Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995

by James S. Olson

  On April 3, 1975, Ambassador John Gunther Dean asked President Gerald Ford for permission to evacuate all Americans from Phnom Penh. The 1.7 million people in the city were starving. The Khmer Rouge had cut off all routes into the city, including the Mekong River, and the airlift of supplies was becoming precarious, for the guerrillas were closing in on Pochentong Airport. The communists poured 107-mm rockets into the city. Lon Nol had abdicated two days before to a military coalition and left the city for Indonesia, on his way to Hawaii. Hoping to work out a last-minute arrangement for the return of Prince Norodom Sihanouk to power, Kissinger delayed the American evacuation. On April 1 the Khmer Rouge were on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. President Ford then implemented Operation Eagle Pull. Naval helicopters from the Seventh Fleet landed on the embassy grounds and evacuated 276 Cambodian and American embassy personnel and their families, with Ambassador John Gunther Dean the last to leave, carrying the United States embassy flag, neatly folded in a plastic bag, at his side. Six days later the Khmer Rouge swept through the streets of Phnom Penh.

  By that time the North Vietnamese were ready for a final assault of their own. Le Duc Tho was so excited that he came down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to stay in Loc Ninh at Dung’s headquarters. During late March and early April, Dung moved eighteen NVA divisions into place within a forty-mile radius of Saigon. Poised due east of the city were the 3rd, 304th, 325th, and 342B Divisions, charged with taking out the ARVN 1st Airborne Brigade at Ba Ria and the 951st ARVN Ranger Group and the 4th Airborne Brigade near Long Thanh. Northeast of Saigon, Dung placed the 6th, 7th, and 314th Divisions, ordering them to hit Bien Hoa. To the north, the 320B, 312th, and 338th Divisions were assigned the conquest of the ARVN 5th Division at Ben Cat and the ARVN Ninth Ranger Brigade at Lai Thieu. Northwest of Saigon, Dung had the 7th, 316th, 320th, and 968th Divisions ready to pounce on the ARVN 25th Division at Trang Bang and Cu Chi. In the west, the 3rd, 5th, 9th, and 16th divisions were poised to attack the ARVN 22nd Division at Tan An and Ben Luc and the 7th and 8th Ranger Brigades just outside of Saigon. To the southwest, the NVA 8th Division prepared to attack the ARVN 7th Division at My Tho.

  On April 21, President Thieu resigned. Duong Van (“Big”) Minh, Thieu’s longtime rival, assumed the presidency. Graham Martin, the United States ambassador to South Vietnam who had replaced Ellsworth Bunker in 1973, cabled Henry Kissinger two days later telling him that Operation Frequent Wind, the American evacuation of Saigon, was only a few days away. Martin complained to Kissinger that “the only person whose ass isn’t covered is me.” Kissinger cabled back: “My ass isn’t covered. I can assure you it will be hanging several yards higher than you when this is all over.”

  The end came eleven days later. On April 26, 1975, Dung launched the Ho Chi Minh Campaign, and ARVN immediately collapsed in toward Saigon. With television cameras broadcasting the events throughout the world, the North Vietnamese moved in on the city. President Ford implemented Operation Frequent Wind on April 29, and in the next several days American helicopters airlifted 7,100 American and South Vietnamese military and civilian personnel out of Saigon, many of them from the roof of the United States embassy, while naval ships ferried more than 70,000 South Vietnamese to American vessels in the South China Sea. On April 29 Duong Van Minh surrendered unconditionally. Graham Martin left the embassy on April 30. The NVA 325th, 471st, and 968th Divisions then headed for Laos, in further assurance of the Pathet Lao victory several months later. Twenty-one years after the Geneva Convention of 1954, Indochina had fallen to the communists.

  April 1, 1975—A U.S. civilian pilot in the aircraft doorway tries to maintain order as panicking South Vietmamese civilians scramble to get aboard. Thousands of civilians and South Vietnamese soldiers fought for space. (Courtesy, Library of Congress.)

  On the afternoon of April 30, 1975, after Graham Martin and the last Americans were out of Saigon, a column of North Vietnamese tanks appeared on Thong Nhut Avenue and rumbled across Cong Ly Boulevard toward Independence Palace. The tank column crashed through the gates of the palace and lined up on the lawn. A soldier, bearing the blue and red flag with the yellow star of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, emerged from the belly of the lead tank and waved the banner from the palace steps. Neil Davis, a war correspondent from Reuters, went up to the young man and asked his name. “Nguyen Van Thieu,” the soldier replied. The Vietnam War was over.

  Although the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial triggered a storm of protest in the United States, the “wall” eventually became a secred shrine to millions of people who visited it. (Courtesy, Library of Congress.)

  11

  Distorted Images, Missed Opportunities, 1975–1995

  No more Vietnams.

  —Richard Nixon, 1985

  It was not at all like the Iwo Jima monument. On that point nearly everyone agreed. The Iwo Jima statue stands proud in Arlington, Virginia, an eloquent reminder of a simpler, more straightforward war. Frozen in bronze are the five marines thrusting the American flag into the soil on top of Mount Surabachi. Its style is heroic realism, a faithful attempt to reproduce the award-winning photograph. It trafficks in un-complex emotions: the “good war,” John Wayne in the Pacific, go get’em boys, “I shall return.” Not far from the Iwo Jima monument, across the Potomac River, broods the Vietnam War Memorial. It rises out of a depression in the ground, shifts direction a bit, and then descends back into the ground. Its surface is polished black granite, an inscrutable veneer that reflects the image of the viewer and the landscape that faces it. Cut into the granite are the names of the more than 58,000 American men and women who died in the war. What did they die for? What caused the war? What was the nature of the conflict? If you look for the answers in the silent black stone, all you will see is yourself.

  From its inception the memorial generated controversy. It was too vague, some said, too abstract, not heroic enough. Others complained loudly and bitterly about the architect, Maya Ying Lin, a student at Yale. The war had been against Asians. Students had been the most outspoken opponents of the war. Should an Asian-American student memorialize the war? Many veterans answered no. The memorial, meant to commemorate sacrifice, quickened old pains that the years had turned dull. The questions about the meaning of the war returned with fresh force. In response to opponents of the Wall, another sculpture was commissioned. This one, the work of Frederick Hart, is a realistic rendition of soldiers. Both memorials were dedicated on November 13, 1982.

  The controversy died quickly. The polished black stone has taken its place near the other stones—some polished, some not—that memorialize other events and other wars and other men. Tourists dutifully visit it along with the others. Most are pleased by what they see. In some very special way, the memorial is like the war itself—so misunderstood and complex and even abstract. Americans went to a land few understood. They fought a war. And then they returned home. And within a short time Vietnam left the news shows and the news magazines, replaced by other stories.

  During the war 11,000 women nurses had treated 153,000 wounded soldiers. Within months of the dedication of the Vietnam War Memorial, woman veterans began to campaign for recognition of their role in Indochina. In 1983 Diane Carlson Evans, who had served in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969 as an army nurse, was thinking of a memorial to the war’s women. For years she struggled to secure the necessary congressional approval and to raise $2.5 million. By 1991 she had the money and the authorization, and Glenna Goodacre received the commission to design the memorial. She produced a bronze sculpture, larger than life, of three women cradling a wounded GI. The memorial was unveiled and dedicated on Veterans’ Day in 1993.

  The struggle of Americans to come to terms with the Vietnam War has been largely outside the corridors of power. Politicians, diplomats, and military leaders, their credit spent in the years of conflict, lost their chance to influence popular opinion. They gave way to intellectuals and artists and media executives, a diverse collection of historians, writers, and film and
television producers. It was now their turn to explain the war and its impact on American society. The time to ask, “What should we do?” had passed. Now the questions took many forms. What had we done? Why did we do it? How did Vietnam change its veterans? Could they peacefully return to American society? How did their experiences scar them? What did the war accomplish? How did it change American culture and politics? Why did the United States lose? Who or what was to blame?

  It was not the first American war to pile up civilian deaths, and not the first to deserve to be called unjust; it was far more just, for example, than the Mexican War, which stole half of Mexico to the intended benefit of slaveholders. Nor was the United States defeated in battle. Yet defeat it was, forseen by many Americans even during the war, and that amounted to saying that every life lost or taken by the Americans was for a cause unredeemed by achievement.

  Very quickly the Vietnam veteran himself became an issue. Often he was seen as a person not to pity or hate or love but to fear, for he was a ticking time bomb, waiting to plant his lethal self somewhere at home.

  The psychotic or maladjusted Vietnam War veteran was portrayed as a product of the war and the war alone. In most cases, he is a man without a background, without a home or parents or life before his service in Vietnam. It is as if he were bred in the country’s steamy jungles and fertile rice fields. All he knows is war, and when he returns to the United States he continues to ply his trade.

  The Vietnam Women’s Memorial, dedicated in 1993, commemorates the service and sacrifice of tens of thousands of American women who spent part of their lives in Vietnam. (Courtesy, Library of Congress.)

  Sometimes he joins an outlaw motorcycle gang in which violence is a way of life and a reason for being. Such B-movies as Angels from Hell, issued in 1968, next year’s Satan’s Sadists, and in 1971 Chrome and Hot Leather together with The Losers transport the veteran from a helicopter to a Harley. In other films the veteran remains a loner, violence seething within him. In Taxi Driver, released in 1976, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) ticks quietly in New York City. He has no past and no future; he seems to invent both out of emptiness. His letters to his parents are a cluster of lies, and a viewer of the film can suspect that his parents themselves are part of his fantasy life. The only reality in his life is the war that he cannot articulate while it drives him toward violence as surely as he drives his taxi. As Seth Cagin and Philip Dray observe: “Travis Bickle is the prototypical movie vet: In ways we can only imagine, the horror of the war unhinged him. He’s lost contact with other human beings, he doesn’t hear them quite properly, and his speaking rhythms are off. He’s edgy; he can’t sleep at night, not even with the help of pills, so he takes a job as a taxi driver on the night shift.” And he waits to explode. That in the end he kills a pimp, for reasons that on the surface seem driven by virtue, is irrelevant. He might just as easily have killed a politician or anyone else, including himself. His violence knows no reason. It is not directed toward society or politicians or any particular person. It just is. In Karel Reisz’s Who’ll Stop the Rain, a movie rendering in 1978 of Robert Stone’s novel Dog Soldiers, published four years earlier, a veteran is involved in smuggling a shipment of heroin into the United States. Not only does he bring the corruption of Saigon back home with him—for the heroin will ruin civilians just as it did soldiers—but violence and death follow in his wake. As in the other films, the ultimate threat of the veterans is the Vietnamization of the United States. Tommy Lee Jones’s character in Between Heaven and Earth and Kevin Costner’s in The War, both issued in 1994, carry debilitating psychological baggage back from Vietnam.

  Tracks, a low-budget film directed by Henry Jaglom and screened in 1976, gives violence greater direction and logic. An army sergeant, played by Dennis Hopper, escorts home the body of a friend killed in Vietnam. On the cross-country train trip he tries to tell his fellow passengers about the dead soldier, a black hero who saved his life. He asks the civilians about the war and wonders why the United States was in Vietnam. Most of the other passengers are not interested in the sergeant, his dead comrade, or his questions; some are hostile, a few embarrassed. His war is not their war; his sufferings are not their sufferings. The film ends with the burial. Alone, the sergeant watches the coffin being lowered into the ground. Then he jumps in after it. When he emerges from the hole, he is dressed for battle and fully armed. “You want to go to Nam?” he cries out. “I’ll take you there.”

  A film marking a transition in the image of the Vietnam veteran is Coming Home, directed by Hal Ashby and released in 1978. Ashby’s Shampoo, which appeared three years earlier, features a collection of wealthy southern Californians during the 1968 presidential election. As the characters get ready for a Nixon victory party, news of the horrors of Vietnam comes at them from radios and televisions. But they pay no mind; it is not their war, not their concern. Coming Home, to the contrary, brings the war to southern California. Its central characters are Luke Martin (Jon Voight), a bitter paraplegic, and Sally Hyde (Jane Fonda), the wife of a marine captain (Bruce Dern) serving a tour in Vietnam. During the course of the film the conservative, sexually repressed Sally flowers into a liberated woman. She puts on Levis, allows her hair to follow its natural frizzy disposition, and with Luke experiences an orgasm for the first time in her life. Luke too is transformed. Bitter and angry at the start of the film, he becomes introspective and gentle. Coming Home suggests that love can cure the trauma of Vietnam, that understanding can erase the pain of bad memories.

  Viewed in retrospect, Coming Home is sentimental and pat. But in 1978, it was a bold film. Frank Rich of Time magazine called it “one long, low howl of pain,” and other reviewers agreed that it was an important statement. It also showed Hollywood that a film about the Vietnam War could be political and profitable. At the same time it contributed to the rehabilitation of the popular image of the Vietnam veteran. Influenced by Ron Kovic’s autobiographical Born on the Fourth of July, published two years earlier, Coming Home portrays the veteran as not only in need of healing but capable of being a healer. Luke is not a loner; he is not a ticking bomb; he is not a threat to society. His anger flows from the unwillingness of the nation to recognize his plight. “When people look they don’t see me,” Luke tells Sally. His crippled body is an important legacy of Vietnam. Toward the end of the film he tells a group of high school students, “There was a lot of shit over there I find fucking hard to live with. But I don’t feel sorry for myself. I’m just saying that there’s a choice to be made.” And that choice is as present in the United States as it was in Vietnam. Choosing not to live consumed by bitterness but to use his pain to help others, Luke is reintegrated into society.

  The Deer Hunter, which appeared the same year as Coming Home, tells of a similar redemption. Directed by Michael Cimino, the film shows how the war changed the lives of three men from a western Pennsylvania steel town. Of the three, the most important is Michael (Robert De Niro). He begins the film as a loner, and violence seems an integral part of his character. Yet in Vietnam, it seems, surrounded by death and terror, he finds compassion. He saves his life and that of his two companions, and when one of them, Nicky (Christopher Walken), becomes addicted to heroin and Russian roulette, Michael risks his own life in an attempt to reach him. “I love you,” he says just before Nicky’s luck runs out and he loses his final game of Russian roulette. Vietnam purges Michael of his aggression and anger. He is at peace with himself and his surroundings. The film ends on a note of affirmation. After Nicky’s funeral, Michael joins his other friends—women as well as men—in singing “God Bless America.” He is finally a whole person, reconciled with himself, his community, and his country. That same theme comes through in Oliver Stone’s 1990 film Born on the Fourth of July, in which Tom Cruise portrays Ron Kovic, a paraplegic Vietnam veteran who finally comes to his separate peace. The book and movie are not fiction: They tell of Kovic’s actual experiences.

  After 1980 the popular image of the Vietnam v
eteran began to change on television. Like Michael in The Deer Hunter and Luke in Coming Home, the veteran was transformed into a figure of compassion and imbued with a sense of justice. Rather than threaten society, the new television veteran defends society, upholds justice, and restores order. In Vietnam he learned how to fight, use sophisticated weapons, and function in a tight-knit group The very same virtues that led him to Vietnam or were instilled there now compel him to battle evil and injustice in the United States. Television depicted this new veteran in such shows as Magnum, P.I., The A-Team, Riptide, and Air Wolf. Most of the heroes of these shows are unmarried, but their bachelorhood is not viewed as a hostility to women, family, and children. The group functions as their family, and they display a healthy attraction to women that is amply reciprocated. Nor are they scarred emotionally or physically by their service in Vietnam. No guilt troubles their thoughts, no injuries plague their days.

  It is especially notable, as a reflection of how Vietnam changed public views, that these new heroes no longer act on behalf of the government. Crippled by red tape and bureaucratic lethargy, the modern state is presumed unable to act with speed and justice. The veteran heroes are part of the private sector—the United States of Ronald Reagan. As the viewer is told each week at the beginning of The A-Team, “If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them . . . you can hire the A-Team.” But while these veteran heroes act outside the government, they fight for their country. Often they combat external threats—drug smuggling, terrorism, and spying—and on some occasions they operate beyond the national borders. Their cause is always just and on television ends justify means. Perhaps, as Lisa M. Heilbronn writes, they “represent a desire on the part of the public to see our control secured beyond the boundaries of the United States.”