It was 50 years ago this week on April 30, 1975, that the U.S. involvement in the War in Vietnam officially came to an end when the last U.S. military helicopter flew ignominiously from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon (as the capital of South Vietnam was known at that time, but which is now Ho Chi Minh City, named after the No. Vietnamese leader who once worked as a pastry chef in Boston’s Parker House from 1911-13).
For the generations of Americans over the past 50 years who know about the Vietnam War only from their U.S. history classes, the few pages in their textbooks devoted to the war cannot even remotely describe both the upheaval that the war caused in American society at that time and the lasting impacts upon our nation that reverberate today.
More than nine million brave young Americans served during the war, of whom more than 58,000 gave their lives, while another 300,000 were wounded. In addition, there were hundreds of thousands more who suffered the psychological effects from PTSD, as well as the latent toll from Agent Orange (the powerful chemical herbicide that took its name from the orange striping on the barrels in which it was stored) and other weapons used by the U.S. military that resulted in later-life cancers and birth defects that affected tens of thousands of our soldiers and Vietnamese civilians.
For those of us who came of age during that era from 1965-75, we recall watching the war brought into our living rooms every night on the national TV news shows with reports from correspondents who were embedded with our military as they went on their infamous search and destroy missions that transformed the beautiful and placid Vietnamese countryside into a living hell for the Vietnamese people.
We recall reading with stunned disbelief in Time Magazine (Time was delivered to our home every week) about the massacre by U.S. Army American soldiers, led by Lieutenant William Calley, at the Vietnamese village of My Lai, in which hundreds of civilians, almost all of them women, children, and elderly men, were raped and murdered.
We remember the “body count” of “enemy soldiers” that was issued daily by U.S. military officials, under the direction of General William Westmoreland, which was so huge that it seemed that it would be only a matter of time before the small country of No. Vietnam would run out of soldiers.
Only later did we learn that these so-called body counts included hundreds of thousands of So. Vietnamese civilians who were killed by our bombs and assaults on their villages.
Then in 1971 came the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which had been leaked by Daniel Ellsberg to the New York Times, which detailed the secret history of the war (compiled by the Pentagon itself). The Pentagon Papers spelled out how President Lyndon Johnson and previous administrations had systematically lied both to the American people and Congress about what was going on in Vietnam.
The Pentagon Papers detailed the covert actions by the U.S. military that involved us ever-deeper into the process of escalation that culminated with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution passed by Congress in August, 1964, that basically gave Johnson carte blanche to send millions of soldiers to Vietnam without Congress ever having issued a Declaration of War.
Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska was one of only two senators to oppose the resolution with words that would become prophetic, saying he was voting against the resolution because “…we are sending our American boys into combat in a war in which we have no business, which is not our war, into which we have been misguidedly drawn, and which is steadily being escalated.”
Only years later was it revealed that the basis of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution — the supposed attack on U.S. naval vessels by No. Vietnam in the Tonkin Gulf off the coast of No Vietnam — was a complete fiction.
Moreover, the overall justification for the war was the oft-stated Domino Theory, by which American policy-makers suggested that if one country in Southeast Asia were to fall to the Communists, the others would fall like dominoes and would become vassal states of China and the Soviet /union.
But that analysis completely ignored the simple fact that the Vietnam War was a civil war in which the Vietnamese were seeking to throw off their colonial rulers — the country had been invaded and governed first by the Chinese, then the Japanese, then the French, and then the Americans.
Robert McNamara, who served as Secretary of Defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Johnson from 1961-68, and who was one of the chief architects of the American strategy, admitted 40 years later that American involvement in the war in Vietnam was “wrong.”
In the aftermath of the war, trust in our government reached an all-time low and has continued to plummet ever since, even among those of us who generally believe in the values of our democracy and the need for a strong national government.
The War in Vietnam was a tragedy for everyone who even remotely was touched by it. It was a war built on lies on top of lies — and its legacy is a large part of the reason why Americans have such distrust of our government and institutions today.
