The United States, Southeast Asia, and Historical Memory by Pavlick Mark;

Author:Pavlick, Mark;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2019-08-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

From Mad Jack to Mad Henry: The United States in Vietnam (1975)

Noam Chomsky

At 8 a.m. on April 30, 1975, the last US Marine helicopter took off from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon. Less than five hours later, General Minh made the following announcement over Saigon radio:

I, General Duong Van Minh, President of the Saigon Government, appeal to the armed forces of the Republic of Vietnam to lay down their arms and surrender to the forces of the NLF unconditionally. I declare that the Saigon Government, from central to local level, has been completely dissolved.1

For the United States, these events signaled the end of a quarter-century effort to maintain Western domination over all or part of Indochina. For the Vietnamese, it meant that the foreign invaders had finally been repelled and their colonial structures demolished, after more than a century of struggle.

Mad Jack Attacks

With fitting symmetry, history had come full circle. “The first act of armed intervention by a Western Power in Vietnam,” according to the Vietnamese historian Truong Buu Lam, “is generally held to have been perpetrated in 1845 by a ship of the US Navy, the Constitution,” in an effort to force the release of a French bishop.2 The skipper of “Old Ironsides” was Commander John Percival, known as “Mad Jack.” Sailors under his command “disembarked at Danang and proceeded to terrorize the local population . . . United States sailors fired on an unresisting crowd and several dozens were killed . . . ” before Mad Jack withdrew in failure.3 A few years later the French navy returned and took Danang, and in the years that followed, established their imperial rule over all of Indochina, bringing misery and disaster. The agronomist Nghiem Xuan Yen wrote in 1945 that under French colonization “our people have always been hungry . . . so hungry that the whole population had not a moment of free time to think of anything besides the problem of survival.”4 In the northern parts of the country, two million people are reported to have died of starvation in a few months in 1945.5

Throughout this period, resistance never ceased. Early French eyewitnesses reported that

We have had enormous difficulties in imposing our authority in our new colony. Rebel bands disturb the country everywhere.6 The fact was that the centre of resistance was everywhere, subdivided to infinity, almost as many times as there were Annamese. It would be more exact to consider each farmer busy tying up a sheaf of rice as a centre of resistance.7

Meanwhile, the French complained, the only collaborators were

Intriguers, disreputable or ignorant, whom we had rigged out with sometimes high ranks, which became tools in their hands for plundering the country without scruple. . . . Despised, they possessed neither the spiritual culture nor the moral fibre that would have allowed them to understand and carry out their task.8

A century later, the imperial overlords had changed, but their complaints never varied. The resistance, however, did significantly change its character over

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