Fifty Years After Saigon: Remembering the Nobility of a Betrayed Cause
We must remember not just South Vietnam's fall, but why it fell.
We must remember not just South Vietnam's fall, but why it fell.
www.rodmartin.org
30 Apr 2025 ~~ By Rod D. Martin
Fifty years ago, April 30, 1975, the world watched in horror and disbelief as the last American helicopter lifted off from the rooftop of our embassy in Saigon. South Vietnam had fallen in the manner of Ernest Hemingway, “first gradually, then suddenly”: a decades-long war, a relative peace, and then a mad dash by the North Vietnamese Army that consumed the country in less than a month.
What followed was not peace, but darkness. The swift collapse of South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos (turns out the Domino Theory
was true) brought the subjugation of millions, and the opening act of a Communist bloodbath across Southeast Asia. At least a million were sent to the “re-education camps” in Vietnam alone. Half a million were murdered. Another two million fled this brutal night by sea, on rafts wholly unsuited for the tumultuous ocean, in wild hope that an American aircraft carrier might happen upon them. Close to half a million died in the water.
The tragedy was simply breathtaking. And horribly, horribly unnecessary.
~Snip~
None of this had to happen. This was not the end of a war, but the culmination of betrayal — a betrayal of an ally, of a cause, and of the very principles America had defended with precious blood and treasure for eight long years.
The received wisdom is that Vietnam was a mistake, a misguided war fought in the wrong place at the wrong time. That narrative is false. The Vietnam War was part of a noble, epic struggle — the same struggle that won the Cold War and saved the whole world from a similar fate. It was a just effort to stop Communist totalitarianism and genocide from consuming yet another corner of the globe. South Vietnam was not a hopeless case. It was a fledgling republic, striving to build a free society in the shadow of Marxist tyranny and under constant assault from within and without. Its people fought with courage and resolve for more than two decades, first with our help.
~Snip~
But with Nixon forced from office, Congress fell into the hands of men more concerned with leftist politics than principle. Nixon won 49 states in 1972. In the aftermath of Watergate, in 1974, Democrats won overwhelming Congressional majorities: almost 300 House seats, and a filibuster-proof 61 in the Senate.
This radicalized majority, driven by post-Watergate bloodlust, slashed military aid to South Vietnam by over 75%, prohibited any American military response to a massive Soviet rearmament of the North, and watched coldly as North Vietnam violated every term of the accords. They wouldn’t even send our allies tires for their Jeeps or gas for their tanks.
Deprived of ammunition, fuel, and the will of its ally, South Vietnam collapsed — not because it lacked heart, but because it was abandoned, by the same Democrat Party that had sent America’s sons to die there just ten years before.
This is the reality the left refuses to confront even half a century later. The fall of Saigon was not inevitable. It was engineered in Washington more than Hanoi. It was not a military defeat — it was a political surrender, the first of many. Over the next five years, Democrats handed 26 countries to the Communists. That’s on top of Carter’s betrayal of the Shah of Iran.
Richard Nixon understood this. Years after, in
No More Vietnams, he laid out the real lessons of that conflict, lessons we ignore at our peril. He did not argue that we should never fight again. Quite the contrary. He argued that when America fights, it must fight to win — and that when we make commitments, we must keep them.
~Snip~
Second, we must never send our soldiers to fight unless the cause directly serves vital American interests. In this, Nixon prefigured Trump. But once engaged, we must not allow domestic politics to undercut our efforts. Unity at home is essential. Leadership must resist the temptation to bow to the transient winds of public opinion or the distortions of a hostile press.
Third, America must support its allies fully or not at all. Partial support, tepid commitments, and shifting loyalties invite chaos and death. South Vietnam stood ready to defend itself — with our help. Once we withdrew that help, we ensured their destruction. Nixon rightly saw that as an even greater moral failure than a strategic one.
And
fourth, peace is only possible through strength. The idea that we can withdraw from the world, that we can turn our backs on aggression and be left in peace, is a fantasy. Weakness invites conflict. Only credible deterrence, backed by the willingness to act, can maintain stability and peace.
These lessons, learned at tragic cost, should have guided us forward. But they were forgotten. In 2021, Joe Biden gave us a second Saigon, this time in Kabul.
Commentary:
The media was always gave the impression the American military was fleeing South Vietnam in a chaotic panic when it wasn’t even there since South Vietnam fell years after we left, or that Americans were burning that little girl with Napalm although the Americans weren’t involved in the incident, or that all our soldiers did was suffer wounds and defeatism and using Zippos on thatch huts, or that the VC were dominating us and our installations during Tet.
South Vietnam fell because the double-minded and weak Democrat Leftist leaders in America had no commitment or intention of doing what it would take to actually win the war.
Just as Nixon and Ford were minor players in LBJ’s tragic mistake, others have mentioned the part the Democrats as the majority in Congress played.
No brains in the politicians going in, no spines to support our friends in their need to survive. Joey Xi Baidung and his handlers did the same in Afghanistan and to the Ukraine egging it on, and what will happen next with poor leadership there.
Bush '43' should have destroyed every last Taliban resource in Afghanistan. Make the bricks bounce. This could have been done solely by air power and special forces strikes.
W’s great mistake was going the LBJ route: He tried to win the hearts and minds of the population - a population that was stuck in the 8th century, and brainwashed by death cult religion.
That was a fool’s errand, made even worse by his invasion of Iraq. That upset the whole applecart in the region.
I rank W among the three worst US presidents ever. Joey Xi Baidung continues to run first. The other is Woody Wilson.
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