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VIETNAM: DID THE WRONG GUYS WIN?

by g.j. lau

My first epiphany on what was really happening in Vietnam came to me while riding along Highway 1 in a deuce and a half going from here to there or back again. Staring at the passing countryside, I noticed that running parallel to the road was an old railroad line. The gauge was unusually narrow and the track extremely rusted. The rail line was most likely built by the French, probably during the 30's or 40's, when Vietnam was still a French colony.

What caught my eye was the condition of the track. Each separate rail was bent and twisted into wild contortions resembling those corkscrewing roller coasters so popular at today's amusement parks. Only whoever did this was clearly not out to have some fun.

The level of destruction was complete. There was not a single foot of track left straight. And it went on like this for miles. I began to wonder how long it would have taken to so methodically destroy iron railing. And then it occurred to me that this was no doubt done by the same army that the US fought in 1969.

At that point I became aware of deep time as it pertained to the Vietnam conflict. The little bit I had read of the history of Indochina became concrete. This war I found myself in was something that had started long before I got there and would no doubt be going on long after I left.

I felt what Kurtz must have felt as he steamed up the Congo River into Conrad's Heart of Darkness, mesmerized at the passing jungle, impenetrable, blank and dark. Kurtz had the sense of progressing backwards in time with each new bend and twist of the river.

Conrad's novel came to be intimately associated with the American experience in Vietnam. It conveyed not only the horror of what we found out about ourselves in the dark jungle and remote villages, but also a sense of mystery, a sense that there were hidden currents driving events in ways that we never seemed able to really understand. In modern parlance, we call this being clueless.

America was clueless then, and is clueless now. This is inevitable given the fact that Americans persist in viewing the incursion in Vietnam as an extension of the Cold War. For the US, it was always about stopping the spread of Communism. Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson all bought into the domino theory, or at least didn't feel politically strong enough to resist its proponents.

During the war that's all you heard about. "Kill a commie for Christ" was our watchword. And 25 years later many Americans are still convinced that what we were doing was stemming the Red Tide of Communism, a noble undertaking done only to make the world a better place.

The only problem is that this had little to do with the other side's war aims. Ho Chi Minh started out to rid his land of an oppressive and greedy colonial occupier, the French. Before it ended, this battle between a small but determined band of insurgents and one of the superpowers of that era was to take on as many twists and turns of fortunes as that railroad line along Highway 1.

Until World War II, the French controlled Vietnam as a colony. During the War, the French abandoned their claims to Vietnam. At wars end, the world was carved up into zones of operations. China got the northern part, while the British occupied the southern half. What follows is a complicated tale of intrigue and betrayal that led to the 1st Indochina War between France and Vietnam, a war that ended for the French at Dien Bien Phu.

The 1954 Geneva Conference of Foreign Ministers formalized the split of Vietnam into North and South. The leader of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, refused to permit elections as called for by the Geneva Conference. This gave the Vietminh a reason to begin a campaign of disruption that led to the 2nd Indochina War, the one that ended for the United States on a rooftop in Saigon in April 1975.

The governments in South Vietnam, supported by the West, failed because they never had the grass roots support of the peasantry in South Vietnam. Yes, there was an element of coercion in that loyalty, but there was also a shrewd understanding of who had history on their side. The peasants had it right all along. It was only Uncle Sam who never understood Uncle Ho. What really mattered to Ho Chi Minh was independence for his country. He was a nationalist first and a communist second. This is the point that was glossed over then, and is still not fully accepted today.

John McCain raised quite a ruckus during his recent trip to Vietnam when he expressed the thought that the wrong guys had won the war. To some degree he has a point--life in Vietnam since 1975 has not been a bed of roses. Leaving aside the usual problems that come when the winners take their revenge against the losers, the lot of the average Vietnamese has not improved all that much in the last 25 years.

The successors to Ho Chi Minh have not done a great job running the country. Their adherence to an outdated economic philosophy that even the East Germans finally gave up on has hampered growth. It didn't help that the United States did its level best to isolate Vietnam and discourage other countries from doing business there.

If Ho Chi Minh had been smart enough to lose, perhaps Vietnam might have been the beneficiary of an Asian Marshall Plan. But, as luck would have it they won, and they soon discovered that Uncle Sam is not a gracious loser.

Twenty-five years later, America still has yet to truly understand just what the hell happened in Vietnam. The story of Ho Chi Minh's birthing of a nation is a fascinating one, worthy of attention. He is one of the great figures of the 20th Century and will be remembered as such. He had a single goal--to rid his country of foreign powers so that Vietnam would again be an independent nation. He persisted for 60 years, through a World War and numerous smaller wars, taking down two of the world's dominant powers in the process and sustaining over a million and a half deaths to get it done.

It is more than a little ironic that this April 2000 finds the United States absorbed by its two thorniest adversaries from the Cold War era, Cuba and Vietnam. The saga of Elian Gonzalez reopened old wounds that go back to the ill-fated invasion at Cuba's Bay of Pigs. And as we passed the 25th anniversary of the evacuation of Saigon, American attention was once again focussed inward and, for a brief moment, asked itself for the hundredth time, what did it all mean?

It is time for America to finally put aside its grievances against Vietnam and Cuba and accept them back fully into the community of nations. History is implacable in its judgment, and I believe that history will find America betrayed its own dream in the harsh and unforgiving way it has treated these two countries. Forty years of bad blood must finally end if we are to have any hope of rediscovering the idealism and generosity of spirit that truly marked the American century.

G.J. Lau toils deep in the bowels of the Washington bureaucracy. A long-time observer of American politics and mores, he now edits his own e-zine, Singleminded.