Vietnam: A Phoenix From The Ashes

The sky crackled and burned and smoked, a fiery haze of reds and blues and greens and purples. The streets succumbed as hundreds of thousands took to them. Flags flew, red with a gold star. People marched, made speeches. Veterans had their moments in the sun. The city pulsed and rumbled. Raucous? It was raucous and then some. The thrumming of a hundred thousand motorcycles and their incessant beeps. There was, inevitably, the sound of choppers. But this wasn’t war, it was peace. Forty years after the city fell to the People’s Army of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (the Viet Cong), Saigon marked the moment.
Perhaps for some the extended fireworks evoked something of the fire and fury of the last months of the conflict. But they were launched from the helipad on the 52nd floor and the 68th floor rooftop of the Bitexco Financial Tower, a towering symbol of the new Vietnam. Like the fact or not, this is a 21st century city now, where the noise of construction and development never stills. Swords have been hammered into ploughshares.
In the streets below, there were “music- fluctuated water and decorative lighting spectacles” no less, and to ease heat and keep temperatures level, they even installed automatically-operated mist-emitting systems along the entire length of the Nguyen Hue Pedestrian Street.
For the record, all was quiet before the event and again within hours of its conclusion. They respect the past, but life is in the here and now.
NAKED GIRL
Among those in the city for the event were journalists and photographers who had served in Vietnam in the war years, the self-styled Old Hacks network. Much older now and gradually losing members to the ravages of time, they were there as guests of the Vietnamese Foreign Office. They gathered in their numbers on the rooftop bar of the Huong Sen Hotel, where they generously welcomed guests and shared reminiscences, perspectives and very lively arguments.
The group was established after the death in Hong Kong of Dutch photographer Hugh Van E, who shot the famous helicopter picture at the Fall of Saigon in 1975, and it includes those who wrote the reports and those who tok the pictures of history in the making. Among the latter is Nick Ut, whose photo of a naked young girl fleeing a napalm strike truly merits the word iconic. Its publication marked a critical turning point in the public perception of the war.
But that girl – her name is Kim Phuc – is now in her early 50s. Time – almost two generations – has passed and almost everything has changed. One of the Old Hacks said that he had not been there since 1995 and found himself “rather overwhelmed” at the changes wrought in the past 20 years (this said with a gesture to the new buildings forking the sky all around us and the sharp streets replacing the old alleyways).
And yet, that war still weaves a spell, still invests the western imagination in ways not comparable to other conflicts. Only more time will loosen its grip.
ENORMOUS ADVERSITIES
There are many views on why this is. For what it’s worth, I see four key factors. First, in the 1960s news reportage had begun to enter western homes directly through television. There it was in the parlour, right in front of Mom and Pop and the children. Second, western governments hadn’t yet realised how this would affect support for war, so modern mechanisms to control press access hadn’t yet developed. More recently a similar phenomenon emerged in the early days of social media.
Thirdly, the US still had conscription and the draft was sucking in the post-war baby boomers. But this cohort was different from their predecessors. As they reached their teens, their tastes had changed the entire cultural landscape.
Just listen to the music of the times. Moreover, the draft reached deep into the burgeoning middle class. They didn’t like it and increasingly resisted. And they had the knowledge and language with which to do so.
Fourth, those memorably described by the Irish guerrilla leader Tom Barry as “the little men in black pyjamas” proved able to prevail against the greatest imaginable odds.
They did so by enduring. They absorbed incalculable firepower and loss. The US hit them with more explosives than were deployed by all sides throughout World War II: everything bar a nuke. Five million hectares of forest were deliberately defoliated with Agent Orange, a terrible toxin that causes appalling deformations in humans and persists in the ground for several lifetimes. Landmines remain in many places, also in Laos, and still maim. Some 3.8 million North Vietnamese were killed as well as 250,000 South Vietnamese. Over 58,000 Americans died too.
The US left Vietnam devastated. Roads, railways and bridges were destroyed as were two out of three villages. The new government estimated that there were 10 million refugees, one million war widows and just under a million orphans. The economy was in ruins with millions unemployed. Inflation was rampant. The US paid nothing towards reconstruction and did its level best to isolate Vietnam diplomatically and economically.
As if all that weren’t enough to cripple them, the war didn’t end when Saigon fell. It continued in Cambodia, where the appalling Khmer Rouge had taken power, and in the north when the Chinese invaded in 1979.
Yet, notwithstanding these enormous adversities, the new Vietnamese government dramatically lowered poverty from 70% below the poverty line in 1975 to 32% by 2000. And they invested in education too, believing (as did the Irish) it to be the engine of progress. And so they made extraordinary progress.
Thus, there are many very good reasons to mark the moment. But there are caveats to be entered too – for example, in 2012 the World bank noted that “inequality is back on the agenda” noting that income for the poorest 10% of the population fell by a fifth between 2004 and 2010 while the richest 5% were now taking nearly a quarter of the income.
There are profound undercurrents of grief and loss also, and you can glean some sense of their intensity from Hanoi Masters: War is a Wound, Peace is a Scar released by the German label Glitterbeat. It collects the work of Vietnamese musicians and is a deeply affecting work, haunting, elegiac, defiant.
Forty years on, there are those who look at modern Vietnam and argue that the Americans may have lost the war but in the end capitalism won. On the other hand, there are those who describe the country as an out-and-out central control Communist state. They can’t win!
Yes, the streets were locked down during the recent celebrations, but it was nothing that a Dubliner who’d been corralled into viewing zones for the millennium Liffey fireworks display would find excessive. Or indeed, was it any more limiting than what was imposed when the Bishop of Rome visited Ireland in the same year as the Chinese last invaded Vietnam.
ROGUE’S GALLERY
They say that history is written by the victors. But maybe it isn’t. The Vietnamese won the war and internally they also won the peace. But the losers were and remain immeasurably more powerful globally and are therefore in a far stronger position to draft and redraft the narrative.
In particular, some US apologists argue that the American/Vietnam war was started by the North Vietnamese invading the independent and separate state of South Vietnam. But the Vietnamese see it very differently and point to the country’s integrity before the French colonisation, its colonial history under the French, its partition by external forces in 1954, and the buttressing of the artificial South Vietnamese state by the US, as a wedge against the spread of communism.
Meanwhile, other voices bemoan the furious pace of economic expansion in modern Vietnam, the high levels of corruption, the arrival of western fast food and the adoption of social media, western music and designer brands and styles, by both urban elites and masses of young people.
Well, the Vietnamese government has certainly loosened controls and yes, corruption seems endemic. But the US, the UK, Russia, China, France or indeed Ireland aren’t entirely clean in this regard, are they? Besides, no country has ever sustained communist or socialist purity. Look at those who tried: Hoxha’s Albania, Ceaușescu’s Romania, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, Kim’s North Korea... hardly an inspiring rogue’s gallery, is it?
Besides, it isn’t Vietnam’s obligation to satisfy the hopes and aspirations and ideologies of others. Its responsibility is to its own people within the constant flux of changing circumstances.
Everything happens in a series of contexts. One of these is geo-political. Right now, China has embarked on a dangerous and nakedly imperialist campaign to intimidate neighbouring countries over the disputed Paracel and Spratly island chains. Russia may well support China in this (since China has helped it regarding the Ukraine). So Vietnam must forge new alliances and perhaps make some new compromises, as well as using its anniversary to make a point or two.
Economic reality provides a second general context. There are major developments in global equity markets (like rice and coffee, two major export crops in Vietnam) and in communications systems and social media, including cyber espionage and warfare. At the rate at which they change, 1975 is a long time ago.
Demography is a third. Vietnam is full of young people. They know what’s happening beyond their borders. They want cool stuff to wear, to use, to listen to. What’s wrong with that?
And then there’s mythologies, truths and legends, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, where we were and where we’re going. And they change too. Look at Ireland. It took 50 years for us to have sufficient distance to be able to re-evaluate the nationalist creation myth of 1916 and a further 30 before the Northern Ireland peace process emerged. Measured against that timeframe the Vietnamese are moving along pretty well.
MISSING IN ACTION
Indeed, one is constantly intrigued by the contrast between the western need to dwell on the past and the Vietnamese tendency to look to the present and the future. Like us, they venerate their ancestors, but seem to believe their overriding duty is to the living and those yet to come. It is a philosophy worth thinking about.
That duty starts with some very simple fundamentals. Vân-Ánh Võ, one of the Hanoi masters, is quoted in a Guardian article as saying “Vietnam is still a developing country (and) people still need to first fill their stomachs or fulfil the basic needs before anything else.” As they deliver on these essentials, they can (and one hopes they will) move on to much more complex issues. A
full stomach? Oh yes. That reminds me: it’s worth being there for the Vietnamese food alone. But that’s another story for another time.
And yet, some ghosts may never rest. Tim Page is one of the Old Hacks. He’s a legendary figure, another icon. Now 69, he doubts that he’ll be back for the 50th anniversary. As he sat on the roof of the Huong Sen Hotel, his thoughts turned to the 35 journalists who went missing in action in the war and in particular his close friends Sean Flynn (son of film star Errol) and his buddy Dana Stone, who disappeared in Cambodia and whose remains have never been found.
Tim is obsessed by it. He hates the idea that their spirits are out there unable to rest. You want to bring your mates home from the war, he says. It strikes a sombre note amidst the exuberant racket from the streets below.
Those Vietnamese whose relations are among the 3.8 million who died would doubtless agree. But meanwhile, life is to be lived, lovers are to be loved and while you can’t change the past you can change the present and maybe even the future. That task never ends.
After all, history is a platform, not a tomb.