Saigon liberation+40 - the Mad Hatter's Tea Party

HO CHI MINH CITY - Saigon's firemen doing the goose-step in the 40th anniversary liberation parade. A huge portrait of Ho Chi Minh waving from heaven on the front of the reunification palace, reflecting the often messianic nature of Vietnamese communism.

There was a certain whiff of the Mad Hatter's Tea Party in the commemorations of the entry into Saigon on 30 April 1975 of the long-nosed tanks of the people's army, churning into a city with a frightened and expectant population.

Our own hero, the late Australian film cameraman Neil Davis was filming the scene for posterity, and another unlikely hero was actually sitting on the back of one of these tanks, the British poet James Fenton.  

The two bo doi (communist soldiers) eating stale cake in the AP office in downtown Saigon, explaining to three journalists, two Americans and a New Zealander, the route to victory they had taken into the capital, now called Ho Chi Minh City. 

The 40th anniversary celebration did, in a way, seem a little too good to be true. For the first time since victory four decades ago, the Vietnamese had invited surviving correspondents who covered the Vietnam War to return as guests, paying our hotel, meals and, for some, air fares. 

We did not accept “freebies” during our careers as correspondents and photographers, but now we had reached retirement age and the salaries had stopped flowing in, we could use some help to be here. 

Still, it was a generous offer, but why was it happening?

My guess is that the Vietnamese communists, who let us have visas in the past but never really seemed to accept us, are nervous about the threats of China in its claims in the South China Sea, and the building on one almost submerged island of an airfield had set alarm bells ringing here.

Though the Vietnamese won their last battle with China in 1979, after the Vietnamese incursion into Cambodia to drive back the Khmer Rouge who had destroyed the country and caused 1.7 deaths of Cambodians, they have no illusions about the nature of China nowadays. 

Vietnam has just over 90 million people, while China's population is now 1.3 billion, and Xi Jinping is Beijing's toughest leader since Mao Zedong, with his credo of “political power grows from the barrel of a gun”.  

It was a taxi driver on the way to the airport on the day after Liberation Day that put it in perspective. "With the Chinese," he said, “if they just all spit on us, all of us will be drowned."

So, for the first time, the Vietnamese officials of the Press Department of the Foreign Ministry seemed to treat us with more seriousness, as colleagues, rather than former enemies, of people with opinions the Vietnamese seem ready to listen to for the first time.

I didn't escape a bollocking when I had the temerity to enter reunification palace at the end of the parade and ask Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung: "Why have you taken a back seat and why are you leaving it to the Filipinos to stand up to China?" 

It's a leading question: even in his speech Mr Dung had some praise for China's help in the past, and no mention of its South China Sea claims.

Of course, Vietnam has had China as its close neighbour for 2,000 years, so it is used to its looming, often menacing historical presence. But China has used serious violence in the disputed Paracels and Spratley islands, and Vietnamese soldiers have been killed.

At the moment, the Philippines under President Benigno Aquino is criticising China far more more than other south east Asian countries to the Chinese, and the Philippines is a weak country in all but courage - like its boxers.

Of course, it would help Vietnam if it put the war behind it, and started a sincere reconciliation with those who fought on the other side, the fallen South Vietnamese regime of the late President Nguyen Van Thieu.  

Those who battled the wrong side are still called “Nguy” or Puppets, and it is long past time to foster a reconciliation with the Southerners. Their war cemeteries are bereft of mourners wanting to pray for the souls of the dead because families are afraid to go there. 

There were about 30 correspondents and photographers who attended this 40th anniversary affair, instead of the 80 who were at the first re-union in the city in 1995.  

This time our smaller group interacted with correspondents from Russia, Algeria and Hungary, even a Cambodian photographer.

The Algerians had long had a connection, since its soldiers had fought in the French army during that earlier war, but, after the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, had been convinced by their captors that it was time they thought of fighting for Algeria's freedom - which they started later that year.

I went, as I always did, to the Reuters office at 15 Han Thuyen where, on two terms as bureau chief, I slept above our 24-hour-a-day working office, and covered the Tet offensive as the war swirled around us in central Saigon. Sadly, it seemed empty.

Despite the high rise buildings that have appeared in the last ten years, and the luxury stores selling Boss and Cartier, the posters used tanks crashing through the then presidential palace as its continued message.  

The Vietnamese are far behind the Germans, who re-united just 25 years ago. The regime here still insults the losers after 40 years of uneasy union, as even the prime minister did this time round in his speech from the rostrum of the parade, referring to them as “puppets”.

But when all is said and done, it was the Vietnamese who finally decisively defeated the Americans who had taken over the fight from the French colonialists. 

Still, it was a terrible war, with the Americans possibly killing as many as 2.8 million Vietnamese, while losing 57,000 of their own young soldiers in a lost, meaningless cause.

Perhaps Martin Woollacott said it best recently in The Guardian: "The plain fact that the American war in Vietnam was a mistake and a crime - because it was undertaken so lightly, pursued so brutally and abandoned so perfidiously - is about the only plain fact there is."

An incident that occurred to me in 1967 seems to sum up the American presence. We had just evacuated Vietnamese women and children from their bamboo and straw houses in the so-called demilitarised zone dividing North and South Vietnam. 

Suddenly South Vietnamese propeller-driven planes swept in and napalmed all the houses, and the family graves nearby, and the peoples' meagre crops.

The Vietnamese women on the back of the truck began to weep.

There were two American soldiers in the monstrous lorry, one machine-gunner and the driver.  

The machine-gunner leaned forward and said to the driver: "They could have waited until we were further away out of sight before bombing their villages."

The driver replied: "Jeez, what does it matter. They're only gooks."  

It's one of the most inhumane statements I heard in three years covering the war. Still, the word “gook” had common currency.

As it stands now, Vietnam is not a democracy, but remains a party dictatorship. The prime minister did admit that "the rich and poor gap has widened”.  

He did also say that that it was necessary to “sincerely engage in national reconciliation”.

It’s time that Vietnam and its communist party live up to that promise.

PHOTO: James Pringle with Viet Cong veterans outside the reunification palace in Ho Chi Minh City on 30 April 2015. ■