Re-post 2017
This book has been written in the memory of the countless innocent victims of the Communist conquest in South Vietnam, notably:
The hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children massacred in villages and cities, especially Hué;
The
hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese soldiers and officials who
were executed, tortured or imprisoned after the end of the war;
The millions who were driven from their country and the hundreds of thousands who drowned in the process;
The brave ARVN soldiers who fought on when all was lost, and their
valiant generals who took their own lives in the end;
The young South and North Vietnamese conscriptswho died in this
so-called war of liberation, which brought no liberty;
The 58,272 American, 4,407 South Korean, 487 Australian, 351 Thai and 37 New Zealand soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice in Vietnam;
My German compatriots who were murdered by the Vietnamese Communists,
notably Dr. Horst-Günther and Elisabetha Krainick, Dr. Alois Alteköster,
Dr. Raimund Discher, Prof. Otto Söllner, Baron Hasso Rüdt von
Collenberg and many others, who came as friends and paid for it with
their lives.
UWE SIEMON-NETTO
Epilogue
The fruit of terror and the virtue of hope
More than forty years have passsed by since I paid Vietnam my farewell
visit. In 2015, the world will observe the 40th anniversary of the
Communist victory, and many will call it “liberation.” The Hué railway
station, where a locomotive and a baggage car left on a symbolic
500-yard journey every morning at eight, no longer qualifies as Theater
of the Absurd. It has been attractively restored and painted pink. Once
again, as in the days of French dominance, it is the most beautiful
station in Indochina, and taxi drivers do not have to wait outside in
vain. Ten comfortable trains come through every day, five heading north,
five going south. Collectively they are unofficially called
Reunification Express. Should I not rejoice? Is this not just as in
Germany, where the Berlin Wall and the minefields have gone, and now
high speed trains zoom back and forth between the formerly Communist
East and the democratic West at speeds up to 200 miles an hour?
Obviously I am glad that the war is over and Vietnam is reunified and
prosperous, that the trains are running, and most of the minefields
cleared. But this is where the analogy with Germany ends. Germany
achieved its unity, in part because the Germans in the Communist East
toppled their totalitarian government with peaceful protest and
resistance, and in part thanks to the wisdom of international leaders
such as Presidents Ronald Reagan and George G.W. Bush, Chancellor Helmut
Kohl, and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and partly because of the
predictable economic collapse of the flawed socialist system in the
Soviet Bloc. Nobody died in the process, nobody was tortured, nobody
ended up in camps, nobody was forced to flee.
There is an incomprehensible tendency, even among respectable pundits
in the West, to refer to the Communist takeover of the South as
“liberation.” This begs the question: liberation from what and to what?
Was South Vietnam “freed” for the imposition of a totalitarian one-party
state that ranks among the world’s worst offenders against the
principles of religious liberty, freedom of expression, freedom of
speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press? What kind of
liberation was this that cost 3.8 million Vietnamese lives between 1955
and 1975 and has forced more than one million Vietnamese to flee their
country, not only from the vanquished South, but even from ports in the
North, causing between 200,000 and 400,000 of the so-called boat people
to drown?
Was it an act of liberation to
execute 100,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and officials after the fall
of Saigon? Was it meant to be a display of generosity by the victors to
herd between one million and 2.5 million South Vietnamese to reeducation
camps, where an estimated 165,000 perished and thousands more have
sustained lasting brain injuries and mental health problems resulting
from torture, according to a study by an international team of scholars
led by Harvard psychiatrist Richard F. Molina?
Since the mid-1960s, political and historical mythographers in the West
have either naively or dishonestly accepted Hanoi’s line that this
conflict was a “People’s War.” Well it was, if one accepts Mao Zedong’s
and Vo Nguyen Giap’s interpretation of the term. But the Saxon Genitive
implies that a “People’s War” is supposed to be a war of the people. In
truth, it wasn’t. Some 3.8 million Vietnamese were killed between 1955
and 1975. Approximately 164,000 South Vietnamese civilians were
annihilated in a Communist democide during that same period, according
to political scientist Rudolf Joseph Rummel of the University of Hawaii.
The Pentagon estimated that 950,000 North Vietnamese and more than
200,000 South Vietnamese soldiers fell in combat, in addition to 58,000
U.S. troops. This was no war of the people; it was a war against the
people.
In the all too often hypocritical
rhetoric about the Vietnam War over the last 40 years, the key question
has gone AWOL, to use a military acronym meaning absent without leave,
and the question is: Did the Vietnamese people desire a Communist
regime? If so, how was it that nearly one million northerners moved
south following the division of their country in 1954, while only about
130,000 Vietminh sympathizers went in the opposite direction?
Who
started this war? Were there any South Vietnamese units operating in
North Vietnam? No. Did South Vietnamese guerillas cross the 17th
parallel to disembowel and hang pro-Communist village chiefs, their
wives and children in the northern countryside? No. Did the South
Vietnamese regime massacre an entire class of people by the tens of
thousands in is territory after 1954 the way the North Vietnamese had
liquidated landowners and other potential opponents of their
Soviet-style rule? No. Did the South Vietnamese establish a monolithic
one-party system? No.
As a German
citizen, I had no dog in this fight, as Americans would say. But to
paraphrase the Journalists’ Prayer Book, such as hardened reporters have
hearts, mine was, and still is, with the wounded Vietnamese people. It
belongs to these sublime women who can often be so blunt and amusing; it
belongs to the cerebral and immensely complicated Vietnamese men trying
to dream the perfect dream in a Confucian way; to the childlike
soldiers going to battle carrying their only possessions – a canary in a
cage; to young war widows who had their bodies grotesquely modified
just to catch a GI husband and create a new home for their children and
perhaps for themselves, rather than face a Communist tyranny; to those
urban and rural urchins minding each other and water buffalos. What a
hardened heart I had, it belonged to those I saw running away from the
butchery and the fighting – always in a southerly direction, but never
ever north, until at the very end there was no VC-free square inch to
escape to. I saw them slaughtered or buried alive in mass graves, and
still have the stench of putrefying corpses in my nostrils.
I wasn’t there when Saigon fell after entire ARVN units, often so
maligned in the U.S. media and now abandoned by their American allies,
fought on nobly, knowing that they would neither win nor survive this
final battle. I was in Paris, mourning, when all this happened, and I
wish I could have paid my respects to five South Vietnamese generals
before they committed suicide when the game was over that they should
have won: Le Van Hung (born 1933), Le Nguyen Vy (born 1933), Nguyen Khoa
Nam (born 1927), Tran Van Hai (born 1927) and Pham Van Phu (born 1927).
As I write this epilogue, a fellow journalist and scholar of sorts, a
man born in 1975 when Saigon fell, is making a name for himself,
pillorying American war crimes in Vietnam. Yes, they deserve to be
pilloried. Yes, they were a reality. My Lai was reality; I know, I was
at the court martial where Lt. William Calley was found guilty. I know
that the body count fetish dreamed up by the warped minds of political
and military leaders of the McNamara era in Washington and U.S.
headquarters in Saigon cost thousands of innocent civilians their lives.
But no atrocity committed by dysfunctional American or South Vietnamese
units ever measured up to the state-ordered carnage inflicted upon the
South Vietnamese in the name of Ho Chi Minh. These crimes his successors
will not even acknowledge to this very day because nobody has the guts
to ask them: why did your people slaughter all these innocents whom you
claimed to have fought to liberate? As a German, I take the liberty of
adding a footnote here: why did you murder my friend Hasso Rüdt von
Collenberg, the German doctors in Hué, and poor Otto Söllner, whose only
“crime” was to have taught young Vietnamese how to conduct an
orchestra? Why did you kidnap those young Knights of Malta volunteers,
subjecting some to death in the jungle and others to imprisonment in
Hanoi? Why does it not even occur to you to search your conscience
regarding these actions, the way thoughtful Americans, while correctly
laying claim to have been on the right side in World War II, wrestle
with the terrible legacy left by the carpet bombing of residential areas
in Germany and the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Reminiscing on her ordeal on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the news magazine
Der Spiegel, the West German nurse Monika Schwinn recalled her
encounter with North Vietnamese combat units on their way south as one
of her most horrifying experiences. She described the intensity of
hatred in the facial expressions of these soldiers and wrote that her
Vietcong minders had great difficulty preventing them from killing the
Germans on the spot. Nobody is born hating. Hate must be taught.
Fostering murder in the hearts of young people involved a teaching
discipline at which only the school of totalitarianism excels. In his
brilliant biography of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, historian Peter
Longrich relates that even this founder of this evil force of
black-uniformed thugs did not find it easy to make his men overcome
natural inhibitions to execute the holocaust (Longerich. Heinrich
Himmler. Oxford: 2012). It was the hatred in the eyes of the North
Vietnamese killers in Hué that many of the survivors I interviewed
considered most haunting. But of course one did have to spend time with
them, suffer with them, gain their confidence and speak with them to
discover this central element of a human, political and military
catastrophe that is still with us four decades later. Opining about it
from the ivory towers of a New York television studio or an Ivy League
school does not suffice.
In a stirring
book about the French Foreign Legion, Paul Bonnecarrère relates the
historic meeting between the legendary Col. Pierre Charton and Gen. Vo
Nguyen Giap after France’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu (Bonnecarrère. Par le
Sang Versé. Paris: 1968). Charton was a prisoner of war in the hands
of the Communist Vietminh. Giap came to pay his respects to him but also
to gloat. The encounter took place in a classroom in front some 20
students attending a political indoctrination session. The dialogue
between the two antagonists went thus:
Giap: “I have defeated you, mon colonel!
Charton: “No you haven’t, mon general. The jungle has defeated us… and
the support you received from the civilian population -- by means of
terror.”
Vo Nguyen Giap didn’t like this
answer, and forbade his students to write it down. But it was the truth,
or more precisely: it was half of the truth. The other half was that
democracies like the United States seemed indeed politically and
psychologically ill equipped to fight a protracted war. This
realization, alongside the use of terror tactics, became a pillar of
Giap’s strategy. He was right and he won. Even more dangerous
totalitarians are taking note today.
To
this very day I am haunted by the conclusion I was forced to draw from
my Vietnam experience: when a self-indulgent throwaway culture grows
tired of sacrifice it becomes capable of discarding everything. It is
prepared to dump a people whom it set out to protect. It is even willing
to trash the lives, the physical and mental health, the dignity, memory
and good name of the young men who were sent to war. This happened in
the case of the Vietnam Veterans. The implications of this deficiency
endemic in liberal democracies are terrifying because in the end it will
demolish their legitimacy and destroy a free society.
However, I
must not end my narrative on this dark note. As an observer of history,
I know that history, while closed to the past, is always open to the
future. As a Christian I know who is the Lord of history. The Communist
victory in Vietnam was based on evil foundations: terror, murder and
betrayal. Obviously, I do not advocate a resumption of bloodshed to
rectify this outcome, even if this were possible. But as an admirer of
the resilient Vietnamese people, I know that they will ultimately find
the right peaceful means and the leaders to rid themselves of their
despots. It might take generations, but it will happen.
In this sense, I will now join the queue of the pedicab drivers outside
the Hué railway station where no passenger arrived back in 1972. Where
else would my place be? What else do I possess but hope?
