Last week marked the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the dismal end to the American effort in Southeast Asia that extended across six presidencies, from Harry Truman all the way to Gerald Ford.
The second-earliest memory I have of world events was listening to the radio with my mother during the congressional debate over the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in the summer of 1964, or at least being later told that that was what we had been listening to (the first was getting out of the car and having our next-door neighbor come out on his porch and tell us that "they" had shot the president, in someplace called Texas, whoever "they" were and whatever the "president" was).
At the time, and at that age, I didn't care a whit about a place called Vietnam and what was going on there. That was for the grown-ups to worry about.
But Vietnam grew easier to understand as I grew older along with it. Anyone who lived in Chicagoland knew that Mayor Daley's cops had cracked hippie heads in Grant Park during the 1968 Democratic Convention, and many of my older friends talked a lot about Vietnam and the draft in between arguing about Corvettes versus GTOs, Raquel Welch versus Ann-Margret, and The White Album versus Let it Bleed.
Like most of the folks in the ultra-patriotic, working-class neighborhood where we lived, I also gradually came to view the anti-war protesters who waved Viet Cong flags and chanted "Hey Hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today" with extreme contempt.
But anti-war sentiment thoroughly pervaded youth culture at that time, especially the rock music that we all listened to and cared so much about. So by the time the helicopters were lifting off from the roof of our embassy in Saigon, I'd given in and come to accept at least a good chunk of the anti-war orthodoxy.
Much of this was then reinforced in college when I was assigned the standard anti-war accounts like David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, Frances FitzGerald's Fire in the Lake, and William Shawcross' Sideshow. At the least, I'd come to view Vietnam as a tragic mistake. if not necessarily the criminal endeavor that the Chicago Seven and Hanoi Jane said it was.
These days, I find myself teaching the Vietnam War in various classes. I spend three or four sessions on it in my National Security Policy course and include several Vietnam films in War, Politics, and Cinema (The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and Full Metal Jacket). I also assign books like Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War, Michael Herr's Dispatches, and Karl Marlantes' Matterhorn.
In teaching the war to students who have only the haziest understanding of what it was all about, I try to go beyond the simplistic Halberstam, FitzGerald, and Neil Sheehan side of things to incorporate the findings of the new generation of Vietnam scholars, historical "revisionists" who tend to spend less time indicting America for imperialism and more time simply trying to understand how a nuclear-armed superpower was defeated by a pre-industrial nation with less than a tenth of its population.
These works include Phillip B. Davidson's Vietnam at War (which nicely links the American effort to its failed French predecessor), Lewis Sorley's A Better War (which traces how the shift in command and tactics from William Westmoreland to Creighton Abrams dramatically improved conduct of the war on the ground), and Mark Moyar's influential Triumph Forsaken (which lays much of the blame for what later unfolded on the Kennedy administration and its handling of South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem).
The picture that emerges from this newer research, aided for the first time by access to archives and documents from the other side, tends to refute a number of deeply ingrained anti-war assumptions: Ho Chi Minh wasn't a Jeffersonian agrarian reformer but a mass murderer who took his marching orders from Moscow, the Viet Cong weren't an "indigenous liberation movement" that spontaneously arose in response to oppression in the South but a façade created and directed by Hanoi to fool gullible Western liberals, and the Tet Offensive was the worst communist defeat of the war rather than the great victory that our media reported it to be.
However inconvenient they might have been for the consciences of those who cheered for American defeat in Southeast Asia, there were also those embarrassing communist "re-education" camps, the desperate plight of the "boat people" in the South China Sea and the killing fields of Pol Pot's Cambodia.
But Vietnam wasn't, after all, a war unto itself; it was just one (albeit long and costly) battle in a larger war called the Cold War (World War III, in many respects). And precious few could have predicted at the time Saigon fell that, only 15 or so years later, the Berlin Wall would also come down, the two Germanys would be unified under NATO, and the Soviet Union itself would dissolve.
The American soldiers who tried to save South Vietnam weren't war criminals, and the 47,424 who died in battle there didn't die in vain. Our side eventually won, and the world was much the better for it, too.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 05/04/2015