Vietnam: a victory never to be forgotten
It’s a historic anniversary that the US ruling class and its allies around the world wish we would forget. Fifty years ago, on 30 April 1975, US imperialism suffered the worst military defeat in its history as troops of the North Vietnamese Army and South Vietnam National Liberation Front took complete control of Ho Chi Minh City (then called Saigon) and the few scattered areas of the south that had not yet been liberated.
The Vietnamese victory was the culmination of more than three decades of struggle against Japanese, British, French and American imperialism. At the time, the United States was, as it still is today, the world’s leading military power. And yet that incredible power was defeated by a small, underdeveloped, mostly rural society.
The US war against Vietnam at some stages involved well over half a million regular US troops. During the war, the US unleashed previously unimaginable firepower against the Vietnamese forces and the population in general. The tonnage of bombs dropped on Vietnam was approximately three times the total for all theatres in all of World War Two. The US also employed chemical warfare, such as defoliants containing dioxin, which are still today causing deaths and genetic damage.
Vietnam received limited military supplies from China and the Soviet Union, but they were never enough to be decisive. Surface-to-air rockets, for example, increased the US Air Force’s military losses but never came close to stopping the US air war.
And yet all this firepower was unable to prevent Vietnamese victory. Something proved more powerful than massive weaponry. That reality is the lesson that the imperialists want us to forget.
The liberation of Ho Chi Minh City provided a striking emblem of the limitations of technological military power. As helicopters flew the remaining Americans and some of their Vietnamese agents to warships waiting offshore, the US Navy pushed each emptied helicopter overboard into the sea to make room for those still in the air.
What eventually defeated US military power? First and foremost was the heroism and endurance of the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese resistance gradually widened doubts and divisions in US society, opening time and pathways for opposition to the imperialist war within the US and eventually on a massive scale worldwide.
Combined with the US’s inability to inflict a decisive military defeat, this continually growing political opposition contributed substantially to the US rulers’ calculation that continuing the war could cost them more than they were likely to gain. They could see that, around the world, oppressed and exploited peoples were concluding that the US was not invincible and that it could be successfully resisted.
Earlier struggles similarly influenced the antiwar movement. After the 1940s and ’50s era of McCarthyism and “red scare” reaction and house-breaking of most labour unions, things began to shift with the rise of the Black civil rights movement and the ’60s cultural and political radicalisation. The opponents of the Vietnam War who organised the early teach-ins at universities were, in part, following the example of the combination of propaganda and action of early fighters for Black rights, particularly in the US South.
The influence went in both directions. In April 1967, I was conscripted (“drafted”) into the US Army in Chicago. By chance, this occurred on the same day that boxing champion Muhammad Ali had been ordered to report for induction—which he had publicly announced he would refuse because of his religion as a member of the Nation of Islam and his ethical objections to the war.
Ali, who had a talent for concise and colourful explanations, said, “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger”. (“Viet Cong” was the name the US military and media gave to the National Liberation Front.) A week before his scheduled conscription, Ali added:
“I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people, they wouldn’t have to draft me; I’d join tomorrow.”
There was considerable public interest in what Ali would do, and one of the soldiers staffing the Chicago induction centre had turned on a radio tuned to a news broadcast. With the report that Ali had refused to be conscripted, I heard one of the Black soldiers mutter, barely audibly, “Damn, wish I had done that”.
As Vietnamese resistance forced the US to increase its troop numbers in the country, conscription also necessarily increased, including of inductees who were either opposed to the war or at least suspicious of it. For thousands of young Americans and their friends, relatives and partners, the war stopped being a strange conflict in a distant country and became an immediate threat to their wellbeing. The impact was all the stronger for their ability to view scenes of the war on nightly TV news.
The US ruling class was beginning to learn something that had only begun to be evident during the 1950-53 Korean War: there is a significant difference between a “citizen army” in which the citizenry feels its interests are seriously threatened by a menace such as fascism, and one facing an abstract enemy such as “communism” that poses no immediate threat—or an oppressed people fighting for their liberation. People who had witnessed or participated in mass antiwar protests tended to have their opposition increased, not weakened, by induction into the military.
During my two years in the army, 1967-69, all within the United States, the challenge was not to convince fellow soldiers that the war was wrong. We had to persuade other soldiers that they could do something about it. This was the period during which the publication of rank-and-file antiwar “newspapers” (really newsletters) proliferated at military bases in the US and overseas.
At Fort Dix in New Jersey, we called ours the Ultimate Weapon, because the base’s main function was infantry training, and the Army liked to call its infantry “the ultimate weapon”. In the early ’70s, the Student Mobilization Committee, the most radical of the antiwar coalitions, launched a GI Press Service, which sought to provide information, exchange and cooperation among the varied military antiwar publications. We eventually knew of more than a hundred of them.
The spread of antiwar activity in the US military was aided by higher-ups’ bureaucratic efforts to suppress it. A battalion commander who learned of “subversive” activity within his domain, fearing that it would hamper his chances for promotion, would arrange for one or several suspected “ringleaders” to be transferred to a different base, hopefully distant. It could not have been better designed if the object had been to encourage the spread of antiwar activity. The eventual situation was described by Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., in Armed Forces Journal, 7 June 1971:
“The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States. By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not nearly mutinous. Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious.”
In short, the US rulers were worried about the effect of the war, not only on their troops in Vietnam, but on their armed forces more generally. President Nixon tried to ameliorate this situation through his program of “Vietnamization” of the war, which essentially meant withdrawing US troops from Vietnam and supplying the puppet “Republic of Vietnam” with sufficient weapons and financing to fight on for US interests.
From the US standpoint, this was always a forlorn hope, which became increasingly evident after the departure of US ground troops in 1973. When the liberation forces launched their final offensive in early 1975, the “RVN” forces largely melted away or collapsed.
The impact of the Vietnamese victory is still with us, something that capitalist rulers are still trying to overcome. In the US, that impact was often called the “Vietnam syndrome”, as though it described some sort of unfortunate disease. In fact, it referred to the reality that large sections of the US public had seen that their rulers lied shamelessly about a major military conflict. Consequently, they tended to look sceptically at further military operations.
It has since become standard US political doctrine that any new military adventure needs to be carried out quickly so that there is no time for large parts of the public to become really aware of it. To restore their ability to intervene militarily around the world, the US rulers found it necessary to abolish conscription and to rebuild their army as “voluntary”—meaning using social and economic coercion to enlist mainly the poor and oppressed racial minorities.
The ending of conscription was a major setback for US imperialism, and its rulers are today, half a century later, wondering whether they can get away with reintroducing it.
You can see another lesson ruling classes have drawn from Vietnam in government responses to the widespread upsurge of solidarity with Palestinians against the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza and the West Bank. The speed and extremism of government reactions against the first university protest encampments showed their fears of protests growing and spreading as they did with Vietnam. It’s the reason for the attempts to suppress free speech and the almost hysterical attacks on protesters. And just as imperialist propagandists of the Vietnam War sought to discredit opposition as “communism”, today supporters of Zionist genocide try to label any opposition as “antisemitism”.
Our side has also drawn some lessons, which is a part of the reason the Palestinian protests have taken the form they have: both the initial encampments and reaching out to broader layers through large and vocal rallies and marches. Around the world, there are uncountable numbers of oppressed and exploited people who may know little or nothing of the Vietnam War but who have absorbed the understanding that imperialism is not invincible, that it can be defeated by determined struggle, and that “If you don’t fight, you lose”.
