26/04/2025
In Vietnam, celebrating the end of the American War
By Rick Holmes
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam – Fifty years ago, North Vietnamese tanks and Viet Cong soldiers streamed into Saigon from all sides, greeted by celebrating crowds. At the U.S. embassy and a CIA outpost on Gia Long Street, helicopters evacuated the last of the Americans, and the luckiest of their Vietnamese allies, to ships waiting offshore. It was the humiliating ending to America’s longest war, the only war we’d ever lost.
Back in the U.S.A., I was finishing my senior year in college. On the day Saigon fell – April 30, 1975 – my friends and I flew a Viet Cong flag, ordered a keg and threw a small party to celebrate. Saved, just barely, from the draft by a high lottery number, I fought against the war, not in it. I never set foot in Vietnam – until this year.
Don’t expect America to celebrate on April 30 this year. It’s the anniversary of events the young don’t remember and the old would rather forget.
But the Vietnamese remember, and all year they’ve been celebrating their victory in what they call the American War.
On Nguyen Hue Flower Street, in the heart of Saigon, displays celebrating the 50th anniversary of the victorious spring offensive of 1975 are sprinkled among the more gaudy giant snakes celebrating Tet, the lunar new year. There are grand patriotic pageants and teeming crowds of people taking photos of themselves and each other. An outdoor museum illustrates, day by day, the Spring Offensive that ended with the reunification of Vietnam. Everything is decorated in red and yellow, the traditional colors of Tet, and flags are abundant: the national flag, a yellow star on a red field, and the flag of the Communist Party, red with a yellow hammer-and-sickle.
Within days, Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, after the founder of modern Vietnam, who drove the French out of their Southeast Asian colonies and led the North Vietnamese government after the country was split in two. A huge statue of “Uncle Ho,” as he was affectionately known, stands at one end of Flower Street, in front of the French Colonial-era city hall.
On Flower Street, the symbols of communism decorate storefronts advertising capitalism’s most famous products: Chanel, Rolex, Cartier, McDonald’s. To an American visitor old enough to remember, this is jarring. We fought that war as part of a grand battle between capitalism and communism. If we lost in Vietnam, the argument went, communism – an economic system in which the government owned everything and free enterprise was prohibited – would spread throughout Southeast Asia and the world.
The American government turned out to be wrong about that, and so much more.
Hearts and minds
An hour and a half from downtown Saigon, the Cuci Tunnels keep wartime memories alive. The Viet Cong – guerilla fighters taking on America and its South Vietnamese allies – built miles of tunnels under forests, fields and villages. They hid in the tunnels by day and came out at night to wage crippling attacks on government forces.
Fifty years later, the section at Cuci is preserved to tell the story of those battles, mostly telling it to foreign tourists who know little about Vietnam’s 30-year struggle for independence. There are displays of captured tanks, unexploded bombs, secret entrances to the tunnel system and grisly b***y traps the Viet Cong set for their pursuers: deep pits lined with sharp steel spikes.
At the end of the tour, visitors are invited to go down into a tunnel and travel from one entrance to the next. Some of the tunnels have been widened to accommodate foreign tourists, often much larger than the typical Vietnamese of 50 years ago. Still, it’s as claustrophobic an experience as I’ve ever had, fully bent over and walking at first, crawling on hands and knees at the end. I can’t imagine living there.
The tunnels had storage rooms for food and ammunition, classrooms and medical offices. Families as well as soldiers slept in the tunnels, underground to escape the hell being unleashed above ground. American B-52s carpet-bombed the villages, forests and fields of South Vietnam. They dropped na**lm, a jellied gasoline intended to burn the jungle to the ground, the better to expose shipments of ammunition headed for the tunnels. They sprayed Agent Orange, a toxic defoliant, across the countryside, destroying crops and killing livestock. The idea was to drive Vietnamese civilians out of their homes in the Viet Cong-controlled villages and into cities, then under government control. The Pentagon said it was a way to win their “hearts and minds.”
Bombs and tourists
Luang Prabang, Laos – Vietnam’s war didn’t stay in Vietnam. Laos and Cambodia, the neighboring countries in what had been known as French Indochina, fell into civil strife soon after Ho Chi Minh’s forces sent the French packing at Dien Bien Phu. Supplies and ammunition for Viet Cong fighters in South Vietnam came from the north along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which ran through both Cambodia and Laos. American B-52s ran through Laos and Cambodia too.
Laos is a poor, mountainous country most Americans couldn’t find on a map. The B-52s found it. American bombers hit Laos every nine minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. A third of the 80 million bombs dropped on Laos failed to explode. Despite efforts to clean up the unexploded ordinance, bombs and landmines are still exploding, killing Laotians at the rate of one per month, most of them children.
Up in the mountains, you can still see the craters left by American bombs, our Laotian guide tells me. On a boat ride up the Mekong River, I confess to him that I’m an American who lived through that war, protested against it, did everything I could to stop it. Still, I said, I feel I need to apologize for what my country did to your country.
“People don’t do these things,” he said with a shrug. “Governments do these things. Now, the American tourist is king.”
Politics and war
Siem Reap, Cambodia – The tourists start arriving well before dawn, using flashlights to find their viewing spots. Their phones turn in unison to capture the first rays of light hitting the ancient towers of the temple of Angkor Wat. A thousand years ago Angkor, the capital of the Khmer empire, was probably the largest city in the world. Its people built dozens of temples, each more magnificent than the last. They were dedicated to Hindu gods, then to Buddhism, going back and forth as religions vied for the devotions of kings and their subjects.
Up to a million people lived and flourished here for five centuries, until politics and war forced them to move. The jungle reclaimed the land, and the city of Angkor and its temples all but disappeared. The ruins were rediscovered by Europeans in the late 19th century, and a long process of restoring them began, interrupted often by politics and war.
Now tourists from every corner of the globe have discovered the Angkor temples again. They come at sunrise in part to avoid the even larger mid-day crowds. At night they crowd the streets of Siem Reap and the bars of Pub Street, a little bit of Times Square where the great Khmer Empire once stood. A huge new airport, built by the Chinese, welcomes more than 2.5 million visitors a year.
On the walk from the buses to the temple, tourists pass by a group of musicians, seated on a platform, playing traditional instruments. Those paying attention will notice the prosthetic limbs. These are victims of the millions of landmines planted in Cambodia over decades of modern war.
The United States invaded Cambodia in 1970, part of its campaign against the North Vietnamese Army and its supply routes. America supported a coup against Cambodia’s popular monarch, and a civil war tore the country apart. An estimated 300,000 Cambodians were killed in the war, as much as half of them from U.S. bombs. America’s ally in Cambodia was defeated the same month its ally in South Vietnam was driven from Saigon.
At an active Buddhist temple a short walk from our hotel, a pile of skulls tells what happened next. The winners of the civil war, who became known as the Khmer Rouge, set out to build a new Cambodia by wiping out the old. They ordered the cities emptied, their populations forced into field work. They went on a killing spree, beginning with local officials, bureaucrats, professors and teachers. They stripped Buddhist monks of their robes and privileges and knocked the heads off Buddha statues at Angkor Wat.
The temple in Siem Reap was one of hundreds of ex*****on sites that collectively became known as the Killing Fields. A small park preserves what had been a well, used for drinking water before the Khmer Rouge filled it with bodies. “This mass grave recently has been excavated and (they) found 23 more bodies,” a sign reads. “Some of them are children. The victims were beheaded, hacked and whacked with iron bars, machetes, axes and hoes by the Khmer Rouge Regime Executors.”
Hundreds of skulls peer out from behind glass doors in a memorial nearby, their identities still unknown, some of the 1.3 million victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide. Their killing didn’t stop until Vietnam’s invasion in 1979.
Today, Cambodia is a strongman state, with a popular but powerless king and a powerful political dynasty that has wiped out the independent press. Cambodia doesn’t hide its ruined temples or the bones of the Killing Fields, but it’s still suffering from 50 years of politics and war.
War in the North
Hanoi, Vietnam – The capital of Vietnam feels less modern than Saigon, especially in the Old Quarter, where merchants in narrow storefronts have sold locally-made products for centuries. Today, the sign above many stores reads Made In Vietnam. Inside, they sell Nike sneakers, North Face jackets and Apple earbuds, all made in Vietnam.
Other parts of Hanoi reflect the influence of Soviet Russia. The grand plaza between the National Assembly building and Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum is as empty as the Old Quarter is crowded. Ho Chi Minh died in 1969, leaving instructions in his will that he should be cremated, like most Vietnamese. But the party leaders who succeeded him preferred to follow the example of their patrons in Moscow. Like Lenin, Uncle Ho was embalmed, with his remains on permanent display in a fortress-like temple, because the regime’s legitimacy still rests on his cult of personality.
There was a time when Vietnamese students were required to learn Russian. Now they are required to learn English.
Hanoi is a city of lakes, one of which my Hanoi guide, insists on calling John McCain Lake, because that’s where the late U.S. senator splashed down after his plane was shot out from under him during a bombing run in 1967. McCain was dragged ashore, beaten by some of the people he’d been bombing, and locked up in Hoa Lo Prison. Americans of a certain age will remember the Hoa Lo Prison by the name POWs gave it: the Hanoi Hilton.
The prison is a museum now, popular especially with foreign visitors. Up until 1954, the French ran the prison, where it housed political prisoners agitating for independence. Visitors can see cells where prisoners were shackled to the floor, the dungeon where they were tortured, the guillotine that delivered their final punishment.
It also tells the story of Vietnam’s resistance to American bombing, especially in December 1972, which the Americans call the “Christmas bombing” and Vietnam calls “the Dien Bien Phu of the air.” More than 20,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the Hanoi area and more than 1,600 civilians were killed. In the twisted vernacular of the time, the operation was intended to “bomb the Vietnamese to the peace table.”
A few months later an agreement was signed, the POWs were released, and the U.S. brought its combat units home. Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his top advisor, wanted a “decent interval” between the American exit and a North Vietnam victory, which turned out to be about two years.
Communism and capitalism
Neither peace nor prosperity followed North Vietnam’s glorious victory of 1975. Vietnam had a brief border war with China, its traditional rival to the north, and invaded Cambodia to get rid of the China-backed Khmer Rouge. The communist victors imprisoned thousands of South Vietnamese in brutal “reeducation camps.” They imposed a centrally planned economy, which proved disastrous. In the years that followed, up to a million Vietnamese fled tyranny and poverty, most of them undertaking dangerous travel on overcrowded ships. The refugees became known as the “boat people,” and many eventually found homes in the U.S.
By the mid-1980s with Vietnam considered one of the poorest countries in the world, and with millions of its people starving, its rulers instituted reforms that gave the communist nation a capitalist economy. It legalized private property and invited foreign investment, and a slow recovery began.
A display in the Hanoi Hilton, titled “Reconciliation,” spotlights McCain’s return to Vietnam in 1995. President Bill Clinton had charged Sen. McCain, a Republican who spent eight years as a POW in the Hanoi Hilton, and Democratic Sen. John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran who had become an antiwar activist, with defusing the POW/MIA issue that had divided the two nations long after the warfare ended. Conspiracy theorists and Hollywood producers had promoted the myth that Americans were still being held in secret POW camps decades after the war. Once Kerry and McCain vouched for Vietnam’s efforts to find and return the remains of those missing in action, full diplomatic relations were restored between the U.S. and Vietnam. Economic sanctions were lifted and American investors and corporations began to pour in: Intel, Apple, Adidas, Cargill and more. Half of Nike’s sneakers are now made in Vietnam.
Today, Vietnam is a globalization success story, with a fast-growing economy and a sharply improved standard of living. It produces cheap sneakers for America and the world and profits for corporate giants. Its growing middle class is a rich market for U.S. exports.
Vietnam is also a bulwark against China. In recent years, China has been courting Southeast Asia with investments and goodwill. It has funded hydropower plants on the Mekong River, the new Siem Reap airport and a highspeed rail link between the capital of Laos and China. China’s diplomatic and economic initiatives are matched by its military encroachments in what most call the South China Sea. Vietnam, with historic sensitivity on the subject, calls it the “East Sea,” and has become a key U.S. ally in keeping its sea lanes open.
All these factors led President Joe Biden in 2023 to visit Hanoi and sign agreements that elevated Vietnam’s status as a trading partner. Then we had an election.
The Trump era
Vietnam remains an authoritarian state, where one party rules and freedom of expression is limited. The party line blares several times a day from loudspeakers mounted on telephone poles in Hanoi, as it has for decades. “But nobody listens to them,” my guide tells me, “now that they have YouTube.” For professional guides like him, restrictions have eased in recent years, he says, and he can answer visitors’ questions with more candor, especially when they are back in the bus. But in public places, like the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum and the Hanoi Hilton, he must be careful.
His grandmother, who fled to South Vietnam when the country was partitioned in 1954, refused to travel to the north long after reunification, my guide says. But the next generation of northerners moved south to find jobs, and the next generation forgot all about the partition and the American War. As for young Vietnamese today, “what they think about America is how can they go there and make money.”
Many have already gone to the U.S., lots of them illegally, he says, and now they are worried President Donald Trump will send them home.
That’s not the only change Trump has brought to Southeast Asia. His on-again, off-again tariffs – as high as 46 percent for Vietnam – threaten decades of economic cooperation and American investment. Within days of Trump’s tariff announcement, Chinese President Xi Jinping was in Hanoi, signing new agreements on trade and development of Vietnam’s rare earth mineral deposits.
The Trump administration has been breaking promises across Southeast Asia. It threatened to halt the cleanup of an enormous toxic waste site left behind by America’s use of Agent Orange. Trump has halted support for independent media in Cambodia and for projects clearing landmines and unexploded ordinance. When the U.S. freeze on funding forced a mine-clearing organization in Cambodia to close down, China rushed in funds to keep it open.
And when a major earthquake killed thousands in Myanmar and shook the region, the United States, traditionally the leader in emergency assistance, barely lifted a finger. Again, China was there to fill the gap, offering far more aid than the U.S.
Vietnam will celebrate its big anniversary next week with a grand parade through Saigon. Marchers will include military units from Laos, Cambodia and China, but not the U.S. The American ambassador and other U.S. representatives were scheduled to attend the festivities, but they’ve now been ordered to stay home, the New York Times reports.
A joint U.S./Vietnam exhibit had also been planned for Vietnam’s War Remnants Museum, which has long been dedicated to documenting American atrocities. The display was to highlight reconciliation between the two former enemies. But it was being put together by USAID and the National Institute for Peace, two of the agencies Trump is trying to disband, and now it’s been indefinitely postponed.
This is Trump’s foreign policy at work, marked by economic bullying, disrespect for prior commitments, disdain for allies, casual cruelty and corruption. One of the first things Vietnam did after Trump announced his tariffs was to try to win the American president’s favor by fast-tracking a $1.5 billion resort planned by the Trump Organization. This is not how you win hearts and minds, in Vietnam or anywhere else.
When Biden visited Hanoi two years ago, he took the long view, tracing “a 50-year arc of progress between our nations, from conflict to normalization, to this new elevated status.” For now, at least, that progress has stalled.
