MJ Akbar
TIME stands still when it counts. A meeting with the Foreign Minister of Vietnam in Muscat during an invigorating conference on the Indian Ocean organised by the multi-talented Ram Madhav and the Oman Government triggered association to a seminal conflict which became the tragedy of the 1960s and an epic of the 1970s – the Vietnam War.
The American Government became trapped on two fronts: the revolution on its own campuses, and the extraordinary courage of Vietnamese self-belief that prevailed over pitiless napalm. Vietnam redefined the meaning of power for the 20th century. It seeped into my consciousness and became the emotional script of transition from teenage to adult-age during the three years of lost education in the iconic Presidency College in violenceplagued Calcutta between 1967 and 1970. An early memory of the college is the wavy-script slogan plastered on the walls, written in Bengali, a language that lives on rhythm: Aamar naam, tomar naam, shobar naam Vietnam. It neither sounds nor means the same in English: “My name, your name, every name is Vietnam” is flat prosaic monotone compared to the phonetic music of Bengali.
Imperishable image
The other imperishable image is the black-and-white picture of the last helicopter racing away from the American embassy in Saigon on April 30, 1975, a moment that ended one history book and spawned a million new chapters.
One of the best books on Vietnam was published in 1972, three years before history came to a halt, when America knew it had been defeated but its Government did not know how to accept this truth. David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest narrated step by careful step how the cream of American intellectual elite, enticed by that dangerous nymph called good intentions, dragged a mighty power into the toxic swamp that infected the world. Half a century of debate and consideration later, the only rational conclusion is paradox chasing itself into a spin.
Superpower America survived this self-inflicted laceration because democratic institutions found the medicine men who were able to heal the wounds and inject rejuvenation. In a signal reminder that victory can be as problematic as defeat, the Soviet Union, America’s ideological and military nemesis which shared control of much of the world after World War II, decided that it was time for its own Vietnam. Hubris was never any tribe’s monopoly.
Soviet misadventure
About five years after that helicopter in Saigon, Moscow invaded Afghanistan only to discover that its economic impoverishment was not synonymous with national fragility. The 1980s were consumed by the Afghanistan misadventure. The Soviet Union did not possess the recuperative remedies of democracy. Anyone remember Leonid Brezhnev, the Ukrainian with brooding eyebrows and heavy jowl who, as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) for almost as long as the founder of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin, destroyed the political edifice of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin?
In 1975, Moscow and Beijing advertised Vietnam as a communist triumph. That was not quite correct. America was defeated by Vietnamese nationalism, not communist internationalism. What none of the communist powers knew in 1975 was that their ideology was pumping waste rather than blood. The myth of ideological solidarity was exposed yet again less than four years after the last helicopter.
On February 17, 1979, China invaded Vietnam at three points, Lao Cai, Cao Bang and Loc Binh, to punish Hanoi for removing the horrendous Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Beijing forgot that the legendary Vietnamese Defence Minister General Vo Nguyen Giap had defeated the French and the Americans in their era of glory. Within 27 days, China retreated before the Vietnamese counteroffensive. To its credit, Beijing accepted defeat without fuss. The Vietnamese were polite while saying goodbye.
