The world was very different when we helicoptered out of Saigon 50 years ago. It's better now.
With the battle lines drawn between global integrationists and ultra-nationalists, I find myself aligning with nations that I used to abhor. It's hard not to like Vietnam.
Among the many historic moments we are commemorating this month, the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War is perhaps the most relevant to our moment. It encapsulates the essence of the worldwide tug-o-war going on right now between the forces of ultra nationalism and global integration, of “Us vs. Them” versus “It’s a Small World After All.”
Take a look at some of these photos I took in Vietnam a few years ago and tell me which side of the fence our once mortal enemy now stands on.
My wife and I saw both the north and the south. We sailed on the Mekong River1 and bought trinkets next to John McCain’s prison2, the ironically named “Hanoi Hilton.” There are some real Hanoi Hiltons now, and we stayed in a five-star Western deluxe hotel right near one of them, while munching on Dunkin Donuts and sipping Starbucks - and yes, we ate more authentic fare too. Even for a Kosher vegetarian like me, the food was fantastic. All I can say is that I fell in love with the people and the country.
I am old enough to recall vividly the horrors of that war, and how we thought it would never end. I was fortunately too young to be drafted, or to be arrested protesting the draft. I was one of those younger siblings who got to watch it all unfold from the living room cocoon, less a participant than a mini Kissinger shuttling between mom and dad to explain why the older sib was so impossible to deal with. But I watched it all. I saw America claiming to be winning a war that was unwinnable, inflating the enemy body counts while killing more innocent people in unimaginable ways. I didn’t know much about the Vietnamese, just that they were on some level subhuman in the eyes of the military. They had to be or we wouldn’t have burnt out their villages and caused children to be born with birth defects from Agent Orange.
I saw America lose Walter Cronkite. I saw Republican and Democratic presidents lie and the Pentagon Papers save journalistic integrity. I saw Cambodia conflagrate. I saw Bob Hope entertaining the troops as if they were fighting for the right of every American to ogle Raquel Welch.
Hey, I was a kid.
That’s what Vietnam meant to me.
Until I went there.
It was clear from my trip that Mark Twain was correct when he quipped, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness."
A few years before I journeyed to Vietnam, I realized that times had changed so dramatically, when I was scheduling a lifecycle event with a congregant and we ran into a snag having to do with his 27-year-old daughter's vacation schedule.
"Oh, sorry rabbi," he said, "that weekend will be impossible. Amy will be trekking in Vietnam."
Come again?
It turned out that she was going to be there with a friend, another young congregant who, as I recall, had become bat mitzvah the day before yesterday. It also turned out that, while I was focused on other parts of the world, 'Nam had become an increasingly popular place to visit, to the tune of six million tourists in the first quarter of 2025, according to the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism,3 the highest number ever.
Back in the day, most Americans 20-somethings who went over to Vietnam did so rather more reluctantly, many returning in body bags. But those who were once terrified of sending their sons are now freely sending their single young daughters to trek through those same haunted rainforests, and punch their ticket at the Hanoi Hilton. Now Americans are being welcomed with open arms as tourists in My Lai.
Ultra-nationalists are engaged in reckless activities across the globe, fomented by Putin, who needs to continue the war in Ukraine to consolidate his power as his economy teeters. And then there’s the Trump crew, which can’t decide whether it’s going all neo-con on us with its bellicosity over Greenland or just wants to have a parade of tanks rolling down the streets of Washington.
I place my hope in this: As the world continues shrinking, while reactionary forces are fighting hard to re-divide us with tariffs and threats, it’s not working.
Just look at how far we’ve come since ‘Nam.
Fifty years ago, when the last Americans helicoptered out of Saigon, who could have imagined a world where one could freely crisscross Berlin or buy matzah in Abu Dhabi? Who could have imagined that the last two popes would endorse condoms? If that kind of inclusivity is possible, then pigs truly can fly - or at least they can practice safe sex.
Let’s step back a moment from those shiny fascist objects blocking our view to see what is really going on - and what the Axis of Evil Autocrats is so fearful of.
A new kind of domino theory took hold after the fall of Saigon and the collapse of the Soviet Union, replacing the antiquated ethos of the Cold War era. Everywhere we looked, walls of separation crumbled. France and Germany opted to share the same currency. Who’d a thunk it? Turkey and Greece share tourists by the boatload. No big deal. South Africans all share the same multicolored flag. Northern Ireland and Ireland have found common ground.
Wherever we looked over the past half-century, ancient feuds were melting away. The end of the Vietnam War, followed by horrific aftershocks in Cambodia, Rwanda and the Balkans, was the nadir. Class bullies, like Bin Laden, Isis, Iraq, Iran and Russia labored mightily to arrest that change. But the trend toward global coalescence continues unabated. Interconnected economies and globalization are portrayed as the enemy by ethno-nationalists. But for my two students trekking though Vietnam, who unlike a generation before did not come home in body bags, it was just the world as it should be.
And there is no greater symbol of the triumph of global integration than Vietnam. This year, even as Trump tries to bar the doors of trade and cooperation, tourism to Vietnam is through the roof.
No, I don’t mean this roof, below, immortalized in a photo taken in Saigon on April 29, 1975 - 50 years ago last week:
I mean this one, in a photo that I took in Hanoi. With KFC, DD, BK and Popeyes all together on the same floor, one could be excused in thinking that we actually won the war.
And why did we fight that war, exactly?
Whose dominoes are falling now, eh?
I don’t know whether families of the 58,220 Americans killed in action4 should be happy at this turn of events or even more resentful that the grandchildren of the people they fought now love just about all things American.
If Bob Hope’s troops fought for the Constitutional right to see Raquel Welch jiggle, Ho Chi Minh’s fought for the right to eat Popeyes for dinner and a McFlurry for dessert.
Except that now, what economics hast brought together, Donald Trump wishes to tear asunder. Trump’s tariffs have caused Gulf of Tonkin-like crisis for the Vietnamese, who just want to grab a bucket of KFC and live in peace.
Trump is trying to rip open every bandage he can and disrupt a world that has been gravitating toward economic and social integration for half a century. It’s hard to measure the sins of his presidency thus far, but this attempt to tear the world apart just might be his most egregious.
I have some news for him. It won’t work.
Nationalism is a powerful drug, but a parade on Trump’s birthday will not whip Americans into a warlike frenzy. We are not thirsty to land on the shores of Tripoli, with or without illegally deported refugees. The Battle of Copenhagen is not going to happen, because if Trump dares to declare any war anywhere, the battles are going to be fought not “over there,” but on the streets of America. If Trump tries to drum up nationalistic fervor by crying out “Remember the Maine!” what Americans will remember is that Trump is threatening to go to war against Maine, by taking its governor to court.
The Vietnam War was arguably the most damaging failure in American history - at least until Election Day, 2024. But 50 years later, in part because of that failure, the world is a very different place, and in many ways a better place.
That’s because the forces of integration set in motion then are still winning - as the world gets smaller and smaller.
Known now for its unique ecosystems and floating markets and the Cần Giờ Biosphere Reserve, protected by UNESCO. Napalm and Agent Orange not included on the tour.
Outside the “Hanoi Hilton” - followed below that by McCain’s cell.
Graph of tourism trends in Vietnam:
Americans killed in action in Vietnam
Thank you very much for this timely and enlightening article. My first thought was “50 years ~ Wow”?! I am 68 and female so I never had to worry about the draft. My most vivid personal memory from that time was when my Aunt Kay, who had been a Navy nurse during World War II (Pacific Theater & post-war Japan), on a hospital ship during the Korean War; and by the Vietnam War had risen to the rank of Commander announced she was resigning from her post as head of nursing at a Virginia Military Hospital and retiring! What shocked my parents even more were her reasons ~ she knew she was being lied to by her superiors about what was causing the burns she was seeing in her patients, and therefore her inability to do her job properly. She taught me a lot about what it meant to be a true patriot and to choose to serve her entire life for the 🇺🇸. She also taught me that bumper stickers like “America, right or wrong” were dangerous.
Your belief that the forces of global integration will continue despite the destructiveness and depredations of nationalism is optimistic but not implausible. But in Trump world it might just take the battle of Copenhagen to bring about the pushback to end the current insanity in our country.