Portside

Fifty years ago today, on April 30, 1975, Vietnam defeated the United States of America.  

It’s called “The Vietnam War” — but the Vietnamese call it, more accurately, “The American War.” Because it was the Americans who invaded Vietnam eleven years earlier to kill and dominate its people. 

In those 11 years, we slaughtered two million Vietnamese and perhaps another two million southeast Asians in Cambodia and Laos and beyond. Nearly 4 million murdered by the United States! (For context, that’s about two-thirds the number of Jews that the Germans killed in the Holocaust during World War II.)

Unlike the Germans, we, collectively as a nation, have never paid for these crimes against humanity. We have never admitted our guilt in this genocide, never apologized, never shown a speck of remorse, never made any reparations (and no, I don’t count the Nike factories). 

And we have continued our policy of invasion and funding and arming genocide to this day. We funded and armed the slaughters in Central America well into the 1980s. We armed the Iraqis in their war with Iran. Then we spent over two decades bombing and eventually invading Iraq and slaughtering their people — while also losing a two-decade-long war with Afghanistan. 

We do not tell our children, nor teach our students, the real truth of the atrocities we’ve conducted, from our first mass genocide of the Native Peoples of the Americas committed by our White Christian European ancestors, to currently the billions of our taxpayer dollars and tons of American bombs plus scores of fighter jets and other weapons of mass destruction being given to the Netanyahu regime in Israel to massacre tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. And for the two million Palestinians still barely alive in Gaza, we now support a horrific plan to starve them to death, their homes now nearly all reduced to rubble (92% of Gaza has been flattened, according to the UN), with virtually no access to drinking water or medicine, and nearly every hospital, every school and every university bombed to smithereens. It will take years to discover under all the rubble what the real numbers of the dead are. And this doesn’t even take into account the daily attacks on the 3+ million Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank.  

We, you and I, are the backers of all this misery. Joe Biden bankrolled it. It cost him and Kamala Harris the election. Nearly a third — 29% — of the millions of people who voted for Biden in 2020 but who didn’t vote for Harris in 2024 cited their top reason as the Biden/Harris administration’s support for and funding of the war on Gaza. (This was more than those who cited the economy or immigration as their main reason). The media will not report it this way (“It’s the price of eggs!”), just as no media today on this 50th anniversary will state the simple truth that we, the mighty USA, were defeated in Vietnam by one of the poorest countries on Earth, a country which did not possess a single aircraft carrier, no destroyers, no B-52-style bombers — not even one goddamn attack helicopter! They did not have tank divisions, nor a single canister of napalm, no amphibious assault vehicles, not even one pathetic military Jeep that wasn’t a Soviet tin-can knock-off with maybe three wheels on it. They had nothing but the will of their own people to be free of the freedom-loving Americans.  

They kicked the ass of a military superpower — and sent 60,000 of our young men home to us in wooden boxes (nine of them from my high school, two on my street) and hundreds of thousands more who returned without arms, legs, eyes or the mental capacity to live life to its fullest, forever affected, their souls crushed, their nightmares never-ending. All of them destroyed by a lie their own government told them about North Vietnam “attacking” us and the millions of Americans who at first believed the lie. This past November 5th showed just how easy it still is for an American president, a man who lies on an hourly basis, to get millions of his fellow citizens to fall for it. 

That is why we need to make this day, April 30th, a national holiday. Usually, national holidays are used to celebrate victories and commemorate triumphs, like signing the Declaration of Independence or saving all the Indians from starving to death during winter (not true) or whatever Thanksgiving is all about. So why would we create a holiday to commemorate our defeat in Vietnam?

I think we need to do this for our children’s sake, for our grandchildren, for the sake of our future if there still is one for us. We should take just one day every year and participate in a national day of reckoning, recollection, reflection, and truth-telling, where together we actively seek forgiveness, make reparations and further our understanding of just how it happened and how easy it is for the wealthy and the political elites and the media to back such horror, and then to get the majority of the country to go along with it… at least at first. And how quickly after it’s over we decide that we never have to talk about it again. That we can learn nothing from it, and change nothing after it. 

The best way to honor the loss from this tragic war is to commit to never doing it again — and that has to start by realizing we are doing it again right now. Every bomb we send to Netanhayu is proof that we didn't learn a single lesson. 

I encourage every one of you — whether you’ve seen it before or have never seen it — to watch the Oscar-winning Peter Davis documentary HEARTS & MINDS tonight or this coming weekend. It is the most powerful nonfiction film I have ever seen. You can watch it with any Max subscription or on the Criterion Channel. You can rent it on Apple TV+ or Amazon Prime.

Here is a short clip from from the film, featuring Daniel Ellsberg, who revealed the true scope of the war when he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, showing how the U.S. government was lying about the war: 

Ellsberg: “The question used to be: ‘Might it be possible that we were on the wrong side in the Vietnamese War?’ But we weren’t on the wrong side. We are the wrong side.” 

And we were the wrong side again in Iraq. In Afghanistan. In Gaza. How did we get here? We got here because we’ve always been here. Start in 1492 and go forward. 

Remember that. 

Teach our children this truth about us. About our history. Give them this knowledge and with it comes the opportunity for us to change and make different choices for our future. To be a different people. A peaceful people. The Germans did it. The Japanese, too.

Today is a tragic and solemn day. And it should be a national holiday. 

Vietnam’s largest military cemetery of war dead in Quang Tri province. The lens of the camera is not wide enough to capture the vastness of this sacred place.

Images by Steven Clevenger/Corbis via Getty Images; and HOANG DINH NAM / AFP via Getty Images