As we commemorate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the fall--or is it the liberation?--of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the Vietnam war is again a hotly-contested issue. Today the skirmishes are being fought on the battlefield of our collective memory, and, surprisingly, the issue is just as contentious in Vietnam as it is in the United States.
I realized this when a Vietnamese translation of my book The Spy Who Loved Us arrived recently on my desk. The book tells the story of Pham Xuan An, a correspondent for Time during the war and the magazine's last bureau chief in Saigon. An was a great reporter, but, as we later learned, he was an even greater spy. For twenty years he was the Communists' best source of intelligence out of South Vietnam. "We are now in the United States' war room!" exclaimed Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap on receiving An's lethal reports.
After the war, the Communists named Pham Xuan An a Hero of the People's Armed Forces and elevated him to the rank of General. He lived in a Saigon villa filled with books and regaled guests--until his death in 2006--with the illuminating and funny stories for which he was famous. An's revolutionary hopes were disappointed in the post-war years, and he became an outspoken critic of Communist corruption and bureaucracy.
I expected my Vietnamese publisher to cut some of An's remarks, but I was unprepared for the mauling the manuscript suffered. The text was turned into a triumphal paean to the Fatherland. Even the prose gave off the metallic odor of socialist sanctity. Gone was any criticism of Communists or Communism, any criticism, or even mention, of China, any praise for the United States. The list of proscribed words, which had been swapped out for euphemisms, included "graft," "corruption," "concentration camp," and "retreat" (when applied to Heroes of the People's Armed Forces).
The most extensive cuts involved the removal from the text of General Giap. Why eliminate modern Vietnam's greatest military commander, architect of their victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu and the United States in the "American" war? Vietnam's rulers are divided into two camps, one pro-Chinese and one open to the West. The Sinologues control the government, while the internationalists, headed by ex-history professor Vo Nguyen Giap, are accused of being CIA agents. They are considered so dangerous that mention of General Giap's current activities will be deleted from a contemporary history of Vietnam written by an American.
The battle over the war's legacy is equally intense in the United States. At a recent conference in Washington, D.C. on "Lessons Learned, Lessons Lost: Counterinsurgency from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan," sponsored by The Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, top billing was given to the military hawks and counterinsurgency specialists who are back in the ascendancy. As they describe it, the Vietnam war was not actually lost. The United States simply packed up its army and took its successful strategies elsewhere. Instead of winning hearts and minds in Vietnam, the U.S. will now win hearts and minds in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So what went wrong in Vietnam? The United States was betrayed by disloyal journalists--an old canard from the war years. As a Marine Corps University expert recently wrote, the "viciousness" of their "attacks on public servants" amounted to "gross misdeeds" that "harmed the United States." In other words, by doing their jobs these journalists were traitors.
What proof supports these allegations? None has been offered so far. But many journalists talked to Pham Xuan An--who is now known to have been a Communist--which retroactively makes them guilty by association. "Most of the information they passed on was false or misleading," says our Marine Corps' expert, because of their "heavy reliance... on Pham Xuan An."
An's former colleagues cannot produce a single example when he gave the news an anti-war slant. To the contrary, they cite many instances when he spared Time from printing errors, even when these errors--by exaggerating Communist troop strength, for example--might have benefited the other side. It was not his job to plant stories in the Western press. In fact, to protect his cover, he did everything possible to steer clear of Communist ideology and rhetoric. Far from being an agent of disinformation, Pham Xuan An was more lethal as an agent of information. General Giap benefited from his timely and accurate news--the same news that was delivered to Henry Luce. The trick, of course, was knowing what to do with this news.
Honest reporting and human intelligence can shape our destinies, either at war or in peace. This is one of the lessons of the Vietnam war. But thirty-five years after the war's end, many people, both in Vietnam and the United States, are still afraid to hear honest voices speak. The continuing Vietnam war is a battle over memory, history, and truth, and the stakes are still high.
Thomas Bass, author of Vietnamerica, The Spy Who Loved Us, and other books, is a professor of English and journalism at the State University of New York at Albany.