and-statue formula, architectural or landscape designs, virtually all the groups that organized the commemorations rallied supporters with catchphrases borrowed from the VVMF: separate the warrior from the war; honor those who fought while avoiding political statements; help the country to heal. Giving the veterans an overdue welcome home became the rallying point that brought together former supporters and opponents of the war.Footnote ³⁴

Therapists working with veterans had advocated a renewed encounter between veterans and the public. Arthur Egendorf, one of the first who had set up Vietnam veteran “rap groups” that allowed veterans to confront their experiences of the war, said that they could help their fellow citizens by working through and finding meaning in their war experiences. “American society,” he said, “ultimately gains from their efforts to derive significance from the confusion and pain still associated with that conflict.” Harry Wilmer, another therapist, said that the nightmares of combat veterans afflicted with PTSD were “symbolic of our national nightmare.” For the veterans and the nation to recover, veterans had to overcome their reluctance to talk about the war so that Americans could “face the nightmare horror – hear it, see it, know it.”Footnote ³⁵

Oral Histories and the Conventional Vietnam Veteran Image

Oral narratives by those who fought met the call for a veteran-voiced means through which the public could encounter the Vietnam War.Footnote ³⁶ The oral history collections that achieved bestseller status in the 1980s offered, according to their promotional material, the “gut truth” of the war. Marketed as the unbiased accounts of ordinary veterans, they flew under the ideological radar, using personal experience as the warrant of their rhetorical authority. They allowed veterans’ voices to be heard, and they allowed the public vicariously to work through the most troubling moral quandaries left over from the war at the level of episodic personal stories, allowing a sympathetic reader to walk in the shoes of the narrators and see the war through their eyes.

The narratives deal with content familiar to readers of veteran authors’ novels and memoirs: the heat and discomfort of the field, the bile and gore of combat, the moral qualms with which the troops struggled, and the memories that haunted them years later. The oral narratives derive their meaning above all, though, from the frame in which the narrator and reader meet. Here are the stories of ordinary veterans, the grunts who, by definition, are not strategists, historians, politicians, or authors. Here is the story of the war as witnessed by those who were there, who did not plan the war but went where they were sent. And here the public will listen to the unvarnished truths that the witnesses and participants, above all, can provide. By their nature, the oral narratives did not require one to engage with political or strategic judgments in which decisions by the nation’s political leaders – and therefore, in a democracy, the nation itself – would have been implicated.Footnote ³⁷

As Alessandro Portelli has argued, though, no informant in a culture permeated by written and electronic media is innocent of the ideological effects of these forms of communication. Vietnam War storytelling is a particularly salient example of this phenomenon, since veterans’ stories are thoroughly imbued with ideologically inflected understandings of the war. Decades ago, Michael Frisch criticized the reliance of the producers of the PBS series Vietnam: A Television History, broadcast in 1983, on the recorded remembrances of those who “were there,” a move that seemed to grant “experience” sole interpretive authority. Yet it turns out that, unbeknownst to the readers, the raw experience that the oral narrative collections offered could not always be taken at face value. Some of the stories were heavily edited by the authors of the volumes in which they appeared.Footnote ³⁸ Some were highly rehearsed and refined, part of a repertoire of stories recycled by numerous narrators.Footnote ³⁹

Among the most skillful purveyors of these pieces of folklore were fake Vietnam veterans, or “wannabes,” who exaggerated and falsified their experiences in Vietnam. Some individuals even claimed to be Vietnam veterans although they had not served in Vietnam at all. Such wannabes tended to explain the course of their lives as the result of their experiences in Vietnam, and their narratives often focused on “hot-button” subjects, including traumatogenic horrors and atrocity tales, which help to provide rationalizations for unfulfilled and unsuccessful postservice careers. For example, in Wallace Terry’s Bloods, the Vietnam veteran Harold Bryant, who falsified the basic facts about his tour of duty, delivers the standard litany of horror stories: burning villages, mutilating enemy corpses, throwing captives out of helicopters, raping women.Footnote ⁴⁰ Bryant knew a good story when he heard one: he told a story of ingeniously tying a rope around the waist of a soldier who had the misfortune of stepping on the plunger of a “Bouncing Betty” antipersonnel mine. He and his friends yank the soldier away and the mine springs up and explodes harmlessly.

This story is part of the standard repertoire of lore surrounding Vietnam War service that numerous (genuine and fake) veterans have told and retold.Footnote ⁴¹ I myself once heard the same story from a homeless man who used to haunt the environs of the California Vietnam Veterans Memorial. He even showed me a scar on his leg supposedly made by a piece of shrapnel from the mine. Narrators highly attuned to the interests and attention of their listeners and not restricted by the mere happenstance of actual events could home in on tales that aroused their listeners’ pity and horror; and they could refine the stories through multiple retellings to maximize the stories’ capacity to rivet an audience.

Despite its oddness, the phenomenon of the fake veteran is not to be lightly dismissed. Wannabes’ stories are selected because they convey moral and psychological truths about the Vietnam War – what the author Tim O’Brien describes as the “story truth” as opposed to the “happening truth.” Because of the preexisting negative storyline about the Vietnam War, many of the stories involve grotesque and morally questionable acts. As the military sociologist Charles Moskos said, atrocity stories from Vietnam were the functional equivalent of stories of heroism out of World War II. They gave the stories a meaning that resonated with the people back home. But atrocity stories do not exhaust the morally meaningful parables in oral histories. For example, Bloods contains contrasting stories about race. They reveal the racism that the African American troops encountered on bases in Vietnam, but such events act as a foil for contrasting stories in which Black and white troops in combat forge bonds of brotherhood overcoming racial differences.Footnote ⁴² These stories are like biblical parables, condensing in them resonant meanings: the story of America’s struggles not just in foreign wars, but also the course of its struggles with the history of racial injustice. If you want to see a catalog of received knowledge and common sense about the war, and if you want to see the United States talk to itself about its past, present, and future, then find that life world in its purest form in the words of the practiced storytellers, including “veterans” who were never in Vietnam.

Understandably, those who really did risk their lives by serving in Vietnam resented the phonies for assuming the role of spokespeople. The wish to contest “wannabe” stories resulted in determined efforts to expose the fakes in oral history collections and elsewhere – which in turn led to the passage of a law prohibiting unjustified claims of having been awarded military decorations, the “Stolen Valor Act.”Footnote ⁴³ The significance of the “wannabe” phenomenon may lie in its revelation that Vietnam veteran identity had assumed a stereotypic character that fake veterans could imitate; and that the Vietnam War story had taken on conventional forms, such that skilled, nonveteran practitioners could mimic it and spin it into elaborations and variations.

In the readiness of filmmakers, however, to treat veterans as founts of authentic knowledge and judgment, little has changed. Three decades after the broadcast of its first television series about the war, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) screened another major documentary about the war, The Vietnam War, coproduced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.Footnote ⁴⁴ Once again, the picture is filled with veterans talking about what they saw and did in Vietnam. Deliberately eschewing on-screen historians for commentary, the filmmakers depend on veteran narrators to provide historical interpretations of US strategy.

The preference for the on-screen commentary of veterans, rather than nonveteran scholars and experts, leads to some incongruities. A professional historian offers his distinctive and controversial interpretation of the course of the war, his presence on screen justified because he is a Vietnam veteran; conversely, a nonhistorian veteran is licensed to pronounce his judgment of the inner workings of the Johnson administration. The historian Lewis Sorley, speaking not as a scholarly researcher but as a veteran, his on-screen credential the designation “Army” below his name, offers a questionable judgment about the superiority of US strategy after 1969 – ignoring the fact that his service in Vietnam considerably preceded the period about which he pronounces his views to the camera. Karl Marlantes, a marine lieutenant in Vietnam, is licensed to express a judgment about US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s actions in keeping his doubts about the nation’s war policy private, which McNamara revealed in a memoir years after the war.Footnote ⁴⁵ The filmmakers authorize both to provide military–historical commentaries on the principle that only Vietnam veterans are entitled to offer such judgments, even though the particular topics cited lie outside the scope of their personal experience as eyewitnesses in Vietnam.

Like Caputo and Webb, Marlantes was a platoon commander in Vietnam. In his novel Matterhorn, his writing is powerfully vivid. As his predecessor authors do, he conveys the visceral intensity of combat; he captures the malaise, anxiety, and emptiness of the life of a leader, under pressure from ignorant and career-driven higher officers, and worried for the men whose lives depend on his decisions. Like other veteran writers, Marlantes measures the gap in comprehension between those who were there and those who stayed home. As one marine says to Mellas, the central character: “You think someone’s going to understand how you feel about being in the bush? I mean even if they’re like you in every way, you really think they’re going to understand what it’s like out here?”Footnote ⁴⁶ In Marlantes’ writing, the physical degradation that the troops suffered descends to its nadir: he returns again and again to the oozing mixture of blood, pus, and jungle rot through which the foot soldiers squelch, their ulcerated flesh raw with blisters and sores. Yet the moral universe he pictures has not moved far from Caputo’s and Webb’s: the dramatic center of the narrative concerns the troops’ wish to frag the superiors who care nothing for the lives of those they command. The predominant feeling tone of veterans’ experience remains a plaintive mixture of rage and melancholy as Marlantes documents the fruitless and unrewarded sacrifices the troops make, despite their unworthy commanders and an uncaring nation.

Although the producers of the PBS documentary series rely on Marlantes to pronounce on the wisdom of US military policy, Marlantes never claimed to be a military theorist or strategic thinker – albeit he is an astute judge of the impact of the Vietnam War on American society. Limited as a guide to policymaking, Marlantes’ voice – and those of many of the other veterans selected for inclusion by Burns and Novick – is a fascinating index of the way that received truths about the Vietnam War have gathered conviction and authority. If one wants further to understand how a nation comes to terms with the past and settles on commonsense understandings of it, one might study the collective wisdom that the veteran narrators in The Vietnam War recite.

Figure 24.1 The crowd lining the route of the dedication parade for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, expressing the “welcome home” the memorial was intended to symbolize (November 1982).

Source: Wally McNamee / Contributor / Corbis Historical / Getty Images.

The Burns/Novick documentary series begins with Marlantes repeating the familiar complaint about the silencing of Vietnam veterans. “For years nobody talked about Vietnam,” he says. He and another former marine were friends for years before either of them told the other that they had served in Vietnam. Marlantes repeats another piece of folklore, widely believed but convincingly discredited, that he and other veterans were spat on by antiwar protesters when they came back from Vietnam. Although it is impossible now to go back in time and verify whether such events occurred, the scholar Jerry Lembcke has shown that, with one exception, there were no contemporaneous accounts of such mistreatment of veterans when they returned from the war. The tales of having been spat on began to circulate years afterwards, reflecting the psychological truths about the strained relations between veterans and their compatriots, irrespective of how many spitting incidents actually occurred.Footnote ⁴⁷

Reconciliation … and Unfinished Business

Reconciliation between those who fought the war and their compatriots who did not serve in Vietnam has been uneven and incomplete, and the nation’s coming to terms with the aftermath of the Vietnam War has likewise followed a twisting path. Examples of the unfinished business that remained from the war years include the relations between the United States and Vietnam and the health problems of those exposed to chemical defoliants used by the United States’ forces in Vietnam.

The moves to normalize relations between the United States and Vietnam began with a “road map” issued by the administration of President George H. W. Bush and accelerated during the administration of his successor, Bill Clinton. But a major obstacle to the restoration of diplomatic relations was the belief that American POWs, or those listed as missing in action (MIA), were still held captive in Southeast Asia. A conspiracy theory underlay this belief: according to one version, when Richard Nixon negotiated a peace agreement with North Vietnam in 1973, he agreed to pay a massive sum of money to America’s former communist enemy, which the Vietnamese government regarded as “reparations.” Mistrusting Nixon, the North Vietnamese supposedly kept a number of American military captives to guarantee that the payment would be made. Conspiracy theorists believe that when Nixon resigned from the presidency, the deal fell through and the North Vietnamese, unwilling to admit that they still held American prisoners, secretly held on to them. President Reagan had played into and exploited this belief when his administration seemed to give it credence. He himself undertook to write “no final chapter” until any Americans being held against their will came home.Footnote ⁴⁸

H. Bruce Franklin reports that in a poll taken in 1991, over two-thirds of the respondents believed that there were still live POWs in Southeast Asia. It is understandable that family members harbored this irrational belief, because they did not wish to accept that those listed as MIA had died. They formed the core of a group who asserted that the war was not over “until the last man comes home.”Footnote ⁴⁹ This belief served as the basis for the plot situations of “revenge movies” such as Uncommon Valor, Rambo: First Blood, Part II, and Missing in Action in which Americans returned to Southeast Asia on missions to rescue their brothers-in-arms who remain in communist hands.Footnote ⁵⁰ In Rambo, the eponymous hero (Sylvester Stallone) asks, “Do we get to win this time?” Rambo succeeds in finding American captives, but it turns out that the US government operatives planning his mission intended it to fail in order to discredit the idea that there were live prisoners left in Indochina and thereby to put the issue to bed. An unscrupulous American intelligence operative tries to sabotage the mission, but Rambo succeeds in returning the captives to friendly territory. The story has multiple attractions for those who wish to take refuge from historical reality: Rambo vindicates the martial prowess of the American fighting man, refights the war in microcosm, and proves that victory was thwarted the last time only because of a lack of will to win.

Figure 24.2 President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan walk along the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Veterans Day, 1988. Observing a popular custom, they leave a note there – addressed to their “young friends” whose names are inscribed on the wall.

Source: Diana Walker / Contributor / The Chronicle Collection / Getty Images.

The POW/MIA issue was nurtured by rightwing politicians and unscrupulous opportunists as a means of mobilizing resentment against America’s former enemy, as though by keeping the war alive the nation could indefinitely defer an admission of defeat. Disgruntled veterans’ grievances slowed the normalization of relations between the former belligerents, the United States and Vietnam. These old resentments were exploited for political purposes: the POW/MIA issue was the cornerstone of the third-party presidential candidacy of H. Ross Perot in 1992.

Clinton ended the trade embargo against Vietnam in February 1994 and began low-level diplomatic contacts. Diplomatic relations between the United States and Vietnam were normalized in 1995, with the opening of a US Embassy in Hanoi in August of that year. Senator John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran and former antiwar activist, said that normalizing diplomatic relations with Vietnam would “close the book on the pain and anguish of the war and heal the wounds of the nation and help us to put it behind us once and for all.” In 2001, the two countries agreed on a bilateral trade deal. By 2016, when US President Barack Obama visited Vietnam to celebrate the Comprehensive Partnership between the two countries, Vietnam had become the United States’ fastest-growing trading partner. In January 2018, an official visit to Vietnam by Secretary of Defense James Mattis showed how far the relationship between the former adversaries had developed. It occasioned an affirmation of the “enhance[d] defense cooperation” between the United States and Vietnam, with a focus on maritime security, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, and peacekeeping operations. In 2019, US President Donald Trump held up Vietnam as an economic success story that communist North Korea would do well to emulate.Footnote ⁵¹

As relations between the countries warmed, the POW/MIA issue faded from view. However, a lasting legacy of this episode is the congressional mandate since 1990 to fly the POW/MIA flag at military installations, memorials, and government buildings. The hard fact, though, is that no live prisoners have returned from Southeast Asia, and the search for MIAs gave way to the recovery, with Vietnamese assistance, of the remains of US casualties. The leading organization representing Vietnam veterans, Vietnam Veterans of America, now demands the fullest possible accounting of those still listed as MIA and the repatriation of the remains of Americans, rather than campaigning for the return of live POW/MIAs.

As relations between the United States and Vietnam became closer, many veterans made return trips to the battlefields where they once fought. They often report that their former enemies show them no animosity. Indeed, many American and Vietnamese veterans of the war have expressed mutual respect through these encounters. American organizations, some led by Vietnam veterans, have undertaken humanitarian projects in Vietnam. The visits also perform important functions in coming to terms with the legacy of the war and bringing about reconciliation between the former enemies. The Fund for Reconciliation and Development undertook a trip to Sơn Mỹ (Mỹ Lai) in March 2018 to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre.Footnote ⁵²

There is still much unfinished business left over from the war. Veterans claimed that their health was damaged by exposure to deadly contaminants found in the herbicide Agent Orange that US aircraft had sprayed widely in Vietnam in order to deny the enemy ground cover. Because the veterans were prevented by law from suing the US government, they engaged in a major class-action lawsuit to make a claim for compensation against the chemical companies that had manufactured the defoliant; others renewed the lawsuit after a settlement was reached in the first case. In a parallel move, Vietnam veterans demanded treatment through the government-provided health-care system for conditions they believed resulted from their exposure to the chemical defoliant. Initially resistant to recognizing these health effects, the government ultimately recognized a number of conditions as presumptively arising from exposure to Agent Orange.Footnote ⁵³

The ongoing ill-health resulting from Agent Orange exposure meant that, for some veterans, the war was not over on their return to the United States. Underlining this point, Agent Orange affected male fertility and inflicted genetic damage on the children of Vietnam veterans. Agent Orange was one of the issues that added to the sense of grievance and resentment many Vietnam veterans carried, a sense of felt injustice remaining the predominant theme of veteran–governmental and veteran–societal relations, running the gamut of complaints from the POW/MIA myth to the very real problems of PTSD and chemical poisoning. Because of the involvement of chemical companies in the lawsuit, the complaints in this case also carried an anticorporate shading. The issue also affected relations between Vietnam and the United States, given that much of Vietnam suffered contamination, and many inhabitants of Vietnam were exposed to it for life rather than for the relatively brief period of an American soldier’s tour of duty. While tens of thousands of American veterans are believed to have been exposed to Agent Orange, millions of Vietnamese have been so exposed.Footnote ⁵⁴ This situation has spurred American organizations to demand redress for Vietnamese people whose land was poisoned and who continue to suffer the ill-effects of exposure to toxins decades after the war ended for others.

Conclusion

To contemplate the harm done to Vietnam by American forces reminds us of another unresolved matter: the suspicion on the part of a vast number of Americans that deliberate and indiscriminate violence by American troops against Vietnamese civilians was commonplace during the war. In the first decade of the new millennium, the work of investigative journalists uncovered long-suppressed knowledge about the incidence of American-perpetrated atrocities during the Vietnam War. One study concentrated on the actions of a small unit, the “Tiger Force,” whose crimes had been investigated during the war years, although the results of the investigation were buried until reporters from the Toledo Blade dug into the matter; another study looked at the broader findings of the war-era Vietnam War Crimes Working Group. The government’s years-long hiding of these findings tended to reinforce the view that unreported atrocities had taken place in Vietnam and been covered up, and thus seemed to bear out the wartime charge by Vietnam Veterans Against the War that the indiscriminate or deliberate killing of civilians was “standard operating procedure” in Vietnam. This claim remains highly contested by veterans who try to reject the stigma of wrongdoing arising from the war. The reports of war crimes can be dismissed as anecdotal and hence unrepresentative, but the same applies to the reports by blameless veterans that no crimes took place in their units. The fact that crimes took place in one unit does not prove that they took place in every unit; by the same token, one cannot generalize from the absence of crimes in any particular unit. The association between the Vietnam War and American-perpetrated atrocities will likely never be dissipated, understandably leading to a reflex of shame and aversion that Reagan was unable to exorcize, no matter how much he insisted that the war was a “noble cause.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Or will these feelings one day become so amorphous, detached from factual knowledge, that atrocities will cease to sting the conscience, and the war itself will cease to horrify and to warn? The Gallup Organization has periodically asked national samples of the public whether they believe that the Vietnam War was a mistake. As we saw at the start of this chapter, over the decades a steady two-thirds to three-quarters of the public responded that they believed the war was a mistake. Although that finding was broadly borne out by the poll taken in 2013, there was one exception. While all the other age cohorts agreed that the Vietnam War was a mistake, one group – those aged 18 to 29 – disagreed, albeit by a small margin. The Gallup researchers reported, “Young adults are the only age group in which a majority says the Vietnam War was not a mistake (51 percent) – perhaps because they have no personal memory of the conflict.”Footnote ⁵⁶ It may be, therefore, that we are beginning to witness a generational shift in the divided memories of the war. Although the nation may never have truly “healed” from the war, as the planners of Vietnam veterans’ memorials hoped, it may finally be forgetting. As the memory of the war descends down the generations, our shared culture has become the repository for the commonsense knowledge about the war. That common sense is not fixed in stone: it is as malleable as the minds of the population whose thoughts it occupies. We all become the custodians of that knowledge, and our thoughts and feelings will continue to mold the contours of the Vietnam War in American culture.

It had been four years since US President George W. Bush led the nation into war against Iraq, contending that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction ready to launch at an hour’s notice. Those weapons were never found, and boasts of “mission accomplished” rapidly gave way to fears of a new Vietnam War. As public disenchantment reached heights not seen since those years of agonizing futility, the president addressed the 2007 Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) convention to rally support with a warning and a promise: “This enemy is dangerous; this enemy is determined; and this enemy will be defeated.”Footnote ¹ US President Lyndon Johnson had said the same thing in almost the same words. Finally, his audience had stopped listening. Now, the immediate danger to the Bush White House was a new congressional attempt to limit presidential freedom of action, just as had happened at the end of the Vietnam War. Even before the Democrats gained narrow majorities in both the Senate and House in the 2006 midterm elections, Congress had created a ten-person “Iraq Study Group” (ISG) of notables to look at the war with “fresh eyes” – code words for a mandate to find a way out of a new stalemated war.

Prior to the Vietnam years such an initiative would have been unthinkable. In 1968, after three years of war, President Johnson felt compelled to call into session a “Council of Cold War Wise Men.” Previously, they had told him to stay the course. Now, they warned it was time to think about how to get the nation out of a war gone so terribly wrong.Footnote ² In 2006, this new council of foreign policy elders, the ISG, cochaired by former US Secretary of State James Baker and Democrat Lee Hamilton, a longtime member of the House of Representatives and vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, even more forcefully challenged White House prerogatives to conduct a war just as it saw fit. “Many Americans are dissatisfied, not just with the situation in Iraq but with the state of our political debate regarding Iraq,” read the covering letter accompanying its report. “Our political leaders must build a bipartisan approach to bring a responsible conclusion to what is now a lengthy and costly war. … Our leaders must be candid and forthright with the American people in order to win their support.”Footnote ³ Those words fairly screamed “Vietnam” and the devastating “credibility gap” that had undercut LBJ’s war messages and now threatened George W. Bush. Making matters worse, ISG cochair James Baker had been President George H. W. Bush’s secretary of state and close confidant when the elder Bush celebrated victory in Gulf War I (1991) as sounding the death knell of the “Vietnam syndrome” – the end of fears about military actions leading to quagmires in far-off countries.Footnote ⁴

“It’s a proud day for America,” Bush Sr. had declared, announcing victory in the brief war. “And, by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” Vietnam had been fought the wrong way, he said, repeating the political rewriting of the war’s history since Saigon fell in 1975. But this time was different. “We promised you’d be given the means to fight,” he congratulated American soldiers – and himself. “We promised not to look over your shoulder. We promised this would not be another Vietnam. And we kept that promise.” Then came a bold assurance: “The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.”Footnote ⁵ Those were heady days. The Cold War had been won, and the United States could stop having bad dreams about what had happened in Vietnam. In this “new world order” the old questions about overreach no longer mattered. But then came Iraq. By 2007, the exorcism rite had been discredited, and policy elites were as divided as at the end of the Vietnam War.Footnote ⁶ Indeed, only a few weeks into the second Iraq War in 2003, the specter reappeared, with visions of joyous Baghdad citizens pulling down statues of Saddam Hussein replaced by dark clouds rising out of the desert, the very place Bush’s father had said the syndrome had been buried.

Bush Jr. did not deny the resurgence of the Vietnam specter in his speech. The danger was not military defeat, however, but how it had once eroded the American will to stay the course in Vietnam. Despite his own father’s previous assertion, the specter of Vietnam had haunted the president from the outset. Now, he would blame its reappearance on a British novel, The Quiet American.Footnote ⁷ He began his VFW speech by praising the veterans for saving Asia. “Today’s dynamic and hopeful Asia – a region that brings us countless benefits – would not have been possible without America’s presence and perseverance. It would not have been possible without the veterans in this hall today. And I thank you for your service. [Applause.]”

It might not have happened if the United States had faltered. At key moments after World War II, critics and doubters had dismissed American policy in Asia as “hopeless and naïve.” But they had not deterred Washington policymakers, except in Vietnam, where Americans essentially gave in to unwarranted fears. The critics produced a tragedy for the Vietnamese people when Saigon fell to the communists. How did that happen? Who created the Vietnam specter? A British novelist created the Vietnam specter even before any American soldier or marine landed on the beaches at Đà Nẵng! “In 1955, long before the United States entered the war,” he continued, “Graham Greene wrote a novel called The Quiet American. It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent, Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism – and dangerous naïveté. Another character describes Alden this way: ‘I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.’”

As American involvement deepened, with no resolution in sight, Bush went on, “the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam.” Misguided critics insisted there would be no tragic consequences for the Vietnamese if we pulled out. They were wrong. “Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left.” But the price of America’s withdrawal could not be ignored, and it “was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘reeducation camps,’ and ‘killing fields.’”Footnote ⁸ If enough people believed Graham Greene’s version of history and stopped believing in the American mission, then it could indeed unnerve the nation at this critical moment in “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” and lead to disaster in the Middle East. Hence Greene’s portrait of Alden Pyle must be replaced with a narrative of American policy in Asia that would support the Iraq effort, demonstrate that the nation’s policy was neither naïve nor destructive, as the novelist had falsely portrayed it, and rally the country against pulling out of Iraq before the enemy was defeated and the “mission” there was “accomplished.”Footnote ⁹

The burden of Bush Jr.’s comments about Graham Greene echoed the line put forward by “lost victory” advocates of an alternative history of the war, notably President Ronald Reagan: “We continue to talk about losing that war,” he told a press conference on April 18, 1985, about a week before the tenth anniversary of Saigon’s fall. “We didn’t lose that war. We won virtually every engagement.” Instead, “When the war was over and when we’d come home, that’s when we’d lost the war.” The blame fell on the North Vietnamese for violating the peace agreement, but more so on domestic opponents of the war in the media and elsewhere. Never again, he said, must young men be sent out to fight for “a cause that we’re unwilling to win. And that was the great tragedy – that was the great disgrace, to me, of Vietnam – that they were fed into this meatgrinder, and yet, no one had any intention of allowing victory.”Footnote ¹⁰

It was true that Greene’s novel in film adaptations illustrated how doubts had replaced confidence in the American mission. The original Hollywood version in 1958 starred World War II hero Audie Murphy – the war’s most decorated soldier – as Alden Pyle. In this version Pyle was not a secret US government agent, as in Greene’s novel, but a private citizen hoping to provide aid to anticommunist, anticolonial forces, the “Third Way.” Murphy was a perfect choice for the role of a dedicated American, like those in Kennedy’s Peace Corps at the height of the Cold War. The role of the jaded British journalist, Fowler, was played by Michael Redgrave in this version, and then by Michael Caine in the 2002 remake, which was truer to Greene’s narrative. Alden Pyle’s character is the only one that changes. Now played by Brendan Fraser as a man fully engaged in the “domino theory” version of the stakes in Vietnam, Pyle was willing to sacrifice Vietnamese lives to see that the communist-led Việt Minh forces did not win.Footnote ¹¹

In some ways, a better fit for Bush’s hero, however, would have been John Rambo. Surely more of those in the VFW audience knew about him. In a series of three films beginning in the 1980s promoting the legends about mistreated and misunderstood Vietnam veterans, John Rambo stood tall, holding off local police forces who bullied him into resistance by using his guerrilla warfare training. Rambo quickly spawned a popular following as an indomitable fighter. In the 1985 sequel, Rambo: First Blood Part II, the hero, now in prison, is offered a pardon by his old commanding officer if he will return to Vietnam to rescue US POWs supposedly still held captive by the “enemy.” Played by Sylvester Stallone, Rambo replies in an instantly famous plea that echoes and amplifies the “lost victory” legend, coated with bitter sarcasm, “Sir, do we get to win this time?”Footnote ¹²

The First Post-Vietnam Presidents: Ford and Carter

The aftermath of the war did not begin this way. US Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter attempted to appeal to a different side of what it meant to come to terms with defeat. But the “lost victory” legend fit too well with a mythic American past, as Ronald Reagan understood very well, as he began his quest for the presidency in those immediate post-Vietnam years by promoting John Rambo’s version of history. Still, Gerald Ford tried. Ford never had to face a presidential election campaign and explain his positions to a nationwide electorate. His predecessor, Richard M. Nixon, had suggested in the 1968 campaign that he had a “plan” to end the war. That was a neat way to avoid specifics, and he squeaked through to the White House. Whatever self-created fantasies he occasionally projected about a military victory, Nixon knew it was not on the cards. He told his advisors, as he entered the presidential campaign, “I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no way to win the war. But we can’t say that, of course. In fact, we have to seem to say the opposite, just to keep some degree of bargaining leverage.” He did not fear that people would hold up copies of The Quiet American, but that such deceptions would be revealed.Footnote ¹³

Nixon’s plan turned out to be an irreversible drawdown of troops – agonizingly slow as it was – accompanied by the sound and fury of bombing raids that exceeded all that had gone before. Critics likened what he did to a Western desperado backing out the saloon door with six-guns blazing. Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, because the floodwaters from Watergate could no longer be contained, making Vice-President Gerald Ford heir to a lost cause. But Nixon also left behind the “opening” to China that undercut the original rationale for the war, and Ford was able to walk through it even as the Saigon regime crumbled into broken pieces all around him.

Upon becoming president, Ford declared, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.” “Our Constitution works,” he said. “Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.” Like Nixon, he knew – and had known for a long time – that Vietnam was a lost cause. Despite his doubts, all through his years in Congress, Representative Gerry Ford had been a staunch supporter of the war. There was none stronger: “I am unequivocally opposed to retreat and withdrawal from Southeast Asia,” he wrote to a constituent in 1965, “which would mean withdrawal to Pearl Harbor.” As the years went by and the war deepened into a stalemate, like other Republicans he blamed Lyndon Johnson’s “mismanagement” for the nation’s predicament.Footnote ¹⁴

Those claims would have a malign impact on American politics. Ford admitted as much in interviews, long after his presidency, in 2004 and 2005, just as pressure built on President Bush over the Iraq War. He complained to Bob Woodward that he had inherited the problem and was obligated “on behalf of the country to try and solve the damn thing.” As early as 1953, he came away from a fact-finding visit to Saigon filled with doubts. “All these French generals and colonels were dressed up here out in Saigon and telling me how they were gonna win the war against the Vietnamese.” He continued:

None of his predecessors or their top advisors, he charged, ever told the truth about the situation. “I hope we never live through another era like that in American history. … The results were very disillusioning.”Footnote ¹⁶

Few American troops were still in Vietnam when Ford took the oath of office. The 1973 War Powers Resolution, enacted over Nixon’s veto, prohibited any new US combat activity anywhere in Southeast Asia unless authorized by a formal declaration of war. Ford had little choice now but to begin thinking about a postwar healing process.

Years later the War Powers Resolution became a big concern during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when Bush defenders bristled at the congressional initiative in creating the ISG. But for now, it gave Ford a freer hand to begin leading the nation away from recriminations and finger-pointing. He made a good start, but many things combined to undo succeeding presidential initiatives. Nine days into his presidency, he addressed the VFW, asking those in attendance to understand that his position was not one of facing “the terrible decisions of a foreign war.” Instead, “like President Truman and President Lincoln [I] … found on my desk, where the buck stops, the urgent problem of how to bind up the Nation’s wounds. And I intend to do that.” While he opposed unconditional amnesty for draft evaders, he went on, there was a more important imperative guiding his decisions right from his first moments as president: “I acknowledged a Power, higher than the people, Who commands not only righteousness but love, not only justice but mercy.”

The requirements for “earned reentry without penalty for draft evasion” were never entirely clear in terms of what had to be done by a recipient, and brought criticism both from those who pursued the chimera of the missing in action (MIA) and from the antiwar spokespersons for the men who had followed the road to Canada rather than be drafted into the jungle trails of Vietnam. It was indeed a remarkable statement to make at that moment to that audience. The response to this offer was low, however, with only a few thousand applicants, and the program was discarded after only twelve months.Footnote ¹⁷

Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon for Watergate crimes a month after he took office drew a similar response. Other Vietnam-related issues swarmed all around the White House like angry bees. There was the problem of what to do about the military aid Nixon had promised Saigon, and the promises of huge reconstruction aid for Hanoi if it agreed to sign the 1973 Paris Peace Accords. The fall of Saigon rendered that offer moot – or did it? Ford did not talk about these “debts” to the VFW as he finished his address, pledging (as was usual in such talks) to maintain military readiness “and the strength of our will.” “America is not the policeman of the world, but we continue to be the backbone of a free world collective security setup.”Footnote ¹⁸

That the United States had lost its nerve sometime in the last phases of the Vietnam War quickly emerged as a constant preoccupation for a rising group of neoconservatives down to the end of the Cold War – and after. Even in the last weeks before the final defeat, Ford was asked at a press conference the sort of question that pursued presidents who did not endorse the “lost victory” narrative: “Mr. President, are you ready to accept a communist takeover of South Vietnam and Cambodia?” This was a variation on the famous sardonic quip: “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” But there was nothing funny about it for Ford. He answered as best he could: “I would hope that that would not take place in either case. My whole Congressional life in recent years was aimed at avoiding it. My complete efforts as President of the United States were aimed at avoiding that.”Footnote ¹⁹

The only way out of the trap was to bring in a third factor – Congress’ failure to aid the Saigon regime with military supplies. Or Congress and the antiwar “hysteria.” Watergate survivor Henry Kissinger, still secretary of state and national security advisor all-in-one, had hoped a decent interval would at least save the political situation at home. If the United States supplied the aid it had promised, he preached, and then the war was lost in a year or two – then that outcome would be on the South Vietnamese themselves. But there would be no decent interval.

On April 23, 1975, Ford went to New Orleans to deliver an address at Tulane University. It was very much in the spirit of his VFW talk the previous August. After a few introductory remarks, he noted that the battle of New Orleans in January 1815 had been a great victory over the British. This victory should be remembered and celebrated – even though it came two weeks after the signing of the armistice ending the War of 1812. The nation had suffered “a measure of defeat” in that war, including the capture and burning of Washington, but the battle of New Orleans “was a powerful restorative to our national pride.” Today, he went on, the United States could also regain the pride that existed before Vietnam. But it could not be achieved “by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.” He added:

Together, the VFW and Tulane speeches were examples of strong presidential leadership at a difficult moment. Yet they both failed to prevent the bitter feelings that followed the fall of Saigon one week later, on April 30, 1975. Even before that date, Ford faced a powerful challenge for the Republican nomination the following year from former California Governor Ronald Reagan. Reagan attacked Kissinger and Ford for promoting détente with the Soviet Union, which presumably only weakened the United States’ global standing.

Then Reagan’s handlers seized on an even more visceral issue that would handicap presidential efforts to “stop refighting the battles” of the past. Kissinger, Nixon, and Ford, in their haste to end the war, it was charged, had left thousands of Americans behind in prison camps. The POW/MIA question had the longest staying power in modern American politics for those who wanted to refight the Vietnam War – and use war casualties to aid in the quest for political power. And it quickly got out of control. In the 1970s, a POW wife had developed a black-and-white flag with silhouettes of a man next to a watchtower and a barbed-wire fence, with the words “You are not forgotten.” Congress then mandated that it be flown over public buildings six days a year. It remains the only flag that may be flown with the Stars and Stripes over the White House. More important, perhaps, it is still flown every day on thousands of businesses and public buildings across the United States.Footnote ²¹

The POW/MIA legend soon spread with those who promoted false reports of sightings of American POWs in Laos, and the cruel hoaxes perpetrated on families of MIAs, corrupt politicians, the wildest schemes of adventurers. It fostered a “Rambo Faction” in Congress that pushed these cruel deceptions past the last boundaries of decency. It took twenty years and the bipartisan leadership of Senators John Kerry and John McCain to finally exorcize that evil nightmare foisted on American families.Footnote ²²

Yet its symbol is still there when one drives into a gas station or seeks a book at a library. Not everywhere, but still there, like the Cheshire cat’s grin in Alice in Wonderland. Ford had been the first to be trapped by the issue. He made some efforts in the direction of beginning negotiations with Hanoi, but the question was always: Who would go first? The new Vietnamese government wanted to cash Nixon’s promises of reconstruction aid, while Washington countered that supposed violations of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords and Hanoi’s failure to account for MIAs rendered the aid promises inoperable. Diplomatic recognition would only “dignify and reward their posture of linking an accounting of our men to our providing them money,” said Ford, and he would not do it.Footnote ²³

Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter came into the White House in 1977 on a wave of anti-Washington sentiment. He attempted to have it both ways in dealing with the Vietnam legacy. In their third presidential debate, Carter had followed Ford’s lead in opposing Vietnam’s admission to the United Nations (UN) – but he went further, to castigate the president for not creating an MIA task force. He promised that, if elected, he would send a fact-finding mission to Vietnam. On the other hand, he pursued Ford’s quest to stop refighting the Vietnam War in a much-publicized speech at Notre Dame and with a new offer of pardons for draft evaders. At the university’s commencement address on May 22, 1977, he said that the United States “can” have a foreign policy “that is democratic, that is based on fundamental values, and that uses power and influence.” “We can also have a foreign policy that the American people both support and, for a change, know about and understand.”Footnote ²⁴

The obvious reference to past White House duplicity could be read two ways: either that it was true what Reagan and his supporters said about running out on American soldiers left behind – or that from the beginning the war had been fraught with deception. As if on cue, Robert Aldrich’s 1977 film, Twilight’s Last Gleaming, portrayed an enraged air force colonel – played by iconic star Burt Lancaster – who “captures” a missile silo and threatens to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile attack on Russia unless President Stevens reads on national television a top-secret memo that demonstrated policymakers knew the war was unwinnable almost from the start. When Stevens finally agrees to do this, his advisors – the bluest of political bluebloods in the “Establishment” – decide the president must be sacrificed to maintain the fiction and save the country, as they know and love it. Betrayed by his closest advisors, Stevens is shot and killed by a sniper. There is no happy ending.Footnote ²⁵

It was in the Notre Dame speech that Carter also said, “Soviet expansion was almost inevitable” after World War II, a very bad thing to say in any speech, made much worse by adding that as a result of the defeat in Vietnam “we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism” that governed the actions of policymakers. At least that is what most headlines about the speech highlighted. What he actually said at Notre Dame was: “Being confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear.”Footnote ²⁶

Still, no real moves toward resolving matters with the new government of Vietnam succeeded in the four years Carter attempted to “crisis manage” challenges presented by something new under the economic sun, “stagflation,” along with the Soviet move into Afghanistan in 1979, and (worst of all) the Iranian hostage crisis. Along this rocky way, the MIA mission he ordered to Southeast Asia essentially got lost amidst all the turmoil, while National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski sought to play the China card against the Soviet Union, pushing Vietnam aside. China skillfully played its own “American Card,” writes historian Walter LaFeber, using a visit by paramount leader Deng Xiaoping to the United States in early 1979 as a prelude of sorts for Beijing’s invasion of Vietnam later that year to make it appear that Washington was a silent partner in the attack on Moscow’s “ally” in Southeast Asia. The episode ended badly for the Chinese, but little changed otherwise.Footnote ²⁷

The next year brought the roof down on the Carter administration. In response to the American willingness to take in the deposed shah of Iran so that he might receive expert medical treatment, angry Iranian students seized the US Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, and held hostage some fifty-two diplomats. The media portrayed this as a major crisis, with newscasters on all networks constantly calling attention to Washington’s inability to do anything about the outrage, which went on for more than a year. The next month saw the Soviet military move into Afghanistan in an attempt to restore a government friendly to Moscow, an old-style colonial-like adventure that ended instead with the collapse of the Soviet empire and the downfall of the Communist Party.Footnote ²⁸

In response to Soviet military action, Carter had declared détente was over, ordered the creation of a Rapid Deployment Force to meet the danger, and announced a new “Carter Doctrine” purposely patterned after the 1947 Truman Doctrine about Greece and Turkey, warning that any attempt now by the Soviets to gain control of the Persian Gulf would be regarded as an attack on vital American interests and would “be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” But it was all just talk, jeered Carter’s critics. The hostages were still held prisoner, and America’s credibility had suffered another blow. With vivid memories of Americans fleeing Vietnam from Saigon rooftops and scrambling for the last flights out of Tân Sơn Nhất Air Base as shells fell on the runways, it seemed as though there was no end to national humiliation. Days after the hostage crisis began, ABC devoted a nightly broadcast on the situation: The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage. Anchored by Ted Koppel, the show eventually became Nightline.Footnote ²⁹ Carter did not help himself much by declaring that he would not leave the White House grounds for political campaigning until the hostages were freed. That vow only emphasized the nation’s supposed paralysis.

The intense pressure on Carter to “do something!” suggested another possible retreat along the lines of Vietnam. The president called on Vietnam hero Colonel Charlie Beckwith to lead a mission to rescue the hostages. Beckwith was an early volunteer for the Army Special Forces, perhaps better known as the Green Berets, an elite unit that first saw major action in Vietnam. In 1965, (then) Major Beckwith’s men rescued a small force of Green Berets trapped by thousands of enemy troops at Plei Me. The next year he was wounded and nearly killed while directing another rescue operation. Promoted to battalion commander, he was then assigned to teach at the Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Beckwith’s exploits served as a kind of factual counterpoint to another legend-creating film starring John Wayne, The Green Berets, wherein Wayne, in an epilogue to his long career as a rawhide, tough Western hero, rappels down a mountainside with a Vietnamese woman on his back to save her from the communists, among other exploits, thus repudiating the Graham Greene version of American neo-imperialist intentions. The Green Berets was a great commercial success, probably in tribute to Wayne’s career; however, little of it resembled the real war in and over Vietnam. In time – the movie was released in 1968 – it added more stuffing to the “lost victory” myth.Footnote ³⁰

The president asked Beckwith to put into operation what had been learned in Vietnam to take charge of the rescue operation to free the hostages and fly them home. In late April 1980, a mission of eight helicopters attempted the feat. Everything went wrong. Three of the eight failed, and after eight Americans were killed in a collision of one of the helicopters with a C-130 transport airplane, the mission was called off. An investigation determined that the personnel, drawn from all three military services, had not trained together before being selected, and that the mission even lacked a clear chain of command. Participants in the doomed operation blamed a huge dust storm. Beckwith charged it was “doomed by too much internal bickering among bureaucrats who did not have enough experience with high-risk missions.”Footnote ³¹

Designed to end the grip Vietnam had on the American psyche, what the mission really displayed was that technological solutions often failed to solve political crises. But Carter lost the 1980 election standing in the reopened grave of the Vietnam specter. The hostage crisis proved to be a perfect sixty-second excerpt from a full-length documentary about the Carter administration: high hopes for success plunging quickly into frustration and recrimination, and then the president’s approval ratings during the crisis falling from nearly 80 percent to less than 30 percent. It doomed his reelection bid, while paving the way for Ronald Reagan’s huge military budgets, the surefire tonic presidents have recommended for all sorts of political ailments since World War II.Footnote ³²

Reagan the Redeemer

The hostages were released just as Reagan was inaugurated on January 20, 1981. His supporters have long argued this happened because a Carter official let slip that the president had taken military action off the table after the desert fiasco. With a war against Iraq going on, moreover, Tehran needed to court favor with the United States and a new president.Footnote ³³ Public opinion in the United States now appeared ready to loosen Vietnam-era military restraints on the executive. Thus, Reagan’s “Evil Empire” bluster and “Star Wars” ambitions captured the national mood on the rebound from all the Vietnam disappointments.

Four weeks after finally achieving his goal as Republican nominee for president the previous summer, Reagan went to the annual convention of the VFW. The veterans’ group was an eager audience for locker-room pep talks instead of dour sermons about saving energy by turning off the lights upstairs. The VFW had just broken an eighty-year precedent by endorsing Reagan. He hoped they would be just as enthusiastic after four years. “Because, my friends, nothing would mean more to me as president than to live up to your trust.”

It was past time to end post-Vietnam sleepwalking. “America has been sleepwalking far too long. We have to snap out of it, and with your help, that’s exactly what we’re going to do.” There were those who equated military preparedness with a desire for war. The great American humorist, Will Rogers, had an answer for that: “I’ve never seen anyone insult Jack Dempsey.” Reagan continued:

Then came his rallying cry. “It is time we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble cause.” The nation dishonored the memory of 50,000 young Americans who died for that cause when it gave way to feelings of guilt “as if we were doing something shameful.” The soldiers in Vietnam fought as well and as bravely as any Americans had ever fought in any war. There were many lessons to take away from Vietnam. The soldiers next time must be given the means and the determination to prevail. “And while we are at it, let us tell those who fought in that war that we will never again ask young men to fight and possibly to die in a war our government is afraid to let them win.”

Interestingly, however, amidst these vows about the need for military preparedness, Reagan listed the Soviet Union’s “attempt to encircle and neutralize the People’s Republic of China,” and thereby continued to undercut the original motivation for the Vietnam War to block Chinese expansion into Southeast Asia.Footnote ³⁵ After he became president, Reagan mused that what had been needed to drive the specter away and unite the nation behind the effort was a formal declaration of war. Vietnam had been fought under a vaguely worded Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. That was the initial and fatal mistake. He was asked if that might not have widened the war and “gotten us stuck in an even greater quagmire.” His answer was a study in how to have it both ways. That was what was said about Korea, and it “prevented us from allowing General MacArthur to lead us to a victory in Korea.” “Everyone thought that you have to fight a war without winning it or you might find yourself in a bigger war,” he said. “Well, maybe General MacArthur was right, there is no substitute for victory.”Footnote ³⁶

Reagan fought to victory in a 1983 mini-war in Grenada, an island with a total population of 90,000, the size of Fargo, North Dakota, in order to prevent a new Cuba-style regime in the Caribbean. One result was to give director Clint Eastwood a starring role in a movie, Heartbreak Ridge, to show how the marines had overcome the Vietnam syndrome, led by a rejuvenated Korean War veteran. Reagan’s popularity ratings did go up as he narrowed previous gaps vis-à-vis likely Democratic candidates for 1984. Generally speaking, the polls showed that a military victory, any military victory after Vietnam, was welcome, even if some feared Reagan would use the invasion as a springboard for larger operations.Footnote ³⁷

Inside his administration, however, there was an ongoing tussle over how best to avoid another Vietnam that occasionally broke out in public debates between Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger and Secretary of State George W. Shultz, who reversed traditional roles, with Shultz insisting that the 1973 War Powers Resolution hampered presidents seeking freedom of action to use military force to protect American interests, and Weinberger fearing appetite growing momentum. “Employing our forces almost indiscriminately and as a regular and customary part of our diplomatic efforts,” said Weinberger, “would surely plunge us headlong into the sort of domestic turmoil we experienced during the Vietnam War, without accomplishing the goal for which we committed our forces.”Footnote ³⁸

The debate was never really resolved. Both men invoked Vietnam, and both took pieces of the “lost war” thesis to bolster their positions, especially the idea that the war had been mismanaged from the outset by the Democrats. As the Reaganites struggled to find a strategy to avoid another Vietnam while spending $1 trillion on military hardware like the “Star Wars” dream of an antiballistic missile system, terrorist attacks in Somalia and Beirut resulting in American deaths drew no military response from Washington. Shultz and Weinberger played out their beliefs perfectly in these situations. On October 23, 1983, Arab terrorists drove a truck containing high explosives into the marine barracks in Beirut, killing 238 Americans and 58 French soldiers, members of a multinational force tasked with keeping peace between Israeli forces and jihadists operating from Syria. Weinberger had wanted to remove the marines, but Shultz had the president’s ear in terms of a fear that it would look like the United States had cut and run. That view held until the aftermath of the bombing, when the “rescue” operation in Grenada offered a less dangerous field of action to redeem Vietnam.Footnote ³⁹

The biggest Vietnam issue in the Reagan administration, however, turned out to be a heavily fraught cultural issue with political overtones: the erection of a memorial to honor the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam. The campaign for a memorial had begun in 1979 as the idea of a wounded veteran, Jan Scruggs, 29 years old and also a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) sufferer. After his service in Vietnam, Scruggs graduated from American University and then received a master’s degree in psychology. In 1977 he wrote a bitter article for the Washington Post, entitled “Forgotten Veterans of that ‘Peculiar War.’” In it was the genesis of a formal proposal: “Perhaps a national monument is in order to remind an ungrateful nation of what it has done to its sons.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Over the next few years, Scruggs’ initial idea became the central issue under contention about memory of the war. He imagined a place on the National Mall for a garden and statuary representing the soldiers who died, as well as those who served. What was most striking about the movement for a memorial led by a group that took the name Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF) was that there was as yet neither a memorial for the fallen of World War II nor even of World War I in Washington. But in 1980, a bill setting a site for a Vietnam memorial passed both the Senate and the House. Once that happened, and Carter signed it into law on July 1, 1980, things began to move rapidly – into a full-blown controversy about the design of the memorial.

Fundraising dinners were headlined by a variety of people representing almost every point of view about the war “and indeed the inner conflict of the entire Vietnam generation.” For those who had hoped that a sculptor would be chosen to create traditional statuary, the decision to hold an open competition juried by distinguished architects and artists was a foreboding there might not be statuary at all like that common across the land from Gettysburg to small towns honoring both Union and Confederate soldiers. When the jury decided on a design by a Yale undergraduate in architecture, Maya Ying Lin, the jury issued a final praise: “This is very much a memorial of our own times, one that could not have been achieved in another time or place.”Footnote ⁴¹

Lin’s design was by her own naming to represent a “rift in the earth,” a long, black slab of granite on which would be inscribed the names of the fallen. She had designed it as a class project. The announcement produced a storm of criticism about the competition, about the jury’s decision, and about Lin’s background as the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Critics described it as the war protestors’ final victory. It was an ugly battle. In the midst of the furor in 1982, President Reagan revived the POW/MIA issue, flying over 450 MIA family members on military transports to their annual convention. Here, and by inviting selected families to White House luncheons, the president repeated the mantra assuring them their cause had the “highest national priority.”Footnote ⁴²

The criticism mounted with one dissident veteran, Tom Carhart, declaring that he saw in the design “a black trench that scars the Mall with black walls, the universal color of shame and sorrow and degradation.” Secretary of the Interior James Watt, under whose authority the monument would be built, made clear his position against the design, calling it an “act of treason” even before he saw it. A conference inside the White House arrived at a compromise that would involve adding statuary and an American flag at its apex. The fight went on, with Lin responding that the additions would be the equivalent of desecrating the Mona Lisa with a moustache. “Past a certain point, it’s not worth compromising.”Footnote ⁴³ For the two sides it felt like they were fighting a last battle of the Vietnam War, for there was yet more to come in succeeding years. In the moment, however, the compromise was accepted, and eventually the memorial would become almost hallowed ground as relatives of the veterans and well-wishers brought thousands of things that they left at the base of the 250-foot-long memorial.Footnote ⁴⁴

Figure 25.1 A Vietnam War veteran holds a sign praising the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The sign reads: “I am a Vietnam veteran. I like the memorial. And if it makes it difficult to send people into battle again … I’ll like it even more” (1983).

Source: Leif Skoogfors / Contributor / Corbis Historical / Getty Images.

Maya Ying Lin’s memorial was dedicated on November 13, 1982. President Reagan declined the opportunity to be the keynote speaker. Ranking members of his administration were also conspicuous by their absence. The marine band was there, and there were flyovers by military jets. Two years later, the add-on statue by Frederick Hart was dedicated. This time Reagan was there to give the main address. He had just been reelected, and the domestic politics of Vietnam had finally begun to die down. In a memorable passage from his address, he noted that the memorial acted as a mirror when you touched it searching for a name. “From certain angles, you’re touching, too, the reflection of the Washington Monument or the chair in which great Abe Lincoln sits.” The names on the wall reflected the best in us. “And it’s good that we do it in the reflected glow of the enduring symbols of our Republic.”Footnote ⁴⁵

This time there was a brief nod toward the POW/MIA families. There had been much rethinking by both sides on the Vietnam War question, “and by those who did not know which view was right. … And it’s time we moved on in unity and resolve – with the resolve to always stand for freedom, as those who fought did, and to always try to protect and preserve the peace.” Finally, he said, the memorial belonged to all of us. Ahead for Reagan and the world in the following year were the summits with a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, new arms pacts, and the effective end of the Cold War. The last ostensible reason for the Vietnam War had disappeared. US President George H. W. Bush then celebrated the burial of the Vietnam specter after the brief war against Saddam Hussein in 1991.

Americans were more than ready to move on, electing Bill Clinton, who had done everything he could to avoid going into the military and serving in Vietnam. Clinton spoke at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial a few months after entering office in 1993, easily warding off the few who came to protest his appearance. “To all of you who are shouting, I have heard you. I ask that you now hear me,” he prefaced his remarks. If there was any determination to use the Vietnam syndrome in any of its several known manifestations against Clinton, he deftly parried the thrusts. His successor, George W. Bush, had also avoided service. Thus, two presidents were elected without war records so essential in the post–Civil War and post–World War II eras. Not only that, Clinton and Bush had apparently gained politically from their efforts to stay far away from the ground battles or perilous bombing missions over North Vietnam.

Clinton rightly spoke of how Americans viewed the Vietnam era now as “those complicated times.” “Many volumes have been written about this war and those complicated times,” he said at the memorial, “but the message of this memorial is quite simple: these men and women fought for freedom, brought honor to their communities, loved their country, and died for it.”Footnote ⁴⁶

As usual there was the pledge to do all that was possible to find out about the mythical POW/MIAs, but Clinton added a smart political move in pledging to declassify all government materials about those still left behind. Then he lifted the economic embargo on Vietnam, restored diplomatic relations, and set out to negotiate a bilateral trade agreement. All along the way he had the support of Vietnam veterans. The crowning step was the appointment of a former POW, Peter Peterson, as America’s first ambassador to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRVN). Peterson, in turn, gave him full credit for moving ahead so “aggressively” in developing ties with Vietnam. It may not have been any political advantage to do these things, Peterson said, but Clinton saw an opportunity “for America to heal wounds and to build bridges.”Footnote ⁴⁷

After Peterson arrived in Hanoi, an early visitor was Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. During her visit he handed the secretary a brick from the “Hanoi Hilton,” where he had spent more than six years as a POW. It was a symbol of more brutal times, he explained, but now a “stepping stone to a better future.” Parts of the building were being torn down and turned into “a luxury block of apartments and stores by a Singapore Company.”Footnote ⁴⁸ There were deep ironies on both sides at this mini-ceremony presided over by a former POW: Hồ Chí Minh’s revolution and LBJ’s war turned upside down. Peterson noted during Albright’s visit that on the streets of Hanoi Vietnamese treat him as an old friend. “We’re not talking 1975 any more. We’re talking 1997. I think it would be really helpful if Americans could see Vietnam as a country, and not a war.”

After the 2000 election, Clinton traveled to Vietnam for the first official visit by an American president. Large crowds clustered along the highway from the Hanoi airport to the city. He spoke at Hanoi National University about missed connections over the history of the two countries, and the tragic results of the war for both sides, including the staggering numbers of Vietnamese who fought on both sides, “more than 3 million brave soldiers and citizens.” Clinton noted that as a result of the war there were now in the United States more than 1 million citizens of Vietnamese heritage. He amplified Peterson’s comment about the need to see, as more were, Vietnam not as a war, but a country, “a country with the highest literacy rate in Southeast Asia.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Much of the remainder of the speech focused on the forces of globalism, making integration more certain daily. Both countries began, he noted, with a Declaration of Independence, a remark sure to be noted as a reference to Hồ Chí Minh’s famous 1945 public initiative that war critics always cited later as evidence there was more of Jefferson than Marx in Vietnam’s struggle in its war against the French from 1945 to 1954, and how it was misunderstood by American leaders focused on the European aspects of the Cold War. However that may be, or may have been, now both sides appeared to be tip-toeing around, looking for allies in growing apprehension about China’s new assertiveness in the seas around Vietnam and on the world stage.Footnote ⁵⁰

A military alliance was still far off, but the momentum for closer Vietnamese–American relations gained speed after 9/11, even as anxiety about the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns emerged. The Vietnam syndrome or specter had always been about bad experiences in fighting wars of empire, whatever Americans wished to call the “New World Order,” the “Unipolar Moment,” “American Exceptionalism,” or, as Madeleine Albright put it, the “Indispensable Nation.”

America’s New Longest War

Fear of a new Vietnam War actually predated the aftermath of 9/11, when the United States launched attacks on the Taliban in Afghanistan and then moved on with “Shock and Awe” to remove Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction and the regime itself. There had long been an effort by policymakers to build a consensus for military action against the dictator. Secretary of State Albright found herself outflanked at one point by protestors as she began a speech at Ohio State University on February 18, 1998 who chanted, “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your racist war.” Change one word in that chant (“fucking” for “racist”) and you have the most famous (or notorious) chant of the Vietnam era. The change of word here opposed a Second Gulf War – after the one, of course, where George H. W. Bush had buried the specter forever. But unlike the original chant, which expressed frustration, not moral judgment, this new one did not anticipate America’s new longest war to come.Footnote ⁵¹

Albright put a good face on the situation. She told an interviewer that despite the protestors in the audience of 6,000,

But not everyone agreed that American policymakers could see far enough into the future to avoid another Vietnam. Within weeks of the first attacks on Taliban strongholds after 9/11, a newspaper column by R. W. Apple stirred concern even in the Oval Office, where President George W. Bush already had Saddam Hussein marked down as next on the list of “must do’s” to make the twenty-first-century world “Safe for Democracy.”Footnote ⁵³ Apple wrote, “Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam? Is the United States facing another stalemate on the other side of the world? Premature the questions may be. … Unreasonable they are not, given the scars scoured into the national psyche by defeat in Southeast Asia.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Apple’s article was discussed in Bush’s war cabinet, with the president expressing pique about media complaints. “They don’t get it. How many times do you have to tell them it’s going to be a different type of war? And they don’t believe it.” Some CIA officers thought the bombing might have been enough and that a pause might be desirable for negotiations with “moderate Taliban.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld scotched that idea, but in doing so could not avoid bringing up Vietnam. There were not going to be any bombing pauses, especially for some kind of negotiations. “Period. Bombing pauses smacked of Vietnam. No way.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Seven years later, the war in Afghanistan continued. Saddam Hussein had been disposed of, but Iraq’s future was far from being assured as Barack Obama campaigned against John McCain, another former POW in Hanoi, promising an end to the mindset that had produced another quagmire. Months after his election, however, near the end of 2009, Obama settled an embarrassing near-public debate inside his administration fueled by newspaper leaks by announcing he was sending an additional 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan with a mission to bolster and train local forces. These troops would be there for a strictly limited time, he announced in a speech at West Point to a new generation of army officers, and the drawdown would begin in 2011. This half-way commitment brought a chorus of opposition from those who thought the “lessons” of Vietnam were being ignored. Guerrilla warfare student David Kilcullen said Obama’s deadline was “a recipe for Điện Biên Phủ in the Hindu Kush.” General Stanley McChrystal, the commander in Afghanistan, warned even more ominously that the only alternative to sending more troops to that country was the dreaded “helicopter on the roof,” remembered as the last shameful retreat of the Vietnam War.Footnote ⁵⁶

Career diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whose service began in Vietnam, was called to duty again as President Obama made these decisions. His view also was that the deadline was self-defeating, as it removed any incentive for the Taliban to negotiate. But the real problem was that the military still clung to outdated beliefs in Counter-Insurgency (COIN). It was, he wrote in a memo for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “something out of the past which, where it succeeded, was primarily a colonial concept that involved a great deal of coercive force.” It also signaled that the military still had control of the decision-making process because they were, in effect, grading themselves.Footnote ⁵⁷

American troop levels came down, and US Special Forces killed the architect of the 9/11 attack, Osama bin Laden. Obama sat through the tense hours as the SEAL team broke into bin Laden’s unfortified sanctuary and safely exited with his body. It was then buried at sea, and perhaps with it at last the specter of Vietnam. But the war goes on, only now one reminder of the Vietnam War was discontinued: body counts of supposed enemy dead. It had been started up again after Donald Trump became president to rally White House support for America’s new longest war. The practice was abruptly stopped after newspaper inquiries. And for good reason: “The body counts served as a grisly contrast to other metrics that paint a grimmer reality of the war effort – including high attrition rates in the Afghan military and the loss of territory to Taliban militants.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Defense Secretary James Mattis had wanted the practice ended months earlier. “You all know of the corrosive effect of that sort of metric back in the Vietnam War,” he told journalists after declining to release the estimated numbers of Islamic State (ISIS) fighters in a bombing raid. “It’s something that has stayed with us all these years.”Footnote ⁵⁹

In August 2021, the end of the American presence in Afghanistan came about swiftly, and the Afghan government collapsed much more rapidly than many American military and political leaders expected. Donald Trump had instructed Secretary of Defense James Mattis to reduce US troop strength by half in December 2018; at the same time he also ordered the withdrawal of all troops from Syria. Trump, having an aversion to military commitments, still left it to his successor, Joe Biden, to pull the plug and execute the final withdrawal. Biden did just that in the spring and summer of 2021. The August withdrawal was widely covered by the media, and the images did not reflect well on the administration.

The Wilson Center offered an early assessment of the US departure in November 2021. James Jeffrey, chair of the Middle East Program at the Center and a former ambassador to Iraq, brought up the comparison with Vietnam: “This is a failure, first of all. It’s the biggest failure that Washington has seen since Vietnam.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Not so surprisingly, Jeffrey went from 1975 to 2021, all the while completely bypassing the 9/11 attack and the botched invasion of Iraq in 2003 as other possible examples of American failures. Over at the Atlantic Council, Daniel Fried, the former National Security Council (NSC) senior director and former ambassador to Poland, also brought up Vietnam, but his was a more optimistic take on the situation. “History confounds expectations, especially those made in the immediate aftermath of major events. Who believed in 1975 when the US withdrew from Saigon that, years later, Vietnam would welcome the US vice president, seeking American support against a potentially aggressive China?”Footnote ⁶¹ Those years Fried referred to were actually two decades, and they happened after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Vietnam’s chief international and economic lifeline of support. And of course, Fried never discussed how the Taliban leaders of 2021 might constitute a different set of governing and diplomatic challenges from those the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP) did in 1975.

Conclusion

Forty-six years after the United States fled South Vietnam and the South Vietnamese who had worked alongside Americans for so many years, the scenes from Kabul airport were, yet again, heartbreaking. Thousands sought to board the last remaining flights, pressing against fences and rushing planes trying to taxi for takeoff. Writing for the Associated Press, Zeke Miller, Jonathan Lemire, and Josh Boak invoked “setbacks of past presidents such as the withdrawal from Vietnam and the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.” How the latter pertained to the Afghan situation in 2021, the authors never explained; nor were there any obvious parallels – but Vietnam in 1975? That was readily and frequently invoked. As the trio wrote, the images from Kabul “rivaled anything witnessed in Saigon. Thousands of Afghan citizens, many of whom worked as translators and other aides to American troops.”Footnote ⁶²

John Rash (of the Rash Report) got directly to the point: “About 2,800 miles [4,500 kilometers] separate Kabul from Saigon (now Hồ Chí Minh City). And 46 years separate the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces from the threat Kabul faces today from the Taliban. But the perilous parallels between the two long, lost wars are unmistakable.”Footnote ⁶³ As if his words were not forceful enough, Rash’s commentary appeared juxtaposed with the iconic picture of South Vietnamese fleeing to an American Huey helicopter atop a Saigon building, which had become the symbol of the American fiasco in Southeast Asia. Everything old was new again.

It was perhaps most fitting that the USA TODAY editorial board member Thuan Le Elston, herself a self-described refugee from South Vietnam because of her father’s cooperation and work with Americans, asserted that South Vietnamese refugees in the United States were having a terrible time watching the images from Kabul, “not wanting to relive our fall of Saigon nearly five decades ago.” Kabul became the Saigon of the twenty-first century.Footnote ⁶⁴

Kabul was, of course, not Saigon, but the fact that Saigon immediately came to the mind of many commentators speaks to the power that the American involvement in Vietnam has had and how the impact it continues to have on the consciousness of many Americans infects much political and cultural commentary. Vietnam is not going away. Vietnam, itself, is much more than the American involvement and the war, but, from the American perspective, Vietnam remains as resonant as ever.

War is the search for one’s place in the world by military means. It is a way through which states define their relationship with others. The Vietnam War is no exception; it was a process in which two Vietnamese groups – the communists and the nationalists – and three major powers – the United States, China, and the Soviet Union – interacted to advance their own visions of the world and determine Vietnam’s place in it. The war ended with the emergence of the communists as the rulers of a unified Vietnam, the elimination of the nationalists as a political elite, and the termination of US intervention in Indochina. But the struggle to define Vietnam’s relationship with the world did not come to an end. The decades after the war have seen Vietnam chart a twisty trajectory in search of its place in the world. Thirteen years into the postwar period, the same Communist Party that had fought against the United States in the war now sought integration into the US-led international order. Soon, however, this effort was subordinated to an endeavor in the opposite direction. The primacy of the anti-Western direction lasted fourteen years, until Vietnam’s ruling elite clearly recognized that the United States was the paramount power in a unipolar world. In the years that followed, Vietnam accelerated its entrance into the world, and, four decades after the Vietnam War, it completed a journey from an “outpost of socialism in Southeast Asia” and a “spearhead of the world national liberation movement” to a “responsible member of the international community.”Footnote ¹ In a little more than three decades, from the mid-1980s to the late 2010s, Vietnam turned from a fierce opponent into a discreet ally of the United States, while still maintaining its communist regime. This chapter will illuminate these puzzling processes. It analyzes the grand strategies of Vietnam in these decades, together with the motives, thinking, and visions behind those grand strategies, and it documents the key events that shaped Vietnam’s strategic trajectories, together with the larger contexts and developments that made those events possible.

The search for a nation’s place in the world is, metaphorically speaking, the interaction between maps and a landscape. The maps guide the search and are based on the leaders’ worldviews, which reflect their historical experiences and result from a complex process of social ideation. The landscape provides the ultimate test for the maps and is changing almost constantly. Guiding Vietnam’s search during the last four decades were two master maps – dubbed “two camps” and “single market” – that contradicted each other fundamentally. It was the struggle between followers of these maps that shaped the search, but this struggle did not occur in a vacuum: it was primarily a response to changes in the geopolitical landscape.

Vietnam’s Strategic Environment in a Long Historical Perspective

Two features that characterized the strategic environment of all states that have existed in the modern Vietnamese territory throughout history are China and the South China Sea – the former as a world center of power and civilization and a giant market, the latter as a main artery of world transportation and a fountain of wealth. During nearly two millennia, from the third century BCE, when China was unified under the Qin, until the sixteenth century CE, when Portugal and Spain respectively seized Malacca and the Philippines, China, including its regional kingdoms when it was in disunity, was the single biggest power in Vietnam’s neighborhood. Major rulers in Southeast Asia regularly sent “tributes” to the Chinese court in order to gain access to the Chinese market and receive diplomatic recognition. Vietnam, particularly its northern part, is unique in Southeast Asia for an important experience that the rest of the region has never had: Chinese rule, which lasted a millennium (111 BCE–938 CE). It owed much of its tradition, in administration, ideology, technology, scholarship, and art, to learning from China. The advent of European empires – the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the British, and the French – eclipsed Chinese power but not China’s attraction. A key motive that drove the French conquest of Vietnam in the nineteenth century was to gain access to the backdoor of China through the Mekong River from the south and the Red River from the north in the hope of gaining an edge over the British, which policed China’s front doors.Footnote ² In the twentieth century, the United States engaged in the Vietnam War because it wanted to contain communist influence flowing from China.

The South China Sea has always been the heart of a trade zone that connected different parts of the region as well as the final – or initial – leg of the maritime routes that linked China and the rest of Afro-Eurasia. These maritime trade routes held the key to the rise and fall of Funan, the first regional power in Southeast Asia (1st–6th centuries) and the earliest state in today’s southern Vietnam. A contemporary of Funan, Giao province of the Chinese empire, in today’s northern Vietnam, was the terminus of these maritime routes and throve on this interregional commerce. Champa, a shifting alliance of principalities along the central Vietnamese coast (3rd–17th centuries), also gained prominence and prosperity mainly from its control of the trade routes passing through the west–central domain of the South China Sea.Footnote ³ In the last half-century, the sea’s oil and gas reserves added immensely to its value for Vietnam.

The role of China and of the South China Sea changed significantly with changes in the global context. Until the sixteenth century, Southeast Asia was a “protected zone” in the rimland of the Eurasian continent – protected from the frequent attacks and long-term occupations by “nomadic” powers that roamed the steppes of central Eurasia. This distinguished Southeast Asia from the “exposed zones” such as China, India, and the Middle East, whose history was deeply shaped by Inner Asian invasions. The protected position of Southeast Asia was the reason behind some “strange parallels” between this region and Europe, another “protected zone” at the other end of Eurasia, as observed by Victor Lieberman, who coined the terms “protected zones” and “exposed rimlands” of Eurasia.Footnote ⁴ Beyond the gaze of Lieberman’s work, however, from the sixteenth century onward Southeast Asia became an “exposed rimland” of Eurasia, this time exposed to the conquests, interventions, and influence of the powers that ruled the waves of the world’s oceans – the European empires mentioned above, the United States, and Japan. This shift moved Southeast Asia from the “end of the world” to the front line of great-power competition. Consequently, a key element of Vietnamese statecraft changed from leveraging the frontier of an empire to navigating the politics between great powers. As a prelude to the alliances of the Vietnam War, the two warring Vietnams of the seventeenth century – the Trinh in the north and the Nguyen in the south – allied with each side of the Dutch–Portuguese rivalry to obtain military resources and diplomatic support. In both cases, an armed conflict between local groups was intricately joined with a strategic rivalry between great powers. Also in both cases, Vietnam was at the peripheries, not the center stage, of great-power competition. The fall of Saigon in 1975 did not substantially affect the final outcome of the Cold War. The United States lost the Vietnam War but won the global contest with the Soviet Union. The rise of China in the last four decades has gradually shifted Vietnam from the peripheries to the central front line of great-power competition. This front line runs through the East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and the South China Sea. It is in this context that communist leaders of postwar Vietnam have been navigating their ship of state and endeavoring to “anchor” Vietnam in the world.

Birds of a Feather (1975–86)

The unification of Vietnam in 1975 created a country with the combined territories and populations of North and South Vietnam. The new Vietnam was now the second most populous country in Southeast Asia. Its major natural resources included not just the coalfields of northeastern Vietnam, but also the oil and gas reserves in the South China Sea.Footnote ⁵ The new territory and new population provided the new country with more options for its role and position in the world. When communist troops entered the presidential palace of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) on April 30, 1975, they replaced the flag of the fallen regime with that of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Southern Vietnam (PRG), not that of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN). Some options considered for the unified country included a two-state confederation, in which South Vietnam would have its own seat in the United Nations (UN) and stay neutral between the Cold War’s blocs, and a “one state, two systems” arrangement in which the South would maintain its own socioeconomic system. But six months into the new experience, communist leaders rejected these options, not least because they feared that the South could be manipulated by China.Footnote ⁶ In July 1976, North and South Vietnam were officially merged into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRVN).

Buoyed and blinded by their defeat of what the late President Hồ Chí Minh called “two big empires” – France in 1954 and the United States in 1975 – communist leaders imposed with an iron fist their neo-Stalinist perspective upon the unified country. In their grand strategy, the central goal was socialist industrialization, and Vietnam’s place in the world – its relations with other countries and with international groupings – was a means in the service of this end. The way that related the means to the end reflected a peculiar belief that combined a neo-Stalinist worldview, Leninist pragmatism, and the pretensions of Hanoi’s self-image. Marxism-Leninism provided the larger map for determining the goal.

Following the spirit of Lenin’s dictum “communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country,” Vietnamese communists envisioned the building of socialism in their country as consisting of two major missions: to establish and maintain Communist Party rule in the whole country and to build it into an industrialized one. They regarded the military takeover of South Vietnam, which they called “liberation,” as the final step in their long march to bring the entire country under Communist Party rule. As this was completed in 1975, the paramount mission now became socialist industrialization. With Leninist pragmatism, Vietnam’s communist leaders were flexible in selecting the means, trying to take advantage of all available opportunities to achieve their goals. However, the lens through which they recognized the opportunities was a neo-Stalinist worldview that saw other countries in three categories – socialist, nationalist, and capitalist – with Vietnam squarely within the first group as an “outpost of socialism” in Southeast Asia and a “spearhead of the world’s national liberation movement.” Accordingly, Hanoi sought ideological, political, and economic relations with the socialist countries; political and economic relations with the nationalist countries; and only economic relations with the capitalist countries.Footnote ⁷ To capitalize on its role as a “spearhead of the national liberation movement,” it retained the former PRG’s seat in the Nonalignment Movement. Flexibly, socialist Vietnam renewed the fallen Saigon regime’s memberships in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which other socialist countries regarded as instruments of Western power and capitalist exploitation.Footnote ⁸ Hanoi also resisted Moscow’s pressure to join the Soviet-led economic bloc, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON). This positioning reflected a calculated design to obtain maximum economic aid from all over the world while navigating the Sino-Soviet split and hoping for the West’s contribution to Vietnam’s postwar reconstruction.

The end of the Vietnam War gave the victor a sense of invincibility and entitlement. When Vietnam’s central planners drafted the first postwar Five-Year Plan (1976–81), they assumed that the country would face no external security threat, that the socialist countries would maintain the level of their wartime aid to Vietnam, and that the United States would provide $3.25 billion in grant aid and $1.5 billion in commodity aid.Footnote ⁹ These assumptions would become increasingly ill-founded. The Khmer Rouge, with a bigger sense of invincibility, wasted no time in invading the country and killing Vietnamese citizens along the Cambodia–Vietnam border. The close of the Vietnam War removed a common cause that had forced China and the Soviet Union to compete in supporting Vietnam. After the war, both Beijing and Moscow pressured Hanoi to side with each against the other. As Hanoi refused to take sides, both substantially reduced their assistance. China additionally increased hostility along its border with Vietnam. Believing in socialist solidarity, capitalist greed, and Vietnam’s moral high ground, Hanoi held out the hopes that Cambodia and China would return to friendly terms with Vietnam as moderate factions would prevail in these countries, and a Democratic administration in the United States would resume economic aid to Vietnam. By the spring of 1977, the prospects of an anti-Vietnam Sino-Cambodian alliance loomed large, while Vietnam’s overtures to the West met with reluctance as negotiations on normalization between Hanoi and Washington stalled due to Hanoi’s insistence on war reparations. Soviet–Vietnam relations also deteriorated as Vietnam endeavored to stay outside the Soviet orbit. All these coincided with a growing economic crisis at home. Then came the Khmer Rouge’s heavy attacks into Vietnamese territory on April 30 and, again, on September 24, 1977.Footnote ¹⁰

Desperate for massive aid and nearly in a corner, Vietnam took crucial steps that it had tenaciously resisted since 1975 and agreed in principle to join COMECON at an “appropriate time.” In late May 1977, it became a member of two Soviet-sponsored international banks, and in late July a large Soviet military delegation paid an unprecedented trip to Vietnam’s military installations in the south.Footnote ¹¹ As Vietnam’s relations with Cambodia and China turned to open hostility in late 1977, Hanoi concluded that removing the Khmer Rouge by military force was necessary to mitigate this two-front security threat. In January 1978, the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) Politburo decided to prepare for an invasion to “liberate” Cambodia and install a pro-Vietnam government.Footnote ¹² As Hanoi needed insurance against the anticipated Chinese retaliation, it dusted off a Soviet proposal tabled in 1975 and, by early June, agreed to sign a “treaty of friendship and cooperation” – a mutual defense pact – with Moscow. On June 28, Vietnam formally joined COMECON, and on November 3, it officially signed a twenty-five-year friendship treaty with the Soviet Union – the best timing thought to deter Chinese military actions against Vietnam.Footnote ¹³

The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia on December 25, 1978 started a new period in Vietnam’s history. On February 17, 1979, China launched a massive invasion along their land border to “teach Vietnam a lesson.” In the ensuing decade, Vietnam fought a guerrilla war in Cambodia, a punctuated war along the Sino-Vietnamese border, a deepening economic crisis at home, and an international isolation imposed by most of the world’s governments. Contrary to Hanoi’s worldview, Vietnam’s alignment reflected the great power conflict between the Soviet Union and the Sino-US coalition rather than the ideological struggle between socialism and capitalism. Vietnam’s allies were actually Soviet allies, including also “nationalist” countries such as India, Afghanistan, South Yemen, Ethiopia, Angola, and Nicaragua. The country was at war with communist China and the anti-Vietnamese Cambodian factions, mostly the Khmer Rouge, backed by communist North Korea, the United States, Thailand, and others that feared Soviet and Vietnamese influence. Firmly entrenched in the Soviet camp, Vietnam changed its constitution in 1980 to align its political, economic, and social system and its government structure more closely with those of the Soviet bloc countries. The preamble of the 1980 constitution identifies the “imperialist” United States and the “hegemonist” China as Vietnam’s two chief enemies.

Returning to the Regional Matrix (1986–2003)

Vietnam joined the Soviet bloc when the group was in a brewing crisis. Despite the East–West confrontation, the industrial countries of the East had to rely on the cooperation of the West to obtain some critically needed technology and finance. By the early 1980s, the neo-Stalinist economic model had lost most of its steam, and reform became urgent in most countries of the bloc, including the Soviet Union. The new realities of the previous decades, especially the economic decline of the socialist countries, a new wave of technological revolution, and new developments in world politics fueled in the Soviet bloc a new worldview that fundamentally challenged the neo-Stalinist outlook. The new worldview was not a monolithic system of thoughts, but an evolving “family” of similar views that had various origins. Chief among the “common traits” of this family was the understanding that the world was one, not two. If the old orthodoxy saw the antagonism between two social orders, socialism and capitalism, as the source of the most elemental dynamic of international politics, the new worldview proceeded from the interdependence of countries within a single world community, as the dominant Soviet variant underscored, or a single world market, as a prominent Vietnamese variant emphasized. After Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1985, he elevated the new worldview, known as “new thinking” (novoe myshlenie), to a guiding ideology of the new Soviet domestic and foreign policy.Footnote ¹⁴

The new Soviet policy increased pressure on Vietnam to improve its economic efficiency, while signaling an end to the two-camp structure of world politics. Since the late 1970s, Vietnam had tried to reform some aspects of its economic governance, but the general deterioration was not arrested. In July 1986, the succession of Trường Chinh to the deceased Lê Duẩn as CPV General Secretary paved the way for more radical reforms and for a “renovation of thinking” (đổi mới tư duy) in major aspects of Vietnam’s domestic and foreign policy. During the years 1983–6, Chinh turned from a conservative to a reformer by “looking straight at the truth” (nhìn thẳng vào sự thật), a process pressed by burgeoning economic difficulties but primarily facilitated by his son, Đặng Xuân Kỳ, and some of his aides who were new thinkers.Footnote ¹⁵

With Chinh at the helm, the 6th Congress of the CPV in December 1986 vowed to “comprehensively reform” (đổi mới toàn diện) the country’s governance. It lifted reform (đổi mới, literally “renovation”) to the status of a grand cause similar to what unification was for the 1954–75 period. None of the subsequent congresses of the CPV demoted reform from this status, but reform ebbed and flowed as a result of the struggle between its opponents, who were plenty in the party, and its proponents, who were often in the minority.

The fates of the three leading proponents of reform, Trần Xuân Bách in politics, Võ Vӑn Kiệt in the economy, and Nguyễn Cơ Thạch in foreign policy, neatly illustrate the destinies of reform in these areas. Bach, a potential successor to party chief Nguyễn Vӑn Linh, who replaced Chinh at the 6th Congress, was purged from the CPV Central Committee in March 1990 for his advocacy of political pluralism and made a nonperson until his death in 2006. Kiệt became prime minister after the 7th CPV Congress in June 1991, but his proposals for stronger reform in the spirit of “nation and democracy” were often rejected by the conservative majority in the CPV leadership. Thạch was the architect of Politburo Resolution 13, which was later touted as laying the groundwork for Vietnam’s foreign policy in the Đổi mới (Renovation) era, but he was forced to retire to placate China in 1991 and then kept under tight security watch. His book The World in the Last 50 Years (1945–1995) and the World in the Next 25 Years (1996–2020), which outlines his worldview and the road to industrialization and modernization for Vietnam, was confiscated immediately after release shortly before his death in 1998 and only republished in 2015.

Some elements of the new thinking existed as early as 1973 in a report Thạch wrote, as a deputy foreign minister, on the economic cooperation between the Soviet bloc and the West.Footnote ¹⁶ By 1987, they had grown into a relatively coherent worldview capable of providing the theoretical underpinnings for a new grand strategy. In May 1988, despite opposition from the ministry of defense, the CPV Politburo passed Resolution 13 as the main guidance for the country’s foreign and security policy in the new situation. Titled Maintaining the Peace, Developing the Economy, it signals a return to the original aspiration of postwar Vietnam but actually represents a larger turning point in Vietnamese foreign policy, as it fundamentally broke with the worldview that had guided communist Vietnam’s international behavior since the late 1940s. Couched in the language of a struggle between socialism and capitalism, Resolution 13 is nevertheless premised on the assumptions that the world is a single system and a single market where countries big and small are interdependent and compete primarily in the economic realm. Based on this worldview, Resolution 13 outlines what can be seen as the grand strategy of Đổi mới. It states that keeping a peaceful environment in order to focus on economic development is “the highest interest of our Party and people.” Its strategic guidance includes riding the trends of “internationalization” and a “scientific-technical revolution,” finding an optimal position in the international division of labor, and expanding international cooperation to achieve a strong economy and a “strong enough” national defense.Footnote ¹⁷

The objectives and key pillars of Vietnamese foreign policy that were introduced in Resolution 13 would be confirmed at every subsequent congress of the CPV. The key pillars include “befriending all countries in the world,” “diversification” (đa dạng hóa), and “multidirectionalization” (đa phương hóa). The intent of the architects of these pillars was: to broaden international cooperation, with priority given to neighboring states, advanced industrial countries, and the major regional and global powers; to extend the concerns of foreign policy from the political and military to the economic, technological, and other aspects; and to cast a wide web of relationships with not only the socialist and traditionally friendly states, but also regional and major capitalist countries.

If the 6th CPV Congress started the Đổi mới era, the 7th Plenum of the 6th Central Committee in August 1989 marks the largest conservative turning point in the period. Fearing the prospects of regime change, at this meeting, which took place in the shadows of the Tiananmen Square protests in China (April–June 1989) and the fall from power of the Communist Party in Poland (August 1989), party chief Nguyễn Vӑn Linh vehemently criticized the new thinkers and outlined a two-camp grand strategy to protect the communist regime. This strategy called for joining hands with anti-Western forces globally and strengthening the totalitarian state at home to combat US and Western influence.Footnote ¹⁸

At the 3rd Plenum of the 7th Central Committee in June 1992, its first after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the CPV passed two resolutions to guide foreign and security policy in the post–Cold War era. While the foreign policy resolution shares the pragmatism of Resolution 13 and settles on a compromise between the “single market” and the “two camps” worldviews, the national security resolution is firmly based on the “two camps” worldview and identifies “peaceful evolution,” an imagined plot thought to be sponsored by the United States and the West to subvert the communist regime, as the central threat to Vietnam’s national security. The former resolution sets the foreign policy priority on relations with the remaining socialist countries, the regional countries in the Asia–Pacific, and the advanced industrial countries in the West, in this order. The latter resolution, however, is supplemented by a directive drafted by the anti-Western faction of President Lê Đức Anh, which instructs party cadres on the geopolitical proximity between Vietnam and foreign countries. According to this directive, Vietnam’s closest friends were the four remaining socialist countries – China, Laos, Cuba, and North Korea – plus Cambodia, where the Leninist and Vietnam-friendly Cambodia People’s Party was a coruling party, followed by the former socialist countries in Eastern Europe, where Hanoi hoped for a resurgence of communist parties, and India, a nonaligned major power most friendly to Vietnam. The directive instructs keeping the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries farther than the countries mentioned above, and keeping the United States at the farthest distance.Footnote ¹⁹

The two worldviews and their contradicting grand strategies created two divergent policy currents in post–Cold War Vietnam – the anti-Westerners and the integrationists. Their domestic struggle and the meeting of their strategies with the realities resulted in a dogged quest for a strategic alliance with China, a cautious opening to the surrounding region, and half-steps in integration with the larger world during the “long 1990s,” a period bracketed by the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

A strategic alliance with China based on ideology was the key element of the foreign policy agenda of anti-Westerners, who dominated the highest echelons of Vietnam’s politics throughout this period. As Lê Đức Anh, then minister of defense, succinctly explained in 1990, “The United States and the West want to wipe out communism from the entire world. Clearly, they are our immediate and dangerous enemies. We have to seek an ally. This ally is China.”Footnote ²⁰ Initiated by party chief Linh and Anh in 1990, the quest for a strategic alliance with China, although consistently met with Beijing’s rejection, was renewed by every successive General Secretary of the CPV in the “long 1990s,” from Đỗ Mười in 1991 to Lê Khả Phiêu in 1999 and Nông Đức Mạnh in 2001. What Beijing wanted with Hanoi was not an alliance, but a neo-tributary relationship. As Hanoi was far more eager than Beijing to mend their relationship, the result was an asymmetric one whose main feature was Vietnam’s deference to China. Throughout this period, party cadres in Vietnam were instructed orally that China was the strategic ally and the United States the strategic enemy.Footnote ²¹

A cooperative relationship with the United States and membership in ASEAN were the key elements of the integrationist agenda. These arose from the perceptions that the United States was the most technologically advanced country, the largest external market, and the political–military leader of the West, while ASEAN was the main bridge on the road to joining the world. Efforts in these directions were, however, severely torpedoed by the dominant anti-Westerners. The signing of the comprehensive US–Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement was delayed from 1999 to 2000, costing Vietnam billions of US dollars in exports, whereas the conclusion of two historic treaties to delineate the Sino-Vietnamese borders on land and in the Tonkin Gulf was hurried to meet the deadlines proposed by China, 1999 and 2000, resulting in substantial Vietnamese losses. In both cases, party chief Lê Khả Phiêu played a central role, which his opponents cited to charge him when trying to oust him, successfully, at the 9th CPV Congress in April 2001.Footnote ²² The timing of the other landmarks in Vietnam’s relations with the two major powers, the restoration of Sino-Vietnamese and US–Vietnamese relations in 1991 and 1995, respectively, reflected both the Vietnamese tilt toward China and the US approach to Vietnam. Washington stayed one or more steps behind China and ASEAN in engagement with its former enemy. It waited a week after the Chengdu Summit between Chinese and Vietnamese leaders in September 1990 to agree to talk on normalization with Hanoi, and it announced the normalization of their diplomatic relations a year after ASEAN approved Vietnam’s accession to the group.

In the spirit of Resolution 13, party chief Linh told visiting Philippine Foreign Minister Raul Manglapus in November 1988 that Vietnam was “eager to join ASEAN,” but after the fall of Eastern European communist regimes in late 1989, he reverted to his previous conviction that the world was structured as “two camps,” and saw ASEAN as a disguised Western group and a tool of “US imperialism.”Footnote ²³ In the subsequent years, while integrationists such as Prime Minister Võ Vӑn Kiệt, who ranked third in the party nomenclature, and the foreign ministry leaders tried hard to join ASEAN, anti-Westerners such as party chief Đỗ Mười, President Anh, and CPV Executive Secretary Đào Duy Tùng, who ranked first, second, and fourth in the leadership, persistently braked the process. Mười and Anh only changed their minds after their respective visits to ASEAN countries in October 1993 and April 1994.Footnote ²⁴

During the long 1990s, Vietnam pursued an asymmetric two-headed grand strategy in which international integration was subordinated to anti-Westernism. Even after it became an ASEAN member in 1995, its attitude continued to combine a larger dose of anti-Western wariness and a smaller dose of integrationist enthusiasm. Although Vietnam’s leverage of its ties with ASEAN and the United States was instrumental in forcing China to deescalate in the Kantan-III oil rig crisis of March 1997, Phiêu, who became CPV General Secretary in December 1997, preferred bilateralism in dealing with China, arguing that Vietnam would lose sovereignty if its issues in the South China Sea were multilateralized. In December 2001, two months after the US invasion of Afghanistan, party chief Nông Đức Mạnh, who replaced Phiêu at the 9th CPV Congress, agreed to “strongly condemn hegemonism by political superpowers in international affairs” in the joint statement issued on his inaugural visit to China. This was the first time ever that Hanoi publicly took Beijing’s side against another great power’s “hegemonism” – but it was also the last.Footnote ²⁵

Figure 26.1 Vietnam’s strategic trajectories since 1975. The dots represent the strategic alignment of Vietnam in relation to China and the United States.

Source: Graph by author.

Joining the World (2003–24)

The upswing of great-power cooperation after the Cold War, Vietnam’s half-opening to the world, and the introduction of market mechanisms into the economy gradually rendered the integrationists the majority in the ruling class. But unlike the pioneer integrationists of the 1980s, who viewed international integration as a major way to modernize the country, by the late 1990s most integrationists saw it primarily as an opportunity to get rich themselves. These opportunist integrationists supported a wider opening to the world because it made available a larger source of income, but they clung to the Communist Party’s monopoly in politics because it helped them reap hyper-profits.

At its 9th Congress in April 2001, the CPV elevated economic integration with the world into a major long-term policy and vowed to turn Vietnam into an industrialized country by 2020. Its ambition was to replicate the success of the Asian Tigers – South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore – by employing the Leninist state and maintaining Communist Party rule. Yet substantial progress in joining the world had to wait until the 8th Plenum of the 9th Central Committee in July 2003.

Meeting in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq (March–April 2003), which vividly demonstrated the reality of a unipolar world, and with the integrationist majority in the Central Committee, the plenum adopted a new foreign and security policy guidance to replace the 1992 resolutions “in the new situation.” Jettisoning ideology as the main criterion for determining international friends and foes, its Resolution 8 marked the largest pragmatic turn in Vietnamese foreign policy since 1989. The new criteria opened the theoretical possibility for Vietnam to move to an equidistance between China and the United States, and even cross it to veer closer to the United States. Resolution 8 practically rehabilitated Resolution 13 and started a new chapter in Vietnam’s international integration.Footnote ²⁶

Negotiations to join the World Trade Organization (WTO), initiated by Prime Minister Kiệt in 1995 but largely stalled by anti-Westerners, were accelerated as a result of Resolution 8. Unlike many other countries, which saw the WTO as little more than a global trade agreement, Vietnam regarded it as one of the most capitalist among the international institutions. Debates about the merits of joining the WTO revolved around not only the impact of lower trade barriers on domestic production, but more fundamentally whether Vietnam was willing to change the way it organized its social, political, and economic life. Symbolizing Vietnam’s full integration into the Western-led international system, its accession to the WTO in 2007 was perceived as the adoption into a new family and a “jump into the ocean.” Its WTO membership triggered a large-scale reorganization of its political and economic institutions that valued international compliance, efficiency, and transparency.Footnote ²⁷

If the WTO epitomized Vietnam’s adopted family at the global level, ASEAN was its adopted family at the regional level. But while acceding to the WTO demanded substantial concessions, joining ASEAN required milder adjustments. By the mid-2000s, it became normal for a Vietnamese leader to call ASEAN a “family,” and by the late 2000s, ASEAN was perceived as the country’s best shelter against the vicissitudes of great-power politics; by the early 2010s, Vietnam felt so wedded to ASEAN that it aspired to play a “core role” (vai trò nòng cốt) in the group. The background of this ambition included the decision made at the 11th Congress of the CPV in January 2011 to advance as a major policy (chủ trương lớn) Vietnam’s “comprehensive integration” with the world, and the US encouragement of Vietnam’s leadership in ASEAN. The policy of comprehensive international integration implicitly acknowledged that the world was one (a single international system), not two (socialism versus capitalism). By urging full participation in the international community’s activities and compliance with the current international rules, laws, and standards, it solidified Vietnam’s new identity as an “engaged and responsible member of the international community” (thành viên tích cực và có trách nhiệm của cộng đồng quốc tế).Footnote ²⁸ Starting in 2014, for example, Vietnam participated in the UN’s peace-keeping operations, which required a change in the constitution about the mission of the Vietnamese military. The change was made in the 2013 constitution, which was revised mainly to adapt to “comprehensive international integration.”

Following its accession to the WTO, Vietnam became an enthusiast of free-trade agreements (FTAs). Its vision was to turn Vietnam into a world crossroads and to enhance the country’s economic attractiveness by joining a large number of free-trade areas, thus making Vietnam a bridge (cầu nối) between different trade blocs. By 2011, Vietnam signed six multilateral FTAs as an ASEAN member and two bilateral FTAs with Japan and Chile. Between 2014 and 2021, it joined seven more free-trade areas, of which only two included ASEAN. With these fifteen FTAs, Vietnam became a commercial hub that connects major free-trade areas spanning from the United Kingdom and the European Union through the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union to India and all substantial economies in the Pacific basin, except the United States, Taiwan, and Colombia. In this regard, only Singapore was better positioned than Vietnam, since it had an FTA with the United States. Although Vietnam joined the negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in 2008 at the invitation of the Bush administration, it lost an FTA with the United States when the Trump administration withdrew from the TPP in 2017.

The integrationist majority in the ruling elite and the removal of ideology as a foreign policy litmus test also spurred Vietnam to seek extensive and long-term cooperation with many countries around the world. Most prominently, it sought bilateral commitments to a strategic partnership with important regional countries and global powerhouses. Vietnam’s quest for strategic partnerships advanced in three major phases. Its first strategic partners were Asia’s major powers – Russia in 2001, India in 2007, China in 2008, and Japan in 2009. Its next strategic partners included five major advanced industrial countries – South Korea and Spain in 2009, the United Kingdom in 2010, and Germany and Italy in 2011. The rejection by France and Australia of Vietnam’s bid for a strategic partnership at that time pushed the upgrade with these countries to 2013 and 2018, respectively. In the third phase, five major ASEAN members became Vietnam’s strategic partners – Thailand, Indonesia, and Singapore in 2013, and Malaysia and the Philippines in 2015.

The strategic partnerships were the main threads of the web of partnerships that Vietnam built to maintain its security and propel its prosperity in the post–Cold War era. The top tier of this web consisted of ties with the most important countries in Vietnam’s strategic environment. By the mid-2010s, it included special strategic relationships with Laos and Cambodia, “comprehensive strategic partnerships” with China (established in 2008 with the added attribute “cooperative”), Russia (2012), and India (2016), and an “extensive strategic partnership” with Japan (2014). It tilted markedly toward non-Western powers and showed a clear deference to China, in part due to the anti-Western nature of the ideological, military, and security branches of Vietnam’s Leninist state, in part because deference to China was one of the main components of Hanoi’s approach to foreign policy – the other components being power-balancing, interlocking of interests, and enmeshment in international institutions. The glaring gap in the web was Vietnam’s ties with the United States, which sat on the third tier as just a “comprehensive partner” (2013).

The official designation of a partnership helps to codify commitment, signal the partnership’s importance, and facilitate domestic and bilateral coordination, but it is more deceptive than indicative when it comes to Vietnam’s relations with China and the United States. The year Beijing bestowed on Hanoi the mouthful epithet “comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership” – 2008 – was bracketed by Hanoi’s tacit approval, in 2007, of the first public protests against China since 1989, and a new height of Chinese harassment of Vietnamese fishermen in the South China Sea, in 2009. By the late 2010s, Vietnamese diplomats publicly noted that the US–Vietnam partnership was already “strategic” in content, albeit only “comprehensive” in name.Footnote ²⁹

China’s growing assertiveness in the South China Sea, starting in the late 2000s, gradually pushed Hanoi farther from Beijing and closer to Washington. Hanoi moved past the equidistance line between China and the United States after China crossed Vietnam’s red line by installing a giant oil rig, the HYSY-981, inside waters that Vietnam considered its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) under international law. Seen from Vietnam nearly as an invasion, this sparked the worst crisis in Sino-Vietnamese relations since their bloody clash over the Spratly Islands in 1988. Like the Khmer Rouge’s attacks in 1977, the economic crisis in the mid-1980s, the collapse of Eastern European communist regimes in 1989, and the Iraq War in 2003, the HYSY-981 oil-rig crisis, which lasted seventy-five days in the summer of 2014, was a transformative moment in postunification Vietnamese foreign policy. It shattered trust between Vietnam and China and removed key obstacles in US–Vietnam relations. It caused Washington to lift a decades-old ban on weapons sales to Vietnam in order to aid the country in its feud with China. After these events, the two-camp worldview died out in the Vietnamese leadership, and the anti-Western policy current associated with it reached a final demise.Footnote ³⁰ By 2018, as China stepped up its encroachment on the Vietnamese EEZ and the United States augmented its support for Vietnam’s cause in the South China Sea, Vietnam dusted off an offer that the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, had tabled in 2010 but Vietnam had resisted ever since – to raise their ties to a “strategic partnership.” As the plan went, CPV General Secretary Nguyễn Phú Trọng and US President Donald Trump would announce the upgrade at Trọng’s second visit to the White House in late 2019. However, this never materialized, owing to Trọng’s inability to travel.Footnote ³¹ The US–Russia hostility following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 prompted Hanoi to shelve the upgrade of its ties with Washington to demonstrate its commitment to Moscow, among others. In 2023, as Moscow was convinced of Hanoi’s loyalty, Vietnam and the United States elevated their ties to a “comprehensive strategic partnership.”

Vietnam entered a new era of great-power competition with apparent deference to China, a nonexclusive embrace of ASEAN, and a deepening but promiscuous partnership with the other major powers. This architecture was meant to be flexible, to reflect the alignment (as well as incompatibility) between Vietnam’s objectives and those of the others. During the latter half of the 2010s, a non-China tilt replaced the previous non-Western tilt of Vietnam’s web of partnerships. Hanoi paid lip service to China’s epoch-making Belt and Road Initiative, but domestic pressure has prevented the government from participating in this Chinese scheme. Also, Vietnam was one of only four Asian countries that excluded China’s Huawei from their 5G networks – the other three being Japan, Taiwan, and India. On the other hand, by late 2015 Hanoi had made major concessions on labor rights, government procurement, and state-owned enterprises, things that cut to the core of the communist regime, to join the TPP, which was later renamed the “Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership” (CPTPP) after the US withdrawal. Vietnam even doubled down on its free-trade enthusiasm and accepted the noneconomic provisions of the European Union–Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA), which was signed in June 2019. Like the CPTPP, the EVFTA went beyond the dismantlement of tariffs and opening of markets: their noneconomic provisions were intended to enforce higher standards of human rights and environmental protection, promote Western values, and make Vietnam more attractive to Western investors.Footnote ³² As Vietnam’s strategic objectives of denying Chinese regional dominance, maintaining a nonhierarchical international order based on neutral rules in the South China Sea, and becoming a manufacturing and high-tech hub in the global supply chains dovetailed with the policies of the United States, Japan, and, to a lesser extent, South Korea and Australia, these countries were elevated to the top tier of Vietnam’s foreign relations by 2023. At the same time, Hanoi took care to nurture its leadership in ASEAN and its partnerships with Russia and the European Union to broaden its international “safety net.” Likened to bamboo by party chief Trọng in December 2021, the ideal Vietnamese approach to foreign policy should, in the eyes of Vietnamese leaders, provide resilience and flexibility in dealing with the vagaries of international relations.Footnote ³³ This bamboo approach was put to a severe test when a new Cold War erupted between Russia and China on the one hand and the West on the other following Russia’s full-blown assault on Ukraine, tearing apart Vietnam’s web of partnerships with the major powers. Although the Russia–Ukraine war did not pose a direct threat to Vietnam’s quest for resources, security, and identity, it has triggered the largest transformation in the international order since the (old) Cold War’s end. With the advent of a new Cold War, Vietnam needs a new strategic “map” to replace its “single market” worldview, which is predicated on the assumptions of a bygone era.

Conclusion

Vietnam’s exposed position to Western interventions has placed the country before two long-term choices: to reject the Western-led world order and oppose Western influence or to accept the Western-led world order and adapt Western influence. The anti-Western choice, which was more heroic, emerged victorious from the First and Second Indochina Wars – the wars respectively with France and the United States. Critical factors that enabled its success included the anti-Western sentiment, a Leninist party, and the shared border with China. In a play of historical irony, the same factors were instrumental in leading Vietnam into the Third Indochina War – the war with China and the Khmer Rouge – and throwing it into the worst crisis of the postunification period. It took this war and the crisis, which consisted of an economic collapse coupled with severe international isolation, to revive the choice of integration with the world at large. But the fall of Eastern European communist regimes in 1989 strengthened Vietnam’s anti-Western choice, and the factors mentioned above played important roles again in delaying the country’s joining of the world. Eventually, it took the combination of a massive demonstration of US supremacy – the Iraq War of 2003 – and an extensive territorial dispute with China in the South China Sea to shift Vietnam decisively toward international integration.

The anti-Western choice has put Vietnam on the wrong side of history. Its adoption by the Nguyễn Dynasty in the nineteenth century was a major reason behind Vietnam’s loss of sovereignty and becoming a victim of French colonialism. In the twentieth century, it landed Vietnam on the side of the Soviet Union, the loser of the Cold War, a hegemonic competition between the world’s two superpowers. World politics is settled primarily by the strategic contest among great powers. The next instance of great-power competition is centrally the rivalry between China and the United States. Who will win this contest is a question of the future, but the hint to its answer can be found in geography and history. The geography of the Earth suggests that the dominant power of the world’s oceans has a crucial edge over its rivals in the contest for global hegemony. History also shows that none of the great powers based in the continents of Afro-Eurasia – from Persia, Rome, India, and China in the rimland of Eurasia to the Mongols and Russia in its heartland – has ever become a global hegemon. This dominant position has historically been reserved for “offshore” powers – the United Kingdom and the United States – whose location and resources enabled them to achieve mastery of our planet’s maritime domain.Footnote ³⁴ There is no guarantee that Vietnam will not choose the wrong side of history again. But if it does not sacrifice its interests in the South China Sea, which entail a commitment to denying Chinese primacy in the region and upholding international law as opposed to China’s “nine dash line”Footnote ³⁵ claims, it will likely land on the right side of history – for the first time in two centuries.