(MIS)REMEMBERING VIETNAM

 

Many mainstream news outlets, and especially Public TV,  have been featuring reminiscences about the “fall” of Saigon and the end of what we call “The Vietnam War.” In Vietnam they call it “The American War” -- to distinguish it from the 10-year battle to gain independence from the French colonialists that preceded direct US involvement.  The stories and documentaries emphasize the tragedy of the considerable number of Vietnamese, who, out of conviction or otherwise had thrown their lot in with the American occupiers.  Thousands of them, in panic, sought to leave the country with the departing US personnel. Many succeeded, more did not and were abandoned in the hasty American evacuation from Saigon on April 30, 1975.

 

The trauma and suffering of those Vietnamese who left, and many who stayed behind or struggled to flee later, cannot be denied. But the real tragedy of the Vietnamese people did not just occur in 1975.  A hundred years of colonial rule preceded it –French domination, briefly interrupted by a Japanese invasion during the Second World War, was followed by renewed French post-war occupation -- facilitated by US financial and military assistance.  The French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 led to a Geneva Agreement to re-unify Vietnam through a democratic vote that everyone believed would be won by resistance leader Ho Chi Min. 

 

Instead, the US maneuvered to evade the referendum by supporting a separatist regime in southern Vietnam, dominated largely by a Catholic minority that had been nurtured under French colonialism..  Many of the political and military elites allied with the US had earlier collaborated with the French – or even the Japanese – against Vietnamese independence. By blocking the Geneva Accords and national re-unification, the US condemned the tortured country to 20 more years of near genocidal warfare that killed up to 3 million Vietnamese and created many more millions of internal refugees. 55,000 Americans also died.

 

Of the estimated one-million who fled following the defeat of the US and South Vietnamese forces, many ended up in Dorchester, where the older generation of the community is still dominated by an aging, unreconciled exile elite.  Up and down Dorchester Avenue – and in the Vietnamese Cultural Center where DPP meets -- you can still see the yellow flag with red stripes of the long-defunct Republic of (South) Vietnam. Younger Vietnamese-Americans increasingly self-identify as a community of color faced with discrimination and engaged in the struggle for economic and civil justice.

 

Meanwhile, 2015 also marks the centennial of the first US invasion of Haiti, followed by many more over the years.

 

40 Years Later, From the Fall of Saigon to Our Fallen Empire

If our wars in the Greater Middle East ever end, it’s a pretty safe bet that they will end badly -- and it won't be the first time. The “fall of Saigon” in 1975 was the quintessential bitter end to a war. Oddly enough, however, we’ve since found ways to reimagine that denouement which miraculously transformed a failed and brutal war of American aggression into a tragic humanitarian rescue mission… Defeat in Vietnam might have been the occasion for a full-scale reckoning on the entire horrific war, but we preferred stories that sought to salvage some faith in American virtue amid the wreckage. For the most riveting recent example, we need look no further than Rory Kennedy’s 2014 Academy Award-nominated documentary Last Days in Vietnam… Our vivid collective memories are of Vietnamese refugees fleeing their homeland at war’s end. Gone is any broad awareness of how the U.S. burned down, plowed under, or bombed into oblivion thousands of Vietnamese villages, and herded survivors into refugee camps. The destroyed villages were then declared “free fire zones” where Americans claimed the right to kill anything that moved.   More

 

Agent Orange: Terrible Legacy of the Vietnam War

From 1961 to 1971, the US military sprayed chemical products that contained large quantities of dioxin in order to defoliate the trees for military objectives… Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California) has introduced H.R. 2114, the Victims of Agent Orange Relief Act of 2015. If enacted, the bill would lead to the cleanup of dioxin and arsenic contamination still present in Vietnam. It would also provide assistance to the public health system in Vietnam directed at the 3 million Vietnamese affected by Agent Orange. It would extend assistance to the affected children of male US veterans who suffer the same set of birth defects covered for the children of female veterans. It would lead to research on the extent of Agent Orange-related diseases in the Vietnamese-American community, and provide them with assistance. Finally, it would lead to laboratory and epidemiological research on the effects of Agent Orange.  More