Timothy Martinelli, On-line Forty-Niner April 30, 1997
The day Saigon fell the last helicopter lifted off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy with a contingent of U.S. Marines, one carried a brown-paper sack with the American flag folded inside.
It was Monday April 29, 1975. Below thousands of Vietnamese who had worked for the Americans fought for their chance to get out. It did not come that day.
It was the longest conflict America was ever engaged in, yet there never was a declaration of war.
It ripped the fabric of society and divided the nation as no crisis, with the exception of the civil war, had in our history.
It seemed to many that in the last years of the war and those just following the fall of Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, a collective amnesia affected the American psyche.
No one wished to talk about the great crusade against communism that was sunk in the quagmire of 'Nam. The April 30,1975 copy of the 49er has no mention of Vietnam on the day following the communist victory. On May 1 an the editorial was run, which we include on this page.
As time passed the war took on a life of its own. There were Rambo and Chuck Norris, trying to settle the score. Only in the movies could they do what 500,000 troops could not, defeat the evil Reds.
Which brings us to the subject of MIAs. To this day no American, soldier or civilian, has been found alive there since the original POWs were returned by North Vietnamese.
For a long time many in government did not believe any Americans were held in Southeast Asia. No one could speak up with this opinion. The bitterness and loss were just too great for anyone to argue with those who believed.
In thousands of places all over the country the black POW-MIA flag flies beside Old Glory. Few Americans are aware that the Asian people can claim somewhere around a million MIAs. They have no flag.
There were the continuing effects of Agent Orange, the defoliant which was used by the ton in a battle against the very plant life of Vietnam. Like much of what America did in Vietnam, Agent Orange came back to haunt us also.
General William Westmoreland, whom the anti-war demonstrators called "General Waste more land," refought the war in a federal court. CBS News took the place of the enemy in that replay.
When a memorial was proposed to honor the fallen and the veterans of the war a design by Maya Ying Lin was chosen.
Like all things having to do with this tar-baby war there was a fight. Many felt that the sunken black wall was too bleak, too defeatist. A statue by Frederick Hart was placed near the Wall as a compromise.
For many years, thanks to those sensitive souls in Hollywood, the movies and TV featured "the crazed Vietnam vet character," causing all sorts of havoc.
Then there was Cambodia. Words do not exist to describe the horror that was visited upon that poor nation, but it was part of the Vietnam conflict, and the killing there continues to this day.
When Bill Clinton ran for president the debate about the war returned like a reoccurring bad dream. How had Clinton avoided service? Did his participation in anti-war demonstrations in England render him unfit to be commander in chief?
The war went on, not as the heroic World War II movies which gave us victory and final closure but as one more divisive controversy, coming to the publics attention from time to time.
The war really is over. More than 60% of Vietnam's population was born after the conflict. To the current college age generation it is the stuff of movies, if it is even remembered at all.
Finally, this year, we will send an ambassador to Vietnam. He has been there before. As a POW Pete Peterson existed in the squalor of confinement. He will now occupy the ambassador's
mansion.
A phrase that emerged after the conflict was, "the lessons of Vietnam." We can only hope that those are the correct lessons, and they are not forgotten.
We, as a nation, with profound military strength, must exercise corresponding wisdom in its use.
We fought against a people whose aspirations of independence had been denied. It was a fight driven by an ideology of questionable value, a war that alienated so many, in the end we were fighting ourselves.