The Rooftop That Haunts Us Still
Fifty years ago, a helicopter took off from the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, loaded with American diplomats, CIA officers, military staff, and panicked Vietnamese civilians. That moment April 30, 1975 wasn’t just the dramatic close to a failed war. It was the real-time broadcast of American collapse, arrogance, and denial.
The world watched the so-called “indispensable nation” flee. Not just soldiers and spies, but the whole story. And if there was any doubt that Washington learned anything from the wreckage, all one has to do is look at the charred remains of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and now Gaza and Yemen. This isn’t a feature of U.S. foreign policy. It’s the default setting.
A Quick Reminder of What the War Actually Did
The U.S. didn’t just lose a war in Vietnam. It left behind a staggering body count well over 1.5 million dead, many of them civilians. American troops left with trauma, PTSD, and diseases tied to Agent Orange, but Vietnamese children are still being born with deformities from those chemicals. Over 55,000 Americans died, for what? To stop a theory “the domino effect” that fell apart faster than the South Vietnamese government.
America’s Cold War machine said this war was about “freedom.” What it really did was help crush independence movements under the boot of napalm and rhetoric. And today? We still throw money and bombs at problems we refuse to understand.
Quote: Andrew Bacevich (Quincy Institute)
“The United States has yet to reckon fully with the causes and consequences of the Vietnam War… Yesterday’s mistakes become the basis for tomorrow’s actions.”
Bacevich, like many others not on defense contractor payrolls, isn’t pulling punches. He says the foreign policy class has worked overtime to dodge responsibility for the carnage in Vietnam and it’s worked. The same crowd now justifies endless wars with the same dead logic.
War: Not a One-Off, But a Habit
Some people still call Vietnam a “mistake.” But Greg Daddis, a historian and military expert, calls out that delusion for what it is: a story we tell ourselves so we can keep doing it again.
“Americans came home from World War II with a faith in their power and in their responsibility to maintain a stable international order… That faith was coupled with fears of communism. These universalizing fears, paired with faith in military power’s transformative capacities, led to a misguided Southeast Asian crusade.”
Sound familiar? Iraq. Afghanistan. Syria. We’re not just repeating the same war we’re recycling the same excuses.
Lying as Policy, Killing as Routine
Carolyn Eisenberg, a professor and author, lays it out bluntly: no one in charge paid a price for Vietnam. And no real accountability ever happened.
“The conviction that the U.S. has a right to violently shape the internal life of foreign nations… and that lying to the public is a necessary feature of governance, never disappeared.”
What Eisenberg describes isn’t just historical. It’s our current reality. Whether it’s Gaza today or Yemen last year, we’re still in the business of destruction while calling it “security.”
Punchline Worth Remembering
When American presidents say “we had no choice,” they always mean “we made sure no better options were allowed.”
The Myth of Noble Intentions
Morton H. Halperin still wants to believe in some kind of noble policy that Vietnam was a bug in an otherwise sound system. But the facts tell a different story. Truman’s idea of helping people “resist subjugation” morphed into sending teenagers to die in rice paddies to prop up puppet governments.
Even Eisenhower, the supposed “moderate,” refused to sign the Geneva Accords. Why? Because he didn’t want to look soft on communism. American pride cost millions their lives.
Steve Kinzer drills the point home:
“America’s war in Vietnam wasn’t an aberration. It reflected a key fact: domestic politics shapes our foreign policy.”
In other words, dead Vietnamese civilians were collateral damage in Lyndon Johnson’s plan to pass the Civil Rights Act and not get torn apart by the GOP in the next election. Let that sink in.
Want to Know What’s Worse Than a Mistake? A Pattern.
Noah Kulwin, host of the “Blowback” podcast, cuts through the fluff:
“The U.S. war on Vietnam could not have ended in any way other than failure… But the striking resemblance between how that war failed and how wars since have failed must be observed.”
He points to the same chain of errors, delusions, and arrogance stretching from Saigon to Kabul. If this is a bug, then someone forgot to fix it in 50 years of updates.
Quote: Robert Levering
“At the time, I thought the Vietnam war was just a horrible mistake. The Iraq and Afghan wars have convinced me otherwise.”
Levering, an antiwar organizer who saw the worst of it up close, just got back from Vietnam. He visited the site of the My Lai massacre where U.S. troops gunned down over 500 civilians and saw children born with deformities from Agent Orange. This is not ancient history. It’s living, breathing consequence.
Punchline That Should Be on Every D.C. Office Door
You don’t get to call it a mistake if you keep doing it. That’s not an accident it’s policy.
Who Really Pays the Price?
When we say “America lost the war,” what we mean is the ruling class got embarrassed. But Vietnamese people lost everything. And they’re not alone.
Today it’s Palestinians, Yemenis, Afghans whole populations thrown under the U.S. foreign policy bus. As Anatol Lieven (from the Quincy Institute) explains, these failures are stitched into the fabric of how America does business overseas.
He says it best:
“Tragically, the failures of the U.S. in Vietnam were due to persistent features of U.S. foreign policy.”
Translation: This isn’t new. It’s how the empire works.
Closing Thoughts: Helicopters, Hubris, and Historical Amnesia
That last helicopter didn’t just lift bodies off a roof. It lifted away any illusion that American power was righteous, competent, or even particularly strategic. The people in charge didn’t learn a damn thing. Because they didn’t want to.
Fifty years later, we keep hearing that each war is different. But the logic is always the same. Bomb first, justify later, lie always.
We’re still stuck on that rooftop. The only difference is the camera angles have improved.
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