The United States is finally free from the doubt, despair, and dissolution characteristic of the post-Vietnam War years. Today, the Vietnam Memorial, engraved with the names of men who made the ultimate sacrifice, serves as a reflection of the debt we owe to these noble men, as well as to those who survived.
Ten years ago, a North Vietnamese tank thundered through the gates of Independence Palace in Saigon and symbolically ended the Vietnam War. This is an appropriate historical milestone from which to survey the legacy of the Vietnam War.
In 1975, we were recoiling from the trauma of Vietnam. We were confused and divided about the importance of our Pacific interests. To our detriment, isolationism and insular tendencies became fashionable. Fortunately, the United States of 1985 is not the United States of 1975.
The United States has shed its post-Vietnam doldrums of doubt, despair, and dissolution. This country is emphatically committed to the progress of people living on both sides of the Pacific. The United States is embarked on an exciting era of economic opportunities with a host of friends and allies in East Asia, stretching from Japan and South Korea through China and Southeast Asia to the South Pacific.
The United States has recovered from the traumatic, and—for the South Vietnamese—tragic end of the Vietnam War. The country’s future actions should not ignore the lessons of that involvement, nor should our actions be paralyzed by that experience. U. S. involvement in Vietnam was not the unmitigated disaster it was once thought to be.
Four major developments mark the last decade:
- Vietnam’s noncommunist neighbors have made tremendous progress.
- Temporary Soviet gains have exposed Moscow’s opportunistic nature and been offset by our improved relations with China.
- Communism in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia failed terribly and shattered the myth of “world monolithic communism.”
- We have come to the realization that our involvement, however flawed, was noble and unselfish; the United States has no sins to atone for, and no sense of guilt to assuage.
Progress Personified: Southeast Asia remains important to the Free World's vital interests. The sea-lanes near Southeast Asia, linking the Indian and Pacific ocean basins, are among the most important—and the most ex posed—arteries of world commerce. Tankers transiting the narrow Strait of Malacca haul veritable oceans of Persian Gulf oil—enough to supply 75% of South Korea's and the Philippines' national needs, and 65% of Japan’s. Carrying cargoes of every description, 4,000 merchant ships pass through that strait every month. Attempts to hinder, obstruct, or otherwise constrict that continuous flow of world commerce would be tantamount to a direct assault on the livelihood of civilized nations.
The Soviet Union uses its current beachheads in Vietnam and Afghanistan to project its military capabilities into Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. The Free World should find this alarming.
In looking at regional developments since 1975, the noncommunist nations of Southeast Asia undeniably have advanced to a remarkable degree. Their success in maximizing economic opportunities is largely the result of our "buying time" in Indochina, along with their own substantial trade and foreign policy initiatives. The Wall Street Journal recently cited the spectacular growth of the "dominoes that didn't fall"—the five charter members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The charter member nations are Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Brunei became a member last year.
ASEAN's emergence as a powerful entity in diplomatic trade and economic strength is the success story of the past decade—made possible partly by carefully nurtured U. S. ties to those countries individually and collectively. ASEAN is our fifth largest trading partner, and outranks such major partners as France, Italy, Brazil, and South Korea in total trade. In 1972, U. S.-ASEAN trade was valued at $2.8 billion—12 years later, there has been a 950% leap, to $26.6 billion.
The free nations of ASEAN are inhabited by 280 million people. The region is our largest trading partner in terms of population, and it is a maturing market for finished products. Outside North America, only Japan, Great Britain, and West Germany deal with us in greater volumes than ASEAN. In the past decade, the annual gross national product growth in ASEAN averaged a stunning 7%—unequaled anywhere.
ASEAN has likewise become a respected voice in international circles. The United Nations (UN) has denounced the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia every year since 1979, a tribute to the collective political clout ASEAN musters among the world’s policymakers. ASEAN’s unwavering support for the anti-Vietnamese coalition in Cambodia demonstrates the cohesiveness of what was, in the early years after 1967, a loose collection of economically and politically fragile nations.
ASEAN countries participate actively in other international gatherings. Thailand has been sitting on the prestigious UN Security Council since May of this year. Malaysia and Indonesia, with predominantly Muslim populations, are often consulted by their neighbors and other friends on questions involving religious sensitivities in the Middle East, and are important members of the Non-Aligned Movement. The Philippines boasts recently retired Foreign Minister Carlos Romulo, one of the philosophical founders of the United Nations. Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew has begun grooming a new generation of impressive leaders, even as he continues his record of accomplishments.
ASEAN's members do have internal problems. But a bankrupt Vietnam exports tens of thousands of guest workers to Eastern Europe and grants the Soviets access to Vietnamese bases. Cam Ranh Bay now boasts the largest Soviet naval presence outside the Soviet Union. Soviet advisers operate in Laos and Cambodia, their overtures designed to monitor and maintain close ties with Vietnam’s empire.
This trend of increasing dependence upon an outside power, although an ideological ally, wreaks havoc with the words of Ho Chi Minh: "Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom." Vietnam today has mortgaged much of that independence and freedom to a more powerful communist hierarchy.
Moreover, Vietnam has utterly destroyed the myth of its benign intentions. Opting for a Soviet-style, quick-fix military action in Cambodia, it has become mired down in a guerrilla war that is a mirror image of its actions against the West. Not only has Vietnam squandered its own independence, it is determined to prevent others from tasting any freedom.
For Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian families, communism's vision of the future is, in reality, a continuing nightmare: trapped in the vise of an omnipresent police state that is cheered on by Moscow's Marxist ideologues. Vietnam has adopted the domino theory for its own use, with the remark that troubles in Laos or Cambodia directly threaten the very existence of the Hanoi regime. Under Asia’s two biggest imperialists, which possess two of the world's three largest armies, Indochina's subjugation is a convincing demonstration of the brutal, expansionism of Vietnamese and Soviet communism.
To travel through the rice paddies of northern Vietnam today is to survey the bounds of emptiness. Vietnam can harvest little more than hopelessness, mired as it is in the myopic mind-set of Hanoi’s aging revolutionaries. These revolutionaries are well-suited to waging war under a nationalist banner, but ill-suited to managing peace. The wartime promise to the people—out of sacrifice comes prosperity—was never kept and is nowhere to be found under the 1975 victors.
The massive departure of human talent from Indochina dramatizes the totalitarian grip that has wrecked the ideals of many card-carrying communists. A former founder of the National Liberation Front has stated that the North Vietnamese engaged in a deliberate deception to achieve what had been their true goal: the destruction of South Vietnam as a political or social entity in any way separate from the North.
Vietnam’s coercion, both subtly and directly, has fragmented communism unlike any development except the Sino-Soviet split. Worse, Vietnamese practices have discredited communism. In Asia, communism has lost its appeal.
Looking Back: The world of 1985 is vastly different from that of 1975, or that of 1965, 1955, and 1945—all major benchmarks of our involvement in Southeast Asia. U. S. involvement had major flaws, most noticeably our failure to recognize the dimensions of the conflict we faced, and our failure to realize that dau tranh (Vietnamese for struggle) had both military and political applications. More than 58,000 young Americans died in combat, and countless others were traumatized and debilitated. Their ultimate sacrifice has provided the painful catharsis that has strengthened the United States of today.
Some critics of the war argue that Ho Chi Minh was not a communist, that he was merely a patriot and nationalist who sought U. S., Soviet, and French assistance at critical points in his country's history. This patently false assertion is belied when one remembers that Ho Chi Minh was a founding member of the French Communist Party and a communist international agent in Asia for 15 years before World War II. Soviet writings of the time refer to Ho as "our agent." Ho's clandestine Indochina Communist Party formed the strongest nucleus of—and dominated political decisions within—the Viet Minh, the embodiment of Vietnamese nationalism after the Japanese invasion of 1940. Ho was the best-known wartime resistance leader in Vietnam, capable of delivering enough votes to win a national election. But he was also a calculating leader with unbridled ambition. He ruthlessly eliminated scores of noncommunist nationalist leaders who stood in the way of a communist takeover of the nationalist movement. Thus, as the Pentagon Papers (The Senator Gravel Edition, Volume 1, page 52. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971) point out:
"In the last speculation, U. S. support for Ho Chi Minh would have involved perspicacity and risk. . .Ho’s well-known leadership and drive, the iron disciplined and effectiveness of the Viet Minh, the demonstrated fighting capability of his armies, a dynamic Vietnam ese people under Ho's control, could have produced a dangerous period of Vietnamese expansionism. Laos and Cambodia would have been easy pickings for such a Vietnam. . . . The path of prudence rather than the path of risk seemed [to the United States] the wiser choice."
In 1945, the United States was recovering from World War II and focused on the Soviets' grab for power in Eastern Europe, the rehabilitation of Western Europe, the communist revolution in China, and the need to restructure our wartime economy to peacetime conditions. The violent reaction to the French return to Indochina—300 Westerners slain in Saigon in September 1945—made no profound impact in Washington.
The French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 led to the Geneva Peace Conference that divided Vietnam, but called for national elections within two years. Eight hundred thousand Vietnamese Catholics immediately fled North Vietnam. South Vietnam's new President Ngo Dinh Diem refused to talk to Hanoi, a regime which he believed put communism before the national interest. Moscow advised that both Vietnams should be admitted to the United Nations, which the United States vetoed.
In 1959, Hanoi set up the National Liberation Front and sent 20,000 guerrilla-war cadres into South Vietnam. Two years later, 30,000 workers began to expand the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The explicit purpose: conquer South Vietnam as soon as possible.
A Flawed But Noble Effort: Once President Lyndon Johnson began sending U. S. troops to Vietnam in 1965 to stave off defeat, our own problems began. His unwillingness to mobilize both public opini9n and the nation's reserves for the war—for fear of jeopardizing the "Great Society"—meant major setbacks for a coordinated, affordable civilian and military policy. The long-term economic costs ruined his dream of the Great Society he wanted as his presidential legacy. The critical failure to mobilize broad support and military reinforcements eventually doomed the effort. His hesitancy to ask Congress for a declaration of war confused many about the exact nature of our involvement and drove domestic opponents into various forms of defiant resistance.
Without a formal declaration of war, says military historian Colonel Harry Summers, Jr., U. S. Army (Retired), there were no public sanctions against acts of treason, sub version of our armed forces, consorting with the enemy, and other rules to ensure the guarantee of a united front to fight North Vietnam.
Judgments aside, it is obvious our military intervention in South Vietnam in 1965 thwarted an imminent North Vietnamese victory. It shattered the major misconception in Hanoi that the United States would not shed blood to save South Vietnam. Our initial failure to appreciate the dimensions and dynamics of such an overwhelming U. S. commitment, in a culturally alien environment, however, meant that our involvement there evoked the "tail wagging the dog" syndrome: national policy seemed always to be reacting to events, rather than orchestrating them.
We have learned there are limits to what direct military power can obtain if it is wielded by a free, open democratic society, instead of a coercive, brutal, totalitarian one. Another superpower, the Soviet Union, has no such constraints in Afghanistan.
Without a clearly defined objective, our military strength was often misused. Field commanders could not apply appropriate principles of war. They could not concentrate on the offensive. Achieving mass of force and economizing elsewhere proved difficult. The piecemeal approach to committing troops hindered our early strategic advantage to mass overwhelming force to destroy the enemy’s war-making apparatus. Surprise and security were also major problems.
President Johnson, as Commander-in-Chief, too often tried to master too many details and control too much of the war’s conduct. His inability to delegate to a military he mistrusted proved fatal.
Our victories in major battles misled us. We failed to realize that victories sped the conversion to political struggle. A military victory in itself was not sufficient. One then had to attack the other pincer—the political situation.
Earlier, I referred to what arguably was a failure to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of Ho Chi Minh’s communist movement and the government it eventually installed in Hanoi. The strengths have been demonstrated: his personal leadership and charisma; a Viet Minh army that had defeated the French; a functioning infrastructure throughout most of the country; and the strong nationalism derived from battling external domination for centuries.
There were relatively few weaknesses compared to these strengths. Basically, Vietnamese communist assumptions proved flawed on major strategic decisions: that the United States would not commit its forces to save the South; that the infant South Vietnamese administration could survive long enough to build popular support; and that Hanoi’s nearest friend, China, would steadfastly rebuff U. S. attempts to split the communist neighbors.
As recent events have shown, the mentality that manufactured those miscalculations has deposited Vietnam in 1985 among the world’s poorest nations, devoid of international goodwill, and jittery over a likely rapprochement between Moscow and Beijing. Vietnam has become a destitute and paranoid pariah whose involvement in Cambodia has unmasked its innate appetite for aggression.
The United States overestimated its abilities to influence the unique nature of the Vietnamese revolution, dominated as it was by the communists. The “turnstile” changes of government after the coup against Diem and our counterproductive personnel policies (annual rotation of advisers, many of whom had only marginal fluency in Vietnamese) made it virtually impossible to instill fighting spirit and sound tactical expertise throughout an army appallingly paid and whose dependents were poorly treated.
Conclusion: Our involvement, however flawed, gave Vietnam’s noncommunist neighbors the breathing space and wherewithal to make amazing developmental strides. With their economic growth the envy of every other region, ASEAN has shown what happens when free nations can concentrate on improving their trade balances and standard of living, rather than committing all too many of their limited resources to defend against a bellicose enemy.
Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia brought the People’s Army of Vietnam to ASEAN’s doorstep. Fortunately, Thailand, the country directly confronted, has had the luxury of more than a decade of development and commendable success against its own insurgency. Thailand is much better equipped in 1985 to handle any overt cross-border threat than it would have been without the U. S. involvement in Vietnam.
Our effort to forestall communist domination over South Vietnam was unselfish and noble, one whose ultimate investment proved too expensive for us to sustain. The debt we owe to our soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice is profound and timeless, as President Ronald Reagan articulated so well last year at Arlington National Cemetery (The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 28 May 1984):
. . . at a ceremony in Gettysburg in 1863, President Lincoln reminded us that through their deeds, the dead had spoken more eloquently for themselves than any of the living ever could, and that we living could only honor them by re-dedicating ourselves to the cause for which they so willingly gave a last full measure of devotion.”
President Reagan has rightly called our Vietnam veterans "heroes as surely as any who have ever fought in a noble cause." Certainly, li these earnest remarks are directed as well to the families of those men still listed as missing in action in Indochina. We call upon Hanoi again, on this significant anniversary, to heal the sorest wound of the conflict, and lay to rest the misery and uncertainty hundreds of American families still feel in not knowing the fate of their loved ones.
Mr. Armitage graduated from the Naval Academy in 1967 with a bachelor of science degree in engineering. His initial tour of duty was in a destroyer off the coast of Vietnam. He subsequently served three in-country tours in Vietnam. After resigning his commission in 1973, Mr. Armitage worked with the U. S. Defense Attaché’s office in Vietnam. Immediately prior to the fall of Saigon, he helped effect the removal of people and assets from Vietnam. He has since worked as a consultant and as an assistant to Senator Robert Dole (R-KS). Mr. Armitage is currently the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.