Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (48 page)

The emergence of new forms in popular culture reflected Vietnam’s political and economic changes. Such American films as
Platoon
played to crowded houses in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. And the Vietnamese film industry started to make films that showed the emotional complexity of the war. In
Ahn va em
(Brothers and Relations, issued in 1986) a veteran returns from war to find a changed Vietnamese society. Hanoi is wallowing in consumerism, his family has betrayed the ideas of socialism, and government corruption hampers efforts to reconstruct Vietnam. The veteran questions why he fought. In the end of the film, he turns away from the modern Vietnam and withdraws to the traditional, “unprogressive” life of the rural village. Recent films also revise the image of Americans. American soldiers are portrayed as victims of a senseless and unjust war: confused, frustrated, and angry but not evil.
Free Fire Zone
, which appeared in 1979, assigns evil not to the soldiers but to the machines of war. The filmmaker anthropomorphizes helicopters, endowing them with malevolence. They drop from the sky like prehistoric birds of prey. They, not their pilots, are blamed for the destruction. In the last scene of the film the Vietnamese shoot down a helicopter. In the wreckage they discover a dead pilot. “It is a sad moment,” notes the film critic Karen Jaehne, made “all the sadder for a photo of the pilot’s family carried away from the carnage on the wind.”

Altogether the films signal a shift in Vietnam’s attitude toward the United States. Since 1986 the SRV has promoted cultural exchanges with the United States by liberalizing its visa policy and allowing American writers and journalists greater access to Vietnam. American tourists can now visit Hue, Dienbienphu, and the Cu Chi tunnels. The government has allowed Vietnamese Amerasian children to emigrate to the United States to reunite with their parents. Through actions and words, the SRV has conveyed the simple message that the war is over and the time to forgive is at hand.

The message, however, was at odds with American foreign policy in the 1980s. During his two presidential terms, Ronald Reagan consistently ignored Vietnamese efforts to normalize relations between the two countries. Rather than emphasize points of agreement, he stressed fields of discord. Reagan focused on two issues: Vietnam’s continued occupation of Kampuchea and the POW-MIA controversy.

On the matter of their invasion of their neighbor, the Vietnamese began accommodating Washington even before the end of Reagan’s presidency, expressing a willingness to withdraw their troops; in 1988 they actually began to pull back. This was not an especially good thing. Given the centuries of hostilities between the Vietnamese and the Khmer, the SRV was not anxious to see the Khmer Rouge return to power. And other nations feared that a reinstalled Pol Pot (which to the great benefit of the Khmer people did not happen) would resume his genocidal war against all Western influences within Kampuchea. Nevertheless, the Vietnamese completed their withdrawal from Kampuchea in 1989.

The POW-MIA issue was largely imaginary. Fueled by a series of POW-MIA movies and the incendiary rhetoric of the Reagan administration, a large portion of the American public became convinced that thousands of prisoners of war and other American soldiers listed as missing in action were still alive in Vietnam. This emotionally charged issue blocked talks between the United States and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam for almost a decade. It also defied logic and impartial investigation. Of the Reagan administration’s intractability, Terry H. Anderson observes:

Technically, it is impossible for any Vietnamese government to find “all recoverable remains” under fifteen years of jungle growth. . . . Also MIAs are not just an American problem. The French still have 20,000 MIAs from their war in Indochina, and the Vietnamese list over 200,000. Furthermore, the United States still has 80,000 MIAs from World War II and 8,000 from the Korean War, figures that represent 20 and 15 percent, respectively, of the confirmed dead in those conflicts; the percentage is 4 percent for the Vietnam War. . . . The real “noble cause” for [the Reagan] administration is not the former war but its emotional and impossible crusade to retrieve “all recoverable remains.”

Yet in its effort to improve its foreign relations, Vietnam coupled with its withdrawal from Kampuchea an attempt to address the POW-MIA charges. High-level contacts between Washington and Hanoi increased in number and significance late in the Reagan administration. In September 1988, the two countries agreed to joint field investigations in Vietnam to identify the remains of American MIAs. In April 1992 President George Bush eased the American trade embargo in Vietnam by allowing the sales of products for humanitarian needs, primarily grain and medicines. At the end of 1992, Bush agreed to permit American companies to open offices in Vietnam, sign business contracts, and begin feasibility studies.

During the first year of the Clinton administration, the president dropped American opposition to settlement of Vietnam’s debts with the International Monetary Fund. The move toward normalization of relations, however, ran into trouble late in 1993 when circumstantial evidence from former Soviet archives and Vietnamese defectors indicated that several hundred American prisoners of war remained in Indochina after the return of the 591 POWs in 1973. Pentagon officials immediately went to work trying to confirm the stories, but they were unable to find any evidence corroborating the charges. Few politicians, however, were willing to risk promoting normalization until Vietnam became more cooperative, whatever an increased cooperation in regard to an issue so deliberately murky might mean. Bob Smith, a New Hampshire Republican who visited Vietnam frequently to investigate the issue, remarked late in 1993: “I don’t know if anyone is alive today, but I do know that we don’t have all the facts.”

Eager to get on the good side of administration officials in Washington, D.C., Vietnamese leaders early in 1994 began releasing more and more information about American soldiers missing in action and worked more diligently at returning the remains of MIAs. To acknowledge the Vietnamese effort and to encourage Hanoi to be even more forthcoming, in February 1994 President Clinton lifted the trade embargo, opening Vietnam and most of Indochina to American business. Only one step remained in the normalization process: diplomatic recognition of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

Early in 1995, the Clinton administration began leaking stories to the press about possible diplomatic recognition. Many Vietnamese-Americans opposed normalization, insisting that the United States should withhold recognition until the communist regime collapsed. The potential Republican presidential candidates Robert Dole of Kansas and Phil Gramm of Texas voiced opposition as well. So did POW-MIA advocacy groups, among them the National League of Families of Vietnam POWs and MIAs. Clinton lined up some heavy hitters of his own. Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican and former POW, backed the idea of recognition, as did Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and Vietnam veteran, and Senator Bob Kerrey, a Nebraska Democrat who had lost a leg in Vietnam.

While the Clinton administration was moving toward recognition, the Vietnamese were preparing for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, planning parades, parties, and solemn observances through-out the country. They wanted to make the most of history, to remember better days when a Third World nation had humbled the greatest superpower. Images of the North Vietnamese Army’s triumphant march toward the United States embassy in Saigon still stirred the hearts of tens of thousands of Vietnamese; Vo Nguyen Giap was a military genius and living icon; and Ho Chi Minh had become a demigod to his country. But the celebrations demanded tact. Vietnam, desperately impoverished, needed good relations with the United States. And in 1995 Vietnamese under the age of twenty-five, a majority of the country’s population and carrying no memories of the war or few, yearned for a better life, which millions of them thought to see in the wealth and culture of the United States. The Vietnamese leadership was not about to let any raucous, self-righteous twentieth-anniversary celebrations anger influential Americans. Vietnam moved forward with the anniversary preparations, but the Politburo made sure to keep them subdued.

What stoked the still burning embers of the Vietnam War in the spring of 1995 and postponed normalization efforts was not anything perpetrated by the Vietnamese, but a publishing event in the United States.

To coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the fall of South Vietnam, Random House issued
In Retrospect
, the memoirs of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. For twenty-eight years after leaving the Johnson administration, McNamara had kept his peace, refusing to answer any questions about the Vietnam War. To most antiwar activists, he was
persona non grata
, the arrogantly intellectual architect of an unnecessary war that killed three million Vietnamese and nearly 60,000 Americans, a war that had polarized the country and created a nation of cynics. Random House hyped the book as McNamara’s
mea
culpa
, the confessions of a troubled man who wanted to come clean. The publisher booked him on every talk show in every major media market, and he responded to questions directly, his voice sometimes cracking and his eyes welling up in tears. In conducting the Vietnam War, he admitted, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had mistakenly seen a communist Vietnam as a grave threat to national security, underestimated the power of Vietnamese nationalism, overestimated the influence of communism, and tried to find a military solution to what was essentially a political problem. In short, he acceded to every major criticism the antiwar movement had offered in the 1960s. “It seems beyond understanding, incredible that we did not force ourselves to confront such issues head-on. But then, it is very hard, today, to recapture the innocence and confidence with which we approached Vietnam in the early days. . . . We were wrong, terribly wrong.”

The book rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists, not because Americans accepted McNamara’s confession or endorsed his ideas, but because its publication drew hostility from across the public spectrum: liberals as well as conservatives, antiwar protesters as well as veterans. Anger drew readers to the book, and its reading as like as not deepened the anger. Skeptics charged that the man who had sent millions of boys to Vietnam and brought hundreds of thousands home in body bags or on hospital gurneys, meanwhile devastating the Vietnamese land and people, was just as arrogant as ever, and greedy as well, poised to make millions off the book. Former critics of the war wondered about the length of his silence, if indeed ever since 1966 he had realized his mistakes. McNamara’s disclaimer about not speaking up earlier—“I didn’t know any way to do it. At that point my voice wouldn’t have made any difference”—went nowhere. “It’s the same McNamara as ever,” one former antiwar activist fumed. “He still thinks he’s one of the best and the brightest. Those are crocodile tears he sheds.” Veterans’ groups joined in the fury though not in the reasons for it. The Gulf War had resurrected the reputation of American soldiers, and the luster of Vietnam veterans was brighter than ever. Just when the country was finally taking note of their sacrifice, the architect of the war was disparaging the American effort there and, as far as many veterans were concerned, tarnishing the men who had fought. “That no good son-of-a-bitch,” remarked Wendell Johnson, a purple-hearted marine who had lost part of his foot near Chu Lai. “He’s making a couple of million now, going to the bank with his blood money. You would think he’d at least have the good sense to donate the profits to some handicapped veterans he sent off to war. Hell, I’d be satisfied if he gave the money to wounded Vietnamese. Anything but keep it himself. Has he no sense of decency?”

The Clinton administration was forced to postpone temporarily its plans for diplomatic recognition. The president had to wait for the Vietnamese victory celebrations, tame as they were, to be off the news, and McNamara to be off the television screens. But opinion polls indicated that most Americans supported normalization. On July 11, 1995, at a brief White House ceremony, the president extended diplomatic recognition to Vietnam. “This moment,” Clinton said in a prepared statement, “offers us the opportunity to bind up our own wounds. They have resisted time for so long. We can now move on to common ground.”

A generation after the fall of Saigon in 1975, the American people wondered how it had happened, how the Vietnam War had gone out of control, how the richest country in the world could sacrifice hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of young men and women in a military effort that seemed, in the end, to have so little significance. Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia had fallen to communism, but the rest of Asia survived. Only three dominoes went down. During the 1970s and 1980s the victorious Socialist Republic of Vietnam slipped into stupefying poverty, while the United States recovered from its malaise and enjoyed a period of unprecedented growth and prosperity. Communism had taken over Indochina in the end, and the United States was just fine anyway.

Back in the late 1940s, when the American confrontation of communism began, it had all seemed so simple, so clear, the threat so real and the sacrifice so necessary. Communism was on the march—in Europe and in Asia—and it appeared to be enjoying great success. Much of Eastern Europe was under Soviet domination, and in 1949 China fell to Mao Zedong’s cadres. Communism threatened to do the same to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The United States adopted a policy of containment and looked to apply it all around the world. Because Southeast Asia seemed crucial to the economic recovery of Japan and Western Europe, American policymakers committed themselves to the survival of the French empire. Given a choice between colonialism and communism, they chose colonialism. And when outright colonialism under the French collapsed, the United States went to the support of its remnant in the form of South Vietnam.