From Comrades in Arms: How the Americong Won the War in Vietnam Against the Common Enemy—America Part II
Indochina 1975: Liberation, Celebrations and Con-sequences for South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
By Dr. Roger Canfield
Adopted from Comrades in Arms: How the Americong Won the War in Vietnam Against the Common Enemy—America
The End Appears Inevitable
Despondent, President Thieu reads and rereads his secret letters from ex-President Richard Nixon promising military aid, no matter what happens. Indeed, the 1973 Paris Peace Accords promises “unlimited military replacement aid” for South Vietnam.[64]Nixon has resigned and Gerald Ford is indecisive.
President Ford plays golf in the sun in Palm Springs; the CIA offers advice on improving South Vietnam’s propaganda; Kissinger wonders why the Vietnamese do not “die fast … [and not] linger on;” and the South Vietnamese futilely beg for B-52 strikes. Objecting to B-52 strikes, and confusing leftist organized angry crowds with American public opinion, Kissinger says, “The American people will take to the streets again.”[65]
Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda gaze over a “large map filled with push pins and inked-in lines to indicate troop movements.”[66]The North Vietnamese gives Tom Hayden battlefield information since his December 1965 visit to Hanoi.
Peace Forces Meet in Chicago and Paris to Cut Aid,
including Homeless Orphans.
At the LaSalle Hotel in Chicago April 5-6, 1975 Sylvia Kushner of the communist front organization the Chicago Peace Council convenes a National Conference for a Drastic Cutback in Military Spending.
On April 7 in Paris POW exploiter and Hanoi agent Cora Weiss, Hue 1968 massacre denier Gareth Porter and others meet Ambassador Dinh Ba Thi, the PRG/RSV representative to the La Celle Saint Cloud consultative conference and a key member of Hanoi’s intelligence network in the US and France. Intelligence official Thi is “applauded.” Thi “thank[s]…the American antiwar movement for contributing positively to the struggle…. in particular, in working ‘to completely end U.S. aid to the Thieu clique.”
Rep. Ron Dellums, who has provided taxpayer-funded staff and office space to Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda’s Indochina Peace Campaign to cut off U.S. aid to Indochina, says, “The… [Paris] Conference… will speak to the hundreds of thousands [of Americans] who were part of the inspiring resistance to the war in Indochina.” Reps Ralph Metcalfe, Bella Azbug, Les Aspin, and Abner Mikva join Dellums.[67]
No Aid to Refugees, Including Orphans
In Paris Hanoi’s agents thank the peace movement for opposing “all acts designed to deceive and stir up public opinion, such as organizing the evacuation of people and evacuating orphans from South Vietnam.”[68]
Final Victory of Armed and Political Struggle Close at Hand
On April 7th, a gray haired, little old man, a diplomat and joint nominee for a Nobel Peace Prize with Henry Kissinger, personally delivers Hanoi’s military orders to the Viet Cong’s COSVN command headquarters. Hanoi creates COSVN in October 1961.[69]COSVN is a wholly owned entity of Hanoi. Hanoi provides “the leadership [for COSVN] to organize the resistance movement for all of South Viet Nam.”[70]COSVN is still a place the “peace” movement and many subsequent Vietnam and intelligence historians insist does not exist.
Le Duc Tho, who refuses his piece of the Nobel Peace Prize for signing the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973, now rallies NVA Corps Commanders and troops for the final military assault on Saigon. Tho is likely unaware that the CIA says Saigon is safe.
The enemy has 5 divisions against our 15. Thus we cannot fail to win victory.… All official U.S. statements have ruled out…renewing U.S. intervention. …We must…quickly and firmly do our job.”[71]
Does the Abzug-McCloskey congressional delegation constitute an official go ahead statement? In short, a top communist party official orders Hanoi’s military to press on to Saigon. Hence, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi’s top negotiator, ordering the invasion demonstrates for the final time the complete harmony of the political, diplomatic, and armed struggle in a winning grand strategy for revolutionary war.
Winning Hearts and Minds
Hollywood’s Happiness over Hearts and Minds Echo Hanoi
The next day, April 8, 1975 Bert Schneider receives the Academy Award for best Feature Documentary, “Hearts and Minds,” a film saying America is uniquely racist and militarist. Bert Schneider says, “It is ironic we are here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated.” Schneider reads a congratulatory telegram from Ambassador Dinh Ba Thi of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, PRG, Vietnamese Communists in Paris. Thi is a key member of Hanoi’s intelligence network in the US and France. In “friendship” Thi thanks the American antiwar movement “for all they have done on behalf of peace.”[72]They are, as Pham Van Dong says, “Comrades in Arms.”
Francis Ford Coppola creator of Apocalypse Nowshowing Vietnam to be hopeless, unwinnable and destructive appreciates this “positive, human optimistic ‘message’ from the Communists in Paris. It is “beautiful.”[73]The Hollywood audience gives a standing ovation[74]honoring Schneider, the liberators, the enemy and their American agents, Schneider and Coppola. Hollywood dishonors American and South Vietnamese fighting and dying for freedom from the conquering Communists.
The Crucial Hearts and Minds are in USA
General Westmoreland says the greatest irony is the U.S. demanding that Saigon win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people while Hanoi wins the hearts and minds of “those most responsible for getting us involved in the first place [U. S. political leaders.] [75]Angelo Codevilla says the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese are won. They always flee south, while the battle for hearts and minds of the American elite is “in faculty lounges… [and]… in carpeted rooms not jungles.”[76]
Northern Tanks Crush Southern Hearts and Minds
In the end, Mark Moyar, author of the definitive work on the Phoenix counterintelligence pacification program, writes, “The Government of Vietnam had won the struggle for control over rural South Vietnam and the allegiance of its inhabitants, but it lost the war.”[77]After all, the political war inside South Vietnam is only one pincer of the Vietnamese strategy. The People’s War is won with Soviet tanks and American agents of influence. The hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese people are in the end irrelevant.
It has taken approximately 17-22 main force divisions and massive logistics to defeat the South Vietnamese defenders. “Like us, Hanoi failed to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the South Vietnamese peasantry. Unlike us, Hanoi…play[ed] their trump card…a twenty-two division force,”[78]says Stuart Herrington, a successful Phoenix advisor who helps win the hearts and minds of many South Vietnamese.
Ironically, it is the American and South Vietnamese decades of military victories, which are irrelevant against the hearts, minds, press and politicians on the Second Front in America. General Davidson writes, “The antiwar elements in Congress became the most powerful ally of the North Vietnamese Politburo. …The United States Government never clearly realized that the hearts and minds of the American people had become the critical battlefield.”[79]
The Last Days—
ARVN’s Gallant Last Stands and American Betrayals
History is indifferent to the honorable last days of the ARVN. Indeed it falsely reports mostly dishonor and cowardice.
At the end after its initial heroic defense to the death at Phuoc Binh, the northern catastrophic collapse, and the chaos on the coastal roads leading south, the remnant South Vietnamese forces ultimately stand up and fight gallantly. On April 9, at Xuan Loc Brig. Gen. Le Minh Dao leads one ARVN 18thDivision against parts of four PAVN divisions, 5th, 6th, 7thand 341 divisions. Until April 13, ARVN advances against communist forces in the Delta just outside Saigon.[80]The near supply-less 18thARVN Division fights heroically north of Saigon at Go Dau Ha and Xuan Loc, but by April 15 flees 35 miles south toward Saigon. On April 16th, a coastal city fifty miles south of Thieu’s second (Nha Trang-Tay Ninh) defense line, Phan Rang falls.
In the End ARVN Courage Counts for Nothing
On April 10 Ambassador Graham Martin urges the President to put into his speech the next day that “ARVN is fighting…with extreme tenacity and courage.”[81]On April 16, 1975 speaking to House Appropriations Chairman George H. Mahon, Kissinger says, “The South Vietnamese are fighting very well. I think some Senators are more afraid of a South Vietnamese victory than defeat because they have to vote for another appropriation.”[82]
On April 14 at a meeting of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Senator Jacob Javits tells Kissinger, “I will give you large sums for evacuation [of Americans] but not one nickel for military aid to Thieu.”[83]
Civilian Refugee Plight, “…just a pittance,’” Jane Fonda
New York Timesreporter Robert Reinhold is interviewing antiwar leaders Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda while hundreds of thousands of refugees, clogging the roads, flee, not into the arms of their northern liberators, but into Saigon. Hayden and Fonda watch “… scenes of refugee flight and death with dismay, but not surprise.”
About the South Vietnamese refugees, Jane Fonda says, “The suffering and turmoil have been going on for decades — this is just a pittance.”[84]She is right only with respect to the true human sacrifices. The untold horror is the true body count–Hanoi’s 1.1 million to 1.4 million dead over the course of the war, far greater than the most infamous phony body counts.
Making a Show of Saving a Few Allies.
Editor of the WashingtonPost,Ben Bradlee calls Kissinger, “I’ve got three guys in Saigon…the evacuation of whom is obviously important to me. …
Kissinger: …Americans or Vietnamese?
Bradlee: …Now, I’m talking exclusively about Americans. …Do you feel the evacuation plans are okay?
Kissinger: Our problem with evacuation is to do it in such a way that we don’t trigger one, total panic, and two, anti-American riots. …I’m not so worried about getting Americans out….
Bradlee: Yeah.
Kissinger: …There are hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese…we must make at least a show of trying to save their lives.[85]
The mere show of saving allies is the true pittance of no interest to Jane Fonda.
Lying Betrayals
In Nha Trang Consulate General Moncrieff Spear tells loyal U. S. allies, the Montagnards, fleeing from Ban Me Thuot and Phu Bon that U.S. Navy ships will evacuate them, but the ships never appear. A Saigon Foreign Service Officer, Walter Martindale, III,[86]allegedly sells Montagnard places on ships to rich Vietnamese.[87]On April 26, airlift organizer Dean Brown briefs Kissinger on the evacuations. “Americans are walking down to the planes with their Vietnamese friends and saying let [them] on. …The people have no papers and there is no proof they are high risk at all. …”
By April 28, some 43,000 Vietnamese and Americans are evacuated from Tan Son Nhut airport outside of Saigon in large aircraft, C-141 and C-130. A pittance. Tan Son Nhut, the major air field outside of Saigon falls,[88]as do the hopes of those seeking escape by air.
In Hanoi on April 16thParis negotiator Xuan Thuy tells Larry Levin, Tom Hayden’s staff director of the U.S. Coalition to Stop Funding the War, that “the South Vietnamese people…have risen up and [North Vietnam’s] liberation forces [had] joined(ed) in their struggle.”[89]On the same day Premier Pham Van Dong tells Dutch TV, “Our southern compatriots…are recording great victories.”[90]Xuan Thuy, negotiator in Paris who meets many American, demands the U.S. stop munitions shipments and pull U.S. ships out of Vietnamese waters.
It is entirely a Northern victory, since the indigenous Viet Cong of South Vietnam are mostly dead and South Vietnamese civilians flee, including Pham Van Dong’s mother, from their “liberators.”
Ford: “finished as far as America is concerned.”
The end near, President Ford says, “Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.” The fall of Vietnam “portends neither the end of the world nor of America’s leadership in the world.” Mimicking a magnanimous Abraham Lincoln, a defeated President Ford says it is time to “… unify, to bind up the nation’s wounds.”[91]
Cambodian Killing Fields: Real and Immediate
On April 17th, the Cambodian capital falls; led by Hanoi funded Pol Pot. Sokhom Hing, an agent of the Khmer Rouge and a participant in Hayden-Fonda’s Indochina Peace Campaign’s strategic planning at Germantown in October 1973 declares the “people cheered them whole heartedly. …There was no bloodbath.”[92]
The Khmer Rouge declares “Year Zero.” On Day One of Year Zero a new world of “new socialist men” marches not into utopia, but Hell itself. The Khmer Rouge conqueror enters Phnom Penh. It force-marches the entire population, including hospital patients, out of the city. Within days communist apologist and American peace activist Sakhom Hing is proved wrong. The Khmer Rouge executes top Cambodian leaders who had refused evacuation with the American Ambassador to Cambodia in Operation Eagle Pullon April 12. On Day One of Year Zero, April 17, 1975 the Khmer Rouge executes Sirik Matak, Lon Non and cabinet members.[93]
And so the bloodbath begins with relentless, unending vengeance. Over a period of three years, as many as 2,000,000 Cambodians, perhaps athird of the entire population, die in the “Killing Fields.” Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden and the press corps say the cut-off of U.S. aid prevents a bloodbath. Instead the cutoff of military aid accelerates the massacre. The hardcore left says American bombing drives Pol Pot mad. In truth the forced evacuations and the slaughter are the fruits of Pol Pot, a utopian socialist reading the military advice of Lenin, Stalin, Ho and Mao in Paris cafes. Similarly, linguist consultant for communist dictators, MIT’s Noam Chomsky says the Khmer Rouge “may actually have saved lives.” Jim Wallis’s Sojourner, future spiritual adviser to President Barak Obama, makes an industry out of publishing articles and editorials blaming the Cambodian genocide on America.[94]
“As if words were effective anti-tank weapons” Jay Veith
Delusions of a Communist Peace
“Indochina Has Not Fallen”
With the conquering communists entering Phnom Penh, Cambodia on April 18th, Tom Hayden talks to representatives of the Khmer Rouge.[95]The April 18th issue of the New York Timescites Hayden’s interpretation of the events: “Indochina has not fallen — it has risen. What has fallen is the whole cold war establishment.” According to Hayden, the communists will not take over the governments of Indochina, but will instead establish coalition governments. “The policy of the other side is reconciliation,”
“Communism is one of the Options that Improve People’s Lives,”
Tom Hayden.
Meanwhile as the Soviet tanks roll south toward Saigon and innocent civilians flee from the murderous artillery of Hayden’s forces of reconciliation, Tom Hayden confidently proclaims, “Communism is one of the options that improve people’s lives.” In an article proclaiming “Peace,” Hayden writes in the May 8, 1975 Rolling Stone,“It is a high irony that the new government of Cambodia came to power on a day exactly 200 years after Paul Revere’s ride, but now the shots heard around the world are coming from Indochina.”
“Indochina Without Americans: For Most a Better Life,”
New York Times.
Date line, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, the New York Timesheadlines a Sydney Schanberg article, “Indochina Without Americans: For Most a Better Life.”
Bug Outs, Betrayals and Broken Promises
On April 21, 1975, an angry President of South Vietnam, Nguyen Thieu, speaks for 90 minutes on TV to the people of South Vietnam. Thieu read a 1972 letter from President Nixon pledging “severe retaliatory action” if South Vietnam’s survival is threatened. Thieu condemns the Paris Peace Accords, Henry Kissinger and the U.S. “The United States has not respected its promises. It is inhumane. It is untrustworthy. It is irresponsible.” His last hurrah finished, Thieu flies off to safety in Taiwan, away from certain execution. He later lives quietly and well in London and Boston.
In an April 22, telephone conversation, Kissinger tells ABC’s Ted Koppel, “We’re also trying to save some South Vietnamese. You can’t just leave everyone there.” A minimum list of 200,000 warrants evacuation.[96]Richard Botkin writes, “The American evacuation of Saigon was like some oversized, cruel, real-life game of musical chairs…and the music was about to be turned off-permanently.” Actually, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” was the radio code to begin evacuations meaningful only to Americans[97]since snow does not fall in hot and tropical South Vietnam.
The human suffering deserves relief and it comes to only some.
Humanitarian Aid to the Conquerors Only
Medical Aid to Liberated Viet Nam
In the USA William Zimmerman’s IPC affiliated Medical Aid for Indochina advocates medical assistance to one side—liberated Indochina. Similarly, on April 16, 1975 the U.S. Committee for United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, delivers 19 tons of drugs to Hanoi intended for PRG, liberated zones of South Vietnam. Actually, it is direct United Nations military assistance to the medical needs of the NVA conquering troops on the battlefields of South Vietnam.[98]
April 25-27, 1975, claiming a danger that U.S. Marines just might be returning to South Vietnam, American “peace” organizations–the AFSC, Fellowship of Reconciliation and War Resistors League in Amsterdam and the KGB controlled Stockholm Conference on Viet Nam co-sponsor an Emergency Conference on Viet Nam. Like UNICEF and Medical Aid for Indochina, the Emergency Conference concentrates medical aid to liberated, communist controlled, parts of South Vietnam.Ambassador and intelligence officer Dinh Ba Thi attends. Nancy Pocock of the Canadian Voice of Women travels to Paris to the Embassy of the PRG to “congratulate them on their victory …and their needs for aid.”[99]During 1975 Germantown coalition member AFSC gives aid to Hanoi and PRG of $301,797.[100]
The left’s selective humanitarianism extends to the Governor’s office in California.
Governor Jerry Brown Opposes Helping Refugees
California Governor Jerry Brown, a long-time friend of Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, “We want to dump Vietnamese” on California which is suffering a high rate of unemployment.[101]Julia Taft, chair of President Ford’s task force on the Vietnamese refugees, says the governor of California, Jerry Brown, tries to “prevent planes carrying refugees from landing at [the federal] Travis Air Force Base near Sacramento.” Brown’s Latino secretary of Health and Welfare, Mario Obledo, “felt that this addition of a large minority group would be unwelcome in California. And he says that California already has a large population of Hispanics, Filipinos, blacks, and other minorities.'”[102]In his election to a fourth term in 2014 Brown wins entirely with nonwhite voters. Vietnamese Californians do not vote for Jerry Brown. They send a Vietnamese-American Republican, Janet Nguyen, to the California State Senate.
The Abandoned: “suppressive fire…as necessary.’
On April 29, at 1:01 AM Zulu, Henry Kissinger cables Ambassador Graham Martin precise instructions for the final betrayal of America’s Vietnamese allies. “If the [Tan Son Nhut] airport is open…continue the evacuation of high risk Vietnamese…If the airport is unusable …resort to helicopter evacuation of all, repeat, all Americans…suppressive fire will be used [against South Vietnamese refugees] as necessary…. Warm Regards, 0208.”[103]Embassy staff has the terrible task of overseeing the abandonment of the South Vietnamese.[104]Abandoned in haste the American Embassy leaves behind files listing 30,000[105]Phoenix cadres, pacification program staff, who have defeated the Viet Cong infrastructure “winning the hearts and minds” of most of the people of South Vietnam with improved security.
“Cowards” in ARVN 7thDivision Prove Heroes at the End
Amidst American dishonor the ever-lasting honor of the ARVN 7thdivision is on final display. The Saigon Press Corps maligned ARVN 7thdivision since the battle of Ap Bac in 1963, in its last battle does well. The 7thDivision defeats the NVA attempting to take QL 4,[106]the “People’s Road” from the Mekong Delta across the Bassac River to Can Tho straight to Saigon. At the end the men of 7th Division act as if they were still “the veritable lords of the northern Delta” as they had been at least since the late 60s. The 7this under the skilled and militantly honest command of Gen. Nguyen Khoa Nam, a man of “deep conviction, brilliant leadership skills, and ascetic integrity.”[107]General Le Van Hung, a stalwart at major battle at An Loc in 1972, ably assists Nam until both commit suicide.[108]
The wife of General Le Van Hung tells the story of the final days of her husband and General Nguyen Khoa Nam, Commander of the long falsely defamed 7th Division:
MR IV was relatively calm… because of the calmness generated by the leaders of the region–leaders like General Nguyen Khoa Nam and my husband (General Le Van Hung). …They decided not to flee, not to run away. And therefore, the personnel under their command did not want to flee either….A small number …did try to escape and ran away. …General Nam and General Hung were three times offered a chance to evacuate by their American advisor. ….They refused….to abandon their men and their country but to stay and defend it to the death. …There was (a Communist) infiltrator…in the radio station and instead of broadcasting the order of General Nam, that everybody was supposed to stay put and fight, they broadcast the message from General Minh telling everyone to surrender…. We tried to locate the colonel who was in charge of distributing maps and orders. …This officer had taken his family and ran away after passing the duty to his captain (who) …disappeared….The careful and well-arranged plan was now suddenly foiled because of an act of betrayal and cowardice. At that time, alongside national road number (QL-) 4 from Cai Lay and My Tho to Long An, there was heavy fighting going on (where) …fighting continued until May 2nd, 1975 [past April 30th surrender]. Very heavy fighting. General Nam ended his life by shooting himself in the temple at 6:00 AM, May 1st, 1975. … I left Vietnam finally by boat. I was in a refugee camp with my children for 11 months in the Philippines. Then I came to the United States… to make a life for my children, to raise them and to continue to follow the path of my husband.[109]
So after heroic fights to the end, Gen. Nguyen Khoa Nam, like Brigadier General Le Van Hung, Brigadier General Tran Van Hai, General Le Nguyen Vy, and Major General Pham Van Phu, commit suicide.[110]About 17 military commanders commit suicide. They are hardly the cowards history still falsely records.
Twelve and thirteen year old junior high school students barricade and defend their Truong Tieu Sinh Quan military academy taking heavy casualties until surrender.[111]
At noon 20 kilometers from Saigon in the last battle of the war on the Street without Joy, Highway 1, a 60-man remnant of 82ndARVN Ranger Battalion commanded by Major Vuong Mong Long, surrounded, fights to the last.[112]On the last day, Lt. Thanh and Lt. Tran Van Hien pilot a C-119 gunship providing fire support to ARVN units fighting the NVA.[113]
Evacuations of South Vietnamese Minimal
The betrayal and abandonment of the South Vietnamese is shrouded in frantic last minutes efforts. Some 35,000 South Vietnamese escape in American transport planes in the week before NVA artillery forces the closure of Tan Son Nhut in Saigon.
As for Kissinger’s “suppressive fire,” order, on the last day Marine guards fire canisters spewing pink smoke to fend off the last desperate Vietnamese clawing to get aboard the last helicopters out of Saigon. The much-vaunted and frequently photographed helicopters of “Operation Frequent Wind,” rescue only 5,680 South Vietnamese. Some helicopters land on small decks and are tossed into the sea to make room for subsequent landings of handfuls of refugees.[114]
Photo:Vietnamese evacuees board CH-53 at DAO Compound, Saigon, Operation Frequent Wind, 29 April 1975, USMC.
Last Phony Photo
There is the last of so many great phony photographic portrayals of the presumed ignoble American experience in Vietnam. Marine guards toss canisters spewing pink smoke to fend off the last desperate Vietnamese clawing to get aboard the last helicopter flying off the roof of an American building. The building is described forevermore as the Embassy of United States of America. It is not.
This photo like so many others about the war in Vietnam veers far from the truth. It is not the American Embassy. It is the CIA safe house at the Pittman Apartments on 22 Ly Tu Trong Street, evacuating only a few top Vietnam officials, e.g. Gen. Tran Van Don and Tran Kim Tuyen, and abandoning most of the CIA’s thousands of other South Vietnamese agents, employees and families.
Only thirty years later on April 29, 2005 will the photographer, Hubert Van Es, finally reveal the true location of his photo to readers of the New YorkTimes.[115]In a communist War Museum Van Es finds one of his earlier photos captioned with the 173rdAirborne retreating when they were actually advancing. Van Es says the caption distorts history with “self-serving propaganda.”[116]Van Es’ news and views are 30 years late. A propaganda museum is a fitting venue for this late news. Denis Warner, Australian journalist writes it was “the first war lost in the columns of the New York Times.[117]
Last Night in Saigon
On the last night in Saigon, the rich take to barges. At 6:30 P.M. on the 29th, “A power cut had blacked out the city … it cloaked the shame.”[118]
The lights go out, the rains come down, but American betrayal and shame does not wash away.
| Photo: 35 Vietnamese refugees spend eight days at sea before rescue by USS BLUE RIDGE (LCC-19) PH2 Phil Eggman |
On the morning of the 30thof April 1975, the sun comes up to reveal hundreds of small boats off the coast.[119]Another 32,000 South Vietnamese make it out on their own by sampan, raft, basket and rowboat to the US ships. About 20,000 board South Vietnamese Navy vessels.[120]The U.S.S. Kirkconvoys thirty-two ships of the South Vietnamese Navy loaded with 32,000 refugees to the safety of the Seventh Fleet and to Subic Bay, Philippines.[121]
As if taking orders from the peace movement or the Congress, in a scant three days, on May 2nd, the Joint Chiefs of Staff terminates American “refugee operations.” Most of 980,000 South Vietnamese serving in ARVN units are abandoned.
“Good Morning Vietnam”
It is 7:30 A.M., April 30, 1975. It is “Good Morning Vietnam” for a top field commander of the victorious army. General Van Tien Dung says, “There had been no morning so fresh and beautiful, so radiant, so clear and cool, so sweet-scented as this morning of total victory.” Appropriate for her contribution to the Communist victory, COLIFAM exploiter of American POWs and Women Strike for Peace’s Cora Weiss holds the English copyright upon the General Dung’s book Our Great Spring Victory. Cora Weiss, who did not translate Dung’s work into English, earns the honor as a comrade in arms serving on Hanoi’s second front in the USA. Cora Weiss heads Committee of Liaison with Families of Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam,COLIFAM, used to exploit the families of American POWs. Weiss and Hanoi let loose “a fiendish virus of crushed hopes and destroyed faith” among families of POWs and generated antiwar sentiment among some family members.[122]COLIFAM sponsors many antiwar visitors to Hanoi generating an endless stream of pro-Hanoi press coverage.
At 11:30 A.M. on April 30 the Soviet T-54 tanks of the North Vietnamese 203rd Armored Brigade shatter the brittle iron gate guarding the Thieu-abandoned Presidential Palace of the Government of the Republic of Vietnam.
Saigon’s Streets Are Without Joy
“Liberated” Saigon (renamed Ho Chi Minh City) does not share in the joy. French journalist Brigitte Friang describes tanks entering Saigon at noon on April 30th, “They advanced into a dead city, welcomed only by 125 foreign journalists. The rush of the press … not the rush of the population.” On the streets of Saigon there are no indigenous Viet Cong, no black pajama guerrillas, no grateful peasants and no jubilant Buddhists to be seen. Friang, a member of the French resistance in WWII says, “I did not expect such a strong rejection.” It is not like the joyous liberation of Paris from the Nazis in 1945.
In 2008 resident Vietnamese still call the “liberated” former southern capitol Saigon rather than Ho Chi Minh City.
Viet Cong, PRG Fiction Revealed
For the foreign news cameras only, northern soldiers plant the blue, red, and gold flag of the Viet Cong. Photos of the single Viet Cong flag are carried over the international wire services. Decades of blood and millions of casualties purchase a nanosecond of fictional honor for the Viet Cong, whose nationalist flag will soon be taken down and whose memory, always a fabricated fantasy, will fade rapidly from international view.
In the May 15 Victory Day parade no Viet Cong flags fly.[123]The Viet Cong are represented by an “unkempt and ragtag” group under the yellow on red starred flag of North Vietnam. Truong Nhu Tang, asks why? General Van Tien Dung replies “the army has already been unified.”[124]In July in Hanoi Truong Chinh tells Tang, “The strategic mission [is now] to accelerate the unification of the country and…a rapid, powerful advance toward socialism: The (National Liberation) Front and the [Provisional Revolutionary Government], PRG not only had no further role to play, but become obstacles.”[125]
The Viet Cong had never been anything but a branch of the North’s political-military operation in the South. As Le Duan of North Vietnam said soon after the war, “Our [Northern] part is the unique and single leader that organized, controlled, and governed the entire struggle of the Vietnamese people from the first day of the revolution.”[126]With as many as 85,000 killed in Tet 1968, the remaining Viet Cong cadre are few and reinforced by North Vietnamese, “Born in the North to die in the South,” over a million northerners do die in south.
The Viet Cong, the NLF, except for Madame Binh’s ceremonial duties, play no significant role in the new government. One Buddhist member of the old parliament, Nguyen Cong Hoan, takes office in the new parliament before being carted off to a reeducation camp.
Hanoi’s 4,800-page, four volume official history, History of the Southern Movement,cites the names of NLF and PRG leaders (Vo Van Kiet, Pham Van Xo, Tran Van Tra, Tran Bach Dang, Nguyen Huu Tho, Tran Buu Kiem, Huynh Tan Phat, Nguyen Thi Binh) only in passing. The NLF, PRG and Alliance of National Democratic and Peace Forces receive similar short shrift. They are recognized only as overt fronts for the Vietnamese Communist Party.[127]
Celebrations of Communist Victory: Agents, Peace Groups
“How Happy They Must Be”: Van Tra, Hayden, Zinn, McAuliff
While hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese are desperately fighting to board departing planes, helicopters, barges, and ships, the Left in America joins Hanoi’s rejoicing.
Like Colonel General Tran Van Tra, Tom Hayden is close to tears “thinking of the faces of the people in Vietnam over the last ten years, thinking how happy they must be.” Jane Fonda is jubilant about the fall of Saigon. She compares North Vietnam’s occupation of Saigon to the American Revolution: “a revolution for independence playing itself out in Vietnam.” She says, “To say Saigon has ‘fallen’ is to say that the 13 colonies ‘fell’ two centuries ago.” Watching American TV images, fugitive underground Weathermen, WUO, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, rejoice, “We were overjoyed. …We spent several days celebrating, laughing and crying.”
According to professor Howard Zinn, another secret Communist, “everyone stood up and cheered” when a message is read to the audience at a protest meeting at Brandeis University on April 30, 1975. The message is that “the Saigon Government has surrendered. The war is over.”
As the American ambassador, Graham Martin, is leaving conquered Saigon, John McAuliff, a leader of Hanoi’s loyal nominal Quaker cadre, American Friends Services Committee, AFSC, arrives in victorious Hanoi as part of a three-week “peace delegation.”
In Hanoi John McAuliff and a “coalition delegation,” of United Campaign for Peace in Indochina, Cora Weiss, Fred Branfman and Ira Arlook, meet a representative of the Vietnam-U.S.A. Society. Do Xuan Oanh is an English speaking and well-practiced greeter of American comrades[128]of Viet My, the South Vietnam People’s Committee in Solidarity with the American People. My Viet is formed after meeting in Bratislava. McAuliff proposes “a U.S.-Vietnamese conference…in (South) Vietnam” whose purpose is to “celebrate the end of the war and…the Vietnamese people to thank the American people.” And to “create a new structure of cooperation” which would support reconstruction and other economic and humanitarian aid and counteract “hostile ‘who lost Indochina.” The co-sponsors of the proposed conference are the Solidarity Committees of the DRV and PRG and the American’s United Campaign for Peace in Indochina.
“Progressive” Vets
A Vietnam Veterans Against the War/Winter Soldier Organization, VVAW/WSO, letter says, “The Vietnamese and Cambodians have won great victories …aided by progressive people and organizations throughout the world … such as IPC and VVAW/WSO. …We too will one day celebrate our victory over imperialism.”[129]
The National Office Collective of VVAW/WSO thinks the Indochina Peace Campaign, IPC, is insufficiently revolutionary. The IPC, lobbying Congress, gets involved in electoral politics. Revolutionary Tom Hayden has decided to run for the U.S. Senate in California.[130]Hayden succeeds in besmirching Democrat Gene Tunney helping elect Republican George Murphy Senator from California.
Sheep in NYC Meadow
| Photo: Victorious Vietnam, Hanoi Poster | The “joyful welcome to peace” is cause for special collective celebration. Miraculously organized in only ten days, 50,000 people gather for a celebration at Sheep Meadow in New York City’s Central Park on May 9, 1975. David Dellinger, Bella Abzug, and Elizabeth Holtzman speak and Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, and Phil Ochs sing. Madame Binh cables the New York celebration extending, “our warm feelings and profound gratitude to those Americans who for years worked untiringly to end the unjust, criminal war and, most recently, to cut aid to the |
warlike fascist Nguyen Van Thieu junta. …We hope you urge the U.S. government…to help us to rapidly…reconstruct our country.”[131]
Le Thi Xuyen of the Vietnamese Women’s Union writes to Arlene Eisen Bergman, “This great victory is inseparable from your militant solidarity, assistance and support….We always remember your…rallies, demonstrations, petitions, leaflets, cables, letters in protest…. We think that our victory is also yours.” Xuyen asks for the return of Vietnamese orphans.[132]
Celebrations
The U.S. committee for the conference would include “John [McAuliff], Cora [Weiss], Don [Luce]/Doug[Hostetter], Fred [Branfman]/Larry [Levin], Ira [Arlook], Nina [Mohit] representing AFSC, CALC, IPC, CSFW (or IRC). [133]
In Stockholm on June 20-22, the 7thcongress of the United NLF –groups of Sweden gather for “happiness and victory. The U.S.-Imperialism is defeated in Vietnam.” The Swedes write to IPC seeking “continuous contacts and near collaboration” to give “continuous political and material support” to the Vietnamese.[134]
Photo:Viet Nam’s Ultimate TriumphHanoi Poster, N.D., N. Bich.
Jim Wallis, frequent war protester, “prominent organizer in the Michigan State University chapter of SDS,”[135]friend of Daniel Berrigan, editor of Sojourners, an advocate of Marxist-Leninist social justice, and a cheerleader of the Viet Cong is pacified by the Communist conquest of South Vietnam. He says “I don’t know how else to express the quiet emotion that rushed through me when the news reports showed that the United States had finally been defeated in Vietnam”[136]Wallis replaces Jeremiah Wright as President Barack Obama’s spiritual advisor.
No Reconciliation, No Third Force.
“Third Force” Members Revealed as Agents of Hanoi
Paul Quinn-Judge, a member of the American Service Committee and a stay behind reporter was surprised,
Many foreign observers [including the AFSC] had portrayed the third force as a neutralist coalition leaning neither towards Communism nor the U.S. From my conversations, however, they emerged as a radical nationalist grouping which had frequent contacts with the NLF, and was aware that many NLF cadres were active in third force movements.[137]
The day after the fall of Saigon, Huynh Tan Mam, frequent greeter of American peace delegations, nominal author of the People’s Peace Treaty signed by South and North Vietnamese and American students, and a Hanoi agent reveals himself at last on television. Mam stands before a massive portrait of Ho Chi Minh praising the North Vietnamese conquest.[138]“Third force” NLF agents, Buddhists and Catholics, publicly join the communists they had previously been meeting secretly.
The false “neutrality” of third force exposed, they begin helping disarm and register Saigon’s police officers and ARVN troops for reeducation camps. A few well-known, Tran Thi Lan, Ho Ngoc Nhuan, Phan Khac Tu, Ngo Ba Thanh, Huynh Lien, Huynh Tan Phat, Truong Ba Can, and Vo Dinh Cuong, came out of the cold to become part of the communist government.[139]
Hanoi orders the disbanding of provincial chapters of the National Reconciliation Force in South Vietnam and begins the imprisonment, torture and killing of third force neutralists, Buddhists, Dai Viet.[140]McAuliff will form the U.S. Indochina Reconciliation Project to acquire reparations for Hanoi.
On May 30, 1975, Hanoi, McAuliff and other Americong reject an offer for a “Bratislava style” conference in Japan offered by Gyotsu Sato [141]
Consequences for the Peoples of Indochina
The remaining people of Indochina begin to pay dearly for their associations with American politicians grown indifferent to their flight. “Peace was another name for the reglement de compte: the punishment and repression of the defeated,” Nghia M. Vo writes.[142]
None escape the wrath of the victors.
The lucky lose only their property, wealth, and civil rights.
In Cambodia…They stuck bamboo poles thru the length of …baby’s bodies and nailed them to the walls of buildings. …Many mothers went instantly insane.”[143]
In Vietnam…At 6:30 P.M. on the 29thof April 1975, “A power cut…blacked out the city … it cloaked the shame.”[144]The lights went out, the rains came down, but American betrayal and shame did not wash away.
In Laos…Operations “Extinct Destruction,” and “Razing Entirely” eradicate the Hmong mountain tribesmen of Laos beginning decades of “ethnic cleansing and genocide” that got “not one minute of American network news air time.”
Confiscation of Private Property
“Student” leader, peace movement greeter, and Viet Cong spy, Doan Van Toai, is given his first assignment, “a plan for confiscating all the private property in South Vietnam.”[145]Truong Nhu Tang, the Viet Cong Minister of Justice, says Hanoi’s “corrupt and incompetent bureaucrats and brutal security forces…fought among themselves to confiscate the best house, the richest plantations, and black market luxuries.”[146]Nghia M. Vo writes, “The South Vietnamese…witnessed the greedy and voracious northerners descend on the South like swarms of locust, hauling almost everything back to the North from watches, bicycles to gold bars.”[147]In September 1975, a currency exchange makes all old Saigon currency worthless, wiping out the savings and wealth of all southerners.[148]
Flush toilets, transistor radios, ceiling fans and working watches fascinated northerners who had been told that the South Vietnamese lived in great poverty.[149]
Thought Controland Cultural Transformation
Now reassigned to reeducation tasks, Nguyen Ngoc Giao, VC intelligence agent and liaison to the U.S. peace movement in Paris, writes in the People’s Armynewspaper in June 1975, “We must manage each person. We must manage their thoughts and actions, word and deeds, philosophy of life and ways of livelihood, social relations and travel.”[150]
On October 5, 1976 Nguyen Van Hieu, Vietnam’s Lenin, who had met many American antiwar activists in Communist capitols and conferences promising democracy is now Minister of Culture. Hieu calls for a “struggle to eradicate the poison of reactionary and decadent thought and culture.” This involves “seiz[ing] books, movies, pictures, and tapes that violate the disciplines of propaganda,” says Cu Huy Can, vice minister of Culture.[151]
As in all Communist regimes, the Minister of Culture’s job is to rewrite the history and to destroy the cultural remnants of the vanquished regime and its peoples. And so it is now Vietnam as it was done in the USSR and Mao’s China. Note that multiculturalism in the USA also expresses animus toward traditional American political and religious culture. Inside the USA the history of the Vietnam War is largely taught from Hanoi’s politically correct perspectives.
Freedoms of Speech and Press suppressed
Scores of politically competitive newspapers disappear from the streets of Saigon. In March 1976, the communist government finally orders all foreign correspondents, wire services and the Red Cross to leave Saigon before May 8, 1976. By 2014 Vietnam still ranks 174th out of 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index.
Prostitution, Drugs
Despite years of peace activists like Jane Fonda and Arlene Eisen Bergman blaming moral decadence upon America troops, “Large-scale prostitution and drug use” is today tolerated “because of profits.”[152]Sex trafficking and cheap labor are Vietnam’s most profitable exports.
Karen Nussbaum, a former employee of People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice, PCPJ, and Indochina Peace Campaign, IPC, is appointed by President Clinton to the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor where she organizes a symposium on Forced Labor: The Prostitution of Childrenwhose report identifies Vietnam as a major source of child prostitutes. Perhaps defending her old allies during the war, Nussbaum wrongly credits Vietnam with working to stop sexual slavery.[153]A near decade later Vietnam remains human trafficker extraordinaire.[154]
Worse Follows.
French human rights activist Dr. Jacqueline Desbarats shows that “more than a million South Vietnamese are forcibly relocated to “New Economic Zones.” Two-and-a-half million are sent to “reeducation” camps, and more than 100,000 are victims of extra judicial killings.[155]
Reeducation Camps
About 800,000 ARVN officers and men will be sent to reeducation camps,[156]better described as slave labor camps. Originally told their reeducation would only three days for most and thirty days for a few, some 250,000 are imprisoned for over six years.[157]They endure twelve-hour workdays and supplement rotten, stale and mildewed rice by catching lizards, frogs, insects, mice, rats, snakes.[158]Of the hundreds of thousands who go to reeducation camps 10% die every year from starvation, lack of medical care, torture and execution.[159]Some 56,000 die of thirst, hunger, disease and suicide. The Communists give special treatment to some in the camp. For a Montagnard leader, Nay Luette,
They sawed his head open, split it in half to reveal half of his brain (they also did this to at least one American POW)….It was done to shock the others in the camp, and afterward they summoned his wife to pick up his body with his head sawed open and brain revealed, according to POW Mike Benge.[160]
New Economic Zones
Forced labor in the New Economic Zones is a means of social engineering to build the “new socialist man.” It also displaces and turns the hill peoples (Montagnards) into minorities in their ancient national homelands, e.g. Dac Lac, Gia Lai,-Con Tum and Lam Dong provinces in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. Le Monde’sJean Lacouture estimates that as many as three or four million city residents are forcibly moved to the “new economic zones,” which he describes as “a prefabricated hell.”[161]By 1988, some two million are forcibly relocated to often mosquito-infested jungles with poor soils.[162]
A Million Political Prisoners Admitted
By 1977 about 300,000, including some complaining Viet Cong, are imprisoned, many multiples of the prison population of 7,000 of Thieu’s prior anticommunist government on April 30, 1975. Prime Minister Pham Van Dong on September 22, 1978 says, “In over three years I have released more than one million prisoners from the camps.” Dong’s admission of the number of Hanoi’s political prisoners is five times greater than Hanoi’s and the peace movement’s biggest lie, that South Vietnam has 200,000 political prisoners. This is thirty times greater than President Thieu’s actual prison population of 7,000.
Saigon’s prison cells, Don Luce’s horrendously described and fictitious “tiger cages,” shrink in size under Hanoi’s “humane and lenient” treatment. Prisoners are warehoused in conex shipping boxes and in prison cells measuring three foot by six foot for singles. Forty to 100 prisoners share larger cells 5 foot by 25 foot. Buddhist Thich Thien Minh who survives ten years in a Thieu prison dies after six months in a Communist prison.[163]
For tens of thousands it is the peace of the graveyard.
Nights of the Long Knives
Within ninety days of the fall of Saigon it is as Viet Cong expert Doug Pike predicts, the “night of the long knives.” At night and in lonely places the “liberators” quietly take away and execute 70,000-85,000 South Vietnamese.[164]According to the French Ambassador, among them are the 30,000 Phoenix cadres who the Communists easily identify in abandoned CIA files.[165]Conquering Gen. Dung says the files of the General Staff and the Directorate-General of Police are also captured in whole.[166]Nguyen Cong Hoan says these systematic executions are revenge killings of opposition party members, police, intelligence, Phoenix officers, anticommunists and hoi chanhdeserters from the Viet Cong.
Like the Viet Cong atrocities before, systematic murders are outside the view of the disinterested and diminished Saigon press corps. The press still hangs out within a few blocks of downtown Saigon — the Givral coffee shop, the terrace café of the Hotel Continental, the “Continental Shelf,” and the rooftop bar of the Rex Hotel.
The killing occurs at night out in the districts and provinces. Outside of Saigon many of the condemned have public trials in hamlet rallies to stir up hatred of enemies of the state and are given death penalties. Yet most executions and burials are in secret places.[167]
Press Purged, Show Trials
On June 12, 1976 with the foreign press purged in May 1976, the government now announces show trials, “People’s Tribunals,” for 12 categories—lackeys, puppets, blood indebted and enemies of the government and revolution.[168]In the first two years, 1975-76, no fewer than 65,000 are silently killed according to interviews of 800 refugees conducted by Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl Jackson at the University of California, Berkeley.[169]They are dispatched by gunshot, machete, live burial and extended torture.[170]Some are beheaded, castrated and disemboweled.
Ethnic Cleansing Throughout Indochina
And some receive special media inattention. The “ethnic cleansing and genocide” of mountain peoples, Montagnards, e.g. Degar,[171]and the Khmer, Lao, Cham in Cambodia, Laos and Viet Nam gets “not one minute of American network news air time,” according to U.S. Army correspondent and novelist John M. Del Vecchio.[172]
Cambodia
Things get worse in Cambodia-Kampuchea. Only a few leftist chroniclers write, “…[D]uring Pol Pot’s regime, two to four million (half the population) perished.” It is a “reign of terror… horror… holocaust.”[173]Michael Lind writes, “If any Americans deserve a share of the blame for the Khmer Rouge massacres and famine, it is anti-war members of Congress … [who denied] military aid and air support for America’s Cambodian allies.”[174]
In the twenty months after the liberation of Cambodia NBC, CBS and ABC “gave one minute a month to a purge that …in relative population exceeded the slaughter of Hitler’s and Stalin’s concentration camps,” says Ernest W. Lefever.[175]
Laos Falls
On August 22, 1975, Laos falls–the third country of Indochina—a mere formality. Nobody notices since North Vietnam has had its way with Laos since President Kennedy’s neutralization left the Hanoi-supported Pathet Lao in control of the half of the country along the Ho Chi Minh trails. The quiet genocide of the Hmong who fight the CIA’s secret war in Laos begins largely unnoticed. Timemagazine falsely reports a “Polite Revolution…a well-mannered affair.” Seduced by Communist use of traditional Laotian music, Timeand diplomats call it “the song-and-dance revolution.” Perhaps the real horror is beyond the imagination of the long duped press corps.
Hmong of Laos Pay Dearly–“butchered like wild animals.”
The CIA has run a silent, secret war in Laos in which the Hmong fight 70,000 North Vietnamese troops to a standstill for a decade.[176]During the Vietnam War Gen. Vang Pao and the Hmong are American allies paid to force Communism out of Indochina. Some 35,000 Hmong give their lives; mostly males 17-34 are dead by 1968.[177]
The Hmong of Laos are abandoned just like th