Hanoi III Week IV

Hanoi III Week 4
We spent the week academically on the Nixon years: Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the war and “Vietnamization,” his plan to turn the war back over to the Vietnamese to carry out. In his frustration about ending the war, Nixon employed his “madman theory” to suggest to Hanoi that he detested communism and was prepared to use almost any weapon to ensure victory over North Vietnam. As part of this strategy, Nixon took the war to Cambodia and Laos, thus complicating resolution of the war in Vietnam itself. We also explored Nixon’s strategic moves to improve relations with the Soviet Union and normalize relations with China, partly in hopes of obtaining Soviet and Chinese support to end the war. Neither cooperated, out of concern that pressure on Hanoi risked alienating North Vietnamese leadership and encourage Hanoi to move to embrace of one or the other side in the Sino-Soviet schism.
We were also treated to a thoughtful analysis by a key participant on the Paris negotiations of the strategies of each side and negotiations of the Paris Accords that ended the war in January 1973, following the traumatic confrontation between Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu and the subsequent “Christmas bombing” of the Hanoi-Haiphong corridor of North Vietnam.
We also heard my description of post-Accord circumstances in the Mekong Delta after the United States military forces departed from Vietnam. We examined conditions in the South from 1973-1975 as Hanoi undertook “socialist transformation” to reform South Vietnam’s economy according to communist theory, resulting in enormous economic hardship and passive resistance to those policies.
We finished the week in Dai Bai Village, Bac Ninh Province, forty kilometers North of Hanoi with the poignant task of cleaning up a Vietnamese Peoples Army of Vietnam cemetery. We found graves of those killed in the first Indochina war with the French, many from the “American War,” and one tombstone from February 1979 during the brief war against the Chinese invasion to “teach Vietnam a lesson, and one from 1984, evidently of a soldier killed during Vietnam’s 1979-1989 invasion and occupation of Cambodia.
We also called on several families whose sons or husbands died during our war with Vietnam and one former soldier who had been shot in the head at point blank range by American soldiers fighting in South Vietnam. We were uniformly received hospitably, but occasionally tearfully. One young woman whose father had been disabled during the war and been taken to a hospital just before our visit broke down in tears. One 87-year old “gold star Mother,” who lost her husband when she was 25, seemed moved to tears in meeting with the children of the ‘former enemy.”
The Princetonians performed admirably with songs that I had not heard before and also a terrific dancer who emerged from the students midst to add luster to the performance.
To wrap up a very good week, we attended the American Chamber of Commerce Fourth of July festival and treated with hot dogs, fried chicken, ice cream and Budweiser. An extraordinary gymnast dazzled us with his athletic feats and then with an eight-foot long python wrapped around his body. The gymnast also invited two blue-eyed children to join him the python’s embrace. Two Mothers were joyful when the two children were released from the embrace. There were also dogs that incompetently refused to jump through hoops, and monkeys that more dutifully performed. After the Star - Spangled Banner and short remarks by the American Ambassador, the evening concluded on a happy note.