HAD WE SEEN EYE TO EYE!

Hoang Ngoc Nguyen
Forty years after the Vietnam war drew to a close tragically devastating to millions of people living in the south of the seventeenth parallel, I am still obsessed with several questions of “What ifs”. Being a tirelessly concerned student and writer of the Vietnam War in the past four decades, starting from the day the communists from the North entered the capital of the south on April 30, 1975 and I, as a senior official of the defunct Saigon government, was destined into a “re-education” camp, I have tried to answer for myself these “what if…” questions, if only for the sake of understanding more convincingly why we lost the war. But not always I felt happy with the answer I came to.

What if Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in 1963, sent to Saigon in August by President John Kennedy to seek a solution to the tumultuous Buddhist crisis for which then President Ngo Dinh Diem should be held partly responsible, had been more inclined to look for a peaceful and conciliatory solution rather than adopting unconditionally the idea of a coup d’etat which killed both the president and his brother, giving rise to the nonsensical reign of a group of French-raised generals? Could the Saigon government still under Diem have been more able to control the expansion of the war in the countryside, and the United States therefore may not have had to send ground troops to Vietnam as they did in April 1965?
What if General William Westmoreland and President Nguyen Van Thieu had precisely calculated the plan of Viet Cong to stage a countrywide Tet offensive in 1968 so they could be better prepared to pre-empt the enemy, prevent them from entering Saigon and Hue, and suppress the whole uprising campaign of the Viet Congs within a few days instead of a few weeks? We all know now that Ha Noi decided to launch the risky Tet offensive with the delusional anticipation that the South Vietnamese would stand up against the rulers. Eventually, they lost the war militarily. But they won it politically: the American people confronted President Johnson with an ultimatum: Enough is enough!
What if President Nixon, after winning re-election in November 1972, had pressed Hanoi for a major concession (withdrawing North Vietnamese troops from the south) with his historic Christmas bombing instead of gaining nothing from it. He did not need to bomb the North in order to force them to sign the peace agreement, but he needed this bombing to tell Ha Noi to pull its troops back to the north. He bombed, but he only aimed at the Nobel peace prize for Henry Kissinger!
What if Nixon had not been brought down by the Watergate scandal in August 1974? For fear of Nixon’s punitive reaction, North Vietnamese leaders had decided to wait until 1976, when Nixon would have been busy finishing his second term, to launch a total offensive in the south. Unfortunately for the south, Nixon left two years in advance!
What if the South Vietnamese leadership had realized that all was lost after Nixon was impeached and therefore they should have a new war strategy of survival? President Thieu reportedly was still dreaming offshore oil resources could rescue his regime, he was even planning for a third term after having his National Assembly rewrite the constitution, even believing that President Nixon’s successor would honor his promise.
In fact, the first “what if …” question should have dealt with the French army stupidly besieging themselves in the valley of Dien Bien Phu and disastrously losing the 170-day-long battle which spelled the shameful end to French colonial rule. Had the French succeeded in resisting the Dien Bien Phu temptation, they could have bided the time strengthening the nationalist government of Vietnam in Saigon and waiting for more military American aid from a still somehow hesitant President Dwight Eisenhower.
Taking into account all these “what ifs” which spread over a period of more than two deacdes, the only conclusion we may reach is that although Man may not propose, God certainly disposes. If it were not the fate, or karma, of Vietnam, what else could have led us to this outcome of the 20 years of conflict.
One “what if” leads to another. But eventually, I have the feeling of seeing the most distressfully enlightening “what if”: What if the two allies, the United States (the government and its people) and South Vietnam, had better understanding of each other. The Vietnamese people, not the junta alone, should not think that “this is the American War”, and there were no limits to American power. With that mind frame, they acted as though they were fighting for the United States, and this super power would never give up this “outpost of the Free World”. The American war leadership should assess correctly the only way to end the war is to win it. And they should not overestimate the risks of confronting Red China or the Soviet Union if the war was to be expanded to the north. The antiwar movement was very ready to criticize the southern regime, but how much did they know about the mass exodus of almost one million people from the north to the south in 1954, the bloody land reform campaign in the north in those years 1954-1957, the suppression of the Quynh Luu revolt in 1958, the Tet massacre of thousands of civilians in Hue in 1968… At least the south had democracy to suppress, the press freedom to repress, the religious freedom to oppress. In the north, there were none of these things so the “proletarian dictatorship” was “free”. And it is still free.
The most disturbing part of this story is that almost nothing has changed - like water under the bridge. American war critics of the previous days could now know what have happened since that day 40 years ago in Vietnam, a country where it’s really hard now for observers to see where they place their values in. Vietnam is among only a few countries turning a blind eye to the failure of communism as an ideology as well as a political system. And do we need to say that owing to the Vietnam War, other Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines… still could stand in all those challenging years of the sixties instead of falling like dominoes. Unfortunately, even now, some Americans looking back over the years kept saying that Presidents Johnson and Nixon had deceived the American people, ignoring a more dreadful fact about the dirty tricks Hanoi drew Tricky Dick to sign the Paris Accord, and the grand deception they trapped the South Vietnamese people into “re-education camps”. And do the Vietnamese understand the Americans any better now that they are here? This depends on how much the average Vietnamese have really learned about American history, politics, government, democracy. Not so many people are really interested in studying, so how can they learn?