Vietnam

25 Years After End Of Vietnam War:

Myths Keep Us From Coming To Terms With Vietnam

by Bob Buzzanco

As we approach the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War on April 30 and the reunification of Vietnam under socialist rule, memories of that conflict are still alive and a vital part of American political discourse.

During a recent visit to Vietnam, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen pointedly refused to apologize for the U.S. military action there, explaining, as he put it, ''Both nations were scarred by this. They [the Vietnamese] have their own scars from the war. We certainly have ours.''

Cohen's words echo those of President Carter, who in 1977 refused to normalize relations with Vietnam because, in his words, ''the destruction was mutual.''

Vietnam has also been a major part of this year's presidential politics. With the rival major candidates, George W. Bush and Al Gore, respectively, explaining his service in the National Guard or touting his time in Southeast Asia. Even more than Bush and Gore, Sen. John McCain put Vietnam into a central place during his run for the presidency. As the son and grandson of admirals and a prisoner of war in Vietnam for nearly six years, McCain's opinions on the war gained significant attention and carried great weight.

There is no basis even to suggest that the fallout from the war affected the United States and Vietnam similarly.

In particular, McCain believed that American troops in Vietnam, as a common complaint holds, fought with one hand tied behind their backs, that it was ''senseless'' and ''illogical,'' in McCain's words, to not carry the ground war over the 17th parallel into North Vietnam or to not wage a totally unrestrained air war, especially with B-52 bombers.

Cohen and McCain tap into rich myths about the war, views that still resonate after 25 years but also, and unfortunately, are misguided and wrong and keep us still from coming to terms with Vietnam.

There is no basis even to suggest that the fallout from the war affected the United States and Vietnam similarly. While the United States suffered serious losses -- more than 58,000 of its military killed and billions of dollars spent -- Vietnam's losses were staggering. More than 3 million Vietnamese died during the American war, with at least that many wounded. More than 15 million Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians became refugees. American weapons -- especially the 6.5 million tons of bombs dropped on Indochina -- destroyed more than 10,000 hamlets and 25 million acres of forest in South Vietnam (the land of the U.S. ally in the war); additionally the United States dropped more than 11.2 million gallons of Agent Orange and 400,000 tons of napalm on South Vietnam, a nation roughly the size of New Mexico or Arizona.

Since the end of the war, thousands of Vietnamese continued to be killed every year from contact with unexploded bombs from the war, and their environment continues to feel the effects of dioxin and other herbicides. There is nothing ''mutual'' about such destruction; ''their scars'' run much deeper than ''ours.''

McCain's point is equally troubling, for it offers a ''stabbed in the back'' explanation in place of a reasoned examination of a war that was morally, politically and strategically wrong. Indeed, many of America's ranking military officers, the comrades of McCain's father and grandfather, had warned against a war in Vietnam from the 1950s forward.

In 1954, amid the Dien Bien Phu crisis, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff recognized that the Nationalist-Communist Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, held the military initiative and were successfully identified with ''freedom from the colonial yoke and with the improvement of the general welfare'' of the Vietnamese people.

By 1963, as the Kennedy administration was escalating the U.S. commitment to Vietnam, the incoming Marine Commandant, Gen. Wallace Greene, lamented to fellow officers that ''we're up to our knees in the quagmire'' in Vietnam and warned ''you see what happened to the French,'' which had lost its colonial hold over Indochina in 1954, ''well,