As conditions in Vietnam worsened, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese fled the food and electricity rationing, de-Westernization, grinding poverty, and countless other daily hardships. Ethnic Chinese, the business leaders and merchants in Ho Chi Minh City, left the country in droves. The “boat people” risked the dangers of the South China Sea to find a new home. Tens of thousands drowned when their rickety ships sank, and thousands more were killed by pirates. Tens of thousands were caught by Vietnamese authorities before they had gone very far. Indonesia and Malaysia frequently rejected them when they did make landfall. Although exact statistics are difficult to obtain, as many as 250,000 Vietnamese boat people died during their escape attempt.
Diplomatic woes compounded domestic unrest. In 1977 President Jimmy Carter cautiously approached the SRV. Determined to improve the image of the United States among Third World countries, soon after his election Carter announced that he “would be perfectly glad to support the admission of Vietnam to the United Nations and to normalize relations with Vietnam.” That autumn he made good on his promise, and the two countries allowed academic and other cultural exchanges. At that moment what the SRV most needed were the investment capital and technological expertise of the United States. But in 1978 the SRV committed several critical mistakes, the most important of which was to demand reparations as a precondition for normalization. That prompted a quick reaction in Congress, opening still fresh psychological wounds. Carter’s decision to pardon all Americans who had fled to Canada during the war to avoid the draft and to extend that pardon to all who had deserted from the armed forces had a similar effect. Carter’s initiatives—Vietnam’s best hope of recovery and economic stability— died on the floor of Congress. In 1978 the SRV made another decision that, however justifiable, brought further disaster. It invaded the newly named Kampuchea (formerly Cambodia).
In comparison with the wretchedness of Kampuchea, Vietnam’s problems seemed insignificant. “Everybody, Cambodians and foreigners alike,” the New York Times correspondent Sydney H. Schanberg would recall of the mid-1970s, “looked with hopeful relief to the collapse of the city, for they felt that when the Communists came and the war finally ended, at least the suffering would be over. All of us were wrong.” When Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge roared into downtown Phnom Penh in armored personnel carriers and trucks in April 1975, they brought a demanding, ruthless ideology with them. They began emptying the cities of Cambodia, forcing people into the countryside for reeducation. For Pol Pot it was the beginning of a new age—”Year Zero” for the new country of Kampuchea. Dreaming of a preindustrial, agricultural utopia, he launched an assault on cities, teachers, intellectuals, professionals, and the middle class. He completely evacuated Phnom Penh, turning the city of three million people into a ghost town. He ordered the destruction of libraries, temples, schools, colleges, businesses, and whole cities. He transformed Kampuchea into a concentration camp, a huge “killing field” where two million Kampucheans lost their lives.
The Vietnamese watched the horrors with growing anxiety. A revolt in eastern Kampuchea in 1977 sent hundreds of thousands of frightened Kampucheans fleeing across the border into Vietnam. By 1978 the SRV had witnessed enough of Pol Pot’s megalomania. Vietnamese troops invaded Kampuchea, drove Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge into the jungles, and established the People’s Republic of Kampuchea. But the invasion did not end the suffering. Coming as it did during the planting season, it deprived peasants of their rice crop, and widespread starvation resulted. Pol Pot regrouped his forces and with 35,000 troops began a guerrilla action against the invasion. The Khmer People’s National Liberation Front, supplied by the United States, fielded 15,000 of its own guerrillas, and another guerrilla army, 9,000 strong, was loyal to Prince Norodom Sihanouk. The three groups fought guerrilla wars against one another and the Vietnamese. With the Vietnamese in Kampuchea, the premeditated killing of civilians stopped, but once again war was sweeping across Indochina.
The centuries-old animosities between Vietnamese and Khmer stirred other ancient hatreds and fears. China did not want to see the SRV extend its influence. On February 17, 1979, Deng Xiaoping sent the People’s Liberation Army across the border into Tonkin. The war lasted less than one month, but it took the lives of 35,000 people. On their way out of Tonkin, the Chinese destroyed several towns, blew up vital railway links, and obliterated important power plants and a phosphate mine responsible for most of Vietnam’s fertilizer.
The border war against China and the guerrilla war against Kampuchea further strained the Vietnamese economy. Before the two wars the SRV had been attempting to secure desperately needed loans from China, Japan, and several Western countries. As the fighting became hotter, the international financial community became colder. The SRV had the added cost of maintaining a standing army of more than one million men and stationing 140,000 troops in Kampuchea. By the mid1980s the SRV had become one of the poorest nations in the world, but its army was the world’s fourth largest. The American war in Vietnam was over. The ancient wars, pitting Vietnamese against Khmer and Chinese, continued.
For the money needed to keep its country solvent, Vietnam turned to the Soviet Union. The loans the Soviet Union provided—$1.5 billion annually—carried strings that stretched back to Moscow. To many people inside and outside of Vietnam, it soon appeared that Soviet domination had simply replaced American domination, Soviet advisers and experts flocking to Vietnam as the Americans had done twenty years later. “Americans without dollars,” the Vietnamese called them.
By the mid-1980s the SRV was at its lowest point. Economic reorganization had failed. Emigrants—many of them valuable professionals whom the country needed—continued to leave. The guerrilla war in Kampuchea dragged on. And Soviet advisers worked to turn the SRV into Cuba East. Finally, in 1986 the SRV committed itself to a radical change. At the Sixth Communist Party Congress, party leaders admitted that their experiment in communism had failed. The old guard retired and a new set of leaders, led by Nguyen Van Linh, took office. Linh, born in Hanoi but resident for most of his life in the south, symbolized the desire for true national unification. He realized that the economic and foreign policies of Pham Van Dong were bankrupt. Boldly, and with a firm sense of resolve, he once again looked West.
Undoubtedly influenced by the ideas and actions of Mikhail Gorbachev, Linh opened Vietnam to increasing amounts of democracy and capitalism. He permitted politicians to contest for assembly seats, and he released political prisoners. He sanctioned limited free enterprise and trimmed the glutted governmental bureaucracy. He even opened up Vietnam to Western goods. The historian Terry H. Anderson noted Western T-shirts and Madonna tapes on the streets of Hanoi. A few years earlier the SRV had frightened away Western investment capital; now it courted Western bankers and industrialists by enacting a liberal foreign investment code. An “underdeveloped nation such as Vietnam,” Linh emphasized, “needs even more to look to the capitalist world for lessons.”
Vietnam had little choice but to turn to the West. In spite of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika reforms, throughout the 1980s the economy of the Soviet Union continued its downward spiral. Ever since the early 1960s, infusions of financial aid from the Soviet Union had kept the North Vietnamese economy afloat, and after 1975, the process of rebuilding Vietnam required even more money. The influx of Russian rubles that for a decade had at least partially masked the economic disaster Vietnamese communists were bringing to their country the Soviet Union had to cut further. (In response to an appeal for loans, so went a story among the Vietnamese, Moscow sends a cable: “Tighten your belts.” Vietnam replies: “Send belts.”) The USSR could no longer prop up the economies of its satellites, for its own economy was imploding. Nor could it politically control them. With stunning rapidity beginning in 1989, the Soviet bloc in Central and Eastern Europe disintegrated. Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary went their separate ways. A rebellion succeeded in overthrowing the communist government of Romania,
an especially brutal regime that had kept itself independent of Moscow. Yugoslavia broke up into petty warring states. And in 1991 the Soviet Union itself collapsed and ceased to exist. The river, or creek, of rubles dried up. Vietnam’s choice was simple: Turn to the West and liberalize its economy or face economic collapse and political ruin.
The emergence of new forms in popular culture reflected Vietnam’s political and economic changes. Such American films as Platoon played to crowded houses in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. And the Vietnamese film industry started to make films that showed the emotional complexity of the war. In Ahn va em (Brothers and Relations, issued in 1986) a veteran returns from war to find a changed Vietnamese society. Hanoi is wallowing in consumerism, his family has betrayed the ideas of socialism, and government corruption hampers efforts to reconstruct Vietnam. The veteran questions why he fought. In the end of the film, he turns away from the modern Vietnam and withdraws to the traditional, “unprogressive” life of the rural village. Recent films also revise the image of Americans. American soldiers are portrayed as victims of a senseless and unjust war: confused, frustrated, and angry but not evil. Free Fire Zone, which appeared in 1979, assigns evil not to the soldiers but to the machines of war. The filmmaker anthropomorphizes helicopters, endowing them with malevolence. They drop from the sky like prehistoric birds of prey. They, not their pilots, are blamed for the destruction. In the last scene of the film the Vietnamese shoot down a helicopter. In the wreckage they discover a dead pilot. “It is a sad moment,” notes the film critic Karen Jaehne, made “all the sadder for a photo of the pilot’s family carried away from the carnage on the wind.”
Altogether the films signal a shift in Vietnam’s attitude toward the United States. Since 1986 the SRV has promoted cultural exchanges with the United States by liberalizing its visa policy and allowing American writers and journalists greater access to Vietnam. American tourists can now visit Hue, Dienbienphu, and the Cu Chi tunnels. The government has allowed Vietnamese Amerasian children to emigrate to the United States to reunite with their parents. Through actions and words, the SRV has conveyed the simple message that the war is over and the time to forgive is at hand.
The message, however, was at odds with American foreign policy in the 1980s. During his two presidential terms, Ronald Reagan consistently ignored Vietnamese efforts to normalize relations between the two countries. Rather than emphasize points of agreement, he stressed fields of discord. Reagan focused on two issues: Vietnam’s continued occupation of Kampuchea and the POW-MIA controversy.
On the matter of their invasion of their neighbor, the Vietnamese began accommodating Washington even before the end of Reagan’s presidency, expressing a willingness to withdraw their troops; in 1988 they actually began to pull back. This was not an especially good thing. Given the centuries of hostilities between the Vietnamese and the Khmer, the SRV was not anxious to see the Khmer Rouge return to power. And other nations feared that a reinstalled Pol Pot (which to the great benefit of the Khmer people did not happen) would resume his genocidal war against all Western influences within Kampuchea. Nevertheless, the Vietnamese completed their withdrawal from Kampuchea in 1989.
The POW-MIA issue was largely imaginary. Fueled by a series of POW-MIA movies and the incendiary rhetoric of the Reagan administration, a large portion of the American public became convinced that thousands of prisoners of war and other American soldiers listed as missing in action were still alive in Vietnam. This emotionally charged issue blocked talks between the United States and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam for almost a decade. It also defied logic and impartial investigation. Of the Reagan administration’s intractability, Terry H. Anderson observes:
Technically, it is impossible for any Vietnamese government to find “all recoverable remains” under fifteen years of jungle growth. . . . Also MIAs are not just an American problem. The French still have 20,000 MIAs from their war in Indochina, and the Vietnamese list over 200,000. Furthermore, the United States still has 80,000 MIAs from World War II and 8,000 from the Korean War, figures that represent 20 and 15 percent, respectively, of the confirmed dead in those conflicts; the percentage is 4 percent for the Vietnam War. . . . The real “noble cause” for [the Reagan] administration is not the former war but its emotional and impossible crusade to retrieve “all recoverable remains.”
Yet in its effort to improve its foreign relations, Vietnam coupled with its withdrawal from Kampuchea an attempt to address the POW-MIA charges. High-level contacts between Washington and Hanoi increased in number and significance late in the Reagan administration. In September 1988, the two countries agreed to joint field investigations in Vietnam to identify the remains of American MIAs. In April 1992 President George Bush eased the American trade embargo in Vietnam by allowing the sales of products for humanitarian needs, primarily grain and medicines. At the end of 1992, Bush agreed to permit American companies to open offices in Vietnam, sign business contracts, and begin feasibility studies.
During the first year of the Clinton administration, the president dropped American opposition to settlement of Vietnam’s debts with the International Monetary Fund. The move toward normalization of relations, however, ran into trouble late in 1993 when circumstantial evidence from former Soviet archives and Vietnamese defectors indicated that several hundred American prisoners of war remained in Indochina after the return of the 591 POWs in 1973. Pentagon officials immediately went to work trying to confirm the stories, but they were unable to find any evidence corroborating the charges. Few politicians, however, were willing to risk promoting normalization until Vietnam became more cooperative, whatever an increased cooperation in regard to an issue so deliberately murky might mean. Bob Smith, a New Hampshire Republican who visited Vietnam frequently to investigate the issue, remarked late in 1993: “I don’t know if anyone is alive today, but I do know that we don’t have all the facts.”
Eager to get on the good side of administration officials in Washington, D.C., Vietnamese leaders early in 1994 began releasing more and more information about American soldiers missing in action and worked more diligently at returning the remains of MIAs. To acknowledge the Vietnamese effort and to encourage Hanoi to be even more forthcoming, in February 1994 President Clinton lifted the trade embargo, opening Vietnam and most of Indochina to American business. Only one step remained in the normalization process: diplomatic recognition of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
Early in 1995, the Clinton administration began leaking stories to the press about possible diplomatic recognition. Many Vietnamese-Americans opposed normalization, insisting that the United States should withhold recognition until the communist regime collapsed. The potential Republican presidential candidates Robert Dole of Kansas and Phil Gramm of Texas voiced opposition as well. So did POW-MIA advocacy groups, among them the National League of Families of Vietnam POWs and MIAs. Clinton lined up some heavy hitters of his own. Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican and former POW, backed the idea of recognition, as did Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and Vietnam veteran, and Senator Bob Kerrey, a Nebraska Democrat who had lost a leg in Vietnam.
While the Clinton administration was moving toward recognition, the Vietnamese were preparing for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, planning parades, parties, and solemn observances through-out the country. They wanted to make the most of history, to remember better days when a Third World nation had humbled the greatest superpower. Images of the North Vietnamese Army’s triumphant march toward the United States embassy in Saigon still stirred the hearts of tens of thousands of Vietnamese; Vo Nguyen Giap was a military genius and living icon; and Ho Chi Minh had become a demigod to his country. But the celebrations demanded tact. Vietnam, desperately impoverished, needed good relations with the United States. And in 1995 Vietnamese under the age of twenty-five, a majority of the country’s population and carrying no memories of the war or few, yearned for a better life, which millions of them thought to see in the w
ealth and culture of the United States. The Vietnamese leadership was not about to let any raucous, self-righteous twentieth-anniversary celebrations anger influential Americans. Vietnam moved forward with the anniversary preparations, but the Politburo made sure to keep them subdued.
What stoked the still burning embers of the Vietnam War in the spring of 1995 and postponed normalization efforts was not anything perpetrated by the Vietnamese, but a publishing event in the United States.
To coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the fall of South Vietnam, Random House issued In Retrospect, the memoirs of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. For twenty-eight years after leaving the Johnson administration, McNamara had kept his peace, refusing to answer any questions about the Vietnam War. To most antiwar activists, he was persona non grata, the arrogantly intellectual architect of an unnecessary war that killed three million Vietnamese and nearly 60,000 Americans, a war that had polarized the country and created a nation of cynics. Random House hyped the book as McNamara’s mea culpa, the confessions of a troubled man who wanted to come clean. The publisher booked him on every talk show in every major media market, and he responded to questions directly, his voice sometimes cracking and his eyes welling up in tears. In conducting the Vietnam War, he admitted, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had mistakenly seen a communist Vietnam as a grave threat to national security, underestimated the power of Vietnamese nationalism, overestimated the influence of communism, and tried to find a military solution to what was essentially a political problem. In short, he acceded to every major criticism the antiwar movement had offered in the 1960s. “It seems beyond understanding, incredible that we did not force ourselves to confront such issues head-on. But then, it is very hard, today, to recapture the innocence and confidence with which we approached Vietnam in the early days. . . . We were wrong, terribly wrong.”
Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam 1945-1995 Page 39
