Around 1980 I knew a rather unpleasant young man –no, no, allow me my honesty, he was a horridly despicable young man – who considered himself an authority on Viet Nam because he had spent a few days visiting his parents who both worked at the US Embassy in Saigon. I forget just what his father’s title was, his job had something to do with diddling cats, I think. His mother was convinced of her superiority to the rest of mankind because she made the coffee for His Majesty Ambassador Bunker.
One day in a rare fit of condescension, the young man took me by the hand and said, “Talovich, you and I know what really happened in Viet Nam because we saw it from the top.”
My only goal being putting as much space as possible between us, I diplomatically refrained from breaking his ribs for him and retreated, thinking, no we did not! You may be as thoroughly befuddled as the others who saw the war from the top, but my view was from the bottom.
What the fat cats and big wigs say holds very little appeal for me. Nixon’s hot air, Bunker’s bunk, Ho Chi Minh’s deceit, Chairman Mao’s trickery, McGovern’s pompous declarations, you can take them all and shove them up your nose. I have always been more interested in how life goes for the little guy. I was 17 turning 18, and acutely aware that my friends - Viet Namese boys my age were getting drafted and dying in battle, that girls my age were getting married and pregnant so their lovers would at least have a child to leave behind. I stayed away from the rich foreigners who picked their way along the poverty-stricken streets with such visible disdain. I wandered around slums alone and unarmed, ate in stands along streets considered too dangerous for foreigners to enter, and subjected those poor people to my rudimentary Viet Namese language skills, for which it is a wonder they did not shoot me right then and there.
That was a long time ago, but my hackles still rise when I see something like the exchange (Atlantic Monthly) between La Fallaci, a beautiful Italian reporter, and The Kiss, Henry Kissinger, during the war. La Fallaci asked, “Don’t you find that it’s been a useless war?” Kissinger said, “On this, I can agree.”
It’s enshrined in American righteousness that the Viet Nam war was a useless war, because after all, it was all about Me Me Me (or, if you will permit me a dreadful bilingual pun, My My My), and the communists proved to us that we were losing, even while our troops conquered them and stopped their invasion. America was too egotistical to consider Viet Namese (Chinese) strategic thinking, and too proud to consider the plight of the typical Viet Namese.
No doubt, the war was terrible. What war isn’t? But something escaped the notice of lofty reporters and politicians and moralists: the peasants stayed in South Viet Nam throughout the war. No matter how bad the fighting, the common Viet Namese stayed put, close to the tombs of their ancestors, at home in their own language and culture, despite the poverty and suffering.
As soon as Nixon and Kissinger turned over the Republic of Viet Nam to the communists, and the war stopped, floods of Viet Namese fled the country, something they had never done before. They could stand the war, but they could not bear the peace Ho Chi Minh’s government brought.
Americans, descendants of immigrants, in general are more rootless than people of older nations, so it is hard for us to understand the unwillingness of Viet Namese to leave home. Viet Namese are probably among the people in the world least willing to leave their homeland. But as soon as the war ended, they started running for their lives.
Haven’t you heard the expression, “voting with your feet”? That is what a million or more of these poor people did, and hundreds of thousands died trying to escape the peace American protestors brought them. Doesn’t that tell you something?