Vietnam–the Forever War

Nick Turse

When a tank crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon 50 years ago on April 30, the Potemkin state of South Vietnam collapsed and the Vietnamese war of independence, fought in its final phase against the overwhelming military might of the United States came to a close.

America lost its war, but Vietnam was devastated. “Sideshow” wars in Cambodia and Laos left those countries equally ravaged. The United States unleashed an estimated 30 billion pounds of munitions in Southeast Asia. At least 3.8 million Vietnamese died violent war deaths; an estimated 11.7 million South Vietnamese were forced from their homes, and up to 4.8 million were sprayed with toxic herbicides like Agent Orange.

The US did whatever it could to cripple the reunited Vietnam. Instead of delivering billions in promised reconstruction aid, it pressured international lenders like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to reject Vietnamese requests for assistance. The newly unified nation of farmers had no choice but to till rice fields filled with unexploded American bombs, artillery shells, rockets, cluster munitions, landmines, grenades, and more.

The war’s toll continued to rise, with 100,000 more casualties in Vietnam in the 50 years since the conflict technically came to a close and many more in the neighbouring nations of Southeast Asia.

After all that, America could have learned something.

At the cost of over 58,000 American lives and $1 trillion, at current value, America’s shocking defeat at the hands of South Vietnamese guerrillas and soldiers from what then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called a “little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam” could have led to lasting change. The US might have grappled with the suffering it inflicted across Southeast Asia and pledged not to turn another region of the world into a charnel house and a munitions scrap-yard. The people who led the US to war and those who have assumed power since then could have absorbed how dangerous hubris can be; the inability of military might to achieve political aims, and the terrible costs of unleashing devastating firepower on a tiny nation. They could have grasped the merits of restrained foreign policy.

For a very brief moment, Congress did attempt to require human rights concerns to factor into American foreign policy. That urge soon evaporated.

Instead, America turned a blind eye to continued deaths in Vietnam and backed a genocidal regime in neighbouring Cambodia to further injure the country with whom it had just made peace. Then the US quickly doubled down, setting in motion a means to turn its humiliating defeat in Southeast Asia into a 20-year war in Southwest Asia, against even weaker opponents, that ended in another mortifying loss.

“We were taught that our armies were always invincible, and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam,” President Jimmy Carter observed in his famous “malaise speech” on July 15, 1979, while paradoxically claiming that the “outward strength of America” was unequalled. The United States was, he said, “a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might.”

But even as he mouthed those words to the American people, Carter was setting in motion secret operations that sowed the seeds for a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the 9/11 attacks, and more than two decades of forever wars. America would trade one agony for another, making rash choices that would inflict pain on its own people and devastation across another entire region.

On July 3, 1979, Carter authorized the CIA to provide covert aid to insurgents, the nascent mujahideen, fighting the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan. “On that day,” Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski recalled, “I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid would lead to a Soviet military intervention.” When his prediction came true later that year, Brzezinski gloated: “We now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War.”

Stoking war for the purpose of revenge by proxy had dire costs. For the Soviet Union, the conflict became a “bleeding wound,” in the words of that country’s leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Over nine years, the USSR lost 14,500 soldiers. The people of Afghanistan endured far worse, suffering an estimated 1 million civilian deaths. The Soviet withdrawal in 1989 paved the way for a brutal civil war followed by the Taliban takeover of the country.

The covert conflict by America and its allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, also empowered Islamic extremists—including Osama bin Laden —and set the stage for the rise of his terror group, Al Qaeda. The Soviet Union quickly passed from existence, collapsing in 1991. Bin Laden soon turned his attention to American targets.

In 2001, 19 Al Qaeda operatives with box cutters used airliners to kill almost 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. They were able to goad the world’s sole superpower into eschewing a measured law enforcement response to the 9/11 attacks for a ruinous “global war on terror.” The forever wars, which began in Afghanistan, spread to Pakistan, Somalia, Iraq, Libya, the African Sahel, Syria, Yemen, and beyond.

It took the United States until 2011 to finally kill bin Laden, but the conflict he ignited has raged on without him. The US would suffer wheel-spinning stalemates across multiple war zones and another embarrassing defeat, this time in Afghanistan.

But just as with Vietnam, other people suffered far worse than Americans. More than 905,000 people have died due to direct violence in the forever wars, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. Around 3.8 million more have died indirectly from economic collapse, the destruction of medical and public health infrastructure, and other causes. As many as 60 million people have been displaced by the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines. All that death and suffering has been purchased by the US government for a butcher’s bill of about $8 trillion and climbing.

The Trump administration has even found a way to add more casualties to the toll of the Vietnam War.

Trump’s 90-day freeze on foreign aid ground US-funded programmes in Southeast Asia, including demining initiatives, to a halt. In February, an unexploded US bomb in Laos killed two teenage girls. That same day, two toddlers in Cambodia were killed by another piece of unexploded ordnance.

Aid has since resumed, but it remains unclear for how long and in what amounts. What isn’t in doubt is how much it is desperately needed. Millions of acres in Vietnam—almost one-fifth of the country—were still contaminated by US munitions as of 2023. There might be as much as 800,000 tons of unexploded ordinance, or UXO, littering the nation. Experts say it could take a century or more to remediate Southeast Asia —and that was with full, uninterrupted US assistance.

More than 15 years ago, this writer travelled around Vietnam meeting survivors of the long, lethal tail of the American war and covering the work of a local demining team. A girl named Pham Thi Hoa was a war victim.

Pham’s family suffered immensely from the American War. One set of great-grandparents was killed in 1969, when their hamlet was bombed. That same year, a great-aunt and three of her children died the same way. Sometime after the war ended in 1975, Pham’s other great-grandfather was killed by a landmine. A great-uncle died from an unexploded ordnance blast in 1996. And in 2007, Pham’s father, mother, and 3-year-old brother were all killed by a 105 mm US artillery shell.

Wars aren’t really over when they’re officially over. America’s conflicts keep killing people long after the guns fall silent in Vietnam. Just how many more people die may depend, in part, on the Trump administration’s decisions in the weeks and months ahead.

[Source: theintercept.com]

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Frontier
Vol 57, No. 48, May 25 - 31, 2025