Fall of Saigon

[CADPAT SOLDIER]

Article http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7684222

Today, Was the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, It marked the official end to the Vietnam conflict. The victory was celebreated by the Communist goverment in   HO CHI MINH CITY (Saigon) with parades and fanfare. I wonder if any american veterans look back today and how they feel?




HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam - Waving red flags, troops marched Saturday down the boulevard along which North Vietnamese tanks rolled into this city 30 years ago in a victory ending the Vietnam War.

Hundreds of aging veterans, their chests decked with medals, watched from the sidelines as the soldiers headed toward the Presidential Palace. The legendary Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap was among them, standing alongside the president.

Giant billboards of Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam's revolutionary leader, overlooked the parade route and adjoining streets, which had been blocked off to the public due to security concerns.

On April 30, 1975, Communist tanks barreled through the palace gates in what was then Saigon, capital of South Vietnam. The city's fall marked the official end of the Vietnam War, and the United States' decade-long campaign against communism in Southeast Asia. The war claimed some 58,000 American lives and an estimated 3 million Vietnamese.

â Å“I was listening to the radio with my family and heard that Saigon had been liberated. I was very happy because for many years we weren't free. After 30 years we have rebuilt our country. Our land is safe and secure and I think the future will be better for my children,â ? said To Thanh Nghia, 51, a government worker marching in the parade.

'Future will be good'
The atmosphere in the country three decades later has been mostly festive, focusing on Vietnam's recent economic rejuvenation. Memories of the war and its aftermath are little more than anecdotes in history books for most Vietnamese who were born after it ended.


â Å“My father and grandfather fought in the war but I was too young. I think my future will be good because they created opportunities for my generation,â ? said Nguyen Thanh Tung, an 18-year-old student.

Along the grand boulevard where communist tanks once rolled, capitalism has taken solid root. Some parade floats, sponsored by Vietnamese banks, sported the logo of American credit card companies. One float featured women pushing shopping carts filled with supermarket goods.

These days, Le Duan Street is home to Diamond Plaza, a glittering, upscale department store where French perfumes and Italian shoes are sold to an emerging urban, middle class. Along the same strip, a French-owned five-star hotel sits across the street from the U.S. consulate.

'Economic locomotive'
While Vietnam proudly recalled its victories over both the United States and colonial France, the focus was clearly on the future.

â Å“Through our two resistance (wars) against foreign aggressors, the historical clashes in Saigon will always be in the forefront,â ? President Tran Duc Luong said to cheers from the crowd. He called Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, the country's â Å“economic locomotive.â ?


Desmond Boylan / Reuters
Youths in Ho Chi Minh City display the Vietnamese flag during a parade Saturday to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the end of the war with the United States.

With the president on the giant reviewing platform was a guest of honor, Raul Castro, the brother of Cuba's longtime leader Fidel Castro who stood by Vietnam's communist regime for decades. Also flanking the leader was Giap, the military mastermind behind the defeat of French forces at Dien Bien Phu and later, ousting the Americans.

Despite Vietnam's remarkable recovery from the devastation of war, most of its largely agrarian population of 82 million remains poor with per capita income hovering around $550 a year.

But Vietnam is on the crest of an economic wave, recording an annual growth of 7.7 percent last year â ” second only to China in Asia. One of the biggest signs of that is the construction under way in much of Ho Chi Minh City.

Luu Quang Dong, a 68-year-old veteran from northern Vinh Phuc province, traveled for four days via bus to attend Saturday's ceremony.

Dressed in his olive uniform covered in red and gold medals, he said he made the trip to see the city he had stormed into three decades ago, arriving with his unit just minutes after the tanks crashed through the palace gates.

â Å“I wanted to come and see how much the city has changed,â ? he said.

Reconciliation looms large
Though the North and South reunified three decades ago, the task of reconciliation still looms large.

On Friday, Prime Minister Phan Van Khai reached out to Vietnam's former enemies, urging them to â Å“close the past, look to the future.â ?

The United States has become Vietnam's single-largest trading partner. But relations with overseas Vietnamese, who sent back nearly $4 billion in remittances last year, remain more sensitive.

Despite the government's message of reconciliation, lingering mistrust continues. Earlier this week, the government banned a book of love songs from the pre-1975 era.

â Å“Thirty years after the war, the country is really reconciled now. Maybe some people still feel bitter about the liberation of Saigon but that number is very small,â ? said Han Van Minh, 65, who was a sergeant in the Saigon army and now runs a small business.

 

[DBA]

Another viewpoint on the same event and what happened in the years after it : http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/moonbatcentral/2005/04/30th-anniversary-of-start-of-southeast.html

30th Anniversary of the Start of Southeast Asia's Communist Genocide: A Leftist Day of Shame

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon and the start of the genocidal bloodbath that occurred when communist revolutionaries in Vietnam and Cambodia, unchecked by U.S. military might, began the wholesale imposition of Marxist "social justice" on their peoples.

Shortly after Saigon was captured by North Vietnam, one million South Vietnamese residents were forced to move to so-called "New Economic Zones." Re-education camps, a staple of communist regimes, were quickly established. Executions became commonplace.

The implementation of "social justice" in South Vietnam was so "successful," that one million Vietnamese fled their country for the open seas, choosing to risk death by drowning while seeking asylum in other lands, over the imprisonment, starvation, torture and execution that had become official state policy in their native country.

In Cambodia, similar events of far worse magnitude began unfolding two weeks earlier on April 17, 1975 when the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh to begin an attempt at creating a communist Utopia in record time.

Viewing all cities as places corrupted with capitalists, intellectuals and foreign influence, the Khmer Rouge forced the evacuation of Cambodian cities, including Phnom Penh, one of 2.5 million people. Phnom Penh's inhabitants, including hospital patients, were thrown out into the streets at gunpoint and forced to march to the countryside where, if they survived the march, they were made to work the fields-- torture and death and starvation their constant companions as they slaved away.

A British journalist who was observing the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh from the safety of the French embassy had this to say about the evacuation of its hospitals: [the Khmer Rouge] was tipping out patients like garbage in the streets...Bandaged men and women hobbled by the embassy. Wives pushed wounded soldier husbands on hospital beds on wheels, some with serum drips still attached. In five years of war, this is the greatest caravan of human misery I have seen."

Once established, the Khmer Rouge controlled all aspects of human activity. It disallowed freedom of speech, banned religion, eliminated all human rights and forbid ownership, even of one's own clothes. Anyone suspected of having ties to the West or Cambodia's deposed government was summarily executed, as were all their relatives down to second cousins. The Khmer Rouge eliminated all currency, shut down all schools, universities and hospitals. It eliminated professional occupations including law, medicine and engineering. It banned the traditional family. It forbade Cambodians to cook or eat outside a forced communal setting. In short, the Khmer Rouge obliterated, root and branch, the entire socio-economic fabric of Cambodia in an effort to construct a perfect society where all were equal and content.

When the quest for a perfect society ended in 1979, one-third of Cambodia's 1975 population was dead.

Just prior to the U.S. withdrawl from Saigon, NY Times columnist Sydney Schanberg penned a piece titled, "Indochina without Americans: For Most, a Better Life." It reflected the wide-held view of the mainstream media of the time. Schanberg concluded that, "it is difficult to imagine how their [Southeast Asian's] lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone."

Mr. Schanberg's foresight was, like so many other leftists', shrouded by reflexive anti-Americanism.

I've spent much of today reading about the wide-spread horror that happened as a result of the U.S. abandoning Southeast Asia to communists. I'm in no mood to mince words--the American far Left caused the defeat of the U.S. in Indochina. The far Left deliberately sapped the will of America to fight and win in Vietnam. It cleverly enlisted the news media, one already sympathetic to its cause, into helping it destroy a proud nation's will. It deliberately intimidated gutless U.S. government officials into acceptance of military defeat. Its members directly aided our communist enemies-- no surprise there, since the far Left's leadership was composed mainly of communists, just as it is today. It deliberately vilified our brave soldiers, while its loud-mouth members cowered behind deferments and one-way trips to Canada. It heartily wished for and worked towards our country's defeat, just as it wishes for America's defeat in Iraq today.

It has the blood of Cambodia's killing fields on its hands and it would risk spilling the blood of a million Iraqis if that risk guaranteed America's defeat.

For the far Left, today should be marked as a day of great shame.

 

[Whiskey_Dan]

I was in Vietnam in early Janurary and I can tell you, the people of Vietnam are very happy with their government today. They are building new roads, new infrastructure, an expanded airport in Saigon (no S. Vietnamese calls it HoChiMinh City), and all the new high rises being built by foreign companies.
My family, being from S. Vietnam, still has no trust for the Northern government, and I am sure there are many others who feel the same way. My uncle (dad's twin), died during the US-led invasion of Cambodia while my dad himself narrowly escaped the tanks that entered Saigon some 30 years ago while serving with the US Army then the Army of S. Vietnam, arriving with the "boat people" in the late 70's.
But on April 30th people didn't just celebrate, they also mourned, for so many lives were lost the day those communist tanks began rolling through the streets of Saigon. I attended one of the mourning ceremonies on Fraser St in Vancouver (most Viet in N. America are S. Vietnamese), they also thanked a nation that readily took them in and gave them shelter in time of need, Canada. In 1979 alone, 4000 such refugees were taken in and housed in places where people just took them in as their own. My dad was lucky to already have a brother living in Canada. It was a very authentic ceremony with veterans of the S. Vietnamese army taking part, and people attending it from as far south as California. From the looks on their faces, it still hurts a lot. That is why I joined cadets, and that is why I want to persue a career in the Canadian Forces. On Saturday night I was even commended for being the third generation in my family that would be in the military, espicially that of Canada. The freedom they fought for but unfortunately lost, is what I want to fight for.
And on behalf of S. Vietnamese living in Canada. Thank you Canada for being there.

Dan