'Remembering' Vietnam
Seventeen years after the April 30, 1975, liberation of Saigon, the world's first "television war" is again dominating the screens. This time the effect is to produce a new history of the first colonial war that the US and its allies, including Australia, lost.
Gone are the vivid images of Vietnamese tanks breaking through the gates of Saigon's Doc Lap Palace, headquarters of the puppet South Vietnamese regime. They are replaced by a number of stories supposedly about Australians who fought in the war. The ABC has contributed its bit with the two-part soapie, Frankie's House.
The new television war coincides with the unveiling in Canberra of the memorial to 504 Australian troops who needlessly lost their lives in Vietnam. The inauguration of the memorial was promoted as the "final chapter" to the long saga of bitter memories and bitter experiences of thousands of returned veterans.
But for those involved in the memorial project, like Cameron Stewart and Jonathon Porter, it was more accurately the culmination of a seemingly never-ending "30-year fight for recognition".
There are two main reasons that little was said or done earlier by those who control the media, and why now the story must be distorted. The vested interests who took the US and then Australia into Vietnam have been unable to explain why they launched the war against a just and necessary struggle for national liberation and self-determination in the first place. Even more dangerous for them would be an understanding of why they lost.
The worldwide mass anti-Vietnam War movement helped bring an end to the involvement of the Western powers in Vietnam by getting the Australian and other troops out. To that extent, it also helped bring an end to the nightmare soldiers had to live through. It is understandable that many veterans are bitter at what they see as a decision to enter the war without full public support.
And this is just what the powers-that-be can now not explain. To have allowed a truly democratic decision on the war would almost certainly have resulted in a big vote against it. That is why the October 3-4 Australian editorial stated, "... from the time the war finished it was imperative to put the political divisions caused by the war into the historical archives".
The Vietnam War contained a salutary lesson, that a people with no military might to speak of could defeat the strongest military power in the world. That unparalleled feat was possible because their struggle for independence was an overwhelmingly popular one, and because they had a clear strategy about how to achieve their aims.
Australia's Vietnam veterans have suffered greatly ever since their return from the war, from serious persistent medical ailments as a result of injury or from the myriad of chemical agents used to many, the trauma of the war has left deep emotional scars.
Supporters of the war have seized on the distress of many veterans in a twisted way, attempting to create the sentiment that it was the popular struggle against the war that was responsible for these problems. In all the recent media coverage, therefore, one thing that is not given much attention at all is just who (Menzies and his establishment backers) was responsible for sending them to Vietnam in the first place.
Clearly, rolling back the "Vietnam syndrome" is the aim. But the widespread protests over the Gulf War last year show they still have a long way to go.