The U.S. Exit From Vietnam War: U.S. and South Vietnamese Veterans Share Their Perspectives

Military veterans from the U.S. and South Vietnamese share their perspective on how the U.S. exited the Vietnam War, and the lasting impact of the conflict. Caesar Smith was a career military officer who served two tours in Vietnam. Dan Gannon is a Marine Corps veteran who served in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970. He spent more than 300 days in combat, rising to the rank of Captain before leaving the military. Hien Van Le spent 21 years in the military. He rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and was the Head of Military Intelligence of the South Vietnamese Marine Corps from 1970 until the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. This segment is from Iowa Experience: Vietnam, a panel discussion recorded at Iowa PBS in Johnston, IA on September 10, 2017.

Caesar Smith: I still don't know whether or not we had a choice on withdrawing. I have no idea, no vision of what withdrawing with dignity would even look like in Vietnam. How long would it take? What kind of agreements do you have to have with the north? Are they willing to go to those agreements? And even if they did and we did it with dignity I guess you'd call after World War II what the Japanese did was end the war with dignity but I'm not sure that would have been okay either. I don't think there was an answer.     

Dan Gannon: It would have been a tough answer. The difficult thing, we're back in the same thing again, we didn't learn from it. We're back in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, how are we going to get out of that? And how are we going to get out of that with any type of dignity or what we really want out of it and that is peace in that part of the world? But the people there have to want it, they have to fight for their own country and stand up and fight the terrorism, fight ISIS, it can't be just the U.S. doing this all over the world. The other countries and the rest of the world have to step forward to help us with that.  
   
(applause)    

Dean Borg: I just want to clarify, are you saying that America was doing everything in South Vietnam that it could have and that South Vietnam was not contributing and that South Vietnamese people did not really want you there? You've just heard just the opposite here, they felt abandoned, these two people, but South Vietnamese people in general?  

Dan Gannon: I don't think they did not want us there and I think they wanted their country back but the problem is you've got to remember what was going on there. It wasn't just the NVA, it was the Viet Cong, the Viet Cong they're the folks that infiltrated the south and they had to deal with that, they had to deal with that too. But I don't know if they had the will to do that. And you've got to remember, you've got a lot of very rural agricultural parts of that country, they really want to be just left alone, let's raise my rice, let's feed my family and there was a lot of pressure being placed throughout the country, through the VC, on those families whether it was taxation, whether we take your kids and they go north. So you had a lot of internal things going on. But it goes back to the fact, if we wanted to win the war, as small as that place was, we were fighting in the wrong country. Once we started to bomb Hanoi, now we're talking about war here, if we go to war we've got to go to win the war, not go to sort of win the war, we've got to go win the war. If you're going to win the war, with the power we had, if we would have went to North Vietnam instead of South Vietnam, fought our way through then we would have ended it, ended it with dignity and it would have ended eight or nine years earlier because it was a small country. But we didn't do that, we set up all these games, we set up all these rules of engagement, it's just like Hanoi, the Ho Chi Minh trail. Where was the Ho Chi Minh trail? It wasn't in Vietnam, it was in the other country, so we couldn't even go do that and do it by what the rules of engagement were. And a lot of us in Vietnam, soldiers were not happy about that. If we're going to stop this let us go do that.   

Dean Borg: Hien has already told us that he felt abandoned. If he were to return now to South Vietnam or if he had remained there would his life, would he even be alive? Is there a ransom, is there a price on his head? 

(Hien Van Le speaking)  

Hien Van Le: When the North Vietnamese advanced to the South they were considered to be the winner of the war and the South Vietnamese were the losers. We were treated very differently. We were the second class citizens. Nobody in South Vietnam wanted to live in a Communist system. There was a saying at the time, if the telephone poles knew how to walk they would have left Vietnam.     

Borg: Was it worth it? Should this war have ever have been fought? Was there anything gained?    

Hien Van Le: If you want my true opinion, America won the war, we won the war. If you look at all the Communist countries and counted them right now, how many are left? All of Eastern Europe rejected Communism, Cuba is asking for help. Where else does Communism exist? Only in a few places. So if you consider the purpose of the Vietnam War was to stop the spread of Communism, America had truly won the war.