AT 7:53 Wednesday, April 30, 1975, rose from the rooftop of the US Embassy in the center of Saigon from the CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter, which led to ten sea security Worm ohinawaTo. Its departure marked the last mission of evacuation through a massive helicopter, which began less than 24 hours earlier and proclaimed the end of the United States' ever-game military presence in South Vietnam. Two hours later, through the gates of the Presidential Palace of the Republic of Vietnam, the northern -Vietnam pliers bearing the flags of the South Revolutionary Release Front.
Fifty years later, the scene of the promotion of helicopters and tanks is imitated by the popular imagination of both the United States and Vietnam. And in both countries, some inevitability is related to the capture of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War. When Vietnam's modern socialist republic is preparing to celebrate the victory of half a century refer When the “resistance to America to save the state”, the Vietnamese state promotes history, which remains unchanged since 1975: the Vietnamese South Republic (RVN) was a “American-Puppet” regime for 2000-year-olds against popular invaders.
But in the United States, as in a large extent in the Western world, the narrative looks significantly similar: Vietnam was a “Bad War” The American Hubriste moved on and unreliable and corrupt and corrupt from the American Hubriste, which many believe was still “nationalistic as a communist”. Indeed, “Vietnam” is still our most memorable shorter in terms of geopolitical miscalculation and military failure.
However, such a popular memory interprets a more complex historical reality on the nature of the Vietnamese Republic and the Vietnam War.
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Over the past two decades, the reputation of the Republic of Vietnam has undergone extensive review by historians. If the South -Vietnam policy often disturbed instability and corruption, then idea From a non-communist Republican government in the south, the public enjoyed the widespread support of the public, as this public often contributed to their political leaders. South -Vietnam protests were regular but these represented Lunch -Vietnam's desire to solve the war – and many other topics – in their own conditions. For example, when Munk Thích Quảng ức burned alive on June 11, 1963, he represented a Buddhist revival movement that was critical Both Vietnam's communism and RVN.
Buddhists who took the streets of Saigon did not want to overthrow the government; They promoted the reverse of the laws that restrict religious practice. But the Buddhist reason has since been accepted by the Communists – a misunderstanding of what the modern Vietnamese government promotes. A year later, Saigon High School students had not rebelled that South Vietnam could consider reconciliation with the bottom.
Taking the role of the Vietnam Republic seriously helps us to rethink the nature of the war. Hollywood in the United States shapes guerrilla destroyers and claustrophobic jungle fire brings with the internet memes “Trees spoke in Vietnamese”, strengthening a hopeless harvester in which the US had no business. Vietnam, dusty provincial museums and recentThey reflected for the 50th anniversary of the feeling of reflecting upside down, displaying the US military mannequins of Wily Peasant Farmers.
These renderes hide the much ordinary war in Vietnam. North Vietnamic soldiers, armed with Chinese-made fishshnikovs and supported by Soviet tanks, were regularly Americans and RVN troops (not to mention them Provide Australia, South Korea and Thailand).). In April 1969, the US army sent more than 500,000 members of the service – a size comparable to Napoleon's Grande Armé. By 1975, the Vietnamese Democratic Republic was the third largest army. The Vietnam War was not a tropical brush fire.
The most important thing is that the war was not only between Vietnam and the Americans, but rather between the independent Vietnamese locked in the civil war. When the conflict became the Showdown of the Cold War, its main participants were Vietnamese, who fought and died for their respective sovereignty ideas.
Today, these dimensions of the war are overlooked in both Vietnam and the United States, albeit for various reasons. Vietnam, April 30, 1975 is visible “As a result of the undesirable decision of the Vietnamese people, to build a united nation that could never be shared with any force.” But in this saying, the uncomfortable reality hides that the large wagons of the Vietnamese people actively rejected the national liberation front and the connection of the communist power. To acknowledge that the “resistance to America” was also a fellow war of Vietnam, it would be acknowledged that a non -communist alternative was a legitimate result of the conflict. This reception not only interferes with the conventional framework of the war, but also at the focus of the Vietnamic Communist Party itself at the focus of the legitimacy of the state.
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In the United States, the RVN agency is serious about protecting US military intervention – something that not only feels archaic, but requires the reopening of old wounds in American society. Given that the war influenced both democratic and Republican Presidential administrations, the US failure is widely shared, and today's American audience is much easier to accept in the entire political spectrum by the fact that the intervention was a mistaken tragedy intended to failure.
The narrow lenses of their popular accepted narratives have restricted our understanding of the following history, especially given the US tendency to become the preferred historical analogue of current events in the Vietnam War. In the early 2000s, discussions were about US troops' behavior in Iraq, and reflections on patriotism and the treatment of returning troops Soaked in comparisons of the Vietnam War AgeTo. Comment on recent protest movements including harsh suppression of students' demonstrators War in Gaza has triggered gloomy comparisons In 1970, Thekent State for the massacre. In August 2021 in Afghanistan literal adjacent assembly Chinooks in Kabul and the Knights in Saigon. It seems that everything reminds us of a cultural moment of the Vietnam War.
America's apparent inability to escape from Vietnam's symbolic weight, shifting concentration on handy issues, provoking the Vietnamese era of the American distant world, where it can be safely contained in the cry of misconception about foreign military intervention or prejudice to domestic policies. Therefore, the Trump administration has an eloquent ordered Vietnamese American diplomats to avoid participating in the upcoming anniversary.
Half a century after Saigon's fall, there are versions of the conflict, which many Americans and Vietnamese are adhered to, are strikingly similar. They reflect each other in introducing their war and inevitable. However, in simplifying historical reality, these narratives reduce the past and prevent us from properly understanding the historical parties we concern and their motivations.
Only understanding the complexity of the earthly war as the importance of Vietnam can indeed cope with the true heritage of Vietnam: the war with many different narratives and possible results. As the famous Vietnamese writer and former north -Vietnam Army veteran Bảo Ninh writes The sadness of war“Each of us carried a separate war in his heart … Our only post -war similarities came from the fact that everyone had experienced difficult, painful and various fates.” April 30, 1975 is not the end of the further interpretation, but the opportunity to start again and better understand the separate wars that its participants experienced.
Andrew Bellisari is a professor of history at the University of Purdue and the Faculty of Faculty of the Faculty of Political History and Technology (CAP) of the Purdue American Political History and Technology Center. Previously, he was Ho Chi Minh City, a founding member of Vietnam at the University of Fulbright and Harvard Kennedy School Vietnam.
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