I had just turned 17 when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese, 25 years ago last Sunday.
My reaction was relief. I wasn't worried about myself -- U.S. involvement in the fighting had ended two years earlier, in 1973, and the draft had ended two years before that -- but my feeling then was that the United States, Vietnam and Cambodia would all be better off with communist victory.Vietnam, of course, was a television war, and I was a television kid; I watched everything I could. My favorite network back then was CBS, because Walter Cronkite was the most overtly anti-war of the nightly news anchors; I didn't like ABC's Howard K. Smith, because he was too hawkish.
But TV was as close as I came to the conflict. Growing up in university towns, I not only didn't know anyone who was in Vietnam, I didn't know anyone who was in the military.
But I did know anti-war protesters. My first political memory was, at age 6, holding my mother's hand as I saw a pro-Viet Cong rally in Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Mass. Not anti-war, but pro-Viet Cong. That was 1964. All through the '60s, my youthful admiration was directed to those hippies and yippies who not only wanted the war over, but the United States defeated.
My view changed in the '70s; I read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" and came away persuaded that the Soviet Union was indeed an evil empire.
Still, after the fall of Saigon, I dismissed the first horror stories coming out of Indochina. The Vietnamese boat people were all South Vietnamese collaborators, I told myself. And I certainly couldn't believe that the Khmer Rouge really were massacring their fellow citizens at a rate far beyond the Stalinist liquidations of the '30s -- maybe as many as 2 million from 1975 to 1979. But the proof was there; the reality of the killing fields sank in when I learned that Pol Pot's communists, eager to eliminate anyone who might be tainted by Western education, automatically killed anyone who wore eyeglasses. I was a four-eyes of long standing.
Then came the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979; I started to believe Solzhenitsyn's warning to the West: Moscow was already fighting and winning World War III.
Two decades later, communism has imploded almost everywhere, and Vietnam veterans have gone, in the popular perception, from baby killers to heroes. Sen. John McCain is arguably the most admired man in American politics today; Vice President Al Gore manages to get his service in Vietnam into the very first paragraph of campaign Web site biography.
Joe Klein, a baby boomer who came of age in the radical '60s, has published a new novel, "The Running Mate." Not only is the hero a Vietnam vet, but the acknowledgments include this valentine to McCain and the other five Vietnam combat vets in the U.S. Senate: "The enthusiasm of their service -- then and now -- their honor and their integrity should be an example to us all."
Now comes a nonfiction work that would like to undo what's left of the left's critique of America's Indochina intervention. The title tells it all: "Vietnam, the Necessary War," by the journalist-historian Michael Lind. Even now, I can't buy his argument; the loss of life and the damage done -- to the country of Vietnam and to the psyche of America -- was just too great.
Even so, Lind is correct when he argues that, in the cold eye of world history, the Vietnam War was a relatively small matter. But Lind goes one step further: There will be more foreign military adventures -- and, inevitably, misadventures -- in America's future. "If the United States is to continue to be the dominant world power," he writes, "or even one of several great powers, then American soldiers must learn to swim in quagmires."
A quarter century after Vietnam, many young doves are now old hawks. Bill Clinton, the former anti-war protester, has directed more foreign military operations than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
And while one can doubt the wisdom of many of those operations -- most notably, Kosovo -- it's hard to disagree with Lind's assertion that U.S. military power will be needed to preserve the new world order. So the long twilight struggle of the future is to prevent potential Vietnams from becoming actual Vietnams.
James P. Pinkerton is a Newsday columnist and a member of its editorial board.