The War That Won't Die
Carol Wilder

Although the rules do not explicitly say so,
it is suggested that you don’t ask the guards
‘Is he dead?’

--Lonely Planet Vietnam Guide

Ho Chi Minh’s monumental final resting place shimmers in the sweltering heat. Uncle Ho didn’t want it this way, on display in a glass box in a concrete shrine. He requested cremation and the spreading of his ashes in north, central and south Vietnam. But the 3rd Politboro overruled, deciding in secret that Ho’s 1969 death, with the America War still raging, was awkward timing for such an inauspicious farewell. So his lifeless body was moved via air conditioned transport to a bomb-proof cave for a year of artistry by chief Soviet enbalmer Dr. Sergei Debrov.

By 1976 Ho Chi Minh was good as new, for a dead man, and the mausoleum was complete, its design often compared to the tomb of Lenin. It also bears an incongruous resemblance to the New York Stock Exchange headquarters. There is no mistaking that it houses something important. This is my fourth visit to the mausoleum, which sounds a little peculiar on the face of it. But the first time in 1993 as a guest of the Ministry of Labor, was obligatory. The second and third visits I was accompanying friends new to Hanoi. And today I return to ask in my search for living Vietnam, “Is he dead?”

This time I think I am prepared for the drill: no cameras, no bags, no tank tops, no hands in pockets, no hats. Alas, today I learn that anything sleeveless is a tank top, and am loaned a polo shirt the way private clubs lend neckties to gentlemen who have overlooked the dress code. The line is endless; never visit on a Sunday.

The tomb room is dark except for pinkish orange spots turned on Ho’s paper pale face and hands. He is wears a blue mandarin jacket and is covered by waist high blanket. We are marched briskly around the bier, attended at each corner by a fine-looking armed guard in white uniform and gloves. Ho seems larger than expected, wispy beard wispier, composed, and, yes, definitely dead, albeit a living legend in a living Vietnam.
In Vietnam the war is gone but not forgotten, reflected upon but resolved, remembered with sadness for the loss and sacrifice it exacted, acknowledged with a quiet pride. Seventy million out of Vietnam's nine-three million people were not born when the war officially ended in 1975. It also helps to be the victor. It also helps to remember that the U.S. was but a long line of invaders – China for centuries, Japan, France – who tested their will on this country not much bigger than California, and failed. America to Vietnam is just a cowboy country that passed through. Vietnam in America is still seen almost entirely through the lens of war, President Bill Clinton’s sloganeering during his November 2000 visit -- “Vietnam is a country not a war” -- didn’t change that. Clinton’s enthusiastic welcome by the Vietnamese people was tempered by somewhat more guarded official speeches, but the net effect was open-armed. The Vietnamese are understandably wary about their former enemy turned friend, but the American War is history.

The Vietnam War in America is the Undead War. Just when you think the corpse has been laid to rest, it bolts upright in the coffin in the middle of the funeral. A zombie/vampire combo whose psycho-signature movie is closer to George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead than to Platoon or Apocalypse Now; whose TV show is not M.A.S.H. but Dark Shadows, aired at 4 p.m. daily from 1966-71, just between school and the evening news. Vietnam lives in America as part of a national embarrassment and shame at what was lost; it lives in anger for those who believe the U.S. cut and ran and could have won.

Walking out of the stone mausoleum into the dazzling day, I try to catch my breath. You can smell, taste, feel, weigh, bathe in the Hanoi air even when it’s not the height of summer. Home in Manhattan, where it doesn’t even get this hot in the W. 4th St. subway station, seems remote. Yet walking away from the idolized Uncle Ho, thinking about the undead war, recall my New School colleague John’s excited voice back in the year of 9/11 as he poked his head in my office, fresh from a meeting at the administration building.

* * * *

“The network news crews are all over Twelfth Street. I think it has something to do with Kerrey and Vietnam.” My mind went blank. Everyone knew New School President Bob Kerrey’s Vietnam story: Navy SEAL, lost a leg in Nha Trang and gained a Medal of Honor. War hero. A designation he always wore lightly but never disclaimed. It didn’t seem to hurt his political career. I had first met Bob Kerrey in the mid-1980s in a celebrated class on the Vietnam War taught by Walter Capps at UC Santa Barbara. He was the governor of Nebraska. It was the Debra Winger days. Capps' class was then the largest class in the UC system, with 1400 students. I was intrigued when New School named Kerrey president, as much because of the Vietnam connection as because of his unorthodox background for a college presidency. But if you are going to make a roll of the dice at a college badly in need of a higher profile, why not make this one?

I scrambled to make it home to catch the network news that night and turned to NBC, because I knew their overblown orchestral theme would set this drama up to a tee, though every network led with the story. Brokaw intoned: “Some shocking news from long ago and far away. . ." Three decades after the fact, war hero Bob Kerrey had been accused of a village massacre.

This set off a mediathon that lasted nearly three weeks – sort of a Columbine size media commodity – that included Dan Rather interviews, the punditocracy in full swing, and that mark of truly having made it – the cover of Time. It doesn’t really matter if you are Pol Pot or Mother Theresa at that level – infamy is its own reward in a culture of information consumers with lurid and rapacious appetites. And more savvy than Chance in Being There, we don’t only “like to watch.” CNN.com’s bulletin board on Bob Kerrey posted more than 1300 messages in the few weeks after the story broke, a priceless trove of public opinion.

I had more than a passing interest in the Kerrey affair, both as a long time student and scholar of Vietnam and because Bob Kerrey the leader of my university. But more than anything the sudden scandal reminded me of other times the corpse had sat bolt upright in the coffin, other times the veil of mystery about Vietnam had lifted or been ripped away. America’s fascination with Vietnam is never far from the surface, though sometimes years may pass between eruptions.

The undead war cannot make its peace because America hates a paradox, and Vietnam was as paradoxical as it gets. Worse yet, it runs counter to the national narrative of the U.S. as good guys and winners. Many disagreements continue to exist on how and why the war was lost; on the morality and need for it in the first place. Vietnam is full of secrets and lies. Its legacy is carried by the baby boomer generation who aren’t going to let anything having to do with them die ever if they can help it. Vietnam is sexy, sweaty. It is associated with a time (the 1960s, most of which took place in the 1970s) of sex and drugs and rock 'n roll that young people today can only imagine. It references an intensity of direct living and feeling that eludes today’s mediated second-hand lives. Vietnam is romantic. Faraway, lush and green, ceiling fans, vestiges of France's colonial la mission civilisatrice. Even the goriest portrayals – Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Deer Hunter – are beautifully horrible thanks to the imperative of cinematic glorification.

Vietnam is a great commodity. More than 5,000 books written, 30 feature films, millions of dollars in Ramboiana alone. The subject of the Vietnam War is mediagenic. It works for books, plays, video games, movies, talk radio, and endless internet chat and self-expression. There is even a “Virtual Vietnam Wall.” Vietnam has become a popular tourist destination, notwithstanding a 2009 drop due to the H1N1 virus. In 2008, Vietnam was visited by four million tourists, ten percent of them from North America. One thing that keeps Vietnam living for Americans is that the lack of catharsis that Aristotle prescribed as a necessary condition for the resolution of any tragedy. Many Americans, especially veterans, travel to Vietnam to see reminders of the war. Closer to home there are war memorial sites in cities and towns across the U.S. – notably at Kent State in Ohio and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. that exist precisely in order to keep the war and those who fought it alive.

* * * *

Tin soldiers and Nixon comin’
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drummin’
Four dead in Ohio
-- Neil Young

Four oblong granite stones line up like giant caskets one behind the other atop a leafy knoll on Kent State’s central campus. They are the centerpiece of the site commemorating Sandra Scheuer, Jeffrey Miller, William Schroeder, and Allison Krause, shot to death by Ohio National Guard troops on May 4, 1970. Four students were killed and nine wounded that day during an anti-war rally at high noon in the middle of the campus commons. The dead and wounded students were, on average, more than one hundred yards from the soldiers who shot them. Two students were shot from the front, seven from the side, and four in the back. One student was shot in the back of the neck from 250 yards. (Scranton Commission Report) Two of the dead were not a part of the rally; one was an ROTC cadet and one was on her way to class. Almost immediately, five million American college students went out on strike for the rest of the term. It ranks even now as the best of times and the worst of times for the Vietnam generation.

Early news reports identified the dead as guardsmen. State officials reported that the shooting started when a rooftop sniper opened fire on the guardsmen. General Sylvester Del Corso said “guardsmen facing almost certain injury and death were forced to open fire on the attackers.” None of these statements was true. A presidential commission later called the shootings “unnecessary, unwarranted and inexcusable.” (Scranton) It took twenty years, until 1990, for a memorial to be completed on the campus, following years of fractious debate and protest between activists and parents determined to remember and a university administration that would just as soon forget.

I am an accidental expert on Kent State, having been a graduate student there in 1970. In Ohio we used to say “if you can’t go to college go to Kent,” but it was the only place within commuting distance where I could study the then-obscure field of media and communication, and it was a good program. May 4th bestowed a morbid cachet on a school and place whose very ordinariness created the dramatic irony. Kent State? Not Berkeley, Columbia, Wisconsin? I entered a cow college as a complete political innocent and graduated from an icon, where, literally, the war came home.

May 4th has suffered a slow death by semantics over the years. In 1995, the University Publications Office requested that the word “shooting” be changed to “events” in a college newsletter. In the year 2000, an invitation I received from the “Coordinator of Public Relations” to speak at the 30th commemoration ceremonies, prescribed the topic: “The Mediated Reality of the Kent State Incident.” It continued: “The panel will examine the various histories and interpretations. . .and how specific audiences have accepted interpretations that make sense to their respective value system.” In my talk I addressed the value system that chose the neutered term “incident” to describe May 4th at its very own commemoration ceremony, making the point that words do matter. Why “incident”? Why not even the plainly descriptive “shootings” or “killings ? You don’t have to call it a “murder” or a “massacre,” neither of which is a stretch, to know that it was more than an “incident.” It is worrisome enough that among Kent students at that time, only two-thirds knew the year of the shootings, 58% could identify Nixon as the president at that time, and 16% knew the name of even one of the dead.

To my surprise, the mothers of William Schroeder and Jeffrey Miller were in the front rows. As the mother myself then of a twenty year old son, the age their boys were when they died, this choked me up, and I wish I could report that I threw away my prepared remarks and said something moving and profound. But all I could manage in the emotion of the moment was to thank them for attending and acknowledge their courage. Imagine, thirty years later there they were, tending the flame. I doubt if Mrs. Schroeder and Mrs. Miller talk about May 4th as an “incident.”
In 1999, memorial sites were dedicated to each of the slain students at the precise spots in the parking lot where they fell. Each May 3rd there is a midnight candlelight walk that ends in this place, where caretaking students maintain a vigil at each site and others leave poems, flowers, teddy bears, candles. This is where the secret ritual, the real ritual of remembrance of May 4th is enacted. It is a solemn line of mourners who walk through the night by candlelight around the campus and then from one to the other of these very personal sites of remembrance. If you ever think that Kent State is dead, appear some May 3rd at midnight in the parking lot behind Prentice Hall, and you may learn differently.

* * * *

“The ones who died were the lucky ones.”
-- Vietnam vet anon.

The most living relic of the Vietnam War -- the most vivid and seductive and scary -- is the Vietnam combat veteran, whose place is being taken in turn by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. Of the 2.7 million Americans who served in Vietnam, about one in five saw significant combat, which is not to say that the others had an easy time of it, but consider this:

A young boy is raised in a patriotic Christian culture to love god and country; to believe “thou shalt not kill.” At the age of 18, not yet old enough to drink orvote, he is given a “choice”: fight in a mysterious war far away, openly resist and face imprisonment, or leave the country in exile. Unable by virtue of social class to defer service or join the Texas National Guard, he enlists and begins a basic training calculated to override his lifetimes of values and make him into a killer. “Thou shalt not kill” becomes “Kill ‘em all. Let god sort ‘em out.”

He is sent half-way around the world alone on a one-year tour of duty in a situation so singularly merciless he will never be able to share the experience with those who were not there. He is thrust into a war that is not even declared a war, where he does not know who the enemy is, where the lines of battle are, or what the objectives may be, because the enemy is everywhere, the lines do not exist, and the objectives are both hopeless and hopelessly confused. It is a guerrilla war of perpetual terror. He learns the thrill of battle that comes with the excruciating fear, the start of a combat adrenaline addiction.

If he survives, he flies home (again alone) to Youngstown or Omaha or East L.A. He is barely twenty. His peers call him “baby killer.” Veterans of former wars call him “loser” or “coward.” He hears a story making the rounds that a WW II vet will get his drinks bought for him, a Korean vet will buy his own, and a Vietnam veteran has to buy for the bar to get out alive.

Everyone is now a little spooked by this brooding, strange and changed creature, and one thing for sure is that he doesn’t want to talk about it. And so for years, the movies do the talking for him, building an aggregate stock character from faces that may look different on the surface (Voight, Stallone, Gregory Hines, Martin Sheen, Tom Berenger, Al Pacino, Gary Sinise, Samuel L. Jackson) but add up to a consistent cultural narrative of victimization and blame. As different as these film portrayals of veterans may be, they most always follow a pattern of patriotism, trauma, disillusionment, and blame. “I was an Eagle Scout. I believed in America. Then they sent me over there and I saw my best buddy’s body parts blown up all over me. And for what? For this lousy godforsaken hellhole of a country where they don’t want us anyway? Fuck the world.”

Gregory Hines in White Nights gives the best Vietnam veteran speech on film. A defector to the Soviet Union, having gone through a bottle of vodka with Baryshnikov and Isabella Rosselini, he taps his way around the room delivering a stunning monologue made all the most powerful by the fact that the film isn’t even about Vietnam. “I kept sayin’ to myself – this war’s gotta be about something – we can’t just be hired killers. It’s not possible. We’re Americans. There was this little voice in my head that said ‘Ray, you’re being used. They don’t even think you’re human and they want you to die for them to make them richer.” The cumulative subliminal effect of dozens of such characters has built the myth of the Vietnam veteran as the wounded warrior.

Myth or cliché or both, as firsthand experience of the war recedes father into the past, mediated realities become the only realities of remembrance. The myth of the wounded warrior combines the need to victimize, shame, and punish the veteran in order to distract us from the political causes of the war with the contradictory need for moral heroes in a culture that sanctifies greed and violence.. The wounded warrior both carries out the cultural imperative and suffers for our sin of compelling him to do so. His atonement (and ours) can be realized only through his perpetual self-sacrifice. We can celebrate him only so long as he continues to suffer.

What is irresistable about this is that the wounded warrior represents the secret, the dangerous, the forbidden. He has broken the rules. He has killed people, maybe worse. Violence echoes in his sensuality, making him at once impotent and omnipotent. Wild in a manageable way, more like the young Brando than Rambo. He is emotionally if not physically disabled. We want to help. He is larger than life yet less than his youthful potential. He is at once heroic and fallen to earth. He is a living archive of the guilt and shame of a country that finds it all too convenient to displace blame from the architects of the war onto its victims. If the Vietnam veteran didn’t exist, we would have to invent him. It is difficult to imagine the pantheon of American archetypes (hometown hero, lonesome cowboy, trophy wife, business tycoon, hooker with a heart of gold) without him.

The suffering of all movie combat veterans and many real ones keeps the war alive, unresolved, incomplete. What should be a conversation has become a cliché. And then there is another war to depict, another war started under false pretenses against an enemy who was not really an enemy, in a country whose language and customs are overlooked and whose people are underestimated. The movie has ended too soon, but the wars go on forever. We may never know the secrets in the heart of the wounded warrior, but we do know that every so often, when least expected, the undead war will sit bolt upright once again.

* * * *

“It was dark”
-- David Halberstam

Ten days after the Kent State killings, on May 14th 1970, Lt J. Robert Kerrey was in Washington D.C. Standing straight with his parents at his side, Richard Nixon bestowed upon him the Medal of Honor, the country’s highest award for military service. Nearly every college and university in the country was on strike, shut down, in a blind outrage about May 4th. It was the defining moment of a country at war with itself. Kerrey reportedly hesitated about receiving the medal.

Bob Kerrey was one of the lucky ones. He went on to a successful business and political career. Handsome, smart, and charming. A war hero in a war without heroes. He had not dodged the literal bullet and had lost half a leg to prove it, but he seemed to have dodged the metaphorical one – the sadness, anger, and misfortune that dogged the lives of so many of his fellow veterans.

Always known as quirky and independent, Kerrey was more enigmatic about Vietnam than veteran political compatriots like John McCain and John Kerry. You could usually predict where they would stand; Kerrey was more of a wild card. I can remember hearing him tell his Vietnam story to those 1400 students in 1986, and feeling that for someone with Medal of Honor level experience, it sounded somehow distant compared to many of the other veteran narratives I heard during those years, which were searing in their immediacy and authenticity. The head of a major war research center told me that most of Bob Kerrey’s Vietnam friends are conservatives on the war, though he himself has escaped that label, at least until he later became a hawk on Iraq. Within the veterans community nationally, he has always kept a low profile for someone of such stature. All of this now makes more sense.

The crux of the question about that 1969 SEAL action in Thanh Phuong is whether Kerrey’s squad returned fire on a night mission, killing about twenty Vietnamese women and children, or whether some or all were lined up and shot execution style on Kerrey’s order. Teammate Gerhard Klann and several Vietnamese eyewitnesses share the latter account. Kerrey and his other squad mates, who have closed ranks, insist they were returning fire, but even Kerrey calls the action an “atrocity.” When that’s your own interpretation, is there another side?

Trying to have an informed Vietnam War conversation with just about any American apart from a combat veteran -- even smart ones of the “Vietnam Generation” -- too often becomes more like like having a battle of wits with an unarmed person. The context, the history, the complexity just isn’t there. Even most people who once knew a lot have let it slide into history – so much to remember these days -- and to anyone younger you might as well be talking about the Peloponnesian wars. Did you know that Just over one-half of today’s seventh through twelfth grade history teachers completed a history major or minor in college, so the situation is not likely to get better any time soon.

The problem with living Vietnam moments like the Kerrey story is that it is easy to think you are having a conversation about Vietnam, when you are having a faux conversation about Vietnam, one based on platitudes (“War is hell” “You can’t judge him unless you’ve been there”) and ideological certitudes (“The whole war was wrong.” “If Kerrey’s a war criminal, what does that make Kissinger?”). This is not a bad discussion to have, maybe better than nothing, but in a case like Kerrey’s it goes a long way in explaining why the media went so easy on him. Television as a medium privileges visual grammar, not the verbal grammar of complex discussion. It is thumbs up or thumbs down. And in this case, regardless of their personal opinions, pundits gave him the benefit of the doubt. There was more criticism of Dan Rather for his unusually tough minded interview than of Bob Kerrey’s guarded responses on 60 Minutes II.

Kerrey came forward about Thanh Phuong because his secret was about to be revealed by Gregory Vistica’s intensively researched story scheduled to appear in the New York Times Magazine on April 29th, 2001. Kerrey’s preemptive public relations strike upon learning this prompted the Times to take the unusual step of putting the Vistica piece online the Wednesday before its scheduled Sunday publication. Kerrey went on the offensive, first of all getting out ahead of the Vistica story with his own statement on April 26th, then quickly convening from around the country the corroborating members of the SEALs team on April 28th and issuing a joint statement supporting Kerrey’s account vs that of Gerhard Klann. Both of these events involved the close counsel of take-no-prisoners publicist John Scanlon, whose role might have gone unnoticed had he not died on May 4th in the midst of the turmoil, with the result that his Kerrey consultation was featured in the first sentence of his New York Times obituary.

An atrocity story connected to the president of the famously progressively New School had the dramatic elements of the shooting of students at the obscure university of Kent State. The obvious irony heightened the already fevered pitch on campus in the early days of the story, and the president’s offices were abuzz with busy suits from New York and D.C. “It was like the West Wing,” one staff member told me. “When I came to work this morning George Stephanopoulos opened the door for me!”

Not all members of The New School community welcomed the excitement, especially in the Graduate Faculty of Social and Political Science. Founded as the University in Exile by intellectuals fleeing Hitler, at that time of the Kerrey affair it was the only division of the eight University divisions with full-time faculty and tenure. As a result its free speech was somewhat freer than elsewhere on campus. A flood of emails called for Kerrey’s resignation. The Kerrey scandal had them scraping dozens of graduate students and a fair number of faculty off of the ceiling. The most critical pieces anywhere in print came from some of Kerrey’s own highest profile graduate faculty – Christopher Hitchens, Jonathan Schell, and Adolph Reed. Pressure mounted for Kerrey to speak to students and faculty at some sort of University forum.

In mid-May, President Bob Kerrey convened a town-hall forum for the New School community in its prized Joseph Urban designed auditorium, the site of performances over the years by John Cage, Martha Graham, Erwin Piscator, Karen Findlay, and most recently the home of “Inside the Actors Studio.”

Twice the house capacity of 475 lined up. Some were sent to watch on a cable hook up, the rest turned away. Security was fit for a rock star. Kerrey stood attended by cross-armed executives on the floor rather than the stage, a down-with-the-people gesture he volunteered had been carefully weighed. In shirtsleeves, he read from a manuscript the essence of which was “I want this public memory to be used for something good.” I cannot report more because no recording devices were permitted, according to the president’s office the transcript was “not available for release,” and taking notes would have been awkward in a context that felt like a cross between a pentacostal church service and a trip to the principal’s office, only this time it was the principal who was doing the explaining.

Kerrey was followed by two faculty members chosen either for props or for supporting roles depending on your source. A psychology professor – an expert on memory – lectured us that sometimes you might remember things that didn’t happen, and sometimes you might forget things that did. “Now why didn’t I think of that,” whispered the colleague next to me. The memory expert was followed by an earnest sociologist who, speaking for posterity, included thanks to her children. Sometime during the posterity speech I noticed an exceptionally well-dressed gentleman – sitting casually on the edge of the stage behind Kerrey. He looked both familiar and out of place, but my attention returned to the students now lined up at the mic to take their turn. A few were gutsy, but there was less charge in the air than at a book signing. As about the fourth student, an African American woman, got to the mike, Kerrey interrupted her to introduce the pin-striped stranger. It was David Halberstam.

Halberstam rambled for about three minutes like a defense attorney who had lost his notes, but the gist of the message was “It was dark. It was night. It was a very dark night. It was a long time ago. Give him a break.” Then he exited from the auditorium by a side door, presumably having more important things to do than stay for what either preceded or followed his own cameo. I counted three “it was darks,” qualifying the phrase for the company of other exculpatory soundbites: “mistakes were made,” “the glove doesn’t fit,” and “it depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” Mr. Halberstam’s, brief appearance as an outsider at this family occasion was received as more of a pandering to the audience than a credible endorsement.

But Kerrey got through it, partly because four months later 9/11 obliterated not just the World Trade Center but any other topic of conversation as well. To add to what seemed a charmed life for him, he was then given a prestigious appointment to the 9/ll Commission. Kerrey was obviously a bit the worse for wear, but lucky that this story did not break in the 1970s when he might be in court or the 1980s when he would have likely been out of a political career. Breaking as it did in the age where information is the ultimate commodity, it has made him only more valuable on the open market as an author and lecturer. But his luck didn't last. On December 10, 2008, the "senior faculty" by a wide margin voted no confidence in his leadership. A series of meetings and demonstrations followed that culminated the following April 10th with a clamorous student occupation of a campus building, with a huge police presence and threats of very real violence. It looked as if Bob Kerrey might be headed for another Kent State.

Once again Kerrey dodged the bullet, and won the battle but not the war. On May 7 he announced that he would not serve beyond the end of his contract in 2011. In a final irony, it was his management style not his military history that brought down the curtain. Out of three million American troops who served in Vietnam, only 246 were awarded the Medal of Honor and Bob Kerrey was one of them. But wits and charisma notwithstanding, he could not prevail over a university of ten thousand people without drawing fatal fire.

* * * *

Ho Chi Minh went out a hero, an avuncular leader who ruled with cunning and affection. Still, it took twenty years for the 6th Politboro to correct the tall tales told in 1969 by the 3rd Politboro about the circumstances of the death of Ho Chi Minh. In 1989 it was revealed not only had it been Ho’s wish to be cremated, but also that his date of death had been September 2, 1969 and not September 3rd as officially announced. September 2 is Vietnam’s Independence Day, and the Politboro did not want to mar the celebration.

It had been Ho himself who started the Independence Day holiday when in 1945 he spoke to 500,000 people in Ba Dinh square, site of his current resting place, with American planes flying overhead in support. It was a moment of hope and ultimate folly for Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese people, when they had reason to believe that America was on their side in the struggle for independence and unification. Believing that the American revolution represented a model of liberation, Ho began his speech by quoting from the Declaration of Independence, “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” He thought America would be Vietnam's friend in establishing an independent Vietnam. How wrong he was.

It would be another thirty years before Ho Chi Minh’s vision would be realized, six years after his death. Depending upon your political vocabulary,Vietnam was unified, liberated, or fell in 1975. But in America, Vietnam is still the war that won’t die.