The Last Grim Goodbye

The last images of the war: U.S. Marines with rifle butts pounding the fingers of Vietnamese who tried to claw their way into the embassy compound to escape from their homeland. An apocalyptic carnival air--some looters wildly driving abandoned embassy cars around the city until they ran out of gas; others ransacking Saigon's Newport PX, that transplanted dream of American suburbia, with one woman bearing off two cases of maraschino cherries on her head and another a case of Wrigley's Spearmint gum. Out in the South China Sea, millions of dollars worth of helicopters profligately tossed overboard from U.S. rescue ships, discarded like pop-top beer cans to make room for later-arriving choppers.

In the end, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese poured into Saigon, raised the flag of the Provisional Revolutionary Government and took into custody South Vietnamese President Duong Van Minh and Premier Vu Van Mao. For many Americans, it was like a death that had long been expected, but was shocking when it finally happened.

So the century's longest war was over, in an efficient but ignominious evacuation. It was nightmarish enough, but it could have been worse; only a few South Vietnamese soldiers fired at the departing Americans, and none were on target. At least the U.S. was spared the last awful spectacle of its people fighting a pitched battle with its late friends and allies. In fact, the Americans managed to bring about 120,000 South Vietnamese refugees out with them.

Perhaps appropriately, the American goodbye to Viet Nam was the one operation in all the years of the war that was utterly without illusion.

So much so that Americans were recoiling from any reminder of the war--even at the risk of betraying some of their best ideals. In California, Arkansas, Florida and other sites where South Vietnamese refugees might be settling, many citizens were angrily telling them to stay away; there were not enough jobs even for Americans. It was not an edifying performance in a nation settled by immigrants and refugees.

There was something surrealist in the swiftness of the last catastrophe--a drama made doubly bitter by the fact that most Americans had made their emotional peace with Viet Nam more than two years ago. The P.O.W.s had come home, the last American soldiers had withdrawn. The nation turned, not very happily, to other preoccupations--to Watergate and then to coping with recession and inflation. But since Viet Nam had deceived Americans so many times before, it was perhaps fitting that it should be the only war they would have to lose twice.

Having come to terms two years ago with Viet Nam, most Americans wanted to put it behind them again. Gerald Ford said earnestly: "This action closes a chapter in the American experience. I ask all Americans to close ranks, to avoid recrimination about the past, to look ahead to the many goals we share and to work together on the great tasks that remain to be accomplished."

For a variety of reasons, there was a subdued sense of shame--for some because the nation, as they saw it, had become involved in such a disastrous futility in the first place; for others because the U.S., as they believed, had betrayed an ally and nullified the years of its own sacrifice. As he was about to go for coffee with some bankers and businessmen in Warren, Ark., Newspaper Editor Bob Newton remarked: "Viet Nam will never come up in the conversation. Everybody is embarrassed. It is almost unreal that this could have happened to us."

Fitfully but emphatically, the old polarities of the '60s could still reassert themselves. At Berkeley, the cradle of student radicalism, some 1,000 demonstrators marched with Viet Cong flags to cheer the Communist victory. Activist Tom Hayden called the fall of Saigon "the rise of Indochina."

Some conservatives formulated a stab-in-the-back theory. Lecturing at

Georgia Tech, California's ex-Governor Ronald Reagan drew cheers when he blamed "the most irresponsible Congress in our history" for the collapse in Viet Nam. A bitter editorial in the conservative Indianapolis Star declared: "After the Americans of a braver generation destroyed the Nazis and the horrors of concentration camps became known, pictures of the atrocities were published all over Germany with the caption Wessen Schuld?--'Who is to blame?' The same question applies today." Such rhetoric raised the question of whether Viet Nam might become a campaign issue in 1976. For Republicans to blame a Democratic Congress for "losing" Viet Nam, however, might be risky; it was a Republican Administration, after all, that presided over the Paris peace treaties and the policy since. There will always be room for the question whether the U.S. could have got out sooner and in better order.

For the moment, it seemed unlikely that the U.S. would have the stomach to refight Viet Nam. The war had already cost too much in lives and money wasted 9,000 miles away--more than 56,000 Americans dead and 303,000 wounded, upwards of 1 million dead Vietnamese, $141 billion spent, 7 million tons of bombs dropped--and all for a war that came, more or less, to nothing. The cost had also been exorbitant in hatred and alienation at home.

The macabre carnival of the '60s has long since subsided, although it worked profound changes in America. It remains a question, though, what lessons were carried away from Viet Nam on those last helicopters (see Opinion, page 20). And how Americans finally feel about the aftermath will partly depend on how the victors act in Indochina.

Meeting with some Republican congressional leaders last week, President Ford had some disquieting news from mystery-shrouded Cambodia, which the Khmer Rouge have all but hermetically sealed. The victorious Khmer Rouge forces, he said, had executed 80 high-ranking officers of the defeated Cambodian army. Then Ford added: "They killed the wives too. They said the wives were just the same as their husbands. This is a horrible thing to report to you, but we are certain that our sources are accurate." Said one of the Senators who attended the meeting: "There was a gasp around the table." Other reports from Cambodia under its new Khmer Rouge regime--which already claimed a seat in the United Nations--were disturbing. Refugees reported executions of 100 wealthy or religious figures--and the numbers might rise. Four monks were said to have been shot to death on the steps of a pagoda when they refused to leave.

The new rulers announced that they would "firmly adhere to a policy of independence, peace, neutrality and non-alignment." Some observers thought that the statement was not directed so much at the U.S. as at Hanoi, which used Cambodia as a staging and resupply area for the war in South Viet Nam for more than a decade. But that would be cold comfort for the U.S. if a much-feared "bloodbath" were to happen.

In an important sense, the U.S. is now freed to make a new start, and to act with renewed vigor and judgment elsewhere in the world. But "putting Viet Nam behind us" may not be so easy, after all. Ending America's mental and emotional involvement may prove as hard as ending its physical involvement. The U.S. may have to live for some time with old--and new--nightmares.

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