May 13, 2025
On April 30, 1975, the city of Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese communists. A big military parade in front of hundreds of thousands of flag-waving Vietnamese was held last month in what is now called Ho Chi Minh City to mark the fall of Saigon 50 years ago. Many conservatives have been reflecting on this event. I don't agree with what some of them are saying because they are apologists for the immoral, unnecessary, undeclared, senseless, criminal Vietnam War.
The Vietnam War officially ended in January of 1973 after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. The agreement resulted in the withdrawal of all remaining military forces from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The civil war between North and South Vietnam quickly resumed, the North conquered the South, and the two countries were reunited on July 2, 1976.
The United States spent about $140 billion (said to be $1 trillion today) and lost over 58,200 men. Like U.S. military personnel who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, they all died in vain and for a lie. They died to get their name on a wall, so Vietnam could join the World Trade Organization and become a U.S. trading partner, so Vietnam could receive millions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid, so the United States could sell military supplies and weapons to Vietnam, and so hundreds of thousands of Americans could visit Vietnam every year as tourists.
The death toll of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians is in the millions, many of them civilians. This is something we never hear about from conservative apologists for the Vietnam War. Instead, it is all about the hundreds of American POWs and MIAs who are unaccounted for.
I have written three articles in which I have expressed my opinion of the Vietnam War. The first is a review of John Marciano, The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration? (Monthly Review Press, 2016). The second is a review of Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (Metropolitan Books, 2013). The third is an article titled "Should We Honor Vietnam Veterans?"
Here are some things that I said:
The Vietnam War was not a mistake, a blunder, a noble cause, or a painful chapter in American history; it was a crime that will forever be a blight on the United States.
The "daily fact of life throughout the years of the American presence in Vietnam" was murder; beatings; torture, including waterboarding and electric shock; rape, including gang rape; sodomy; forced displacement; home burnings; specious arrests; planting of weapons on dead civilians; imprisonment without due process; corpse mutilation; killing and raping of children; point-blank executions; mass killings; dehumanization and humiliation of civilians; repeated aerial bombing and artillery fire on rural populations; aerial spraying of defoliants that wiped out crops; slaughter of animals; using people for target practice; running down civilians with jeeps and trucks, including deliberately crushing people with armored vehicles; destruction of food supplies; sexual exploitation, abuse, violence, and slavery; forced drownings; prisoner abuse and executions; defecating in houses; taking body parts as trophies and souvenirs; mounting Vietnamese heads on poles; lashing corpses to U.S. vehicles; dropping corpses from helicopters.
I for one will never forget what Vietnam Veterans did - they traveled half way around the world to fight an unjust, immoral, and unnecessary war against people they didn't know who were no threat to them, their families, or the United States. The Vietnam War was a monstrous evil in every respect.
In reflecting on the Vietnam War, some conservatives are saying that the real problem with the war is that we lost, that we were not permitted to win, or that we could have won the war quickly and left.
So, even though the United States foolishly took sides in a civil war; unnecessarily sent its troops halfway around the world; wasted billions of dollars; senselessly sacrificed 58,000 of its young men; and killed millions of people, many of whom were civilians; the U.S. military should have dropped more bombs, shot more bullets, thrown more grenades, dropped more napalm, employed more attack helicopters, destroyed more buildings, and killed more people in a country that was no threat to us so that America could win a noble patriotic cause and have peace with honor.
Here is my reflection: Because the Vietnam War was from the very beginning immoral, unnecessary, undeclared, senseless, and criminal, every day that the United States was involved in the war was one day too many. The only honorable thing to do was to immediately stop fighting and get out-not after we "won" or developed some plan or met some objective.
Muhammad Ali may have been wrong about religion; he may have had several failed marriages, affairs, and illegitimate children; and he may have underestimated Joe Frazier; but he was certainly right when he said: "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong." And neither did the United States.