Vietnam prepares to celebrate 30th anniversary of war's end

Vietnam will celebrate next Saturday the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, a defining moment that sealed the catastrophic failure of US policy in Indo-China and cemented the communist victory in the long war. . A little after midday on April 30, 1975, a North Vietnamese tank crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon, the defeated South Vietnamese regime's capital, since renamed Ho Chi Minh City. .

The war thus ended a few hours after the last Americans left by helicopter from the roof of the US embassy. The defeated South Vietnamese troops shed their uniforms and weapons while heading for the near empty city centre. . General Duong Van Minh, alias "Big Minh", who had been hastily made president of South Vietnam in the regime's dying days, admitted defeat. The Vietcong blue and red flag with a golden star flew aloft the palace.

. Radio Giai Phong (Liberation), which throughout the conflict had been putting out the communists' upbeat messages and political propaganda, commenced regular transmissions. .

"The forces of the national liberation front have taken control of Saigon. Don't be afraid. You will be treated correctly," it said in its first broadcasts. . Pomp and ceremony is in the offing this week to commemorate the victory still deemed a historic pillar of the communist party's claim to the power it wields with an iron hand while at the same time pursuing economic liberalisation. .

"The ceremonies are meant to revive patriotism and national pride among the Vietnamese people, especially the youth," said Luu Van Kien, an official of the ministry of culture and information, member of the organising committee. . "This victory is a golden milestone in Vietnam's revolutionary path and affirms the leading role of the party and of Ho Chi Minh," its founder, he said. .

Ho Chi Minh City, now the country's business capital, had on Sunday already closed access roads to the Reunification Palace, in front of which buntings had gone up in the form of lamps with red, green, white and blue flames. . On the streets, propaganda posters have gone up paying homage to modern Vietnam's founding father Ho Chi Minh, shown surrounded by laughing children, or depicting tanks and soldiers advancing towards the old palace. . Some 50,000 participants are expected at Saturday's celebrations. .

Festivities began back in early March, with celebrations of the fall of Buon Ma Thuot, in the Central Highlands, the first stage in the communist forces' southward advance. . War veterans and state companies, the media and mass organisations as well as "heroic mothers" and party cadres -- all sectors of society are covered by the propaganda blitz. .

"The 30th anniversary of the liberation of Saigon is an event whose focus is primarily domestic," said Carl Thayer, Vietnam specialist at Johns Hopkins University in Washington. . "Victory in 1975 vindicates the line and policy of the party and army over the course of 30 years of war," Thayer said. "Victory against foreign aggression is also a source of legitimation for the communist party." .

Speeches are expected to focus less on past military exploits than on the need to boost economic development. . The war left 58,000 dead on the US side and a total of nearly three million in the opposing Vietnamese camps. . However, the nearly two-thirds of the population born after the war knows little of that era and cares even less. .

Vietnam has enjoyed 7.0 percent economic growth in the past several years, with a booming middle and upper class fattening on the back of the market economy and mainly focused on further advancement. .

The April 30 processions will therefore see less of military presence and more of "diverse social sectors", organisers said, noting the ceremony's main theme will be "Saigon-Ho Chi Minh City, 30 years of construction and development". — AFP Vietnam will celebrate next Saturday the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, a defining moment that sealed the catastrophic failure of US policy in Indo-China and cemented the communist victory in the long war. .

A little after midday on April 30, 1975, a North Vietnamese tank crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon, the defeated South Vietnamese regime's capital, since renamed Ho Chi Minh City. .

The war thus ended a few hours after the last Americans left by helicopter from the roof of the US embassy. The defeated South Vietnamese troops shed their uniforms and weapons while heading for the near empty city centre. . Ge neral Duong Van Minh, alias "Big Minh", who had been hastily made president of South Vietnam in the regime's dying days, admitted defeat. The Vietcong blue and red flag with a golden star flew aloft the palace. .

Radio Giai Phong (Liberation), which throughout the conflict had been putting out the communists' upbeat messages and political propaganda, commenced regular transmissions. .

"The forces of the national liberation front have taken control of Saigon. Don't be afraid. You will be treated correctly," it said in its first broadcasts. .

Pomp and ceremony is in the offing this week to commemorate the victory still deemed a historic pillar of the communist party's claim to the power it wields with an iron hand while at the same time pursuing economic liberalisation. .

"This victory is a golden milestone in Vietnam's revolutionary path and affirms the leading role of the party and of Ho Chi Minh," its founder, he said. .

On the streets, propaganda posters have gone up paying homage to modern Vietnam's founding father Ho Chi Minh, shown surrounded by laughing children, or depicting tanks and soldiers advancing towards the old palace. .

Festivities began back in early March, with celebrations of the fall of Buon Ma Thuot, in the Central Highlands, the first stage in the communist forces' southward advance. .

War veterans and state companies, the media and mass organisations as well as "heroic mothers" and party cadres -- all sectors of society are covered by the propaganda blitz. .

"The 30th anniversary of the liberation of Saigon is an event whose focus is primarily domestic," said Carl Thayer, Vietnam specialist at Johns Hopkins University in Washington. .

"Victory in 1975 vindicates the line and policy of the party and army over the course of 30 years of war," Thayer said. "Victory against foreign aggression is also a source of legitimation for the communist party." .

Politburo member and Ho Chi Minh City party secretary Nguyen Minh Triet will deliver a speech. President Tran Duc Luong is expected to attend a gala meeting in front of the presidential palace, now called the "Reunification Palace." . Speeches are expected to focus less on past military exploits than on the need to boost economic development. . The war left 58,000 dead on the US side and a total of nearly three million in the opposing Vietnamese camps. . However, the nearly two-thirds of the population born after the war knows little of that era and cares even less. . Vietnam has enjoyed 7.0 percent economic growth in the past several years, with a booming middle and upper class fattening on the back of the market economy and mainly focused on further advancement. .

General Duong Van Minh, alias "Big Minh", who had been hastily made president of South Vietnam in the regime's dying days, admitted defeat. The Vietcong blue and red flag with a golden star flew aloft the palace. .

Radio Giai Phong (Liberation), which throughout the conflict had been putting out the communists' upbeat messages and political propaganda, commenced regular transmissions. .

"This victory is a golden milestone in Vietnam's revolutionary path and affirms the leading role of the party and of Ho Chi Minh," its founder, he said. .

Some 50,000 participants are expected at Saturday's celebrations. . Festivities began back in early March, with celebrations of the fall of Buon Ma Thuot, in the Central Highlands, the first stage in the communist forces' southward advance. . War veterans and state companies, the media and mass organisations as well as "heroic mothers" and party cadres -- all sectors of society are covered by the propaganda blitz. .

However, the nearly two-thirds of the population born after the war knows little of that era and cares even less. . Vietnam has enjoyed 7.0 percent economic growth in the past several years, with a booming middle and upper class fattening on the back of the market economy and mainly focused on further advancement. .

I attended the "Vietnam and the Iraq War" presentation given at the University of Chicago Law School by Professor Geoffrey Stone 20 January 2005. As a veteran of the Vietnam War from August of 1969 to January of 1971, serving as an infantry squad leader in a mechanized infantry company, and with another unit as a tank commander on an M48A3 tank; I was keenly interested in the form that the lecture might take. After a cursory reading of Professor Stone's curriculum vitae, I suspected that Professor Stone's take on the South East Asian conflict might indicate a general disapproval of the United States war effort. My suspicions were proven correct. The lecture was an attempt to paint the American war effort in Vietnam as misguided at best and an imperialistic effort to establish SE Asian capitalistic hegemony at worst. The antiwar left was portrayed as being noble and idealistic rather than populated by a hard core that actively hoped and worked for a US defeat, the US government as destructive of basic civil liberties in its attempt to monitor their activities, and the North Vietnamese and Vietcong as nationalists who wished to preserve their unique culture against an imperialistic onslaught. He described the South Vietnamese government in terms that were heedless of the South Vietnamese government’s struggle to survive a relentlessly ruthless Communist assault while he stated the South Vietnamese government was engaged in an unwarranted assault on human rights. He neglected to mention ANY of the numerous genocidal atrocities of the Vietcong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA). He described the Tet Offensive as a surprise for the United States in which 1100 American soldiers died and 2300 ARVN soldiers, and not much more about it.

I challenged Professor Stone on the following. The reason that the United States opposed nationwide elections that were to be held in accordance with the 1954 Geneva accords was due to the murder and intimidation campaigns carried out by Ho Chi Minh. This fact is in Professor R. J. Runnel's book Death by Government, in which he cites a low estimate of 15,000 and a high figure of 500,000 people in the “murder by quota” campaign directed by the North Vietnamese Communist Party Politburo that would have made the election a corrupt mockery. This campaign stipulated that 5% of the people living in each village and hamlet had to be liquidated, preferably those identified as members of the "ruling class." All told says Runnel, between 1953 and 1956 it is likely that the Communists killed 195,000 to 865,000 North Vietnamese. These were non combatant men, women, and children, and hardly represent evidence of the moral high ground claimed by many in the antiwar movement. In 1956, high Communist official Nguyen Manh Tuong admitted that "while destroying the landowning class, we condemned numberless old people and children to a horrible death." The same genocidal pattern became the Communists’ standard operating procedure in the South too. This was unequivocally demonstrated by the Hue Massacre, which the press did a great deal to downplay in its reporting of the Tet Offensive of 1968.
I pointed out that the National Liberation Front was the creation of the North Vietnamese Third Party Congress of September 1960, completely directed from North Vietnam. I pointed out that the Tet Offensive of 1968 was a disastrous military defeat for the North Vietnamese and that the VC were almost wiped out by the fighting, and that it took the NVA until 1971 to reestablish a presence using North Vietnamese troops as local guerrillas. I pointed out how the North Vietnam military senior commanders repeatedly said that they counted on the U.S. antiwar movement to give them the confidence to persevere in the face of their staggering battlefield personnel losses and defeats. I pointed out the antiwar movement prevented the feckless President Lyndon Johnson from granting General Westmoreland's request to enter Laos and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail or end his policies of publicly announced gradualist escalation. The North Vietnamese knew cutting this trail would severely damage their ability to prosecute the war. Since the North Vietnamese could continue to use the Ho Chi Minh Trail lifeline, the war was needlessly prolonged for the U.S. and contributed significantly to the collapse of South Vietnam. The casualties sustained by the NVA and VC were horrendous, (1.5 million dead) and accorded well with Gen. Ngyuen Giap’s publicly professed disdain for the lives of individuals sacrificed for the greater cause of Communist victory. To this day the anti-war movement as a whole refuses to acknowledge its part in the deaths of millions in Laos and Cambodia and in the subsequent exodus from South East Asia as people fled Communism, nor the imprisonment of thousands in Communist re-education camps and gulags.

When he tried to say that United States should have known it could not put down a local popular insurgency, I pointed out that the final victorious North Vietnamese offensive was a multidivisional, combined arms effort lavishly equipped with Soviet and Chinese supplied tanks, self-propelled artillery, and aircraft. I pointed out to him that it was the type of blitzkrieg that Panzer General Heinz Guederian would have easily recognized. I said how I didn't recall seeing any barefoot, pajama-clad guerrillas jumping out of those tanks in the newsreel footage that showed them crashing through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon. This spectacle was prompted by the pusillanimous withdrawal of Congressional support for the South Vietnamese government in the wake of the Watergate scandal, which particularly undermined this aspect of President Nixon’s foreign policy. It should be noted that a similar Communist offensive in the spring of 1972 was smashed, largely by US air power; with relatively few US ground troops in place.

There were legions of half-truths and omissions that this professor spoke to in his extremely biased lecture. When I asked him why he left out so much that was favorable to the American effort in Vietnam, he airily dismissed my argument as being just another perspective, but tellingly he did not disagree with the essential truth of what I said.

Professor Stone struck me as just another liberal masquerading as an enlightened academic.

He was totally unable to relate how the situation in Iraq is comparable to the situation in Vietnam, so I volunteered a comparison for him. A seditious near traitorous core of anti-war protesters is trying to undermine U.S. efforts there with half-truths, lies, and distortions. I said that in that respect, the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam are very similar. A significant difference is that thus far the current anti-war movement has not succeeded in manifesting contempt for the American military on the part of the general U.S. public as it did in the Vietnam era.
When I was in Vietnam, I recall many discussions with my fellow soldiers about the course of the war in Vietnam and their feelings about it. Many, if not most felt that "We Gotta Get Outta this Place," to cite a popular song of the time by Eric Burden and the Animals, but for the most part they felt we should do it by fighting the war in a manner calculated to win it. I do not recall anyone ever saying that they felt the North Vietnamese could possibly defeat us on the battlefield, but to a man they were mystified by the U.S. Government’s refusal to fight in a manner that would assure military victory. Even though there was much resentment for the antiwar movement, and some (resentment) toward career professional soldiers, I never saw anyone who did not do his basic duty and many did FAR MORE THAN THAT as a soldier. Nineteen of my friends have their names on the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington DC. They deserve to have the full truth told about the effort for which they gave their young lives. The U.S. public is not well served by half-truths and lies by omission about such a significant period in our history, particularly with their relevance toward our present fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.