By Kyle Smith
Wednesday, May 03, 2017
What everyone knows about the Vietnam War is that it was
unwinnable, that the South Vietnamese didn’t much want us there, and that our
military involvement was a moral outrage that did us all deep dishonor.
We know all of this from the movies, don’t we? And yet
there is a movie that shows it up for the pack of lies that it is. It’s a
brilliant, harrowing, emotionally potent documentary by a director with
unimpeachable liberal credentials — a Kennedy, no less. The 42nd anniversary of
the fall of Saigon on Sunday was an excellent opportunity to revisit what
happened between the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, in which the North Vietnamese
Communists agreed to a ceasefire and accepted democratic elections in the
South, and the spring of 1975, when a failure of American will allowed the
Communists to reverse the result for which so much blood had been spilled.
Last Days in
Vietnam, the Oscar-nominated 2014 film by Rory Kennedy (the youngest child
of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who died before she was born) is available for
streaming on Netflix. It’s a devastating counterpunch to the anti-American
propaganda Hollywood and the rest of the leftist culture have been spewing
about Vietnam for more than four decades. Kennedy’s film should make us angry
only that America didn’t go far enough. South Vietnam could have been another
South Korea if our cultural-political resolve had just remained steadfast at
the crucial moment. It’s as if we spent years painstakingly building a
billion-dollar palace, then let termites destroy it rather than spending money
on an exterminator.
Mixing in interviews with, among others, Henry Kissinger
and Richard Armitage, who was then a Special Forces adviser, as well as
astonishing archival footage of the events of 1975 in Saigon, the film explains
that the North Vietnamese were “terrified” of President Nixon in 1974. The
Paris Peace Accords had sparked a full withdrawal of American troops, and Nixon
had warned in writing that the U.S. would “respond with full force” if the
North failed to abide by the ceasefire terms. But after Nixon’s resignation in
August of 1974, says then-CIA analyst Frank Snepp in the film, “Hanoi saw the
road to Saigon as being wide open.” In the spring of 1975, the North Vietnamese
army scythed through South Vietnam with astonishing force. Five thousand or so
Americans and their families were all that remained of the U.S. presence, and
when President Ford asked Congress for $700 million in new military aid, he was
scorned, to the undying shame of the lawmakers in question. Democratic senator
John McClellan of Arkansas said, “I think it is too late to do any good.
Further military aid could merely prolong the conflict and perhaps postpone
briefly the inevitable — a Communist victory.”
The U.S. ambassador, Graham Martin, who had lost his only
son in combat earlier in the war, was tragically slow to respond as the
Communist army rampaged through the South in April. Not until the airport in
Saigon had been shelled, on the morning of April 29, 1975, did he order an
evacuation to begin. Armed Forces radio played the prearranged signal that all
was lost, announcing that it was “105 degrees and rising,” followed by a
playing of Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” Soon a photographer snapped a
picture of a helicopter landing on the roof of the apartment where the CIA’s
deputy station chief lived, and the chaos metastasized. (The photo would later
be erroneously described as having been taken at the embassy.) A tamarind tree
in the parking lot of the embassy that Martin had frequently called “as
steadfast as the American commitment in Vietnam” was chopped down to create
room for evacuation helicopters to land.
Kennedy’s film locates one devastating emotional moment
after another. When a pilot landed his chopper at the embassy with orders to
take the ambassador and flee, the ambassador simply refused to board, ushering
dozens of Vietnamese on board in his place to be taken out to the safety of
U.S. ships at sea. Hundreds more would follow as Martin repeatedly declined to
leave. South Vietnamese helicopter pilots scrambled to airlift their families
out to the nearest ship, the U.S.S. Kirk,
with each aircraft simply shoved overboard by the crew when it had done its
work. Miki Nguyen, then a boy of six, remembers that his South Vietnamese
father landed a gigantic Chinook on a playground to pick him up along with his
mother and siblings. The bird was far too large to land on the Kirk, so each member of the Nguyen
family in turn simply jumped to safety below; one, a year-old baby, was caught
by one of the men on the deck. The pilot, Ba Nguyen, while flying the
twin-rotor aircraft just feet above the sea, somehow managed to extricate
himself from his flight suit, tilt the bird to the right, and jump out the door
to the left, maybe 20 feet from the rotors. Kennedy delivers spectacular
footage of the episode.
Some 75 Marine pilots shuttled Americans and Vietnamese
out of the embassy on helicopters all day and deep into the night. “You’re very
tired, and you’re not seeing an end to this thing,” one pilot recalls in the
film. “And the word comes back: ‘No. Marine pilots don’t get tired.’” North
Vietnamese tanks would be spotted in the Saigon streets nearby by 7:45 the
morning of April 30. The last eleven Americans left the embassy at 7:58.
The effort Kennedy documents so vividly led to the rescue
of 77,000 Vietnamese. The immense courage and honor of the heroes depicted in
the film, and the clamor of the South Vietnamese to receive their share of
American liberty as Communism descended upon their homeland, make for an
eloquent rejoinder to those who dismiss the entire war as a misbegotten mess.
Our troops earned a victory in Southeast Asia that as of 1974 was all but
secure. Washington betrayed them and the people of South Vietnam in equal
measure.
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