My mom had an uncanny ability to size up current events and accurately predict their long-term effects. 50 years ago, I sat in my mom’s colonial dining room and watched the fall of Saigon on her black-and-white TV with two folds of aluminum foil dangling from the rabbit ears. America was not riding high. A year earlier, gas rationing went into effect and a president reelected in a record landslide resigned in disgrace.
As desperate Americans and South Vietnamese scrambled to evacuate, embassy staffers burned millions of dollars in cash to prevent it from falling into the hands of the victorious North Vietnamese. As landing decks on aircraft carriers in the South China Sea became overcrowded, UH-1 “Huey” helicopters, each worth at least $1 million in today’s dollars, were pushed into the ocean to make room for incoming aircraft. The estimated value of the military and other equipment left behind by retreating U.S. forces ranges between $1 billion and $4 billion, plus an additional $1 billion to $2 billion in corporate assets.
“The United States will never recover from this,” my mom said. “They’ll never learn anything from it, because they’ll never understand why it happened.”
Half a century later, she was clearly right. We lost but we didn’t learn.
The big lesson of the Vietnam catastrophe, one we haven’t begun to internalize, is that self-determination is a universal value. No one wants to be told what to do, much less exploited, by foreigners. There’s a corollary to that lesson: superior military and economic power cannot overcome the universal human desire to independently pursue one’s destiny.
“The enemy will win many battles, but in the end, we will win the war,” General Vo Nguyen Giap, commander-in-chief for North Vietnam, told a French interviewer in 1964. That’s what happened in 1975. And in 2011 in Iraq. And in 2021 in Afghanistan, where the $7 billion in abandoned war materiel and the falling bodies of our Afghan employees raining over Kabul created a perfect echo of the collapse of South Vietnam. Sooner rather than later, the same fate will befall Israel in Gaza.
Movies are a window into America’s political soul. American films about its invasion and occupation of South Vietnam depict a barely revised version of Kipling’s patriarchal “White Man’s Burden” with heavy dollops of confusion and self-pity. While “The Deer Hunter” (1978), “Apocalypse Now” (1979), “Platoon” (1986) and “Full Metal Jacket” (1987) all depict the brutalization of Vietnamese civilians by American troops, the primary effect of those narratives is to portray naïve young men corrupted by forces beyond their control and forced to cope with their physical wounds and psychological guilt in the aftermath. The Vietnamese play bit parts or none whatsoever, relegated to background scenery as their U.S. oppressors blow them to bits and struggle with PTSD—failing to make the ethnically correct decision to refuse to kill.
Americans weren’t victims in Vietnam. We were the bad guys. We lost 58,000 soldiers, who were sent to the other side of the earth to prop up a corrupt, unpopular regime against an enemy that posed no threat to us. Our troops killed 2 million Vietnamese. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington is slightly less than 500 feet long. An analogous structure dedicated to the Vietnamese would be more than three miles long.
We have never admitted that we had no business being there. “Rambo: First Blood Part II” (1985) marked the beginning of something even worse than mawkish self-pity, a string of right-wing negationist releases that attempted to retroactively justify the war as a noble patriotic cause—don’t feel guilty, be proud of your service to your country—followed by “Hamburger Hill” (1987), “We Were Soldiers” (2002) and similar imperialist whitewashing of the Iraq War in works like “Jarhead” (2005), “The Hurt Locker” (2008), and “American Sniper” (2014).
The second big lesson of Vietnam for a United States that continues to pursue international monetary, economic, political and military hegemony is that it’s cheaper to rent than to own. The United States currently has a $150 billion a year bilateral trade relationship with Vietnam and hundreds of thousands of Americans visit Vietnam every year as tourists. Business is good. There was no need to control their political system.
Finally, war is expensive. Eight million Vietnam war veterans require care for PTSD, exposure to Agent Orange and various psychological and physical injuries. Resources diverted to the Vietnam War contributed to the hollowing out of Rust Belt cities, declining schools and insufficient spending on infrastructure—problems we’re still dealing with, with no end in sight. The war cost approximately $1 trillion in 2025 dollars.
A crisis can be an opportunity. So can a defeat.
At the end of World War II, Indonesian nationalists waged a brutal war of independence against their colonial oppressors, the Netherlands. Forced to withdraw in 1949, the Dutch turned to their domestic needs. They prioritized postwar reconstruction and expanded the welfare state, funding affordable housing, pensions, and healthcare. Losing Indonesia was great for Holland. France performed a similar pivot after losing its war in Algeria in 1962; it decolonized most of its African possessions and invested in massive public works like high-speed rail. Belgium did the same thing after losing the Congo War in 1965, as did Portugal after 1974, when it lost to the liberation movements of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau.
Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, we should learn from our fellow former colonial powers. Stop starting wars we’re bound to lose. Invest in ourselves.
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “What’s Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems,” which will be published May 1st. He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.
