Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (47 page)

The best expression of this new mood is Sylvester Stallone’s films
First Blood
, which appeared in 1982, and
Rambo: First Blood II
, screened three years later. In the earlier film John Rambo is an ex-Green Beret mistaken for a hippie. By nature a loner and even a peaceful man, he is forced by a series of inept government officials to defend his freedom in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. The movie suggests that men like John Rambo did not lose the war; politicians back home did. In the climactic scene Rambo tells his former Special Forces commanding officer: “Nothing is over, nothing! You just don’t turn it off. It wasn’t my war— you asked me, I didn’t ask you . . . and I did what I had to do to win— but somebody wouldn’t let us win.” Yet there is no examination of just what “winning” in the context of the war in Vietnam means. It is enough for Rambo and his audience that the war could have been won. In the second film Rambo returns to Vietnam to find and rescue Americans missing in action from Vietnam—a popular scenario in the mid-1980s that was central to films released during the decade. But Rambo was really returning to Vietnam to win the war. When Colonel Trautman (Richard Crenna), his former commander, tells him, “The old war’s dead, John,” Rambo replies, “I’m alive. It’s still alive.” And later Rambo asks, “Do we get to win this time?” Trautman answers, “This time it’s up to you.” And since winning is again never defined, Rambo rewrites history. He wins.

Complete redemption of the American military did not really occur until the outbreak of the Gulf War. On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein sent Iraqi troops into the tiny, oil-rich nation of Kuwait. The invasion threatened Saudi Arabia and the vital sea lanes of the Persian Gulf, through which most of Japan’s and the Western world’s oil flowed. President George H. W. Bush carefully constructed a coalition backed by the United Nations and ordered Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. When Saddam Hussein refused to withdraw, the president ordered a massive military buildup. On January 17, 1991, after giving the Iraqis another chance to retreat, Bush unleashed Operation Desert Storm. Allied bombers pounded Iraq, and Iraq forces in Kuwait, for more than five weeks, and on February 24 the ground offensive began. The war was over four days later—a stunning victory for the military.

General Norman Schwarzkopf, the field commander of Allied forces, had conducted a brilliant military campaign, crushing Iraqi forces and achieving a public relations tour de force. Americans watched navy and air force pilots carrying out pin-point bombing campaigns using laserguided “smart bombs,” marines storming Persian Gulf beaches, and armored divisions sweeping across the deserts of the Middle East. When the war was over, the GIs returned triumphant to a grateful nation. Whatever images of an incompetent military still lingered in American popular culture were rapidly put to rest. And in the victory parades that took place across the country in 1991 and 1992, thousands of Vietnam veterans spontaneously joined the marchers down Main Street, getting the attention they had deserved, but never received, during the Vietnam War era.

While American filmmakers Ramboized the conflict, Vietnam labored to construct a nation out of the rubble of war. American bombing had destroyed the infrastructure of Vietnam. Roads and bridges, power plants and factories lay in ruins. Ports suffered from damage and neglect. For a generation the resources of Vietnam had been used to fuel the war machines. Conversion to a peacetime economy presented difficult, at times almost insurmountable, problems. Raw materials were scarce, and investment capital had left with the Americans. Machines imported from the United States broke down, and spare parts were impossible to obtain. Along with hope, peace brought the specter of economic ruin.

Vietnamese communism smothered the country with a stifling bureaucracy. The communists tried to implement Ho Chi Minh’s dream: political reunification of the two Vietnams and imposition of a socialist economic order. North Vietnamese cadres and Vietcong took control of South Vietnam, seized private property, collectivized plantations and farms, squeezed out small businesses, and hunted down South Vietnamese political and military officials. The government forcibly moved nearly one million civilians from Ho Chi Minh City, Hue, Danang, and Nha Trang to “New Economic Zones” in abandoned sections of South Vietnam. Blessed with a strategic location, a huge capacity for producing rice, and an enterprising people, the SRV declined into Third World poverty complete with high unemployment, crippling food shortages, and starvation. Along with the direct results of the war—hundreds of thousands of orphans, paraplegics, and amputees, and the physical destruction wrought by the American military—the ideology of communism rendered as a system of massive control at the hands of a party bureaucracy transformed Vietnam into one of the poorest countries in the world. The average worker made the equivalent of 300 dong a month in 1980. That same year a pair of cotton trousers cost 400 dong and a new bicycle 20,000 dong. Malnutrition became a normal condition. As one Soviet professor in Vietnam privately confided, “How much poverty in Vietnam? We have nothing like this in Moscow. Their party has made so many mistakes.” The SRV also failed in its attempt to de-Westernize the country, replacing capitalist with socialist habits. A number of critics even contended that southerners “Westernized” northerners. The official party newspaper
Nhan Dan
warned that the “new-colonial culture” of the south was “expanding to the north” and threatened to “spoil our younger generation and wreck our revolution.” French food, American beer, and Western ideas became blackmarket commodities. Governmental corruption, always a staple in the south, wound its way north. As one loyal northerner admitted, “I’ve been a Communist all my life. But now, for the first time, I have seen the realities of Communism. It is a failure—mismanagement, corruption, privilege, repression. My ideals are gone.” The worst of capitalism, it appears, had mated with the worst of collectivism.

As conditions in Vietnam worsened, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese fled the food and electricity rationing, de-Westernization, grinding poverty, and countless other daily hardships. Ethnic Chinese, the business leaders and merchants in Ho Chi Minh City, left the country in droves. The “boat people” risked the dangers of the South China Sea to find a new home. Tens of thousands drowned when their rickety ships sank, and thousands more were killed by pirates. Tens of thousands were caught by Vietnamese authorities before they had gone very far. Indonesia and Malaysia frequently rejected them when they did make landfall. Although exact statistics are difficult to obtain, as many as 250,000 Vietnamese boat people died during their escape attempt.

Diplomatic woes compounded domestic unrest. In 1977 President Jimmy Carter cautiously approached the SRV. Determined to improve the image of the United States among Third World countries, soon after his election Carter announced that he “would be perfectly glad to support the admission of Vietnam to the United Nations and to normalize relations with Vietnam.” That autumn he made good on his promise, and the two countries allowed academic and other cultural exchanges. At that moment what the SRV most needed were the investment capital and technological expertise of the United States. But in 1978 the SRV committed several critical mistakes, the most important of which was to demand reparations as a precondition for normalization. That prompted a quick reaction in Congress, opening still fresh psychological wounds. Carter’s decision to pardon all Americans who had fled to Canada during the war to avoid the draft and to extend that pardon to all who had deserted from the armed forces had a similar effect. Carter’s initiatives—Vietnam’s best hope of recovery and economic stability— died on the floor of Congress. In 1978 the SRV made another decision that, however justifiable, brought further disaster. It invaded the newly named Kampuchea (formerly Cambodia).

In comparison with the wretchedness of Kampuchea, Vietnam’s problems seemed insignificant. “Everybody, Cambodians and foreigners alike,” the
New York Times
correspondent Sydney H. Schanberg would recall of the mid-1970s, “looked with hopeful relief to the collapse of the city, for they felt that when the Communists came and the war finally ended, at least the suffering would be over. All of us were wrong.” When Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge roared into downtown Phnom Penh in armored personnel carriers and trucks in April 1975, they brought a demanding, ruthless ideology with them. They began emptying the cities of Cambodia, forcing people into the countryside for reeducation. For Pol Pot it was the beginning of a new age—”Year Zero” for the new country of Kampuchea. Dreaming of a preindustrial, agricultural utopia, he launched an assault on cities, teachers, intellectuals, professionals, and the middle class. He completely evacuated Phnom Penh, turning the city of three million people into a ghost town. He ordered the destruction of libraries, temples, schools, colleges, businesses, and whole cities. He transformed Kampuchea into a concentration camp, a huge “killing field” where two million Kampucheans lost their lives.

The Vietnamese watched the horrors with growing anxiety. A revolt in eastern Kampuchea in 1977 sent hundreds of thousands of frightened Kampucheans fleeing across the border into Vietnam. By 1978 the SRV had witnessed enough of Pol Pot’s megalomania. Vietnamese troops invaded Kampuchea, drove Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge into the jungles, and established the People’s Republic of Kampuchea. But the invasion did not end the suffering. Coming as it did during the planting season, it deprived peasants of their rice crop, and widespread starvation resulted. Pol Pot regrouped his forces and with 35,000 troops began a guerrilla action against the invasion. The Khmer People’s National Liberation Front, supplied by the United States, fielded 15,000 of its own guerrillas, and another guerrilla army, 9,000 strong, was loyal to Prince Norodom Sihanouk. The three groups fought guerrilla wars against one another and the Vietnamese. With the Vietnamese in Kampuchea, the premeditated killing of civilians stopped, but once again war was sweeping across Indochina.

The centuries-old animosities between Vietnamese and Khmer stirred other ancient hatreds and fears. China did not want to see the SRV extend its influence. On February 17, 1979, Deng Xiaoping sent the People’s Liberation Army across the border into Tonkin. The war lasted less than one month, but it took the lives of 35,000 people. On their way out of Tonkin, the Chinese destroyed several towns, blew up vital railway links, and obliterated important power plants and a phosphate mine responsible for most of Vietnam’s fertilizer.

The border war against China and the guerrilla war against Kampuchea further strained the Vietnamese economy. Before the two wars the SRV had been attempting to secure desperately needed loans from China, Japan, and several Western countries. As the fighting became hotter, the international financial community became colder. The SRV had the added cost of maintaining a standing army of more than one million men and stationing 140,000 troops in Kampuchea. By the mid1980s the SRV had become one of the poorest nations in the world, but its army was the world’s fourth largest. The American war in Vietnam was over. The ancient wars, pitting Vietnamese against Khmer and Chinese, continued.

For the money needed to keep its country solvent, Vietnam turned to the Soviet Union. The loans the Soviet Union provided—$1.5 billion annually—carried strings that stretched back to Moscow. To many people inside and outside of Vietnam, it soon appeared that Soviet domination had simply replaced American domination, Soviet advisers and experts flocking to Vietnam as the Americans had done twenty years later. “Americans without dollars,” the Vietnamese called them.

By the mid-1980s the SRV was at its lowest point. Economic reorganization had failed. Emigrants—many of them valuable professionals whom the country needed—continued to leave. The guerrilla war in Kampuchea dragged on. And Soviet advisers worked to turn the SRV into Cuba East. Finally, in 1986 the SRV committed itself to a radical change. At the Sixth Communist Party Congress, party leaders admitted that their experiment in communism had failed. The old guard retired and a new set of leaders, led by Nguyen Van Linh, took office. Linh, born in Hanoi but resident for most of his life in the south, symbolized the desire for true national unification. He realized that the economic and foreign policies of Pham Van Dong were bankrupt. Boldly, and with a firm sense of resolve, he once again looked West.

Undoubtedly influenced by the ideas and actions of Mikhail Gorbachev, Linh opened Vietnam to increasing amounts of democracy and capitalism. He permitted politicians to contest for assembly seats, and he released political prisoners. He sanctioned limited free enterprise and trimmed the glutted governmental bureaucracy. He even opened up Vietnam to Western goods. The historian Terry H. Anderson noted Western T-shirts and Madonna tapes on the streets of Hanoi. A few years earlier the SRV had frightened away Western investment capital; now it courted Western bankers and industrialists by enacting a liberal foreign investment code. An “underdeveloped nation such as Vietnam,” Linh emphasized, “needs even more to look to the capitalist world for lessons.”

Vietnam had little choice but to turn to the West. In spite of Mikhail Gorbachev’s
glasnost
and
perestroika
reforms, throughout the 1980s the economy of the Soviet Union continued its downward spiral. Ever since the early 1960s, infusions of financial aid from the Soviet Union had kept the North Vietnamese economy afloat, and after 1975, the process of rebuilding Vietnam required even more money. The influx of Russian rubles that for a decade had at least partially masked the economic disaster Vietnamese communists were bringing to their country the Soviet Union had to cut further. (In response to an appeal for loans, so went a story among the Vietnamese, Moscow sends a cable: “Tighten your belts.” Vietnam replies: “Send belts.”) The USSR could no longer prop up the economies of its satellites, for its own economy was imploding. Nor could it politically control them. With stunning rapidity beginning in 1989, the Soviet bloc in Central and Eastern Europe disintegrated. Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary went their separate ways. A rebellion succeeded in overthrowing the communist government of Romania, an especially brutal regime that had kept itself independent of Moscow. Yugoslavia broke up into petty warring states. And in 1991 the Soviet Union itself collapsed and ceased to exist. The river, or creek, of rubles dried up. Vietnam’s choice was simple: Turn to the West and liberalize its economy or face economic collapse and political ruin.