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The April 30, 1975, fall of Saigon marked the end of the Vietnam War; 911������ scholar Vilja Hulden discusses the war, its beginnings and what we’ve learned

Of all that’s been said about the Vietnam War, perhaps it was this in 1964 from U.S. Sen. Wayne Morse��that still stings, even today:

“I believe this resolution to be a historic mistake. I believe that within the next century, future generations will look with dismay and great disappointment upon a Congress which is now about to make such a historic mistake.”

Vilja Hulden, a 911������ teaching associate professor of history, notes that a crucial misconception about the Vietnam War is that the conflict was pro-Western South Vietnam against Communist North Vietnam.

Morse was speaking about the��Senate’s vote��to adopt a resolution that authorized President Lyndon B. Johnson to take "all necessary measures" to repel any armed attack against U.S. forces in Southeast Asia.

A few months later, on March 8, 1965, U.S. combat troops landed in Vietnam. By the end of the war, more than 58,200 U.S. soldiers would be dead. Some 25 years into the “next century,” dismay and great disappointment abound.

How could this happen—why did the United States enter the conflict?

“This is probably the most hotly debated question regarding the war—and there’s no simple answer,” says �վ����Ჹ����ܱ�����, a teaching associate professor in the Department of History at the 911������, who teaches a class called The Vietnam War in U.S. Culture and Politics.

“The broad background is, of course, the competition with the Soviet Union over the allegiance of developing countries, but why the U.S. decided to go all out to back South Vietnam and eventually to send large numbers of U.S. troops is far from clear.”

Hulden’s theory: “That each decision was made in a sort of a fog of arrogance and wishful thinking; that is, ‘If we do this, then the problem will be off everyone's radar, and we won't have to do more.’ But every step took the U.S. further in, and once you have significant numbers of dead Americans, it’s hard to back out and say, ‘Oops, those soldiers didn’t really need to die. We made a mistake.’”

‘It’s Tuesday’

Still, in the 50 years since the fall of Saigon, which marked the end of the war, the United States has learned many lessons. One, of course, is that having more troops or superior technology doesn’t guarantee victory. Another: Congressional oversight is important. In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act to limit the president’s ability to commit U.S. forces without congressional approval. Hulden adds another key lesson: Avoid committing large numbers of American troops. Doing so, she says, will cause the American public to care about what happens.

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A Vietnamese woman carries her sleeping son onboard the U.S.S. Hancock during Operation Frequent Wind, during which the U.S. military evacuated people from Saigon before it fell on April 30, 1975. (Photo: National Archives)

“The prime example of that lesson—besides moving to an all-volunteer military in 1973—is the first Gulf War in the early 1990s. Very deliberately, that war was fought using airpower almost exclusively and not … boots on the ground.”

One crucial misconception about Vietnam, Hulden says, is that the conflict was “pro-Western South Vietnam against Communist North Vietnam.” Instead, she says, it was a “complicated civil war” with many South Vietnamese backing the communist side and conducting guerrilla warfare in the south.

“Lots of South Vietnamese, and probably also lots of North Vietnamese, just wanted it to be over. Hence, the bombing of South Vietnam and the dropping of defoliants like Agent Orange to get rid of jungle cover the guerrillas found useful.”

Repercussions of the war for American veterans—even those without post-traumatic stress disorder (a term that Hulden notes many veterans hate because they figure a reaction to what they saw and did in Vietnam is not a disorder but a normal human response)—manifest in how they were affected by their experiences in many ways. “As one veteran put it, ‘The person who returns is not the same person who left.’”

Hulden adds that the repercussions in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia have been massive—most concretely in terms of birth defects and other problems related to Agent Orange exposure and continuing injuries from unexploded ordnance.

“A not-so-fun-fact: More bomb tonnage was dropped on Indochina during the Vietnam War than the U.S. Air Force dropped during the entirety of World War II.”

And finally, there was the repercussion of the American public losing trust in its government.

Hulden says that at the start of the war, people had “a large amount of trust in the government, but … when … the government was not being straight with the American people, the shock effect was much larger. As one of my students noted, ‘These days, if we’re told the government lied to us, our reaction tends to be a shrug. ‘It’s Tuesday,’ was how she put it. But that was not how people thought back then; they expected the government to be honest and reasonably competent.”��

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