How We Oversimplified the History of the Vietnam War

Time​ Magazine

30-04-2025

At 7:53 a.m. on Wednesday, April 30, 1975, a CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter ascended from the rooftop of the United States embassy in downtown Saigon carrying ten Marine Security Guards toward the waiting deck of the USS Okinawa. Its departure marked the final mission of the massive helicopter-borne evacuation that began less than 24 hours earlier and heralded the end of America's once-mighty military presence in South Vietnam. Two hours later, North Vietnamese tanks carrying the flags of the southern revolutionary National Liberation Front smashed through the gates of the Republic of Vietnam's presidential palace.
Fifty years later, the scene of retreating helicopters and advancing tanks has become imprinted on the popular imagination of both the United States and Vietnam. And in both countries, a certain inevitability has attached itself to the capture of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War. As the modern-day Socialist Republic of Vietnam prepares to celebrate half a century of victory in what it refers to as the 'Resistance War Against America to Save the Country,' the Vietnamese state promotes a history that remains unchanged since 1975: the southern Republic of Vietnam (RVN) was an 'American-Puppet' regime destined to crumble in the face of popular mobilization and Vietnam's 2,000 year tradition of resisting foreign invaders.
Yet, in the United States, as in much of the Western world, the narrative looks remarkably similar: Vietnam was a 'bad war' propelled by American hubris, doomed by ignorance and thwarted by unreliable and corrupt South Vietnamese allies against an adversary that many still believe was 'more nationalist than Communist.' Indeed, 'Vietnam' remains our most evocative shorthand for geopolitical miscalculation and military misadventure.
Such popular memory, however, misconstrues a more complex historical reality about the Republic of Vietnam and the nature of the Vietnam War itself.
In the past two decades, the Republic of Vietnam's reputation has undergone extensive revision by historians. While South Vietnamese politics were often beset by instability and corruption, the idea of a non-Communist republican government based in the South enjoyed widespread support from the general public—even if that public often bemoaned their political leaders. Protests in South Vietnam were a regular occurrence, but they represented the desire of the South Vietnamese to resolve the war—and many other issues—on their own terms. For example, when the monk Thích Quảng Đức burned himself alive on June 11, 1963, he represented a Buddhist revivalist movement that was critical of both Vietnamese Communism and the RVN.
The Buddhists who took to Saigon's streets did not want to topple the government; they advocated for the reversal of restrictive laws on religious practice. Yet the Buddhist cause has since become wedded to that of the Communists—a misunderstanding that the modern Vietnamese government continues to promote. Not one year later, Saigonese high school students rioted at the prospect that South Vietnam might consider a reconciliation with the North.
Taking the role that the Republic of Vietnam played seriously helps us rethink the very nature of the war. In the United States, Hollywood depictions of guerrilla fighters and claustrophobic jungle firefights coupled with Internet memes of 'trees speaking in Vietnamese,' reinforce the sense of a hopeless quagmire in which the United States had no business. In Vietnam, dusty provincial museums and newer, sleeker ones inaugurated for the 50th anniversary echo the sentiment in reverse, displaying mannequins of wily peasant farmers taking on the U.S. war machine.
These renderings obscure just how much conventional warfare took place in Vietnam. North Vietnamese soldiers, armed with Chinese-manufactured Kalashnikovs and supported by Soviet tanks, regularly engaged American and RVN forces (not to mention those provided by Australia, South Korea, and Thailand). In April 1969, the U.S. military deployed more than 500,000 service members—a size comparable to Napoleon's Grande Armée. By 1975, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had the world's third largest military. The Vietnam War was no tropical brushfire.
Most importantly, the war was not only between Vietnamese and Americans, but rather between two independent Vietnams locked in civil war. While the conflict became a Cold War superpower showdown, its main participants were Vietnamese who fought and died for their respective ideas of sovereignty.
Today these dimensions of the war go overlooked in both Vietnam and the United States, albeit for different reasons. In Vietnam, April 30, 1975 is seen as 'the result of the Vietnamese people's unwavering determination to build a unified nation that could never be divided by any force.' But this telling hides the inconvenient reality that large swaths of 'the Vietnamese people' actively rejected the National Liberation Front and unification under Communist rule. To admit that the 'Resistance War Against America' was also a war against fellow Vietnamese would be to admit that a non-Communist alternative was a legitimate outcome of the conflict. Such an admission not only upsets the conventional framing of the war, but strikes at the very heart of the Vietnamese Communist Party's own legitimacy to govern the country.
In the United States, to take seriously the agency of the RVN entails possibly defending U.S. military intervention—something that feels not just patently archaic, but would demand reopening old wounds within American society. Given that the war implicated both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations, the blame for U.S. failure is widely shared and it is far easier for modern American audiences across the political spectrum to accept that intervention was a misguided tragedy destined to fail then to think about the actual dynamics of the conflict.
The narrow lens of these popularly accepted narratives has limited our understanding of subsequent history, especially given the tendency in the United States for the Vietnam War to become the preferred historical analogy for current events. In the early 2000s, discussions over the conduct of U.S. forces in Iraq and reflections about patriotism and the treatment of returning troops were steeped in Vietnam War-era comparisons. Commentary about recent protest movements including the harsh crackdown on student protesters over the war in Gaza have evoked grim comparisons to theKent State massacre in 1970. The frantic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 invited literal side-by-side montages of Chinooks in Kabul and Sea Knights in Saigon. Everything seems to remind us of some cultural moment of the Vietnam war.
America's seeming inability to escape the pull of Vietnam's symbolic weight shifts the focus away from the issues at hand by invoking the distant world of Vietnam-era America in which criticisms of misguided foreign military intervention or prejudiced domestic policies can be safely contained. It is telling, therefore, that the Trump Administration has ordered American diplomats in Vietnam to avoid participating in the upcoming anniversary.
Half a century after the fall of Saigon, the versions of the conflict that many Americans and Vietnamese adhere to are strikingly similar. They mirror one another in their presentation of the war and the inevitability of the outcome. But, by oversimplifying the historical reality, these narratives sanitize the past and prevent us from properly understanding the historical actors involved and their motivations.
Only by understanding the complexity of the war on the ground as one foremost between Vietnamese can we truly begin to grapple with the real legacy of Vietnam: a war with many different narratives—and possible outcomes. As the famed Vietnamese writer and former North Vietnamese Army veteran, Bảo Ninh, writes in the closing pages of The Sorrow of War, 'Each of us carried in his heart a separate war… Our only postwar similarities stemmed from the fact that everyone had experienced difficult, painful, and different fates.' April 30, 1975 is not an endpoint closed to further interpretation, but an opportunity to start anew and to better understand the separate wars that its participants experienced.
Andrew Bellisari is Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University and a faculty fellow at Purdue's Center for American Political History and Technology (CAPT). Previously, he was a founding faculty member at Fulbright University Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City and a Vietnam Program Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.