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.