Hearing the helicopters

Forty years after the fall of Saigon

For 40 years, it has been the enduring image of 1975, one featured in a dozen movies and even been turned into the last act of a hit musical: as the North Vietnamese come down the road to Saigon, the helicopters of the United States Navy lift up off the roof of the US embassy, drowning the despairing cries of those left behind that nevertheless clogged the skies and the Central Intelligence Agency's radios. Those sounds still echo and still serve as a reminder across what was the Third World of the possible dangers of allying with the United States. On April 30, 1975, the streets of Saigon, once the bustling capital of US-backed South Vietnam, were deserted except for the Viet Cong's advance forces: groups of engineers who set up little music systems and speakers that had begun to play victory songs as the sun rose on the end of America's great cold war adventure. Bereft of US troops after the Paris peace agreement of 1973, and increasingly short of supplies and outflanked, the speed with which South Vietnam collapsed made the decades of accusation that it was nothing but a puppet state all too real.

For both combatants, and for the world, the scars of the most sung-about war of the late 20th century have yet to heal. Oddly, though, those who have moved most quickly to leave the tragedy of the war behind are the Vietnamese themselves. Even in 1975 the leaders of the Viet Cong had begun to note that their supplies from the communist giants to their north had begun to dry up; China did not want a well-armed, battle-hardened Vietnam on their border. Their fears were well-justified. In a brutal skirmish later in the decade, Vietnam ensured their independence from their former arms-masters. And then turned around, while the generation that fought the war was still around, and made peace with the United States that had killed perhaps a million Vietnamese. Today, Vietnam is a flourishing export-oriented economy and a crucial peg in any attempt led by the world's democracies to contain an aggressive China - more enthusiastic a participant than, for example, India, even though it is debatable if it can now retaliate the way it did in 1979.

India's comparative reluctance dates to the same cold war period, to the sound of those helicopters and the great lesson of the Vietnam War: that superpowers do things for their own reasons, and that in the end it is other countries that lose their young men. How long that lesson can resonate if India, too, is to rise to great power is the question. As for the United States, its long decline began then, in an Asian war it chose to fight and sold on lies such as the Tonkin Gulf incident. A country already hesitant about its power after the Vietnam War repeated the mistake in Iraq; and now few believe it has the stomach for more.