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The Vietnam War 50 years on: Two authors explore the conflict’s lasting effects

May 1, 2023

Fifty years ago, the last American combat troops left Vietnam, although there’d be an American presence there until the fall of Saigon two years later. A half-century on, the war there may no longer be the defining catastrophe of American foreign policy in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the saga still intrigues and infuriates.

Two very different new books – “The Long Reckoning: A Story of War, Peace and Redemption in Vietnam” and “Getting Out of Saigon: How a 27-Year-Old American Banker Saved 113 Vietnamese Civilians” – look back to that era, offering insights into the mistakes that were made and the lessons that could be learned if we, as a nation, were inclined to study the past.

“I’m not terribly optimistic,” says George Black, author of “The Long Reckoning.” “It’s hard to get Americans interested in history and in foreign countries in the best of times.”

Still, his book digs deep into the way the war was conducted, not just by the Americans but also by the North Vietnamese, as well as the efforts over the last 30 years to deal with the lingering aftereffects of America’s unexploded ordnances and Agent Orange.

While Black’s book is heavily researched with a broad scope covering decades, “Getting Out of Saigon,” is a more intimate tale that reads like a thriller set in the fateful and chaotic two weeks in April 1975 when the last Americans finally fled. Ralph White was sent to Saigon by Chase to keep their branch open till the last possible moment. He focused instead on how to get the bank’s Vietnamese employees out of the country and to safety despite an utter lack of official help from the U.S. government – armed with a gun, bribe money and a pilot’s license, White recounts what it took to make his own airlift a success.

Black and White had never met, but during a recent video interview, they discovered common ground: White’s brother-in-law, Ted Osius, was the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam during the Obama years and Black became friends with him during his research and writing. (“He was very important and pushed difficult issues,” Black says, persuading John McCain to get the Pentagon to help pay some of the costs dealing with the aftermath of Agent Orange.)

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. George’s book notes that there have been about 30,000 books on the French and American misadventures in Vietnam. What can your books add to the conversation?

White: When I started writing, a young woman asked me what I was writing about and I said the fall of Saigon and she said, “Oh, what’s that?” I decided I wanted to write a book that explained, “What’s that.”

We wouldn’t have the phrase “the fall of Saigon” in our vocabulary if it wasn’t for the insanity of the U.S. ambassador Graham Martin. He refused to admit that the war had been irretrievably lost well before 1975. Afterward, I would try to explain about the ambassador and people would roll their eyes and I thought I would set it out in print that he was detached from reality.

Black: My book is rooted in a new approach to the war that challenges people to rethink what they know about it.

For instance, I wrote about why so many of the worst impacts of the war are concentrated in a very, very small area about the size of Connecticut. There’s recent scholarship by academics who have gotten into the Vietnamese archives that recast the idea that most Americans have that this war was run by the great military genius, General [Võ Nguyên] Giáp and commanded by Ho Chi Minh.

That’s not true. The destruction of this area has to do with the two men who supplanted their influence, Le Duan, who was a Stalinist, and Nguyen Chi Thanh. They were very hard-line; Giáp and Ho Chi Minh thought their ideas about massive attacks were crazy and wouldn’t work and they didn’t. It caused incredible destruction.

But the United States didn’t necessarily know that Le Duan was in charge or who we were fighting; General [William] Westmoreland’s memoir does not have one reference to him.

Q. How important was it for you to include the names of the people who were doing good, often by using unconventional means, into the history books?

Black: That ability to think outside the box was important with everyone I wrote about. My main cluster of characters are not known to readers, and it was especially important to get in not just the Americans but the Vietnamese people – not just as names, but as people. The doctors and scientists, like Dr. [Ton‐That] Tung and those who took his work through the next generation of research about Agent Orange, were major, serious scientists who are brilliant and had first-hand experience in the valley where the spraying happened. Their work was written off as propaganda for 25 years and I think their reputation is important.

White: It was one of the compelling reasons for writing the book. My primary success factor was luck, but second, were the foreign officers who were like saints and were running clandestine operations, especially Ken Moorefield and Shep Lowman, as well as others like Bob Lanigan, who commandeered barges and took thousands of Vietnamese down the Saigon River.

Q. Ralph, you were willing to break rules yourself to save your employees – you even considered stealing a plane to fly them out.

White: The more that the ambassador told me over and over that I couldn’t get them out and the deputy chief of mission told me they would prevent me from doing it, the more I just became absolutely resolved to get around them. It was not necessarily just about doing the right thing, it was about not being stopped by them.

I had a pilot’s license. I could helm a vessel. I carried a gun. I had bribe money. But those out-of-the-box ideas did not come to fruition. What worked was sleuthing and stealth and willfulness.

Q. What similarities and differences do you see between the Vietnam War and the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan?

White: We didn’t do a very good job in either case. But there are a lot of differences. Congress issued 130,000 visas for people to enter our country during the fall of Saigon but nothing like that happened during the fall of Kabul. We had large processing centers and massive city-sized refugee camps – I was in a few myself as a refugee – and they were well-organized. We did nothing like that for Afghanistan.

Q. What do you think we owe the people and government of Vietnam at this point?

White: The war has been over for 50 years. We should treat them, individually and as a country, with respect and dignity. Our state department should treat them the way we treat every other country so they can succeed or fail on their own, not because of what we did to harm them.

Black: That happened very much under Ted Osius’ ambassadorship. There was a blip in the Trump years but Biden’s attitude is very much what you’re talking about too and I’ve been told, he is planning to go to Vietnam in May, which I think is great.

The most important sentence in my book is when these American veterans show up in a village in Vietnam in the 1990s and say, “What do you need and how can we help?” Every person in my book took their lead from the Vietnamese, instead of saying, “Here’s the solution to your problem.”

These days, the answer may not be what you’d expect. They want more trade and economic development and a close partnership because we have a common interest in keeping China out of the South China Sea and they worry about China dominating their culture.

But they’d also love to get more help with more provinces affected by Agent Orange. The money involved in helping families who need it is a pittance. It’s what they call “decimal dust’ in Washington. A lot of families have aging parents with kids who were affected by Agent Orange from birth and have horrific 24-hour-a-day needs. The Vietnamese point out that this should not be a partisan issue anymore, and they’re right.

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The Vietnam War 50 years on: Two authors explore the conflict’s lasting effects

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