Memories of Empire: Remembering the Fall of Saigon
Despite sharing the same diplomatic table as the United States,
and forging ahead with trade agreements, Vietnam still remembers.
Remembers, that is, those “countless barbarous crimes,” as the country’s
prime minister calls them, committed by the United States during the
long wars of the 1960s and 1970s. On April 30, 1975, Saigon was
stricken by scenes of evacuation and panic. “Our homeland,” explained
Nguyen Tan Dung, “had to undergo extremely serious challenges.”
Both countries provided mirrors of violent change, a form of toxic
exchange that seemed share more with disease than nutrition. A distant
country that was supposedly off the radar of American homes became a
round-the-clock transmission feast of gore and depravity. Then came the
battlefield traumas and the counter-cultural response.
The words from President Gerald R. Ford a week before the fall of
Saigon before an audience at Tulane University spoke of America
regaining “the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam, but it cannot
be