How to Turn a Nightmare into a Fairy Tale. 40 Years Later,
Will the End Games in Iraq and Afghanistan Follow the Vietnam Playbook?
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.
