[jimmies]

I am a software developer in the US with a Vietnamese origin, so I am no historian and my views are probably skewed.

I am among the minority Northern Vietnamese people in the US, most Vietnamese people in the Bay Area are (refugees) from the South. People can tell where one comes from with one's accent. It was undeniable that much suffering and injustice was done for Southern people, especially after the war ended. So many still have a lot of resentments against the Hanoi government in particular and people from the North in general. Some still secretly view Northen international students in the US as red princes and princesses. The truth is far from that, they are just ordinary people looking for a better life. Many of the Northern people also have resentments with the current government as much as anyone else. However, I have to say much of the suffering and conflict is fading. I am so glad that in the last three years I was in the Bay Area, I have made many new Vietnamese friends, and have gone to many Vietnamese-owned shops buying groceries. I have not once had bad experiences with anyone in here. We spoke to each other and caring about each other despite of the differences.

When I was a student in the US, I borrowed as many books and DVDs about the Vietnam war I could from the library and began watching to understand where I came from, and what to make of the war. I am still searching for the answer. One thing I began to understand is the reason that the North won the war. The people from the North did have a charismatic leader and more importantly, they had a sense of righteousness and revenge when they participated in the war. I still remember vividly, one day I watched an (American) documentary about a farmer after the 1972 bombing operation. The bomb killed all of his family members and all the pigs he raised and left him with nothing. He cried and vowed to fight till he dies. The guy had lost everything, he had nothing left to lose. That was the moment I realized it was inevitable that the North would inevitably win.

I see that pattern a lot in places that talked about the war, for example in the article:

>She was only 24 years old but had been widowed twice. Both her husbands were soldiers. I saw her as the embodiment of the ideal guerrilla woman, who’d made great sacrifices for her country.

I do not have as much exposure (or at least as much as I wished) to the literature, arts, and music of the South, but I can say that the sense of righteousness while fighting wasn't as strong in places that I have looked into.

My (personal and flawed) conclusion is that it wasn't the policy, the brainwashing, or the political power of communism, or the help of Russia that made the North win. They won despite despite being poor as hell, they won despite being communist, and they won despite having lost more troops. They won because they took part in the war with a sense of righteousness.

By chance, I just revisited the Vietnam war and the scar it left a couple of days ago, how much it matters in my everyday life, and wrote an essay about it on my blog. Here is the blog I wrote a couple of days ago about the war, btw, if you're so interested: http://www.tnhh.net/posts/lullaby-of-the-artillery.html

[mturmon]

> They won because they took part in the war with a sense of righteousness.

This belief is certainly reflected in one of the best books I've read about the Vietnam War, A Bright Shining Lie, by Neil Sheehan, who was a reporter there throughout the war and devoted a large part of his life to chronicling it.

He repeatedly shows how the ARVN (South Vietnamese Army), from commanders down to recruits, were not deeply motivated in the same way the Viet Cong were - abandoning battlefields, taking bribes to leave the front, etc. Additionally, the South Vietnamese political class was a corrupt gerontocracy with little in common with the people (either peasant farmers or urban) they were supposed to be leading.

For that reason, early American observers said they'd rather be on the side of the North than the South.

[Rendello]

I like this video about a soldier on the ground who realized quickly why the war was unwinnable. The cycle of killing and destruction left the people with nothing but anger and pain, leading them to fight even harder:

> it became clear within three or four months, That my reasons for being in Vietnam were not clear. I mean this notion of defending the people against these invaders from North Vietnam. The people hated me. The Vietnamese people hated me. [...] the Vietnamese people hated me and I gave them every reason to hate me. I beat them, I sometimes kill them, I destroy their houses, I destroy their crops, I destroy their fields, I destroy their culture. Why in the hell should those people like me? And I could see that I was doing that, and I could see that nothing we were doing was having any impact on the war itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tixOyiR8B-8

[vishnugupta]

I think that video is part of a bigger documentary series by PBS[1]. I learned so much about the modern US history and how even to this day the Vietnam war continues to exert its influence in the US in many different ways.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam-war

[csours]

The US had no real conception of what 'winning' was, no real connection to the actual politics.

[lordnacho]

I have a bunch of family in the Bay Area, who ended up there from North Vietnam. You're right that the accents can be recognized, but I also think you're right that resentments have faded. At least I'm pretty sure one of my cousins married a South Vietnamese lady a few years ago.

We still have a couple of stories in the family about the bombings. I wonder how accurate the details are.

One was my uncle, who was driving a truck over the last bridge to be bombed in Hanoi. He got to the bridge, it got bombed, and everyone was looking for his body for days. My grandmother was at the river every day. Luckily, he had somehow not gotten killed, and was in fact stuck on the wrong side, safe. He'd driven upriver to the next crossing, which took some time.

The other story is that my mom's neighbour had a bomb land in her house. The family was killed, apart from the girl, who was my mom's age. My grandmother took her in to live with them. I think the memory had quite an impression on my parents, as they in turn took in a girl to live with them later in life.

[marcodiego]

> The bomb killed all of his family members and all the pigs he raised and left him with nothing. He cried and vowed to fight till he dies.

That's why Sun-Tzu teaches to always leave an escape route for enemy, otherwise he will fight to the last man and inflict more damage than giving up.

[alephnan]

As a south Vietnamese refugee, I think you make good points. I disagree here:

> The guy had lost everything, he had nothing left to lose. That was the moment I realized it was inevitable that the North would inevitably win

I think we can find many counterexamples of other peoples where the result did not turn out in their favor

[baybal2]

If find it more often than not, the side losing the war is the one who thinks that the war was probably a good idea, and than it wasn't.

When your soldiers starting to think "wtf am doing here?," after first thinking they were going for a picnic, you loose in a short order. And even faster if soldier also think that their political leadership are idiots.

[lenkite]

A lot of wars in history have been won by invaders who chose near total genocide of the male population of annexed territories.

Many nations opposed by a military-superior enemy have lost no matter their sense of righteousness.

The Vietnamese won because they managed to inflict sufficiently large number of American casualties that the US lost the will to war. Some folks say wars are won by logistics and not tactics. But it seems that Vietcong guerrilla tactics were far superior to American ones at the time.

All credit to them. To be honest, few nations could have managed this. In that era they were likely the most battle-hardened people in the world.

[zhdc1]

> The Vietnamese won because they managed to inflict sufficiently large number of American casualties that the US lost the will to war. Some folks say wars are won by logistics and not tactics. But it seems that Vietcong guerrilla tactics were far superior to American ones at the time.

It's also worth mentioning that the US had no reasonable way to "win". The threat of Chinese involvement prevented them from invading the north, and strategic air campaigns alone aren't enough when it comes to guerrilla warfare.

[pmoriarty]

Not to mention that the US had a huge antiwar movement, a widely despised draft, and a media which actually did real reporting on the war.

Without these it's quite possible that the US might have used overwhelming force (like nukes) to "win" the Vietnam War.[1]

[1] - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/nixon-want...

[mturmon]

Nixon admits within the tape that he's trying to incite Kissinger, whom he is addressing. Both of them knew the risks of increasing the stakes in Vietnam.

The threat of Chinese reaction to American over-reach was very real. It happened in Korea and the Americans didn't want to repeat that mistake.

The U.S. did try to use overwhelming force in Vietnam. It literally dropped more bomb tonnage on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia than it did during the whole of WWII. It drafted all the men the country would stand. It destroyed one, if not two, Presidents. Still not enough.

I guess the point of my comment is to push back against the suggestion that the US "could have won" except for pesky morals and domestic critics.

[Khaine]

America lost Vietnam because they failed to understand how to undertake counter insurgency operations, they threw untrained conscripts (who didn’t want to be there, and fucked up) into it. They also didn’t care about winning hearts and minds of the local population to drive support away from the VietCong, measuring success by bodycount.

Vietnam massively scared the US military for a long time, only really going away with the massive success of the Gulf War. It is always valuable to get the other sides perspective on a conflict.

Ultimately in a civil war, both sides are usually good and bad, depending on the perspective you take. The vietnam war was no different. It is good to see that the wounds of the war are mostly healed.

[macintux]

Thank you for sharing this with us.

[akarma]

Thank you for sharing. I read your blog and it was really well-said and moving. I shared it with a friend who thought it was poignant and fantastic writing. If you ever create a Substack or something of the sort, I'd certainly subscribe.

[contradaira]

>Many of the Northern people also have resentments with the current government as much as anyone else. However, I have to say much of the suffering and conflict is fading. I am so glad that in the last three years I was in the Bay Area, I have made many new Vietnamese friends, and have gone to many Vietnamese-owned shops buying groceries. I have not once had bad experiences with anyone in here. We spoke to each other and caring about each other despite of the differences.

Former bureaucrats and their children, who fled Vietnam before 2009, are always having disgruntled feeling against Vietnam and Vietnamese successes in general. I know a bunch of them but they won't exist much any longer since Vietnam will aggressively become more powerful and extend its Communist influence overseas. It's merely a matter of time that you will not only see hatred from anti-Communist side disappearing but also pro-Communist side triumphs.

I strolled around many Chinatowns across the US to Europe, and I see PRC flags and Chinese United Fronts everywhere. This is the future of overseas Vietnamese communities.

>My (personal and flawed) conclusion is that it wasn't the policy, the brainwashing, or the political power of communism, or the help of Russia that made the North win. They won despite despite being poor as hell, they won despite being communist, and they won despite having lost more troops. They won because they took part in the war with a sense of righteousness.

They won because they have been largely smarter than history. Trần Văn Hương, a former top RVN official, once said that only Northerners can reign the country supreme, while Southerners and Centralers are more fitting at commerce and warfare which Northerners are also very proficient. This is also my similar observation in the overseas Vietnamese communities where those Vietnamese people of Northern background or Chinese Vietnamese are largely more successful than anyone in the community - mostly Northerners.

The North won because it had been cultured, determined, militant, more clever due to centures of exposure with threats from China.

[nsonha]

> It's merely a matter of time that you will not only see hatred from anti-Communist side disappearing but also pro-Communist side triumphs.

As a Vietnamese I don't see this happening, if you think because it happened in China then it'll happen in Vietnam too, there are a couple of differences:

1) Vietnam doesn't have a "middle kingdom" mentality, we've always been and always will be a small country navigating our success with bigger powers around, so less of that blind nationalism bs, eventhough it's there

2) More importantly, we don't have a great firewall, so people are only going to be more disillussioned about the regime as more of them learn about the outside world.

I am pro socialism btw but of course it's a different thing. Socialism is a growing mindset in the west for sure.

[graderjs]

Thanks for sharing your stories. I liked your blog post. I felt sadness, fear about the future and past, and hope as well as strength in there. I'm sorry this will probably seem like an inconsiderate or dumb question, and I don't know much about Vietnam's history or government, but I wanted to ask what do you think, or what do Vietnamese people think these days, about China's success with their socialism model?