The Fall of Saigon: The final hours

A new commentary every Wednesday - May 6, 2015

The Fall of Saigon: the final hours

I can’t really remember how it all began, but our Public Broadcasting Service reminded us this weekend how it ended—on 29 April, 1975.

We've already heard it before: how U.S. policy about what was once termed French Indochina, was based on something described as the “domino theory,” reiterated by Presidents, Secretaries of State, Defense Secretaries and a score of generals since 1945. “Communism must be contained, or there will be a worldwide takeover.” How could we believe otherwise?

It must have been in the mid-1960s, when I opened my newspaper, swept my hand over the top of the front page, and prophesied to my son and daughter. “All across the top of the page there will be a huge photograph of Haiphong harbor, the best place to land an American Army on the east of coast of North Vietnam,” I predicted. “The entire wide harbor will be full of hundreds of ships. Landing craft will appear like long lines of water bugs extending from the scores of troop ships.

“Correspondents aboard the various vessels will describe how a hundred battleships and aircraft carriers of every size and description, along with wave after wave of bombers based in the south, will have obliterated any semblance of resistance opposing our armed might. Before sundown, two divisions of paratroopers will have been dropped behind the lines and 50,000 pairs of boots will have landed and begun the march westward toward Hanoi. We would be told that it shouldn't take but a week or two for the United States and its allies to scour it of all opposition and make a huge turn to the south, taking in Laos and Cambodia.

"Within a few weeks, the horde from the north and the Viet Cong (National Liberation Front), infiltrated throughout South Vietnam, will be swept up in a huge pincers. Peace will be restored in that troubled land, just like it was in Europe and the Pacific. An American-like democracy will prevail. At the worst, the non-communist line first drawn across the midsection of Viet Nam, will, like that now in place in Korea, be re-established."

The United States was invincible.

By 1974, both of my offspring were carrying lighted candles in peace marches participated in by nearly all of their peers. It deeply troubled me, when day after day photographs of those “Killed in Action,” continued to be carried in the newspaper, only now, it seemed to me that the obituaries were appearing deep in the second or third sections.

What had been withheld in all of the talk about body counts and Agent Orange killing all vegetation was that the demoralized South Vietnamese Army and 58,200 valiant American Service members who had been lost piecemeal had already become fallen dominoes. Estimates of the number of Vietnamese casualties range from 800,000 to 1.3-million.

A major offensive ordered by the Politburo in Hanoi for the final days of March, 1975 brought about the sudden collapse and disorderly retreat by upwards of 250,000 leaderless soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN).

No one in our Government was prepared for this. Secretary of State Kissinger's hope for a last-minute miracle never materialized and General Giap's tanks were suddenly on Saigon's outskirts. The same thing was happening in neighboring Cambodia. The capitol, Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge communists who began to slaughter the inhabitants.

For 40 years now, we Americans have suffered the scenes of absolute defeat; the tragic death of hundreds of orphans in the crash of a cargo plane meant to lift them to safety, the Russian-made tanks crashing through the gates of the former government, and finally the chaotic evacuation of some 22,000 Vietnamese who had been employees of the U.S. or former ARVN military— some by boat and some by helicopter. Then the siege of the U.S. embassy by thousands of desperate Vietnamese in what was quickly renamed by the victors, “Ho Chi Minh City.”

It has been estimated that 30,000 collaborators, both military and civilian employees of the US, were executed, using a list left behind by the CIA in the deserted embassy. The imprisonment of many thousands of others we had sworn to protect began in "re-education" camps.

I suppose we need to swallow the bitter taste of defeat at least once every ten years or so, but in the winter of my life, I cannot help but think by looking at the present circumstances in the world today, the pain of utter defeat 40 years ago, may have taught us very little.

The North Vietnamese demonstrated that a war for their homeland demanded a total commitment. When it comes to war, a policy of "guns and butter" will not suffice.

-Phil Richardson, Observer and Storyteller.

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