I took the photo above 50 years ago, on May 1, 1975. I was living in Berkeley, California, in a $165-a-month apartment on Telegraph Avenue in the student district. Berkeley was a peculiar place, one of the few towns in America where fans of Herbert Marcuse could get up a May Day parade under the banner, “All Indochina Must Go Communist.”
The day before, South Vietnam had gone Communist. This was a landmark occasion. I had grown up with the Vietnam War. I never had to go there; in the lottery of July 1, 1970, I pulled a high number, which meant I was safe from the draft. But for the entirety of my youth, the war in Vietnam was an unhealed sore, a wound in political discussions.
A decade earlier, in 1965, our president, Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat who imagined himself a second Franklin Roosevelt, had sent half a million U.S. troops to Vietnam to defeat the Reds. Americans accepted the war at first — we didn’t like the Reds — but it went on and on. As the dead piled up–eventually 58,000 Americans–a huge protest movement arose in our universities. Most of the protesters were not so fanatical as the ones in the parade above, but we had those in Seattle, too.
America elected a Republican President in 1968, Richard Nixon. He promised to end the war. He dropped a lot of bombs before he got to it, but finally he “Vietnamized” the conflict. The Americans slowly came home, so that we would supply the money and the Vietnamese would supply the blood. The somewhat cynical strategy worked well enough to stave off defeat for a couple of years, but it was never going to produce a win. The Democratic Congress grew sick of this (and of Nixon) and voted to cut off the money. South Vietnam’s army immediately began falling back, and in a short time it fell apart.
The scene in Saigon in 1975 was much like Kabul in 2021 — a mad scramble to get out. The backstory was similar, too: a rich foreign power trying and failing to suppress an insurgency in a country it didn’t really know. (When Joe Biden’s witless secretary of state, Antony Blinken, denied the comparison of Afghanistan to Vietnam, I thought, “Give me a break. You were only 13.”)
At 23, I was sorry to see South Vietnam fall. But I was glad it was all over. On April 30, 1975, I wrote in my journal: “Almost everybody seems to have written off the war emotionally three or four years ago. The Vietnam war is something that happened 1966-1969. For the last two months, it has knocked the recession stories off the front page and the six o’clock news, but people don’t care anymore. I don’t… But this generation won’t forget about it.”
America was so tired of war that we didn’t get hip-deep in a big foreign adventure for another 15 years, until George H.W. Bush decided to rescue the oil sheikhs in Kuwait. Since then, we seem to be in a war somewhere or other pretty much all the time. Right now, the big one is in Ukraine.
I hear the objections: “It’s not the same as Afghanistan or Vietnam.” It’s not an insurgency. The Ukrainians have nationalism on their side, and it puts more fight in them. And despite the nasty talk of Donald Trump being “in Putin’s pocket,” there is no city in the United States where Americans will parade under a banner of loyalty to the enemy, as in the photo above. But there are notable similarities between the adventures in Afghanistan and Vietnam with our enterprise in Ukraine. All of them are far away, distant from a direct American interest. All of them were, or are, unwinnable given what we have been willing to do.
Some of us call for more. It was Joe Biden who promised the Ukrainians that we were in for “as long as it takes.” But that wasn’t a promise he was in a position to make.
I’m sorry Bruce but you are wrong.
Afghanistan and Vietnam are similar in that the United States believed that it could fight a war and win a war on the battlefield with an illegitimate government. The South Vietnam government was a corrupt Catholic minority under Ngo Dinh Diem propped up by the United States. Afghanistan also was also corrupt and illegitimate government under a succession of leaders. For example, the 2010-2013 Kabul Bank scandal involved politicians who usurped $1 billion of funds to finance their own lavish lifestyles. The common people are not going to risk lives for corrupt leaders.
Ukraine, while also having a reputation as corrupt, has a legitimate democratically elected government and is taking steps to eliminate corruption in its efforts to link up with the European Union. The government has the support of the general citizenry which was never the case in either Afghanistan or Vietnam. And importantly Ukrainians are fighting and dying themselves and have been since 2014.
Putin is weak. Weakness is evident in utilizing Shahid drone strikes on civilians. That is not a tactic utilized by someone who has dominating military capability. Putin has lost his proxy in Syria. His proxy in Georgia is seeing demonstrations in the streets. There are rumors of Ramzan Kadyrov, Putin’s proxy in Chechyna, being in ill health and no apparent successor. So far Putin has shielded the wealthy Moscow and St Petersburg from the reality of war, but sanctions are taking hold. Russia’s gains on the battlefield for the most part only come about due to soldiers who are criminals or in debt. There is no sense of purpose in fighting for a cause.