Historians: What happened after we left Vietnam?

[elehhhhna]

I know a bloodbath was predicted--so what actually happened? I was still a kid & not paying that much attention.
Thank You.

[El Supremo]

1. I wasn't there, but...

Many of those who weren't able to escape were put into "reeducation" camps.

[BlueEyedSon]

2. American kids stopped dying there. Locals stopped dying from American

gunfire/bombs/napalm.

[okieinpain]

5. yeah, and now we want to sell them coke, and mickey-d's

[BlueEyedSon]

11. Thats a different issue. And it kills them slower.

"Economics is war pursued by other means."
--Raymond F. DeVoe

[KansDem]

20. It's ironic, isn't it? 58,000 Americans killed in VietNam...

and American corporations are falling all over each other to get in there and set up shop. Yet, no American has died in Cuba (at least "officially") and still we maintain the economic blockade.

Strange and ironic...

[trof]

9. Isn't it funny how that works?

We leave, we stop getting killed.
"They" stop getting killed.
It's insane.
:sarcasm:

[warrens]

3. Most members of the govt, military and corporate world

Spent two to five years in reeducation camps, bored to death. No bloodbath.

[bemildred]

4. All the dominoes fell, the West collapsed, and we're all Communist now. nt

[trof]

7. Yes, comrade.

I got my little red book right here.

[Dob Bole]

25. Shhh! QUIET!!!!!!

[gratuitous]

6. It was horrible

We had a whole bunch of Rambo movies.

Seriously though, as I recall there was indeed a period of rough justice wherein the winners dealt pretty sternly with the losers. Of course, the winners had just licked the mighty U S of A. Someone with more knowledge than I can probably provide more details.

[ArkDem]

8. Search for 're-education camps + Vietnam' and 'boat people'.

[Aristus]

10. All of Vietnam became Communist.

But in name only. I read the book of a fellow travelling in Vietnam and he remarked that in Ho Chi Minh City, there were capitalists everywhere you looked. EVERYBODY was selling something. Everybody was setting himself up in business to cater to the material desires of the newly reunited Vietnamese. The notion that Vietnam was some kind of model of modern Marxism was destroyed by the sight of people hustling after hard currency with all their might.

If the Vietnamese had just been allowed to hold their free elections in 1954, elections the U.S. cancelled because it was known that Ho Chi Minh would win, they would have adopted Communism, found out on their own that it didn't work, and gone peacefully back to being an agricultural and mercantile nation without one innocent American or Vietnamese having to die.

[annabanana]

12. Pol Pot, Cambodia

bad business

[tocqueville]

13. bloodbath on montagnards and a lot of repression and suffering

Fear of persecution caused many highly skilled and educated South Vietnamese connected with the former regime to flee the country during the fall of Saigon and the years following, severely depleting human capital in Vietnam. The new government promptly sent people connected to the South Vietnam regime to concentration camps for "re-education", often for years at a time. Others were sent to so-called "new economic zones" to develop the undeveloped land. Furthermore, the victorious Communist government implemented land reforms in the south similar to those implemented in North Vietnam earlier. However, it is as well to remember that large areas of land in South Vietnam had already been appropriated by the communists well before the end of the war—and their owners compensated for the loss by the South Vietnamese government. Persecution and poverty prompted an additional 2 million people to flee Vietnam as boat people over the 20 years following unification. The problem was so severe that during the 1980s and 1990s the UN established refugee camps in neighboring countries to process them. Many of these refugees resettled in the United States, forming large Vietnamese-American emigrant communities with a decidedly anti-communist viewpoint.

The new unified Vietnamese government also took it upon themselves to punish the indigenous highland Montagnard tribes Vietnam, for their long term opposition to Hanoi, and their cooperation with the United States during the war. Between 1975 and 1978, the Vietnamese government carried out retributions against the highland tribes; imprisoning or executing nearly all prominent tribal leaders and confiscating fertile tribal lands for coffee plantations. Several human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, has called this an act of genocide.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War

[Javaman]

14. After we left, Vietnam went on to drive Pol Pot and the rest of his..

US supported Khmer Rouge out of Cambodia. Thus freeing the people from us once again. funny how that works, huh?

[Yupster]

19. I thought we supported Lon Nol's

military government that was fighting against the Khmer Rouge? The Khmer Rouge were the communists.

[Poiuyt]

22. We did support Lon Nol

It gets confusing. Sihanouk was the king and was somewhat neutral though the US saw him as siding with the Viet Cong. Sihanouk didn't like being deposed by Lon Nol, so he put his support behind Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge made Lon Nol pretty insignificant and totally took over power when the US left Viet Nam. That's when the "Killing Fields" took place. A few years later the Vietnamese government invaded Cambodia and Pol Pot fled.

It is believed that the Killing Fields would never had happened if the US had not destabilized the area.

[Yupster]

23. So we supported Lon Nol

and the communists beat him anyway.

And once the communists took over they went on a murdering rampage.

And somehow we're to blame for this too?

Is there anything in the history of the world that the US is not to be blamed for?

The guys we were against went on a rampage and it was our fault.

So if the side we were for went on a rampage who's fault would that have been?

Somehow I have a feeling that would have been our fault too.

[elehhhhna]

15. Thanks everybody! Anyone care to posit what the result would be

had we stayed?

[Yupster]

21. That's an interesting question

The most interesting part of the Vietnam war to me was the year 1974.

We had pulled our combat troops out so the war was up to the South Vietnamese to fight on their own.

In the spring of 1974, the North Vietnamese crossed the DMZ in a major attack of northern South Vietnam. This was a major all-out assault with tanks, etc.

The attack quickly overran some cities and some South Vietnamese (ARVN) units buckled or ran. This was the test for Vietnamization.

Then something interesting happened.

The ARVN moved reinforcements to the north, counterattacked, pushed the North Vietnamese out of the captured land and cities back across the DMZ, and Washington and Saigon breathed a sigh of relief.

The ARVN (with American airpower) defeated the North Vietnamese offensive, retook their land, and was okay. Vietnamization worked.

Next year in 1975, the North Vietnamese again prepared for a major attack of the south.

Faced with a congeressional cutoff of aid from the US, the ARVN leadership made a disastrous decision. They voluntarily withdrew from the sparcely populated central highlands region of their country where it especially took lots of helicopters and fuel to defend.

That withdrawel turned into a disaster. The troops leaving panicked, and spread panic to the troops in the regions they were entering. By the time the ANV attacked, the ARVN was already whipped, and just fell apart. The ANV ended up just rolling up the whole country, and there was nothing even resembling a big batle. A few ARVN divisions made stands but were outflanked or overwhelmed.

It was an amazing change from one year to another.

The US history says that the ARVN was an army that was not willing o fight to defend its country, but the year 1974 shows there's more to that story as does the whole war. The ARVN took ten times the casualties that we did through the war, and in 1974, defeated the ANV in large battles pretty much on their own.

Then the next year they just fell to pieces.

It asks the question, could the ARVN have defended itself if we didn't cut off their aid?

It really can't be answered.

There are supposed to be some books coming out in the next year or two written by ARVN officers and telling the war from their side. I think those books may add quite a bit to our knowledge of the war, which was probably a lot more complicated a picture than most of us think.

PS - After the war, in Vietnam there was not really a bloodbath. Thousands were sent off to camps. Hundreds of thousands gave up everything to get away with their lives either trying their luck in a boat on the open seas or walking all the way to Thailand. Tribal groups in Vietnam who supported us did suffer bloodbaths at the hands of the victorious communists.

In Cambodia, the Cambodian government that was supporting the US fell just a month or so before Saigon. It fought until the last bullet was shot, and there was a bloodbath there called the Killing Fields. That we didn't even get our friendlies out of Cambodia before the communists took over is a shame on America.

In Laos, it's hard to tell what happened. The friendly government there also fell at the same time. Like Vietnam, the Montagnards who largely supported us have been oppressed since. I don't think anyone really knows what happened there after the war.

[Journeyman]

16. Now's maybe a time you need to pick up a book . . .

Of the 13 replies so far, 12 were fairly useless, 1 sent you to Wikipedia. Find a good book or seek out some good websites. Some subjects just don't lend themselves to the easy, superficial treatment of so many discussion forum posts.

[elehhhhna]

18. any suggestions?

[Yupster]

24. I think it's tough

I don't think a learned history of Vietnam has been written yet.

There's lots of books from our side.

The North Vietnamese have recently been writing their accounts.

What's missing are works from inside South Vietnam and Cambodia. I think that's the storythat hasn't been told.

I don't think we really want to hear it either because it's going to be the story of the US training their armies to fight our style of very expensive warfare, and then pulling the rug out from under them.

Whether they ever had a chance is of course open to debate, but training them and having them fight for years and years taking far greater casualties than we ever did only to leave them behind will not be a story we'll be quick to read about.

[txaslftist]

17. Americans stopped dying there.

For no damn reason.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

26. Considering that at least a couple MILLION Vietnamese died at the hands of

the U.S. and its allies during the U.S. involvement, I'm not aware that any 'bloodbath' that took place subsequently came close to matching this.