When the war finally ended

      It was 50 years ago today. Doesn’t it seem much more recent than that—and also much more distantly in the past?

      But on April 30, 1975, the Vietnam War—one of our generation’s defining issues—finally came to an end.

      It was the day after Armed Forces Radio had begun playing “White Christmas,” to signal that an evacuation was underway. It was the day of those ignominious photos of fleeing U.S. staff and South Vietnam supporters being helicoptered off the roof of the U.S. Embassy.

      It was the day a North Vietnamese tank crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in the city that was then called Saigon. The country that was then called South Vietnam officially had surrendered.

      It was an inevitable day, as American troops had mostly been withdrawn two years earlier.

      So it was on this day that the country that had supported the South Vietnamese, that had poured troops and treasure into a far-off land in a hopeless, pointless war for 20 years, had been defeated. The toll had been terrible:

·       58,000 American soldiers dead

·       More than a million North Vietnamese/Viet Cong military deaths

·       A quarter million South Vietnam military deaths

·       Maybe 2 million civilians, on both sides, dead

·       One hundred seventy billion dollars spent—rather, wasted—by the U.S., the equivalent of $1 trillion now.

      And then added to the balance sheet was the damage the war and the defeat had done to America’s reputation, to American foreign policy and to America’s sense of itself, to an American generation—our generation—that had suffered both external and internal scars. This generation had, perhaps forever, lost faith in its government, its actions, its honesty.

      Which is maybe why, when the war finally ended, after all the years of protests and demonstrations and burning draft cards and moving to Canada, there was, I think I remember, no particular sense of relief on this day 50 years ago. It felt, for many of us, like the feeling you get when you stop hitting your head against the wall.

      It was, in fact, much like T.S.Eliot had written in “The Hollow Men,” that “This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.”