'Tonkin incident' vaguely recalled
The younger generation in Vietnam has its focus beyond the causes of the war with America
Like many Vietnamese born in peacetime, recent high-school graduate Nguyen Minh Hang doesn’t care very deeply about what happened in her country 50 years ago.
“I remember the words ‘Gulf of Tonkin incident’ from a lesson at school, but I can’t remember what it was about,” says the 18-year-old. “I learned about it for about 10 minutes in history class.”
The fear that Indochina would fall to communism was widespread among US leaders by 1964 when, on August 4, after a previous skirmish, the US Navy insisted it was fired upon again by North Vietnamese ships in the Gulf of Tonkin.
That claim turned out to be false, but the incident prompted the US to pass a resolution paving the way for military support to South Vietnam against the communist North in what became known in the West as the Vietnam War and locally as the American War.
While half a century since the Gulf of Tonkin provides a moment of reflection for many in the US, it is far from the minds of young people like Hang.
“Vietnamese textbooks still teach about this incident, but not as much as before, because there are other things to learn about,” says Professor Tran Duc Cuong, former director of the Vietnam Institute for History. “But Vietnamese people understand that the US started the war through the Gulf of Tonkin incident.”
Over the last 20 years Vietnam has transformed from a poor, centrally planned economy into a market economy, and in the process become what the World Bank describes as “one of the most dynamic emerging countries in Southeast Asia”.
With their hard-won wealth, many are reluctant to rake over the country’s impoverished past. “It’s been 50 years, so not many people pay attention to this now,” says Nguyen Duc Gan, 68, who experienced the war first-hand.
A North Vietnamese soldier taken prisoner during a battle with South Vietnamese and US troops in 1970, Gan was held in Phu Quoc prison until his release in 1973. “I think we should close the past, and look to the future. We have so many things to worry about now – economic difficulties, our health, children – so we don’t have much time to dwell on the past.”
That doesn’t mean all historical landmarks are ignored. The day North Vietnamese troops captured Saigon, signalling the end of the war, is celebrated as a national holiday. The 60th anniversary of the Geneva Accords, which brought international recognition for an independent Vietnam, was marked this month by a high-level conference in Hanoi.
There are other reasons for the government to focus on some historic events and not others, says Carl Thayer, emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia.
“Invariably the major events that the party seeks to highlight and celebrate carry the explicit or implicit message that the party was correct in its decisions,” Thayer says. He cites the battle of Dien Bien Phu, in which the Vietnamese defeated French colonial forces, and the liberation of the South in the war with the US.
“The party’s ‘unerring’ success in guiding the Vietnamese revolution is repeatedly used to justify one-party rule,” he says. “Or, to put it in other words, to demonstrate that there is no viable alternative to rule by the Vietnam Communist Party, the author of victory after victory, success after success.
“The main irritant from the Vietnam War is the legacy of Agent Orange and dioxin poisoning and unexploded ordnance, which still kills and maims Vietnamese civilians,” Thayer says.
As a factor in bilateral relations, the Vietnam War has largely receded. “We’re looking ahead at next year and an opportunity to mark the anniversary of 20 years of the normalisation of diplomatic ties and what that means for the future of both our countries,” says Terry White, the US Embassy spokesman in Hanoi.
“Vietnam syndrome” is seen to haunt US foreign policy and military interventions to this day.
“If there was any lesson for Vietnam, it is the need for an effective communications strategy in the face of foreign encroachments on its sovereignty,” says Jonathan London, assistant professor at the Southeast Asia Research Centre at the City University of Hong Kong. “It’s an enduring weakness that Hanoi must address in the face of Beijing’s international propaganda juggernaut.”
Rather than linger over the past, high-school graduate Hang also prefers to focus to the present.
“There are other, much more interesting things in the news, like the Malaysia Airlines plane that was shot down or China putting another oil rig in Vietnam’s sea,” she says.
