How
to Turn a Nightmare into a Fairy Tale
40
Years Later, Will the End Games in Iraq and Afghanistan Follow the
Vietnam Playbook?
By Christian
Appy
If our wars in the Greater Middle East ever end, it’s
a pretty safe bet that they will end badly -- and it won't be the
first time. The “fall of Saigon” in 1975 was the
quintessential bitter end to a war. Oddly enough, however, we’ve
since found ways to reimagine that denouement which miraculously
transformed a failed and brutal war of American aggression into a
tragic humanitarian rescue mission. Our most popular Vietnam
end-stories bury the long, ghastly history that preceded the “fall,”
while managing to absolve us of our primary responsibility for
creating the disaster. Think of them as silver-lining tributes to
good intentions and last-ditch heroism that may come in handy in the
years ahead.
The trick, it turned out, was to
separate the final act from the rest of the play. To be sure, the
ending in Vietnam was not a happy one, at least not for many
Americans and their South Vietnamese allies. This week we mark the
40th anniversary of those final days of the war. We will once
again surely see the searing
images of terrified refugees, desperate evacuations, and final
defeat. But even that grim tale offers a lesson to those who will
someday memorialize our present round of disastrous wars: toss out
the historical background and you can recast any U.S. mission as a
flawed but honorable, if not noble, effort by good-guy rescuers to
save innocents from the rampaging forces of aggression. In the
Vietnamese case, of course, the rescue was so incomplete and the
defeat so total that many Americans concluded their country had
“abandoned” its cause and “betrayed” its
allies. By focusing on the gloomy conclusion, however, you could at
least stop dwelling on the far more incriminating tale of the war’s
origins and expansion, and the ruthless way the U.S. waged it.
Here’s another way to feel better about America’s
role in starting and fighting bad wars: make sure U.S. troops leave
the stage for a decent interval before the final debacle. That way,
in the last act, they can swoop back in with a new and less
objectionable mission. Instead of once again waging brutal
counterinsurgencies on behalf of despised governments, American
troops can concentrate on a humanitarian effort most war-weary
citizens and soldiers would welcome: evacuation and escape.
Phony Endings and Actual Ones
An American president announces
an honorable end to our longest war. The last U.S. troops are headed
for home. Media executives shut down their war zone bureaus. The
faraway country where the war took place, once a synonym for
slaughter, disappears from TV screens and public consciousness.
Attention shifts to home-front scandals
and sensations. So it was in the United States in 1973 and 1974,
years when most Americans mistakenly believed that the Vietnam War
was over.
In
many ways, eerily enough, this could be a story from our own time.
After all, a few years ago, we had reason to hope that our seemingly
endless wars -- this time in distant Iraq and Afghanistan -- were
finally over or soon would be. In December 2011, in front of U.S.
troops at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, President Obama proclaimed
an end to the American war in Iraq. “We’re leaving behind
a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq,” he said proudly.
“This is an extraordinary achievement.” In a similar
fashion, last December the president announced
that in Afghanistan “the longest war in American history is
coming to a responsible conclusion.”
If only. Instead, warfare, strife, and
suffering of every kind continue in both countries, while spreading
across ever more of the Greater Middle East. American troops are
still
dying in Afghanistan and in Iraq the U.S. military is back, once
again bombing and advising, this time against
the Islamic State (or Daesh), an extremist spin-off from its
predecessor al-Qaeda in Iraq, an organization that only came to life
well after (and in reaction to) the U.S. invasion and occupation of
that country. It now seems likely that the nightmare of war in Iraq
and Afghanistan, which began decades ago, will simply drag on with no
end in sight.
The Vietnam War, long as it was, did
finally come to a decisive conclusion. When Vietnam screamed
back into the headlines in early 1975, 14 North Vietnamese
divisions were racing toward Saigon, virtually unopposed. Tens of
thousands of South Vietnamese troops (shades
of the Iraqi army in 2014) were stripping
off their military uniforms, abandoning their American equipment,
and fleeing. With the massive U.S. military presence gone, what had
once been a brutal stalemate was now a rout, stunning evidence that
“nation-building” by the U.S. military in South Vietnam
had utterly failed (as it would in the twenty-first century in Iraq
and Afghanistan).
On April 30, 1975, a Communist tank
crashed
through the gates of Independence Palace in the southern capital
of Saigon, a dramatic and triumphant conclusion to a 30-year-long
Vietnamese struggle to achieve national independence and
reunification. The blood-soaked American effort to construct a
permanent non-Communist nation called South Vietnam ended in
humiliating defeat.
It’s hard now to imagine such a
climactic conclusion in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unlike Vietnam, where
the Communists successfully tapped a deep vein of nationalist and
revolutionary fervor throughout the country, in neither Iraq nor
Afghanistan has any faction, party, or government had such success or
the kind of appeal that might lead it to gain full and uncontested
control of the country. Yet in Iraq, there have at least been a
series of mass
evacuations and displacements
reminiscent of the final days in Vietnam. In fact, the region,
including Syria,
is now engulfed in a refugee crisis of staggering proportions with
millions seeking sanctuary across national boundaries and millions
more homeless and displaced internally.
Last August, U.S. forces returned to
Iraq (as in Vietnam four decades earlier) on the basis of a
“humanitarian” mission. Some 40,000 Iraqis of the Yazidi
sect, threatened with slaughter, had been stranded
on Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq surrounded by Islamic State
militants. While most of the Yazidi were, in fact, successfully
evacuated by Kurdish fighters via ground trails, small groups were
flown out on helicopters by the Iraqi military with U.S. help. When
one of those choppers went down wounding many of its passengers but
killing only the pilot, General Majid Ahmed Saadi, New
York Times reporter Alissa Rubin,
injured in the crash, praised
his heroism. Before his death, he had told her that the
evacuation missions were “the most important thing he had done
in his life, the most significant thing he had done in his 35 years
of flying.”
In this way, a tortured history
inconceivable without the American invasion of 2003 and almost a
decade of excesses, including the torture and abuse at Abu
Ghraib, as well as counterinsurgency warfare, finally produced a
heroic tale of American humanitarian intervention to rescue victims
of murderous extremists. The model for that kind of story had been
well established in 1975.
Stripping the Fall of Saigon
of Historical Context
Defeat in Vietnam might have been the
occasion for a full-scale reckoning on the entire horrific war, but
we preferred stories that sought to salvage some faith in American
virtue amid the wreckage. For the most riveting recent example, we
need look no further than Rory Kennedy’s 2014 Academy
Award-nominated documentary Last
Days in Vietnam. The film focuses
on a handful of Americans and a few Vietnamese who, in defiance of
orders, helped expedite and expand a belated and inadequate
evacuation of South Vietnamese who had hitched their lives to the
American cause.
The film’s cast of humanitarian
heroes felt obligated to carry out their ad
hoc rescue missions because the U.S.
ambassador in Saigon, Graham Martin, refused to believe that defeat
was inevitable. Whenever aides begged him to initiate an evacuation,
he responded with comments like, “It’s not so bleak. I
won’t have this negative talk.” Only when North
Vietnamese tanks reached the outskirts of Saigon did he order the
grandiloquently titled Operation Frequent Wind -- the helicopter
evacuation of the city -- to begin.
By that time, Army Captain Stuart
Herrington and others like him had already led secret “black
ops” missions to help South Vietnamese army officers and their
families get aboard outgoing aircraft and ships. Prior to the
official evacuation, the U.S. government explicitly forbade the
evacuation of South Vietnamese military personnel who were under
orders to remain in the country and continue fighting. But, as
Herrington puts it in the film, “sometimes there’s an
issue not of legal and illegal, but right and wrong.” Although
the war itself failed to provide U.S. troops with a compelling moral
cause, Last Days in Vietnam
produces one. The film’s heroic rescuers are willing to risk
their careers for the just cause of evacuating their allies.
The drama and danger are amped up by
the film’s insistence that all Vietnamese linked to the
Americans were in mortal peril. Several of the witnesses invoke the
specter of a Communist “bloodbath,” a staple of pro-war
propaganda since the 1960s. (President Richard Nixon, for instance,
once warned
that the Communists would massacre civilians “by the millions”
if the U.S. pulled out.) Herrington refers to the South Vietnamese
officers he helped evacuate as “dead men walking.”
Another of the American rescuers, Paul Jacobs, used his Navy ship
without authorization to escort dozens of South Vietnamese vessels,
crammed with some 30,000 people, to the Philippines. Had he ordered
the ships back to Vietnam, he claims in the film, the Communists
“woulda killed ‘em all.”
The Communist victors were certainly not merciful. They
imprisoned hundreds of thousands of people in “re-education
camps” and subjected them to brutal treatment. The predicted
bloodbath, however, was a figment of the American imagination. No
program of systematic execution of significant numbers of people who
had collaborated with the Americans ever happened.
Following another script that first emerged in U.S.
wartime propaganda, the film implies that South Vietnam was
vehemently anti-communist. To illustrate, we are shown a map in which
North Vietnamese red ink floods ever downward over an all-white South
-- as if the war were a Communist invasion instead of a countrywide
struggle that began in the South in opposition to an American-backed
government.
Had the South been uniformly and
fervently anti-Communist, the war might well have had a different
outcome, but the Saigon regime was vulnerable primarily because many
southern Vietnamese fought tooth and nail to defeat it and many
others were unwilling to put their lives on the line to defend it. In
truth, significant parts of the South had been “red”
since the 1940s. The U.S. blocked
reunification elections in 1956 exactly because it feared that
southerners might vote in Communist leader Ho Chi Minh as president.
Put another way, the U.S. betrayed the people of Vietnam and their
right to self-determination not by pulling out of the country, but by
going in.
Last Days in Vietnam
may be the best silver-lining story of the fall of Saigon ever told,
but it is by no means the first. Well before the end of April 1975,
when crowds of terrified Vietnamese surrounded the U.S. embassy in
Saigon begging for admission or trying to scale its fences, the media
was on the lookout for feel-good stories that might take some of the
sting out of the unremitting tableaus of fear and failure.
They thought they found just the thing in Operation
Babylift. A month before ordering the final evacuation of Vietnam,
Ambassador Martin approved an airlift of thousands of South
Vietnamese orphans to the United States where they were to be adopted
by Americans. Although he stubbornly refused to accept that the end
was near, he hoped the sight of all those children embraced by their
new American parents might move Congress to allocate additional funds
to support the crumbling South Vietnamese government.
Commenting on Operation
Babylift, pro-war political scientist Lucien Pye said, “We
want to know we’re still good, we’re still decent.”
It did not go as planned. The first plane full of children and aid
workers crashed and 138 of its passengers died. And while thousands
of children did eventually make it to the U.S., a significant portion
of them were not orphans. In war-ravaged South Vietnam some parents
placed their children in orphanages for protection, fully intending
to reclaim them in safer times. Critics claimed the operation was
tantamount to kidnapping.
Nor did Operation Babylift move Congress to send
additional aid, which was hardly surprising since virtually no one in
the United States wanted to continue to fight the war. Indeed, the
most prevalent emotion was stunned resignation. But there did remain
a pervasive need to salvage some sense of national virtue as the
house of cards collapsed and the story of those “babies,”
no matter how tarnished, nonetheless proved helpful in the process.
Putting the Fall of Saigon
Back in Context
For most Vietnamese -- in the South as well as the North
-- the end was not a time of fear and flight, but joy and relief.
Finally, the much-reviled, American-backed government in Saigon had
been overthrown and the country reunited. After three decades of
turmoil and war, peace had come at last. The South was not united in
accepting the Communist victory as an unambiguous “liberation,”
but there did remain broad and bitter revulsion over the wreckage the
Americans had brought to their land.
Indeed, throughout the South and particularly in the
countryside, most people viewed the Americans not as saviors but as
destroyers. And with good reason. The U.S. military dropped four
million tons of bombs on South Vietnam, the very land it claimed to
be saving, making it by far the most bombed country in history. Much
of that bombing was indiscriminate. Though policymakers blathered on
about the necessity of “winning the hearts and minds” of
the Vietnamese, the ruthlessness of their war-making drove many
southerners into the arms of the Viet Cong, the local
revolutionaries. It wasn’t Communist hordes from the North that
such Vietnamese feared, but the Americans and their South Vietnamese
military allies.
The many refugees who fled Vietnam at war’s end and
after, ultimately a million or more of them, not only lost a war,
they lost their home, and their traumatic experiences are not to be
minimized. Yet we should also remember the suffering of the far
greater number of South Vietnamese who were driven off their land by
U.S. wartime policies. Because many southern peasants supported the
Communist-led insurgency with food, shelter, intelligence, and
recruits, the U.S. military decided that it had to deprive the Viet
Cong of its rural base. What followed was a long series of forced
relocations designed to remove peasants en masse from their lands and
relocate them to places where they could more easily be controlled
and indoctrinated.
The most conservative estimate of
internal refugees created by such policies (with anodyne names like
the “strategic hamlet program” or “Operation Cedar
Falls”) is 5 million, but the real
figure may have been 10 million or more in a country of less than
20 million. Keep in mind that, in these years, the U.S. military
listed “refugees generated” -- that is, Vietnamese
purposely forced off their lands -- as a metric of “progress,”
a sign of declining support for the enemy.
Our vivid collective memories are of Vietnamese refugees
fleeing their homeland at war’s end. Gone is any broad
awareness of how the U.S. burned down, plowed under, or bombed into
oblivion thousands of Vietnamese villages, and herded survivors into
refugee camps. The destroyed villages were then declared “free
fire zones” where Americans claimed the right to kill anything
that moved.
In 1967, Jim Soular was a flight chief
on a gigantic Chinook helicopter. One of his main missions was the
forced relocation of Vietnamese peasants. Here’s the sort of
memory
that you won’t find in Miss
Saigon, Last
Days in Vietnam, or much of anything
else that purports to let us know about the war that ended in 1975.
This is not the sort of thing you’re likely to see much of this
week in any 40th anniversary media musings.
“On one mission where we were depopulating a
village we packed about sixty people into my Chinook. They’d
never been near this kind of machine and were really scared but they
had people forcing them in with M-16s. Even at that time I felt
within myself that the forced dislocation of these people was a real
tragedy. I never flew refugees back in. It was always out. Quite
often they would find their own way back into those free-fire zones.
We didn’t understand that their ancestors were buried there,
that it was very important to their culture and religion to be with
their ancestors. They had no say in what was happening. I could see
the terror in their faces. They were defecating and urinating and
completely freaked out. It was horrible. Everything I’d been
raised to believe in was contrary to what I saw in Vietnam. We might
have learned so much from them instead of learning nothing and doing
so much damage.”
What Will We Forget If Baghdad
“Falls”?
The time may come, if it hasn’t
already, when many of us will forget, Vietnam-style, that our leaders
sent us to war in Iraq falsely
claiming that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass
destruction he intended to use against us; that he had a “sinister
nexus” with the al-Qaeda terrorists who attacked on 9/11; that
the war would essentially pay
for itself; that it would be over
in “weeks rather than months”; that the Iraqis would
greet us as liberators; or that we would build an Iraqi democracy
that would be a model for the entire region. And will we also forget
that in the process nearly
4,500 Americans were killed along with perhaps 500,000
Iraqis, that millions of Iraqis were displaced
from their homes into internal exile or forced from the country
itself, and that by almost every measure civil society has failed to
return to pre-war levels of stability and security?
The picture is no less grim in Afghanistan. What silver
linings can possibly emerge from our endless wars? If history is any
guide, I’m sure we’ll think of something.
Christian Appy, TomDispatch
regular and professor of history at the University of
Massachusetts, is the author of three books about the Vietnam War,
including the just-published American
Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity
(Viking).
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Copyright 2015 Christian Appy
This article appeared originally in TomDispatch.com without the image.
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