On the morning of April 30 1975 a young corporal in the army of North Vietnam drove a tank through the streets of an unfamiliar city wreathed in smoke and resounding with gunfire, and stopped at a set of wrought-iron gates. Corpses lay on the pavement, and in the distance a lone helicopter rose above the United States embassy and turned towards the river.
The soldier, Nguyen Van Tap, paused: could the gate be electrified? Then he gunned the engine and crashed into Saigon’s Independence Palace. Moments later, Nguyen’s lieutenant, Vu Dang Toan, took the surrender of the South Vietnamese regime barricaded inside.
The Vietnam war was over, and the two villagers from north of Hanoi had witnessed what would have once been unthinkable: the humbling of a superpower by a peasant army. In the paint factory on the outskirts of Hanoi where the two men work now, Vu says the significance of the victory was apparent even then. ”When a small country like Vietnam is invaded by a big country like America and wins, then all the other countries can learn a lesson — that they can win a war against America,” he says.
”They ran like cowards,” says Nguyen.
”They simply didn’t have the power to fight us,” adds Vu. He smiles.
America has never really got over that morning in Saigon. On Friday, 31 years later, US President George Bush arrives in Hanoi for a visit steeped in the legacy of an old defeat — and haunted by the prospect of another.
Vietnam and Iraq — it is the comparison that the Bush administration has resisted since the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Weeks later, the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was snapping at reporters for even daring to suggest that the US faced an organised resistance. But by last month, one of the bloodiest since the war began, even Bush was forced to concede that there were points of comparison. He likened events in Iraq to the Tet offensive of 1968, which turned US public opinion against involvement in Vietnam.
In reality, the most compelling parallel has little to do with either Iraq or Vietnam. It is about the nature of power: the US’s view of itself in the world, and its execution of foreign policy.
Once again, the US is sending troops to a faraway country that it does not understand, an incomprehension that has led to fatally flawed war plans and policies. Once again, it has committed forces for reasons that seem unclear at best. In Vietnam, it was the August 1964 attack on US destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin, which we now know never happened. In Iraq, it was the imminent danger that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. And that is why this war has proven so painful — because the lessons of Vietnam were not absorbed.
This is Bush’s first overseas trip since the midterm elections, when American anger at the war in Iraq cost the Republicans control of Congress. In the days since then, Bush has worked hard to persuade Americans that he is willing and able to abandon his administration’s discredited policies. Rumsfeld — our era’s version of Robert McNamara, the Pentagon chief in the 1960s — was sacked. Administration officials argue that Iraq can be fixed. But even if Bush can effect a genuine change of course in the Iraq war, can all the damage of the last three years really be undone? Where will Iraq be 30 years from now, and how will this generation of Americans view this war?
In Vietnam, the visit of a serving US president was intended to show off the country’s rising prosperity — not remind the world of earlier suffering. But in a city where Ho Chi Minh’s marble mausoleum remains a place of pilgrimage, Bush’s weekend in Hanoi may have less to do with the mundane details of trade agreements than awkward reminders of wars present and past.
Wartime scars
This is a city graced by small lakes, where Vietnamese stroll as the evenings cool. During the war, a young navy pilot named John McCain was shot down over one of them. Senator McCain, who this week declared his intention to contest the 2008 presidential elections, spent five years as a prisoner in Vietnam.
His flight suit hangs in a dusty display case in an ochre-coloured prison that was a hangover from the French colonial era, along with grainy photos of gaunt-faced prisoners. In some shots, they are playing ping pong — propaganda produced by the Vietnamese to show the prisoners were well treated. The Americans called it the Hanoi Hilton. The title seems an even greater irony now that part of the prison has been demolished to make way for the luxury Hanoi Towers, a hotel and shopping complex.
Ha Thuc Van, my translator, was born in July 1975, three months after the war. She has never been here before and is uncomfortable at the shackled prisoners and the colonial-era guillotine. ”I’m really surprised here. I feel bad,” she says. ”I was born when the war ended and I want nothing to do with the war.”
That attitude is not uncommon in Vietnam. Half of the population of 84-million were born after the war ended, and those old enough to remember the early post-war years of rice rationing and privation are just as eager to forget. The 80s were a time of economic disaster in Vietnam as the communist authorities pursued what they now acknowledge was ”inappropriate socioeconomic management”.
Thousands of people in the fallen city of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh, were herded into re-education camps; a million more — from north and south — fled the country as boat people.
The Vietnamese are well aware they can never entirely rid themselves of that pain. Children are still born with the deformities attributed to Agent Orange, the toxic herbicide sprayed by US forces against Vietnam’s jungle canopies.
And yet time has erased some wartime scars. What once were free-fire zones have reverted to rubber plantations and rice paddies. Saigon was rebuilt as the bustling metropolis of Ho Chi Minh. And as the victors, the Vietnamese can take pride in their history — or at least make money from it.
War tourism
Seventy-two kilometres north of Ho Chi Minh City, the Cu Chi tunnels, an intricate network of bunkers and supply routes protected by ingenious bamboo traps, are a monument to Vietnamese determination during the war. They are now also one of the country’s leading tourist destinations. Westerners can watch lithe Vietnamese in green uniforms shimmy into a hole that seems about the size of an A4 piece of paper. If they want an even deeper faux war experience, they can let off a few rounds from an AK-47 — 10 bullets for $12.
War was hell. Now it’s a theme park — although old hatreds are not entirely camouflaged. In a video the narrator intones: ”The merciless American bombers have decided to kill this gentle piece of countryside,” extolling the valour of Vietnamese fighters. ”Brave exterminators of American soldiers, brave destroyers of tanks, and brave down-shooters of American aircraft.”
But it is almost impossible to find anyone who still talks like that soundtrack in real life. The generations want to move on. Phan Thanh Hao, a writer and translator, spent her teenage years collecting corpses in the streets of Hanoi. Her son was born in 1972, too young to remember the bombing campaigns that Christmas. ”When I talked to my son about the war, he said ‘now you want me to suffer too,”’ she says.
That attitude may be changing. A long-suppressed novel on the brutality of those years by Bao Ninh, who was one of only 10 survivors in his unit of 500, was republished in Vietnam last year. And Phan’s son now wants to make a film about the war.
For those Americans who came of age during the Vietnam war, the parallels with Iraq are painful and immediate. Veterans’ organisations say the Iraq war has reawakened long-suppressed traumas. ”The longer the war goes on we have increased incidence of Vietnam vets or even world war two or Korean vets whose symptoms are popping up,” says Tom Berger, chairperson of the post-traumatic stress disorder committee of the Vietnam Veterans of America.
But for the government of Vietnam, which is desperate to avoid any friction with its main trading partner, there is little to be gained from memories of that war — and certainly not in openly opposing the US on Iraq. Last week Tran Duc Loi, a senior member of the ideological wing of the Communist party, issued a scathing critique of the Iraqi resistance. ”They behave more like random rebelling groups,” he told IPS news service. ”When we fought, we only fought against the ones who fought us. Civilians were never our targets.” He said he doubted the Iraqis would succeed in driving out the Americans.
Other Vietnamese are not so sure, and in private are highly critical of this war. Nguyen Viet Noi was 18 in 1965 when the US poured thousands of new troops into Vietnam, and one of three members of his family to join the North Vietnamese army. He spent his war building a section of the Ho Chi Minh trail.
He bridles at the idea that Vietnam’s struggle was anything like the war in Iraq. The Vietnamese were organised, he says, and united around a single leader and objective: an independent country. But he also believes that no good can come of this war. ”America sooner or later is going to have to withdraw troops from Iraq, and Iraq is going to have a civil war. America cannot stay there because it is going to cost a lot of money and lot of people. It’s just like with the former Soviet Union and Afghanistan.”
Tet offensive
A superpower came undone. The death toll in Iraq has painfully illuminated for many Americans the fact that their country was unprepared — as it was in 1968 when the North Vietnamese army launched the Tet offensive.
That January, Chuck Searcy was an analyst in military intelligence and based just outside Saigon. When he left his station that evening, the threat level was yellow — normal for that stage of the war — and he went into town to watch a movie. The alarm sounded hours later. Tan San Nhut airbase was overrun and Saigon was under attack. In their billet, the soldiers scrambled to unlock their weapons. ”I will never forget. We were frozen with unexpected adrenaline awareness: ‘Oh my God, how can it be that the war had come to Saigon? Saigon was supposed to be secure.’ But by then we could see the smoke rising, so we knew it was a serious business.”
The attack had a devastating effect on domestic support for the war. ”It made the American people aware for the first time that we were not winning the war, and that it was no longer true that if we kept our resolve and did not buckle under our disappointments we would prevail,” says Searcy, who now heads a mine clearance programme for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. ”The credibility of the American and military leadership was severely undermined and never recovered.”
Bush faced that same moment of mass disillusion this month in the punishment US voters inflicted on the Republicans in the mid-term elections. Across the Pacific, the Vietnamese took note. US politics are followed avidly in Vietnam — even if the motivation now is to track developments that could help accelerate economic growth. There is nothing to be gained in dwelling on the pain of the past – still less on identifying too strongly with the suffering of those trapped in another war.
”The younger generation in Vietnam, they follow the Vietnamese government policy at the moment: don’t talk about the past. Move on. Look to the new,” says Nguyen. ”All nations are our friends.”
At this moment in time that should suit Mr Bush just fine. Maybe, 30 years from now, that credo will guide Iraq too.
Two wars : How they compare
Vietnam
Justification for war US destroyer attacked by north Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin. Some historians now dispute that this happened.
Invasion A few thousand US troops arrive in 1965 in South Vietnam to prop up southern Vietnamese government.
Expanding the war US attacks Laos and Cambodia for providing a supply line to North Vietnamese troops.
Body count More than 58 000 US troops killed and 304 000 wounded. Estimated three million Vietnamese killed and a million in Laos and Cambodia.
Financial cost More than $150-billion for the US alone.
Outcome US troops left in 1973 and in 1975 Vietnam was reunified under communist control.
Iraq
Justification for war Iraq suspected of having weapons of mass destruction and some ties to the terrorists behind the September 11 attacks.
Invasion March 2003: Approximately 100 000-strong allied coalition spearheaded by US forces.
Expanding the war Contained within Iraq, but strong allied intelligence suspects that Iraqi insurgents are being armed by Iranian sympathisers.
Body count Nearly 3 000 US troops killed and almost 22 000 wounded in action. Estimates that at least 50 000 Iraqis, mainly civilians, have died since the invasion.
Financial cost At least $400-bilion and rising.
Outcome Still uncertain. – Guardian Unlimited Â