Vietnam War: Reckoning With The Past, Not Just Celebrating It

2025-05-01 07:01:11

(MENAFN- Asia Times) The parades are over. TikTok videos of marching bands and fighter jets have made their rounds, and Vietnam has officially marked 50 years since the end of the war. In Ho Chi Minh City, crowds lined the streets in celebration. Across the country - and even in parts of the diaspora - this anniversary was met with pride, gratitude and emotion.

But what comes after the applause? For all the fireworks and orchestras, a deeper story continues - quieter, harder and unresolved. The Vietnam War is no longer just a war between nations. It remains a fault line at the center of Vietnamese identity, sharpened by exile, repression and the long shadow of what came after 1975.

Officially, April 30 is the day of“liberation” and“reunification.” In exile and across the diaspora, it is remembered instead as the“fall” - of Saigon, and of a homeland they were forced to leave. Fifty years on, those wounds have not disappeared. They have only shifted. The question is whether they can now be addressed.

Even those rifts have begun to shift. Today, many overseas Vietnamese return freely to visit their families. In both Vietnam and the United States, Vietnamese artists perform to packed audiences. The protests that once greeted official delegations have faded. National belonging, it turns out, can stretch across ideological divides.

But memory cannot be honest without recognizing hard truths. The Vietnamese Communist Party - not just the United States - bears deep, if different, responsibility for the tragedy that followed.

Any genuinely honest pathway to healing calls for our reckoning with those twin burdens - not so much by pressing for an ideological surrender as by insisting on a memory capacious enough to hold the full cost of being human.

As a child, I heard only pieces of this story - the triumphant marches, the narrow escapes. For years, the stories appeared to be two unrelated tales. Only long after, through the fissures of memory and history, did I realize that one was the fragment of the other, both fragments of a single shattered unity: a war that destroyed the country it was meant to save.

This year, on the 50th anniversary of reunification, General Secretary To Lam's commemorative article hinted at a different tone. He did not solely frame 1975 as a military victory, but spoke of reconciliation - invoking“courage,”“tolerance” and“shared pain.”

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