Vietnam War: reckoning with the past, not just celebrating it

Asia Times

01-05-2025

The parades are over. TikTok videos of marching bands and fighter jets have made their rounds, and Vietnam has officially marked 50 years since the end of the war. In Ho Chi Minh City, crowds lined the streets in celebration. Across the country — and even in parts of the diaspora — this anniversary was met with pride, gratitude and emotion.
But what comes after the applause? For all the fireworks and orchestras, a deeper story continues — quieter, harder and unresolved. The Vietnam War is no longer just a war between nations. It remains a fault line at the center of Vietnamese identity, sharpened by exile, repression and the long shadow of what came after 1975.
Officially, April 30 is the day of 'liberation' and 'reunification.' In exile and across the diaspora, it is remembered instead as the 'fall' — of Saigon, and of a homeland they were forced to leave. Fifty years on, those wounds have not disappeared. They have only shifted. The question is whether they can now be addressed.
Even those rifts have begun to shift. Today, many overseas Vietnamese return freely to visit their families. In both Vietnam and the United States, Vietnamese artists perform to packed audiences. The protests that once greeted official delegations have faded. National belonging, it turns out, can stretch across ideological divides.
But memory cannot be honest without recognizing hard truths. The Vietnamese Communist Party — not just the United States — bears deep, if different, responsibility for the tragedy that followed.
Any genuinely honest pathway to healing calls for our reckoning with those twin burdens — not so much by pressing for an ideological surrender as by insisting on a memory capacious enough to hold the full cost of being human.
As a child, I heard only pieces of this story — the triumphant marches, the narrow escapes. For years, the stories appeared to be two unrelated tales. Only long after, through the fissures of memory and history, did I realize that one was the fragment of the other, both fragments of a single shattered unity: a war that destroyed the country it was meant to save.
This year, on the 50th anniversary of reunification, General Secretary To Lam's commemorative article hinted at a different tone. He did not solely frame 1975 as a military victory, but spoke of reconciliation — invoking 'courage,' 'tolerance' and 'shared pain.'
It is rare that a Vietnamese leader publicly acknowledged that national unity need not mean uniformity, and that the suffering caused by the war and its aftermath touched all sides, including those who fled.
The Geneva Accords of 1954 temporarily divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel and called for nationwide elections within two years. The aim was reunification through a peaceful vote, supervised by an international commission.
Yet even before the ink was dry, Washington and its newly installed ally in Saigon doubted they could win at the ballot box. President Dwight Eisenhower himself later admitted that as many as 80% of Vietnamese would have voted for Ho Chi Minh.
Legally and politically, that burden is on the United States. The Geneva Accords of 1954 set national elections in 1956 to reunite Vietnam under a single government. The United States, which supported the South Vietnamese government it had recently helped to install, was the obstruction to that process, not least because it feared that Ho Chi Minh would indeed win.
By rejecting elections and constructing an anti-communist state in the South, Washington transformed a temporary split into a permanent and militarized war. The first chance for a peaceful reunification was missed not by Hanoi, but by Washington's policy.
But morally, the leadership in Hanoi has to take responsibility for what came after. Their insistence on a full-scale military effort to 'liberate' the South, and their behavior after victory in 1975 — the re-education camps, the political purges, the forced migration policies, the refugee exodus — only deepened the wounds of a nation that had already been rent asunder.
The tragedy of Vietnam was not only a fight against foreign intervention; it was also a national division that tore at the fabric of society, one that the policies of postwar Vietnam made worse, not better.
Authentic remembrance must engage with these emerging narratives — not to uncritically embrace them, but to test their sincerity. The heaviest responsibility for starting the war still lies with the United States; the deepest wounds after 1975 were inflicted by Vietnam's own postwar governance.
If To Lam's speech signals a shift toward a broader memory, it is a start. True reconciliation does not require renouncing the Party's legitimacy, but it does demand the harder work of acknowledging past harms — especially to those once cast out — and weaving their experience into the nation's shared story.
To conflate the two histories — to pretend that the communists' conduct before 1975 somehow excuses the repression that came after, or to minimize the United States' catastrophic role in the war's trajectory — is to be mired by delusion. And healing does not spring from forgetting, or from letting prosperity paper over pain.
Nowadays, many among the Vietnamese diaspora — younger generations in particular — don't go back to Vietnam to protest, but for opportunities. The country is vibrant, interconnected and increasingly affluent.
For many, life in Saigon may prove more accommodating than surviving on the fringes of the West. And Vietnam, for its part, seems mostly happy to accept them — as long as they don't challenge the official narrative: patriotism is good; politics is not.
But comfort is not the same as reconciliation. Welcoming people back is not the same thing as being seen. Economic inclusion is not moral redress. A state that offers open arms but keeps the past sealed tight is demanding allegiance, not responsibility.
And for foreign diplomats and businesspeople too, Vietnam's openness and growth can feel alluring — enough to make the past seem like someone else's problem, or a chapter long closed.
The illusion of progress is actual. The Vietnam of today is no longer the place it was even a decade ago. There is more transparency, more space for cultural freedom and a burgeoning pride in national achievement. And many younger Vietnamese, both inside and outside the country, may no longer feel personally burdened by the legacy of war.
But that's also exactly what makes this juncture so crucial. It is not when a society is traumatized that it is most at risk of forgetting, but when it is convinced that it feels too good, too self-possessed to remember.
The threat is not that people will celebrate — it's that they will engage in self-congratulation. Reconciliation can't be quantified with ceremonies and can't be outsourced to the course of time.
It must be built through acts of recognition: naming the costs of the past, listening to the stories long excluded, making space for discomfort. Vietnam's strength lies not just in having survived the war, but in whether it can now face what the war — and its aftermath — truly meant.
A nation's strength is not measured by GDP or foreign direct investment. It is measured by the stories it is willing to tell — and the ones it is still willing to silence. The Vietnam War was not just a military struggle. It was a civil rupture, and its legacies still live in the silences of exile, the contradictions of official memory and the lives that history tried to forget.
Fifty years later, it is time to move beyond the slogans of victory or the bitterness of loss. Courage now means facing history not with illusion, but with clarity. Vietnam has come far in softening old divides.
But if it seeks true reconciliation, it must go further — not only in its ceremonies, but in how it tells its story, how it honors all its people and how it welcomes those once exiled into its future.
Leo Tran writes about international affairs, trade, and global strategy. His work has appeared in The Diplomat, Kyiv Post, and Modern Diplomacy. He also publishes at Vietnam Decoded.