The Fall Of Saigon 1975: Fifty Years Of Repeating What Was Forgotten

Friday, 18 April 2025, 3:58 pm
Opinion: Eugene Doyle

Part one: On the courage to remember

The first demonstration I ever went on was at the age of 12, against the Vietnam War. The first formal history lesson I received was a few months later when I commenced high school. That day the old history master, Mr Griffiths, chalked what I later learnt was a quote from Hegel: “The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn the lessons of history.” It’s about time we changed that.

Painful though it is, let’s have the courage to remember what they desperately try to make us forget.

Cultural amnesia and learning the lessons of history

Memorialising events is a popular pastime with politicians, journalists and old soldiers. Nothing wrong with that. Honouring sacrifice, preserving collective memory and encouraging reconciliation are all valid. Recalling the liberation of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) on 30 April 1975 is important. What is criminal, however, is that we failed to learn the vital lessons that the U.S. defeat in Vietnam should have taught us all. Sadly much was forgotten and the succeeding half century has witnessed a carnival of slaughter perpetrated by the Western world on hapless South Americans, Africans, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, and many more. It’s time to remember.

Memory shapes national identity

As scholars say: Memory shapes national identity. If your cultural products - books, movies, songs, curricula and the like – fail to embed an appreciation of the war crimes, racism, and imperial culpability for events like the Vietnam War, then, as we have proven, it can all be done again. How many recognise today that Vietnam was an American imperial war in Asia, that “fighting communism” was a pretext that lost all credibility partly thanks to television and especially thanks to heroic journalists like John Pilger and Seymour Hersh. Just as in Gaza today, the truth and the crimes could not be hidden anymore.

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If a culture doesn’t face up to its past crimes - say the treatment of the Aborigines by settler Australia, of Maori by settler New Zealand, of Palestinians by the Zionist state since 1948, or the various genocides perpetrated by the U.S. government on the indigenous peoples of what became the 50 states, then it leads ultimately to moral decay and repetition.

Lest we forget. Forget what?

Is there a collective memory in the West that the Americans and their allies raped thousands of Vietnamese women, killed hundreds of thousands of children, were involved in countless large scale war crimes, summary executions and other depravities in order to impose their will on a people in their own country? Why has there been no collective responsibility for the death of over two million Vietnamese? Why no reparations for America’s vast use of chemical weapons on Vietnam, some provided by New Zealand?

Vietnam Veterans Against War released a report “50 years of struggle” in 2017 which included this commendable statement: “To V.V.A.W. and its supporters, the veterans had a continuing duty to report what they had witnessed”. This included the frequency of “beatings, rapes, cutting body parts, violent torture during interrogations and cutting off heads”.

The U.S. spends billions projecting itself as morally superior but people who followed events at the time, including brilliant journalists like Pilger, knew something beyond sordid was happening within the U.S. military.

The importance of remembering the My Lai Massacre.

Whilst cultural memes like “Me love you long time” played to an exoticised and sexualised image of Vietnamese women – popular in American-centric movies like Full Metal Jacket, Green Beret, Rambo, Apocalypse Now, as was the image of the Vietnamese as sadistic torturers, there has been a long-term attempt to expunge from memory the true story of American depravity.

All, or virtually all, armies rape their victims. The U.S. Army is no exception – despite rhetorically jockeying with the Israelis for the title of “the world’s most moral army”. The most famous such incident of the Vietnam War was the My Lai Massacre of March 16, 1968 in which about 500 civilians were subjected to hours of rapes, mutilation and eventual murder by soldiers of the U.S. 20th Infantry Regiment. Rape victims ranged from girls of 10 years through to old ladies. The U.S. soldiers even took a lunch break before recommencing their crimes.

The official commission of inquiry, culminating in the Peers Report found that an extensive network of officers had taken part in a cover-up of what were large-scale war crimes. Only one soldier, Lieutenant Calley, was ever sentenced to jail but within days he was, on the orders of the U.S. President, transferred to a casually-enforced three and half years of house arrest. By this act, the United States of America continued a pattern of providing impunity for grave war crimes. That pattern continues to this day.

The failure of the U.S. Army to fully pursue the criminals will be an eternal stain on the U.S. Army whose soldiers went on to commit countless rapes, hundreds of thousands of murders and other crimes across the globe in the succeeding five decades. If you resile from these facts, you simply haven’t read enough official information. Thank goodness for journalists, particularly Seymour Hersh, who broke rank and exposed the truth of what happened at My Lai.

Senator John McCain’s “sacrifice” and the crimes that went unpunished.

Thousands of Viet Cong died in U.S. custody, many from torture, many by summary execution but the Western cultural image of Vietnam focusses on the cruelty of the North Vietnamese toward “victims” like terror-bomber John McCain. The future U.S. presidential candidate was on his 23rd bombing mission, part of a campaign of “War by Tantrum” in the words of a New York Times writer, when he was shot down over Hanoi.

Also emblematic of this state-inflicted terrorism was the CIA’s Phoenix Program, eventually shut down after public outrage and hearings by the U.S. Congress into its misdeeds. According to U.S. journalist Douglas Valentine, author of several books on the CIA, including The Phoenix Program:

"Central to Phoenix is the fact that it targeted civilians, not soldiers". Common practices, Valentine says, quoting U.S. witnesses and official papers, included:

“Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electrical shock ("the Bell Telephone Hour") rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; "the water treatment"; "the airplane," in which a prisoner's arms were tied behind the back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair.” No U.S. serviceman, CIA agent or other official was held to account for these crimes.

Tiger Force – part of the U.S. 327th Infantry – gained a grisly reputation for indiscriminately mowing down civilians, mutilations (cutting off of ears which were retained as souvenirs was common practice, according to sworn statements by participants). All this was supposed to be kept secret but was leaked in 2003. “Their crimes were uncountable, their madness beyond imagination – so much so that for almost four decades, the story of Tiger Force was covered up under orders that stretched all the way to the White House,” journalists Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss reported.

Their crimes, secretly documented by the U.S. military, included beheading a baby to intimidate villagers into providing information – interesting given how much mileage the U.S. and Israel made of fake stories about beheaded babies on October 7th. The U.S. went to great lengths to hide these ugly truths – and no one ever faced real consequences.

Helicopter gunships and soldiers at checkpoints gunned down thousands of Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, much as U.S. forces did at checkpoints in Iraq, according to leaked U.S. documents following the illegal invasion of that country.

The worst cowards and criminals were not the rapists and murderers themselves but the high-ranking politicians and military leaders who tried desperately to cover up these and hundreds of other incidents. As Lieutenant Calley himself said of My Lai: “It’s not an isolated incident.”

Here we are 50 years later in the midst of the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, with the US fuelling war and bombing people across the globe. Isn’t it time we stopped supporting this madness?

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz.

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