What The Hell America!

From one perspective, this event marked the end of the Vietnam War (more appropriately termed the Second Indochina War, ranging from 1954 to 1975), a conflict that ravaged the country for decades and left deep scars on its people and landscape. The exact number of Vietnamese deaths will never be known, but the toll may be over three million (a figure which dwarfs the 58,220 Americans lost in the war). As the conflict spilled over into Vietnam’s neighbors, it killed perhaps 60,000 and 300,000 in Laos and Cambodia, respectively.

The American use of the term “Vietnam War” fails to convey the larger historical context of what was equally a national and a Marxist revolution. As significant as the horrifically destructive American war between 1964 and 1973 was, it constituted just one phase of a longer Vietnamese struggle against foreign aggression and for a more just society.

In the longest historical focus, Vietnam had been engaged in resistance since the French first attacked the Nguyen Dynasty in 1858. Through multiple waves of imperialist expansion, the imperialist invaders seized and occupied all of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, forming the Indochinese Union in 1887. The Vietnamese opposed the French with conventional and guerrilla warfare, piracy and banditry, and countless everyday acts of resistance for over a century.

After World War I, a new generation of Vietnamese modernizers wanted to eject the French while also learning from the West. Inspired by Japan’s transformation under the Meiji Restoration and by Sun Yat-Sen’s Kuomintang in China, they called for a new Vietnamese modernity and rejected Confucian traditions. In 1927, following Sun Yat-Sen’s party strategy, the nationalist Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang (VNQDD) was founded to liberate the nation and promote a capitalist modernity. Drawn from the educated elite and wealthy families, the liberal VNQDD did not call for widespread social revolution.

The Soviet Union sponsored a more radical program. After seizing power in 1917, Lenin and the Bolshevik Party promoted Marxist world revolution. In 1919, they organized the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow to organize, educate, fund, and discipline the new revolutionaries.

Nguyen Ai Quoc, a young Vietnamese patriot in France who would later take the nom de guerre Ho Chi Minh, was present at the 1920 founding of the French Communist Party in Tours. Drawn to Marxism as the only ideology that offered an anti-colonial critique, he eventually went to Moscow for training. In exile, he founded the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League in 1925 and then the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) in 1930.

With Comintern support, the ICP argued that both colonialism and capitalism were exploiting the Vietnamese people. The ICP accused traditionalists of failing to resist the French and collaborating with the colonial occupiers. The ICP included “feudal” Confucian scholars in its list of enemies and argued that national independence would have to be accompanied by a profound social revolution.

While vague on details, the ICP attracted support from the urban and rural poor who suffered under the colonial political economy. The ICP promised a new path to modernity for Vietnam.

With no small amount of irony, the history of Vietnamese communism is directly tied to French rule. The exploitative colonial political economy created the conditions that convinced thousands of activists that communist revolution was the only viable solution. Marxism, the ideology that eventually liberated and modernized Vietnam, was initially a French import.

Between 1929 and 1931, there was a series of assassination, strikes, mutinies, and rural uprisings that formed what they called “Soviets.” The French responded with harsh repression, throwing thousands into the growing colonial prison system.

Members of the VNQDD, often drawn from the educated elite, fared poorly in the violent jails. In contrast, the Comintern’s revolutionary training gave ICP cadres the skills not only to survive incarceration but to organize and recruit new members. The prisons essentially became universities of revolution and time served was an important qualification for advancement in the party hierarchy.

When the French Popular Front issued a general amnesty to political prisoners in 1936, newly freed Communists organized a political-military force, aiming to both defeat colonialism and start a Marxist revolution. A few years later, with the Japanese invasion and occupation of Southeast Asia shattering the European and American colonial regimes, Ho Chi Minh created the Vietminh, a Communist-led coalition. In August 1945, he declared independence in Hanoi. The French responded by reinvading their “lost” colony in November 1946, starting the First Indochina War.

The Vietminh used guerrilla tactics, appeals to nationalism, and class resentment against wealthy landowners to build support. The increasingly alarmed US government supported the French as part of an anti-communist crusade. By 1950, Washington was underwriting the cost of the war.

After gaining control of the northern countryside and achieving a historic victory in the mountains at Dien Bien Phu, the Vietminh forced the French to the negotiating table. The July 1954 Geneva Accords called for the temporary administrative division of Vietnam until elections could be held within two years.

In the north, the Vietminh officially established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (declared in 1945) and enacted a social revolution with a dramatic (albeit brutal) land reform campaign. A flood of Catholic and upper-class Vietnamese fled south and to France.

In the south, Ngo Dinh Diem’s anti-Communist administration established the rival Republic of Vietnam (RVN), a police state that refused to hold national elections. His disastrous land reform managed to alienate both peasants and landlords. Without a political base, Diem resorted to cronyism, angering just about every segment of society, including the Buddhist monks, some of whom protested with self-immolation. The increasingly corrupt regime used violence against any opposition.

Deeply committed to the goal of national unification but faced with an impasse, the North Vietnamese leadership established the National Liberation Front (NLF) in 1960. While it was a coalition of patriotic groups, the Communist Party dominated the NLF, and it took its orders from Hanoi. Using the same guerrilla tactics that had proved successful against the French, the NLF made rapid gains in the south. Some supported the promises of social revolution, but many non-Communist southern Vietnamese joined the NLF simply as an alternative to Diem.

Diem called the NLF “Viet Cong” or “Vietnamese commies” and waged a counterinsurgency campaign that was as brutal as it was ineffective. The regime took over the old French penitentiary system, using widespread torture such as the infamous tiger cages. Once again, surviving prison was important for advancement in the party.

By 1963, the south was spinning out of control. As the war destroyed the rural economy, refugees flooded the cities. In November, Diem was kidnapped and murdered by his own officers. A series of strong men cycled through the South Vietnamese leadership as corruption and desertion weakened the demoralized the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN).

Despite US civil and military aid, the Republic of Vietnam was on the verge of collapse. When Lyndon B. Johnson assumed the presidency after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, he dramatically increased support for the south and deployed American Marines in 1964. He also started a bombing campaign against the north.

The indiscriminate destruction of the land and air campaigns is still being assessed. From massacres on the ground such as My Lai to the bombing of civilians in Hanoi, there were numerous and well-documented US war crimes.

After 1965, the North sent its formally trained and conventionally equipped People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) to join the NLF. Despite the scale of the American campaign, which peaked at over 540,000 troops in 1969, the Republic of Vietnam steadily lost ground.

American military aid could not solve a basic political problem: most Vietnamese viewed the regime as an illegitimate puppet of US imperialism. To compound the issue, every incident of what the American military called “collateral damage,” be it from the barrel of a M16 or the payload of a B52, increased support for the NLF.

The war’s escalating violence impacted the makeup of the party. A faction of pro-Soviet hard-liners led by Le Duan began to dominate the organization. Le Duan, who had been jailed by the French, represented a generational succession to the aging Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap.

In a cycle of violence, Le Duan ruthlessly matched American aggression with NLF and PAVN attacks. In 1968, the Central Intelligence Agency began the Phoenix Program, a campaign of terrorism, torture, and targeted assassinations to neutralize the NLF and its sympathizers.

Faced with an unwinnable war, Richard Nixon decreased the number of troops in the south as he increased the intensity of the bombing on the north. Nixon’s murderous 1972 Christmas Bombing of Hanoi was followed by the final withdrawal of American troops in March 1973.

With the American military gone, it was only a question of how long the Republic of Vietnam would survive. Initially, Hanoi was concerned that the Americans would honor their promise to return if the south was going to fall. By 1974, however, the Watergate scandal and widespread popular opposition to deploying combat troops to Southeast Asia emboldened the north to launch a Spring Offensive in 1975.

The fall of Saigon, which Hanoi described as the liberation of the city, was the culmination of a swift and decisive offensive by the PAVN and the NLF, whose forces had been steadily advancing southward since the beginning of the year. Starting in March, thousands of ARVN officers and RVN officials boarded American planes with their families in Tan Son Nhat Airport. These refugees were terrified of what a Communist victory would mean for them.

The final assault on Saigon began on April 29, with heavy artillery bombardment and coordinated attacks on key positions. By the afternoon of April 30, North Vietnamese forces had captured the Presidential Palace and raised their flag, signaling the collapse of the South Vietnamese government.

The chaotic scenes of evacuation, with helicopters ferrying 7,000 American personnel and South Vietnamese civilians to safety, became iconic images of the war’s end. While some 130,000 Vietnamese associated with the American effort were resettled in the United States, many who wanted to leave were left behind.

In contrast to the Khmer Rouge’s mass executions of old regime loyalists, there was relatively little postwar bloodshed in Vietnam. However, hundreds of thousands of ARVN officers and RVN officials were held in reeducation camps, sometimes until the 1980s. Washington’s failure to protect its puppet regime or to safely evacuate collaborators signaled a decline in imperial power.

The fall of Saigon was not just a military defeat but also a profound political and ideological shift. It marked the reunification of Vietnam under communist rule, ending the division that had persisted since the Geneva Accords of 1954. The new government faced the daunting task of rebuilding a country devastated by war, while also implementing socialist policies to transform Vietnamese society.

While unified, Vietnam was in a disastrous economic situation after the destructive war. Instead of honoring Nixon’s 1973 promise of over $3,300,000,000 to rebuild Vietnam, Gerald Ford imposed an embargo in 1975. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia on December 25, 1978, both overthrowing the Khmer Rouge regime and starting the devastating Third Indochina War (1978–1991), Ford’s successor Jimmy Carter responded with further sanctions.

Vietnam became reliant on Soviet bloc aid and assistance just as the USSR was going into its prolonged economic collapse. Faced with dismal material conditions and resentful of the heavy-handed northern occupation of the South, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese risked their lives escaping by boat. The so-called “Boat People” became an international humanitarian disaster.

After Le Duan’s death in 1986, the party adopted the Deng Xiaoping–style Doi Moi reforms and has since successfully integrated Vietnam into the global economy while providing significant infrastructure and social services. Following a template that some observers characterized as “Market-Leninism,” the party retained all political power and oversaw all major sectors, but allowed a steady increase in the number of privately run enterprises. With low unemployment and inflation, it is projected to be Asia’s fastest growing economy in 2026. Hanoi won both the war and the peace.

In the United States, this fiftieth anniversary will be marked with emotions such as grief and bitterness among many veterans. The date marks the futility of a conflict in which hundreds of thousands of conscripted young men lost their lives or returned with traumatic physical and emotional wounds. April 30 signals the limits of American power. The event was a slap in the face to many Americans who could not understand how a tiny rural country could defeat the most powerful industrialized war machine in world history.

For their part, diasporic Vietnamese communities in southern California’s Winchester, Silicon Valley’s San José, and Houston, Texas, speak of “Black April.” Founded by those who fled the Communist victory, these communities stridently maintain reactionary politics and loyalty to the defeated ARVN. In Little Saigon, former anti-Communist fighters use terms such as “Day the Country Was Lost” (Ngày vong quốc), “National Day of Shame” (Ngày quốc sỉ), and “National Day of Resentment” (Ngày quốc hận).

With ideological inclinations akin to Miami’s Cuban American community, there is widespread support in these quarters for far-right American political figures from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. Keen observers noted that some of the January 6 rioters carried the South Vietnamese flag in their assault on the Capitol.

In sharp contrast, April 30, 2025, will be a day of over-the-top celebrations in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Saigon’s official name since July 2, 1976. The “Day of the Liberation of the South and National Reunification” (Ngày giải phóng miền Nam, thống nhất đất nước) is one of Vietnam’s most important national events.

For months, thousands of soldiers and scores of pilots have been rehearsing for the celebration. Even troops from Laos and Cambodia will participate.

The commemorative ceremony is taking place at 6:30 a.m. on April 30, 2025, along Le Duan Boulevard where a PAVN tank famously crashed through the gates of the South Vietnamese Presidential Palace, symbolizing the end of the war and national unification. Leadership from the party and state, armed forces, war veterans, youth, and tens of thousands of citizens will be in attendance.

The event will begin with a solemn flag-raising ceremony followed by speeches from central and city leaders, tributes from war veterans and youth representatives, jet and helicopter flyovers, and a massive military parade. After the display of force, the ceremony will conclude with the release of doves and balloons carrying messages of peace and national unity and praise for the party’s program of economic development.

There will also be a meticulously staged epic, reenacting the heroic historical journey of the nation — from the resistance against the United States to the moment of reunification on April 30, 1975. HCMC will host a variety of special side events, such as fireworks and a patriotically branded cycling race, to create a festive atmosphere throughout the city.

While April 30 will be a day of celebration, ceremonies the previous day offered incense and flowers in remembrance of heroic martyrs at various sacred historical sites such as the HCMC Martyrs’ Cemetery, Ben Duoc Memorial Temple, HCMC Policy Cemetery, and the Nga Ba Giong Historic Site — to pay tribute to those who sacrificed for the country’s independence and freedom.