‘I say the Americans really won the war’
Vietnam’s victory over communism
Read Part One here
Read Part Two here
The 1968 Tet Offensive famously broke America’s will to fight in Vietnam, but as my father saw in later life, it also broke the southern Communists militarily. He recalled in his memoirs of covering the war that: ‘From now until the fall of Saigon in May 1975, the Vietnam War was once again part of the struggle for power between North and South that began as long ago as the sixteenth century.’
Writing from a vantage point of a quarter of a century, he reflected that: ‘This is how I see it with hindsight. No such thoughts were in my head on the afternoon of 8 May 1968, when I got a lift to Dalat, and found a seat on a gleaming silver plane belonging to President Thiệu, which was just about to take off for Saigon. On the descent to Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport, the pilot as usual executed a steep and alarming dive to avoid ground fire, and this time the precaution was justified, for the Vietcong had seized much of the south-west part of the city and were indeed firing at all arriving and departing planes, including ours as I was afterwards told.’
Dad saw some horrific things in Saigon, since renamed Ho Chi Minh City, both the suffering of the civilian population and the psychological breakdown of American troops. These young men sought company with the local women, but also poured out their kindness to the local urchins, of whom there were a heart-breaking multitude. American troops, ‘being lonely and starved of family life, smothered these orphans and pseudo-orphans with money and gifts.’
It was a country brutalised by war. He described with horror the story of a ten-year-old boy who had killed his own mother for being a communist, ‘but nonetheless … was publicised in the government press as a symbol of youthful patriotism.’
Although unequal to the task of defeating the North, dad saw in retrospect that the mass of peasants in South Vietnam were turning against the communists and hoping for a better life under a market system. This was despite the South Vietnamese troops of the ARVN being famously unimpressive. He noted on one occasion that during a rest bite between engagements, ‘The ARVIN soldiers smoked and giggled, and I was startled to notice one of them masturbating’.
American discipline, too, famously imploded. As late as 1967 the US troops seemed motivated, in his view. ‘Four years later, what remained of the army was drugged, depressed and even mutinous, its loyalty undermined by black and radical agitation.’
He saw morale collapse during the May offensive at The Battle of Y-Bridge: ‘They skulked most of the time behind their tanks, whose turrets were crowned with Confederate flags and whose insides were crammed with looted drink and miniature TV sets…. The Americans brought their social revolution to Vietnam, not only wrecking their army but causing added misery to the country they once had wanted to help. The Vietnamese never accepted America’s social revolution. Like most Asians, they hated the long-haired hippies, especially their blasphemous claim to follow Hindu or Buddhist religious beliefs.’
Whole quarters of Saigon were taken over by American deserters, ‘who posted permanent sentries against the Military Police.’ One man had gone on a shooting spree because he saw communists everywhere trying to kill him, and told his interrogators afterwards: ‘I even thought the dogs in the compound were Communists. They kept looking at me with their eyes.’
Substance abuse was a major factor, and ‘it was when I tried to report the harmful effects of drugs, pornography and radical politics in Vietnam, that I first encountered the liberal censorship that now would be called Political Correctness. Neither the Listener nor the New Statesman, for whom I had written from Vietnam, would publish articles on this subject.’
Officers grew scared of their own men, amidst an epidemic of ‘fragging’, and the troops became trigger-happy and reckless; he cited a claim that between 1968 and 1973, 10,303 American soldiers died from friendly fire, about one in five of the total (which is not implausible).
Dad’s memoirs were full of horror but there were funny moments, stories which I wish I had the time to hear in person before his decline from a stroke left him increasingly melancholy and uncommunicative. On one occasion a woman in a bar tells him ‘I spend one year at college. I know many English words that other bar girls they not know. Do you know word “castration”, to rip the flesh from the body? I have a very nice apartment. Maybe you come there for formication and copulation?’
Not tonight, he said, he was too tired and too old. ‘Oh yes, you old, but I think you very sexy senior citizen.’ At this point, dad reflected: ‘I thought it was time to leave Vietnam for ever.’
By now the end was coming. The Americans made peace in 1972 and the South fought on for three more years, until the fall of their capital in 1975 - seen as the superpower’s greatest humiliation to date. As a result of all the war material left over, Vietnam was in theory the third largest air power in the world – except that they couldn’t get the spare parts from American manufacturers, and their economy was soon in such a state that they couldn’t buy much from anyone.
Unlike in Cambodia, and despite what some feared, the Vietnamese communists did not embark on mass murder, and didn’t come out of their wartime experience as monsters, although there was retribution. There was especially cruel treatment of women who had children with the foreigners, and most of the mixed-race children were expelled – or worse. Dad’s friend Liz Thomas, an English nurse who worked with street children in the country, told him that the communists were often gripped by a deep racial hatred: ‘They kill the half-caste children. In Danang they took one child and cut its head off.’
(Western taboos about race seemed to be completely incomprehensible, and on another occasion, dad recalled that in the city zoo ‘The Vietnamese enjoyed watching the apes and comparing them with Americans because of their long arms and hairy bodies’.)
The war was devastating: 15 million tons of bombs were dropped on the country, and Vietnam lost about 1.5 million people; afterwards there were a million orphans and another million invalids. In just sixteen days of one mission, Operation Canyon, at least 750,000 pounds of bombs were dropped on the river island of Go No, measuring only five by two miles.
Despite all this, and the site of the downed American helicopter in Saigon as an attraction and spoil of war, the Vietnamese are very pro-American. One old Vietnamese told dad: ‘Yes, I know we used to prefer the French and despise the Americans. But now the Americans have gone, we realise how much we liked them. And that’s why I say the Americans really won the war. They won because we all want them back.’
On top of this, and contrary to the stereotype of Vietnam vets all being terminally scarred by their experience, he also recalled a poll of American servicemen which found that 71 per cent were glad they had gone, 74 per cent enjoyed their time there and 66 per cent expressed a willingness to serve again.
Vietnam’s economic centre is now named after the country’s communist leader, and his cult is seen everywhere. The colonial-era Central Post office, with its huge French map of the region by the entrance, has a portrait of the great leader on the wall. Naturally, this beautiful old building is full of merchandise of all sorts for sale; I didn’t want to be the ten-thousandth person to observe this contradiction, but there you go.
Ho may have died before he could become a tyrant, but his economic legacy was disastrous. Rainer Zitelmann wrote in Reason how the Vietnamese referred to the era of their planned economy as ‘the subsidy period’.
‘In 1977, the government started collectivizing agriculture and nationalizing nearly 30,000 privately owned small businesses. Many peasants in the South regarded collectivization as particularly unjust because the communists had given them land during the war to secure their support and now wanted to take it away from them again. Many of them resisted collectivization, and some left their land or sold their animals rather than work in collectives.’
State-owned cooperatives were incredibly inefficient, receiving 40 per cent of funds but responsible for only 5 percent of total agricultural production. People were rewarded on the basis of how many days they tuned up to work, rather than on any productivity, which hardly incentivised anyone.
‘The amount of food you got depended on your family’s status,’ Zitelmann wrote: ‘State employees received more, factory workers less. If there was not enough rice, people received wheat instead, though hardly anyone knew what to do with it: Even if they knew how to bake bread, they couldn't normally get hold of the other ingredients. In any case, they needed electricity to heat an oven, but electricity was available only a few hours a day.’
By 1980, Vietnam was producing only 14 million tons of rice, not enough to provide its basic needs; food shortages and rationing followed. The first Five-Year Plan being such a failure, the communist government embarked on a second in 1976, which predicted a 14 per cent increase in GDP by the end of the decade. In fact it went up by just 0.4 per cent, at a time of rapidly growing population.
‘Agricultural production was to increase by 8 percent to 10 percent per year; it went up by 1.9 percent. The plan envisaged annual increases in industrial production of 16 percent to 18 percent; the actual annual average was just 0.6 percent. In the entire northern half of the country, the per capita supply of paddy rice declined by about a third in the second half of the 1970s.’ Most of the yield, and the majority of collective farmer’s income, came from the 5 per cent of private land they were allowed to keep.
This was made worse by international sanctions against Vietnam following the country's 1978–1979 invasion of Cambodia – a war that was fairly justified, considering the psychotic nature of the Khmer Rouge – and the conflict with China that same year.
By 1986, inflation was running at 582 per cent and the country was the poorest in the world. Then came the Sixth Party Congress, which followed a reshuffle in the Council of Ministers and a push for market reforms inspired by Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. A new General Secretary of the Communist Party was appointed, Nguyen Van Linh, like many of the reformers a Southerner. He had been disgraced in 1975 because he opposed the collectivisation of land and the nationalisation of industry; now he freed political prisoners, curbed the power of secret police, and allowed back many overseas Vietnamese. Stalinism was now declared as an ‘error’.
This period of reform was known as Doi Moi (‘Renewal’), and under it, ‘Vietnam's gross domestic product grew by 7.9 percent a year from 1990 to 1996, faster than any other Asian country but China.’ The numbers living in extreme poverty fell from 52.3% in 1993 to just 1 per cent in 2020; life expectancy rose from 62 years in 1980 to 73.6 today. The country has vastly improved, as measured by the United Nations’ Human Development Index, and is now only marginally below the global average. Vietnam is no longer classified as a low-income economy.
‘In 1990, with a per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of $98, Vietnam was the poorest country in the world, behind Somalia and Sierra Leone. Every bad harvest led to hunger, and Vietnam relied on food aid from the United Nations and financial assistance from the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries. As late as 1993, 79.7 percent of the Vietnamese population was living in poverty.’
In 1999, a new Enterprise Law was passed, and within five years, a total of 160,000 new businesses were registered: ‘By 2020, the poverty rate had fallen to 5 percent… Once a country unable to produce enough rice to feed its own population, it has become one of the world's largest rice exporters, and a major electronics exporter too.’
The government timetable is for Vietnam to be a rich country by 2045, and it even plans to build a high-speed railway linking Hanoi to Saigon. It will also probably be a big winner from Trump’s tariffs policies, which are aimed at weakening China.
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