LESSONS AND LOSERS
(Spring, 2008)
I was waiting on the Bach Dang pier for the Vina Express hydrofoil for the 90-minute ride from Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)
to Vung Tau. I had made the hop probably more than thirty times in the twelve years I have been working as a business
and education consultant in Vietnam. I was looking forward to escaping the noise, congestion, pollution, and the sheer
danger of being a pedestrian on the streets of District 1 in Saigon. The northern reaches of the back beach in Vung Tau
seemed just right for my last ten days on this trip to Vietnam.
Several minutes prior to boarding, a ragged looking Vietnamese man approached me. He looked old and was carrying
one of those shoulder boards laden with sunglasses, American Zippo lighters refurbished from the war years, Gillette
razors, scissors, and small canisters of shaving lather, among other mainly useless stuff. He didn’t try to sell me
anything, but pointed to a nearby stand where I could get something to drink and told me how many minutes I had to
wait to board the boat. I appreciated his friendliness, even though I knew the drill well. He asked me, in pretty good
English, where I was from. When I replied the United States, he gave me the thumbs up and said “very good.” Then he
simulated a person firing a rifle, pointed to himself, and said “Chu Lai.” I understood. Chu Lai had been the location of a
big American military base south of Danang on the central coast. The vendor had been a southern soldier for the old
Saigon regime fighting on the same side with the Americans. He then spoke softly lest he be overheard by bystanders,
“Ho Chi Minh” while sadly shaking his downcast head. I did not respond except, as a former American airman during the
war, to nod in understanding, if not in total agreement. Boarding time arrived. I gave the vendor a few dollars, mainly
for my own feelings, knowing that for him the money could not assuage for more than a few minutes the misery of his
pitiful existence.
Underway to Vung Tau I reflected on the man’s lot in life, probably similar to that of the gaggle of other older homeless-
looking guys waiting for passengers to alight from taxis at the pier in the hopes of getting a dollar or two for carrying the
heavy bags of Westerners. It paid to not be on the losing side in the contest between colonialism and nationalism,
especially if you were an ordinary Vietnamese lacking the financial resources or political influence to get a spot on the
American airlift out of Saigon in the desperate hours before the Russian T-54 tanks slammed through the wrought-iron
gates of the presidential palace in Saigon. The former southern rulers, politicians, and military commanders, in contrast,
had long since departed Vietnam to lives of luxury in Europe, Canada, and America. The luxury was made possible by
the tsunami of American financial aid which flowed into the country for over two decades, first to support the decaying
French empire in Asia, and then to support an ever-changing succession of greedy politicians and generals in Saigon.
Hundreds of billions of American taxpayer dollars down the toilet. Millions of dead Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians,
and Americans. Among them some of my close friends.
Nations, like individuals, are doomed to repeat history if they do not learn from it. In a national hubris that seems
peculiar only to the United States, American politicians, statesmen, and generals completely devalued the agonizing last
years of la presence francaise in Indochina, and proceeded blithely to replicate the disastrous political, strategic, and
military blunders of the French. Superiority in technology, firepower, mobility, and financial resources counted for little in
the face of a patriotic revolutionary ideology.
After the humiliation of their defeat at Dien Bien Phu in May, 1954, the French packed it in in Vietnam and Indochina
and headed back to Paris and the Auvergne. Almost immediately, the Americans began to take their places on the
cocktail circuits and in the grand old colonial hotels of Saigon. None had ever read or would read, until it was too late,
the works of Bernard Fall, Jules Roy or numerous other writers on the death of colonialism in Vietnam.
But it would take several years, almost a decade after Dien Bien Phu, for the American military presence in Vietnam to
reach a size of any importance. They were first called only “advisors.” But the full-scale Americanization of the
continuing Vietnamese civil war began in 1965. In the meantime, what of the French, Vietnam and the “lessons” of
history?
The French took a detour, and instead of heading back to France, landed instead in Algeria in another doomed adventure
to preserve at least some crumbs of “empire.” A Western army dropped in the middle of the Muslim world during a
period of intense nationalism and anticolonialism. The French modified, but only slightly, the tactics and strategy that
had been their undoing in Vietnam. Well supplied with American helicopters, F-100 fighter jets, and other arms, and
despite the fall of successive French governments toppling like bowling pins which brought the country to the very brink
of civil war, the French managed to hang on until 1962 in a war especially noted for its savagery and brutality on both
the Muslim and French sides. As ordained as the outcome in Indochina, the French also abandoned l’affaire algerienne in
1962. Hundreds of billions of francs down la toilette.
So by the time France departed North Africa, America had two opportunities, courtesy of the French, to learn about the
difficulties and costs of fighting revolutionary wars, especially in remote and difficult physical environments like Vietnam
and Algeria which favored the guerrilla fighting in the shadows and from mountain caves. But American hubris dictated
otherwise, and in 1962 the United States was too busy escalating it’s own foreordained catastrophe in Vietnam which
would end (at least for the Americans) in 1973. More lives and hundreds of billions of American taxpayer dollars also
down the toilet. But for many Vietnamese, like the guys on the hydrofoil boat dock I encountered, America’s former
“allies,” it never ends.
As this is written, some $600 billion USD have been spent, to say nothing of the young lives lost and millions of Iraqis
killed and made refugees, to support another Western army--this time another American army--landed in the middle of
the Muslim world in a period of even more intense nationalism. As in Vietnam and in Algeria, America too will one day
leave Iraq. More lives, and this time trillions of American taxpayer dollars down the toilet. And America’s client in
Baghdad and his friends will join their Vietnamese soul mates, generals Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky in
luxurious foreign exile, courtesy of the American taxpayer. As the refrain goes from Pete Seeger’s popular ballad of the
1960s (Where Have All The Flowers Gone), “when will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?”