Marking the 40th Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon … With What May Be a Huge Argument

By
Greg Diamond
– April 28, 2015Posted in: "The OC", Fresh Juice
40 years ago this Thursday. Want to talk about it?

It happened 40 years ago this Thursday. Want to talk about it?

I had barely entered my teenage years when the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam.  Even at that age, in that era, I was still aware of the arguments on both sides — and I think that plenty of other people my age were as well.  It’s hard to convey how much the Vietnam War ate up the nightly news in the late 60s and the early 70s), during parts of which each broadcast from CBS’s Walter Cronkite contained a three-part body count: casualties (I think it was only deaths, not beyond that) reported by the U.S. armed forces.

Three flags were shown with numbers next to them: an American flag with a number for U.S. troops; the South Vietnamese flag, marking the numbers of ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) troops and perhaps civilian casualties as well; and North Vietnamese flag, which I believe included not only their explicit fighters but also the NLF (National Liberation Front, aka “Viet Cong,” those in the South who sympathized with the north) troops — and perhaps civilians, who may or may not have been correctly labeled as partisans.  (Both sides would refer to their side simply as
“Vietnam” and would not refer to themselves or their enemies with geographic terms; I’m using “South” and “North” here because, at least in the U.S., it was the language of the time and it avoids confusion.)

We were always winning the war.  By that I mean that, when one added together the number of the day’s dead from our side (US and South Vietnam) and compared it to their side, they always had more casualties.  I watched the CBS Evening News (following the Big News with Jerry Dunphy — and the wonderful weatherman Bil Keane and sportscaster Gil Stratton) pretty much every weekday with my father for years.  I was good at mental math, so when the numbers of the day’s dead came up, we were always winning.  I always wondered if a day would come when we weren’t extending our lead, and what that might mean for the war if it happened, but I never found out … because we always led, for as long as I recall the body counts being shown, which now that I think of it was probably not nearly until the end of the war.

I have not been able to find a screen capture of Cronkite and the body counts. (Perhaps they were on the local news, but I don’t think so.) If anyone can, I will substitute it for this photo.)

 

We were always winning because the numbers were made up.

Perhaps “made up” sounds too unkind.  “Embellished,” perhaps?  Let’s just call them “generous estimates” — ones that aimed low with our own casualty numbers and high with theirs.  This was part of the domestic propaganda war: we couldn’t give up the war because we were winning: just look!  (Ask your 10-year-old to add up the numbers!  We can’t stop now!)  Reducing the progress of following the war to something like following the progress of a Lakers game was a way to nudge us to believe that we could actually keep track of what was happening in Vietnam.  But, we couldn’t.  As the great Chick Hearn might have said in those days, the government “faked us into the popcorn machine.”

To be fair: the most extreme conservatives — well, at the time we would have called them “reactionaries” — still blame Cronkite for the loss of Vietnam because of his reporting what they still steadfastly maintain was not the truth.  You can read the work of the recently departed Stanley Karnow, among others, for sources with a lot of references indicating that they were true — but the classified information was not made available to me in grade school and if my dad had it he wasn’t telling.

We may not have known the real numbers, but the government did — and clearly they were hopeless.  And so we bombed the hell out of Hanoi over Christmas 1972 and the cease-fire was signed about a month later.  We left the war, I suppose I’m supposed to say, “with our head held high” in August 2013; we also left behind a bunch of weaponry for the South Vietnamese.  Yet somehow — they would cite lack of American support, while most historians cite a lack of popular support — 20 months later they were routed and then most leaders were evacuated (as in the top photo) and those with government ties or sympathies who remained were imprisoned and “reeducated” or slaughtered.

Orange County became the destination of choice for the South Vietnamese officials and the “boat people” who escaped to the seas — at least those of the latter who survived.  (At least a couple of my classmates at Cal State Long Beach had been boat people.)  The Prime Minister and then Vice President of the Republic of Vietnam, Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, came to live in Westminster and, I’ve been told, played a significant role in the formation of Little Saigon — but as he later earned enmity hereabouts by returning to Vietnam in 2004 to promote commerce to the U.S. (prior to dying in 2011), I don’t know if it’s even possible to assess that anymore.

Because this is in effect the home of the South Vietnamese — or Republic of Vietnam’s, if you prefer — “government in exile,” I’m not looking to get into a discussion of what happened over the course of the Vietnam war and since.  But I’m sure that others are — some of which is timed to coincide with the documentary “Last Days of Vietnam,” by Robert Kennedy’s daughter Rory Kennedy, which was nominated for the Oscar last year (losing to “Citizen Four,” about Edward Snowden), and which will be broadcast on CBS this year.  Kennedy’s movie has been criticized as a whitewash of American policies.  I don’t plan to research its merits myself, but I did get a link to this story in my Inbox today, and it offers a scathing review.

I’m not going to reprint any of it here; that seems to rude.  If you want to engage it, then go read it yourself.  And if you want to offer fact-based rebuttals of its assertions, then maybe any subsequent discussion can do some good.  (If you think that that article is “bad speech,” then “the cure for bad speech is more speech” — remember?)

But if you just want to come into comments and howl in anger and pain — then that’s OK too this week.  It’s 40 years after a dark day for the denizens of Little Saigon — if you’re so inclined, despite the amazing success of Vietnamese immigrants in Orange County, then you have an open forum to vent.

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About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)