Historian Marilyn Young states that at the end of the war, some 9,000 hamlets out of a total of 15,000 were destroyed, as well as 25 million acres of farmland and 12 million acres of forest. In addition, there were about 200,000 prostitutes, 181,000 people disabled, and 1 million widows.9 The 3.8 million dead Vietnamese were approximately 8 percent of the total population of that country in 1975. The equivalent death toll in the United States would be about 17.5 million people.
Recent History
A brief review of U.S. military actions after 1975 is necessary to counter the notion that the death and destruction the United States rained upon Vietnam was merely something from the past that has no bearing on recent decades and the present. As documented by Vietnam veteran and historian Andrew Bacevich, historian and writer Tom Engelhardt, late historian and former CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson, and historians Alfred McCoy and Nick Turse, the last forty years have witnessed an endless string of wars and attempted regime changes in Panama, Nicaragua, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria; the massive growth of a worldwide system of military bases; secret Special Operations missions in 2014 in more than a hundred nations; drone attacks in countless countries; massive spying on Americans and citizens of other nations by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), as revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden; and a “War on Terror” since September 11, 2001, that has, in the name of combating terror, created conditions and “blowback” that have fueled the rise of militant Islamist armed forces now active in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia.10
The Corporate Media
The Vietnam Commemoration and Obama’s speech are merely the latest attempts since 1975 to deny the horrors listed above and portray U.S. violence as a Noble Cause that went astray—the dominant theme put forth by the corporate media, including the influential New York Times. Despite criticisms of American decisions and tactics in the war, the corporate mass media supported the premises underlying Washington’s foreign policy and the ends of the conflict. Journalist and media historian Philip Knightly challenges the widely held belief that American reporters opposed the war: “There is only one flaw in this: the correspondents were not questioning American intervention itself, but only its effectiveness.” They were “as interested in seeing the United States win the war as was the Pentagon. What [they] questioned was not American policy, but the tactics used to implement that policy.…”11
Daniel Hallin, a professor of communications, also disputes the myth that press and television reports confronted civilian and military authorities, and undermined the war effort, essentially the “liberal myth of the adversary press in Vietnam.” Despite this myth, those who have “systematically investigated the media’s role in the war [reveal that] there is an impressive consensus rejecting the notions that the media were adversaries to America’s policy in Vietnam or a decisive factor in the outcome of the war.” As of the time of Hallin’s study in 1989, the three major studies of network television coverage of the war had arrived at the same conclusion: “All reject the idea that the living-room war meant graphic portrayals of violence on a daily basis, or that the television was consistently negative toward U.S. policy or led public opinion in turning against the war.”12
The Antiwar Movement at Home and in the Military
The domestic antiwar movement challenged Washington’s policies; however, the key forces bringing the conflict to an end were the Vietnamese resistance and antiwar protest within the U.S. military. The protest against the war did not begin with college students in 1965, as many Americans believe, but twenty years earlier—in October 1945 when troopships bringing GIs home after the Second World War were diverted to transport French troops to Vietnam to continue its colonial rule there, sparking the first antiwar protest against American involvement. Tens of thousands of veterans of the American war became involved in the antiwar movement, as extraordinary dissent and rebellion emerged from within the U.S. military.
Commemoration Myths
Air Force veteran and scholar H. Bruce Franklin disputes one of the great myths of the American war, resurrected in a different form by Obama and the Commemoration: a deeply held belief held by most citizens decades after the fighting ended that “American prisoners of war [were] still being held as captives in Indochina.” Obama’s reference to this controversy in his speech lends credence to the myth. According to Franklin, the anguish over POWs and MIAs remained “the most important concern of many Vietnam veterans,” exceeding that around other pressing issues, such as Agent Orange and medical care. This myth was linked with that of returning vets abused by antiwar activists, a myth discredited by Vietnam veteran Jerry Lembcke’s Spitting Image, but a testimony to the strength of the dominant and inaccurate beliefs on the war that keep people uninformed and manipulated.13 In their concern for alleged American prisoners and missing in action, citizens here ignored the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese missing at the end of the war, as well as the thousands of homeless Vietnam veterans walking U.S. streets.
The MIA/POW issue helped postwar presidents engage in economic and political warfare against Vietnam for at least two decades, until diplomatic relations were established during the Clinton presidency. After the war ended in 1975, the United States was the only major nation to withhold diplomatic recognition to Vietnam. In 1977 former president Carter was asked whether the United States had “a moral obligation to help rebuild” the country. He stated that we owed Vietnam no debt and had no responsibility because “the destruction was mutual.” Since “we went to Vietnam without any desire … to impose American will on other people” but to “defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese,” there was no reason “to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability.” Called one of the “most astonishing statements in diplomatic history,” it created no stir “among educated Americans” and did not “diminish Carter’s standing as patron saint of human rights.”14
Ecological Catastrophe
The devastating environmental health effects of the war continue to this day, for Vietnamese and U.S. veterans. The ongoing damage to both is told by Arthur Westing in Ecological Consequences of the Second Indochina War; Fred Wilcox in Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam and Waiting for an Army to Die; and Edwin Martini in Agent Orange. Marjorie Cohn, a professor of law and former president of the National Lawyers Guild, participated as one of the judges in the 2009 International Peoples’ Tribunal of Conscience in Support of the Vietnamese Victims of Agent Orange. The panel found that the U.S. government and the chemical manufacturers “knew that dioxin, one of the most dangerous chemicals known to humans, was present in one of the components of Agent Orange. Yet they continued to use it.” It also found that the U.S. war in Vietnam “was an illegal war of aggression (crime against peace) … in violation of the United Nations Charter. It further decided that the use of dioxin was a war crime because it qualified as a poisoned weapon in violation of … international law.” And finally, “The use of dioxin was a crime against humanity, as it constituted an inhuman act perpetrated against a civilian population in connection with a crime against peace and war crimes.”15
The False Story and Denial
Unless challenged, the Vietnam Commemoration