There is much truth to the adage that wars are easy to begin and hard to end. Scholars have shown how marking the formal, legal end to armed conflicts is much more difficult than it appears at first glance.[2] When we acknowledge that “all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory,” the picture becomes infinitely more complex.[3] Although a profound turning point, April 30, 1975 did not mark a definitive end to the Vietnam War but the start of a new chapter in U.S.-Vietnamese relations. Although the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) collapsed, many of its citizens who were aligned with the U.S./RVN maintained their national identity as South Vietnamese long after 1975.[4] In the ensuing two decades, the United States, the South Vietnamese people, and the government of a unified Vietnam governed from Hanoi, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), all had to contend with the reality that the war remained ongoing even as each group made efforts toward postwar reconciliation and peace. The dualities, ironies, and paradoxes of the decades after 1975 are only decipherable once we acknowledge that, rather than diametrically opposed, war and peace are often entangled.
When I teach the Vietnam War, therefore, we encounter April 30, 1975, not on the final day of the semester but with three or four weeks left to go. During the last portion of the class, we examine the myriad of ways the war persisted, including the Indochinese diaspora. The departure of over three million people from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia between 1975 and 1995 marked one of the largest migrations of the late twentieth century. In the twenty years after 1975, over one million Vietnamese ultimately resettled in the United States through journeys that involved clandestine flight or emigration programs that brought individuals directly from Vietnam to the United States. The vast majority were former American allies and their close family members. Despite the tendency to frame refugee migrations as parenthetical to or found in the postscript of the “real” war, the recent conflict in Ukraine serves as a vivid reminder that displacement and dislocation are part and parcel of the wartime experience. For those who risked everything on the high seas (the so-called “boat people”), who attempted daring overland escapes (the “land people”), or who endured prolonged and uncertain stays in refugee camps throughout Southeast Asia, the Second Indochina War (what we call “the Vietnam War” in the United States) remained ongoing, even as the Third Indochina War (armed conflict between the communist states of China, Vietnam, and Cambodia) erupted.