Vietnam, Truth, and Reconciliation 50 Years Later

 

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, April 11, 2025; reprinted with permission

https://worldbeyondwar.org/vietnam-truth-and-reconciliation-50-years-later/

 

Approaching 50 years since the end of the American War, as the Vietnamese call it, and something over 70 years since the start of it, depending when you start the clock, truth and reconciliation remain incomplete. I don’t mean for the people of Vietnam, who seem, from what little I know, in general to have a better grasp of both truth and reconciliation than the U.S. government or corporate media. I also don’t mean truth and reconciliation between governments, which really don’t traffic in either. I mean truth and reconciliation within the United States.

 The U.S. government and society have yet to reach any sort of consensus on apologizing to the people of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and the world for the atrocity that was the war on Vietnam. The complex necessity of apologizing to and blaming those who did it — with more apology the lower the rank and more blame the higher — has yet to fully win out over the grotesque absurdity of thanking them and calling the U.S. military’s largest crime in at least these 70 years a “service.” It is of course possible to wish nothing but well for people while also refraining from thanking them for an atrocity.

 U.S. treatment of the war on Vietnam is typical of U.S. historical blindness. Nobody would debate whether Vietnam or Afghanistan was the longest of U.S. wars if Native Americans were deemed real people and the wars on them, therefore, real wars. Virtually every media outlet in the United States would not call the U.S. Civil War the deadliest of U.S. wars if the 96 percent of humanity outside the United States were deemed real people whose deaths mattered. But the war on Vietnam is still strangely recent. Many living people remember it. It is still very present in U.S. entertainment. It was a war that happened after television news coverage came into being and before governments had mastered the censorship thereof, so mental images of it are uglier (and truer) than of some other wars before and since. Yet said images are disproportionately of U.S. soldiers and mostly fictional ones doing fictional things, due to the aforementioned entertainment.

 Warmongers still do war propaganda with an eye toward crushing “the Vietnam syndrome” — meaning U.S. public opposition to wars (understood as a disease). The U.S. peace movement is still disproportionately made up of people who began their peace activism during the war on Vietnam. Militarists still misinterpret Vietnam as an argument for even worse slaughter. Some opponents of imperialism still misinterpret Vietnam as an argument for violent resistance — despite 50 years (and 100 years, for that matter) in which nonviolent resistance has been far more successful.

 Many strategizing for peace still misinterpret the war on Vietnam as teaching us that a military draft is a path to peace, even though drafts have facilitated greater warmaking by many countries including by the United States in the U.S. Civil War, two world wars, and the wars on Korea and Vietnam, the last of which was able to kill more people than any U.S. war since because of the draft — which hardcore war proponents want to bring back, a task to which well-meaning people should not offer assistance.

 

TRUTH

The Dead

The war on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, by various measures, has not been outdone in any single war by the United States since. A 2008 study by Harvard Medical School and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington estimated 3.8 million violent war deaths, civilian and military, north and south, during the years of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. That’s nearly 10 percent of the population. This study is discussed by Nick Turse in his excellent book, Kill Anything That Moves. Turse believes the estimate is low. But, low or not, it needs to have added to it hundreds of thousands of people killed in Laos and Cambodia, and those in all of those countries who died after the war had ended from injuries, illnesses, starvation, land mines, Agent Orange, or other effects of the war. Those deaths continue mounting to this day. Then there are some 58,000 members of the U.S. military, a number that can also be increased by the number of veterans who have died from Agent Orange, war injuries, or the increased suicide rate that can afflict war veterans. The death count, as in many recent wars, is small, however, compared with the count of those injured and left alive, not to mention those whose whose lives were severely damaged in other ways, such as having their homes burned.

 The war on Vietnam is a contemporary war for us in that it was a war that killed mostly civilians and mostly on one side. U.S. deaths of 58,000 are about 1.5 percent of 3.8 million, a typical ratio for later U.S. wars.

 Turse comments: “Though no one will ever know the true figure, a 2008 study by researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington and a Vietnamese government estimate, suggest there were around two million civilian deaths, the vast majority in South Vietnam. A conservative killed-to-injured ratio yields a figure of 5.3 million civilians wounded. Add to these numbers 11 million civilians driven from their lands and made homeless at one time or another, and as many as 4.8 million sprayed with toxic defoliants like Agent Orange.”

 These are people, Turse points out, who in many cases lived in this war for 20 years, while visiting U.S. troops usually spent 12 or 13 months in it.

 “To deprive their Vietnamese enemies of food, recruits, intelligence, and other support, American command policy turned large swathes of those provinces into ‘free fire zones,’ subject to intense bombing and artillery shelling, that was expressly designed to ‘generate’ refugees, driving people from their homes in the name of ‘pacification.’ Houses were set ablaze, whole villages were bulldozed, and people were forced into squalid refugee camps and filthy urban slums short of water, food, and shelter.”

 The Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. lists 58,000 names on 150 meters of wall. That’s 387 names per meter. To similarly list 4 million names would require 10,336 meters, or the distance from the Lincoln Memorial to the steps of the U.S. Capitol, and back again, and back to the Capitol once more, and then as far back as all the museums but stopping short of the Washington Monument.

 

The Bombs

The human numbers are matched by the bomb numbers. The United States dropped in Southeast Asia 6,727,084 tons of bombs, more than triple what it had dropped in Asia and Europe combined in World War II. It also sprayed from the air tens of millions of liters of Agent Orange, not to mention napalm, with devastating results. The effects remain today. Tens of millions of bombs remain unexploded, and increasingly dangerous. The impact has been on all species, not just humans.

 In Laos, about a third of the country’s land remains ruined by the heavy presence of unexploded bombs, which continue to kill large numbers of people. These include some 80 million cluster bomblets and thousands of large bombs, rockets, mortars, shells, and land mines. From 1964 to 1973, the United States conducted one bombing mission against poor, unarmed, farming families every eight minutes, twenty-four/seven — with a goal of wiping out any food that could feed any troops (or anybody else). The United States pretended it was delivering humanitarian aid.

 Other times, it was just a matter of littering. Bombers flying from Thailand to Vietnam would sometimes be unable to bomb Vietnam due to weather conditions, and so would simply drop their bombs on Laos rather than perform a more difficult landing with a full load back in Thailand.

 Yet other times it was a need to put good deadly equipment to use. When President Lyndon Johnson announced an end to bombing in North Vietnam in 1968, planes bombed Laos instead. “We couldn’t just let the planes rust,” explained one official. The poor today in Laos cannot find access to good healthcare when injured by old bombs, and must survive disabled in an economy few will invest in due to all the bombs. The desperate must take on the risky task of selling the metal from bombs they successfully defuse.

 Cambodia was treated roughly as Laos was, with similar and predictable results. President Richard Nixon told Henry Kissinger who told Alexander Haig to create “a massive bombing campaign . . . anything that flies on anything that moves.” The hard-core right-wing Khmer Rouge grew from 10,000 in 1970 to 200,000 troops in 1973 via recruitment focused on the casualties and destruction of U.S. bombing. By 1975 they’d defeated the pro-U.S. government.

 

The Ground War

The war on the ground in Vietnam was equally horrific. Massacres of civilians, the use of farmers for target practice, free-fire zones in which any Vietnamese person was deemed “the enemy” — these were not unusual techniques. My Lai was an exception in that it made it into U.S. media, but not otherwise. Elimination of population was a primary goal. This, and not kindness, drove the greater acceptance of refugees than has been practiced during more recent wars. It also drove the massacres, and the public announcements of the number of “enemies” killed — as a measure of success, unlike more recent wars in which the U.S. government has tried to avoid mention of the number of people it kills.

 

The Environmental Destruction

Trump is de-funding the ongoing efforts to address Agent Orange and land mines, while NATO members are withdrawing from the treaty banning land mines. These actions surely require avoiding awareness of what was done to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The United States used approximately 19 million gallons of 15 different herbicides, including 13 million gallons of Agent Orange, over southern Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Between 2.1 and 4.8 million Vietnamese were exposed during the spraying and many more continue to be exposed through the environment. Agent Orange exposure continues to negatively affect the lives of men and women in Vietnam and in the United States. Agent Orange exposure is associated with cancers, immune deficiencies, reproductive illnesses and severe birth defects in Vietnamese, American, and Vietnamese-Americans directly exposed as well as their children and grandchildren.

 

The Lost Opportunity

The trillions of dollars spent on the war and on the half-hearted efforts to clean up the mess and care for the victims and veterans, could have been spent on useful projects: education, infrastructure, green energy, housing, agriculture, healthcare. Doing that, would have not only made the United States safer, not only avoided the slaughter of the war, not only avoided developing the military machine that would lead to more wars, but also directly saved and improved many more lives than those destroyed by the war. Those people not so saved are casualties too.

 

The Pointlessness of the Thing

The U.S. government understood from the start that the elite military faction it wanted to impose on Vietnam had no significant popular support. It also feared the “demonstration effect” of a leftist government opposing U.S. domination and achieving social and economic progress. The point was to kill off the people. In the words of the U.S. military historians who wrote the Pentagon Papers, “essentially, we are fighting the Vietnamese birth rate.” The Pentagon Papers also revealed that the U.S. military chose to continue the war for years, believing it unwinnable, primarily to put off “a humiliating defeat” — even while blatantly lying to the U.S. public about progress and success, having used the Gulf of Tonkin non-incident as a fraudulent excuse to start the thing.

 Nixon believed he could end the war by threatening to use nuclear weapons, and when that didn’t work by dramatically escalating the war. A great film called The Movement and the Madman shows how two antiwar protests in the fall of 1969 — the largest the country had ever seen — successfully pressured Nixon to cancel what he called his “madman” plans for escalation. The movement would go on to end the war and Nixon’s career. Whether the parallels between the Johnson-Nixon and Biden-Trump tag teams on Vietnam and Gaza will be matched by a popular eviction of Trump remains to be seen.

 Not only was there no point to starting or continuing the war, not only was there no threat to the United States or anything to be gained, but peace was carefully avoided all along the way. Nixon actually sabotaged the peace talks when Johnson was president, and Johnson considered that treason but had so much contempt for the U.S. public that he chose to keep it secret and protect his political opponent. Or perhaps he worried, as other presidents have, about becoming “another Kennedy.” Johnson, himself, had avoided ending the war for years. President Kennedy made at least some indications of plans to end it before he was killed. President Eisenhower could have listened to his own wisdom in those rare peaceful bits of his speeches that have been elevated by peace activists into phrases we strongly associate with him.

 

RECONCILIATION

The Good Racism

The legacy of the war on Vietnam is pretty clearly not something to thank anyone for. Nor can any sense be found in the mental gymnastics required to thank someone for their “service” while denouncing that very service as the atrocity it was. Nor should we avoid pausing to stare in amazement at such rhetoric in an age of widespread opposition to racism. The war on Vietnam was openly and shamelessly a racist endeavor. Were I to repeat the typical language used by its perpetrators, you would probably accuse me of having committed a worse offense than murder.

 I live in Charlottesville, where a Nazi rally inspired dozens of other cities, eventually followed by Charlottesville itself, to take down war monuments on the grounds that they were racist. I looked around at all of Charlottesville’s war monuments to various wars, including the war on Vietnam, and I couldn’t find any that were not racist. But a decision had been made by U.S. culture to call one side of the U.S. Civil War racist, while treating various other U.S. wars as acceptable non-racist wars. Maybe more decades or centuries will be needed to change that view. In any case, the decision was made to stop glorifying the Confederacy’s war-fighting, but to refrain from imagining that in doing that we would somehow be required to develop feelings of animosity for anyone’s great-great-grandparents.

 

Accountability

Those who have the most to answer for in any war are those who create it, fund it, arm it, profit off it, and prolong it — those at the top, those in positions of power. No one is blameless for anything they do. But a young person taught that war is glorious and threatened with death or prison and shame if he doesn’t take part is not the problem. The problem is people like Lyndon Johnson who privately said the Gulf of Tonkin fable was a lie but publicly demanded war. The problem is people like Secretary of “Defense” Robert McNamara who wrote his glowing reports on the war prior to traveling to the war, admitted on the plane ride back that the war was a horrible failure, and stepped off the plane to claim that success was just around the corner. That’s mass murder by microphone.

 

Handling History

President Barack Obama, who was also the first president to claim that the war on Korea had been a victory, launched a 13-year-long official distortion campaign for the war on Vietnam as various 50th-anniversaries were reached.

 The start of that propaganda campaign led Veterans For Peace and others to take on some heavy-duty truth-telling:

 “It is incumbent on us not to cede the war’s memory to those who have little interest in an honest accounting and who want to justify further acts of military adventurism. The experience of the war ought to be cautionary against the fantasy of world dominance that besots many of our political and military leaders. What are the consequences of trying to control the fate of a people from afar with little understanding or interest — except for the purposes of counterinsurgency — in their history and culture, or their human desires? What are the consequences of dehumanized ideologies used to justify wars of aggression? To honor the Viet Nam generation and to inform current and future generations, we should make every effort to pass on a critical and honest history of the war. As part of our counter-commemoration, we also will also pay tribute to the broad-based resistance to the war. Taking inspiration from the civil rights movement, an unprecedented opposition movement arose not just on campuses, but in the streets, in the military, and around family dinner tables. Millions of Americans resisted the war spontaneously, as well as in organizations ranging from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to the Chicano Moratorium, Women’s Strike for Peace, the War Resistors League, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, American Friend Service Committee, Students for a Democratic Society, Labor for Peace, Business Executives Move for Viet Nam Peace, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, not to mention countless community groups. The movement made the morality of the war an issue for Americans, moving beyond the cost-benefit analysis favored by the punditocracy. The war was wrong, not just too costly; as Martin Luther King warned in his ‘Beyond Vietnam’ speech: ‘the US was on the wrong side of the world revolution.'”

 Ken Burns produced a film that distorted the war, though far short of Pentagon distortion levels. President Joe Biden glorified the war. The corporate media actually blamed Biden and Trump for not having taken part in the war. The two future presidents had gotten dubious deferments. They should have refused on moral grounds.

 To ask that is indeed asking a lot. When we blame Thomas Jefferson for enslaving people we are asking a lot. This is part of learning from history. But it matters that Jefferson had peers who were freeing their slaves — and offering him money to do so. And it matters that thousands of people refused to take part in the war on Vietnam. The moral action was also possible.

 

Beyond Vietnam

“Is our children learning?” President George W. Bush famously demanded to know. Clearly our government is not. But our children might be. They may have been untaught how to build movements. They may be up against a more oppressive government. But in every opinion poll, we’d be better off the more we restricted decision-making to the young. And a smaller percentage of the U.S. public all the time says it would take part in a war.

 So the Vietnam-based U.S. peace movement is aging, but we are not without hope for a future. It just may be a short one unless we act quickly. We should learn from Vietnam war-era activism not to unnecessarily offend anyone. But we should not learn to go very slowly and gently, because we simply do not have that kind of time. Instead, we should insist that those who have not yet caught on to the evil inherent in all war-making go back and look at the war on Vietnam, consider the statements of those who supported it, and then take a look at those whom the U.S. corporate media treats as the exact opposite of experts, namely those who were right about everything.

 

David Swanson is an author, speaker, and founder of World BEYOND War.