Vietnam's 50th - the Celebrations begin. But what's to remember and why?

GRUMPY OLD VIETNAM HAND.

OK, everyone, I’m back in Saigon - oops! Ho Chi Minh City - at the invitation of the guys who won the Vietnam War back on 30 April 1975. Back then, a free chopper ride out from the Americans to that massive US Navy flotilla in the South China Sea already surrounded by the first fleeing Boat People. And yesterday, a free ride back on a Vietnam Airlines’ Airbus 350 full of Aussie tourists and returning Vietnamese-Australians. After all, we media folks helped ‘em win the war, right? And now instead of NVA tanks ploughing into South Vietnam’s Presidential Palace, Hanoi’s Commie Boss is on bended knee begging America to please - pretty please, Mr Trump - don’t bomb us with those 46% tariffs. Our entire economy wouldn’t survive without exports to America and all those remittances too. Does anyone still do irony out there? But that’s just the folks running things.

It is kinda’ funny to see the old VC (Viet Cong, also NLF, National Liberation Front) flag taking pride of place for the 50th Anniversary celebrations of the Fall/Liberation of Saigon, today’s Ho Chi Minh City. The NVA (North Vietnamese Army) really won the war, described at the time as ‘popular uprisings’ all down the South Vietnamese coast and they had to scramble around to get enough flags to crash into the Presidential Palace grounds on 30 April 1975. After the war - and Vietnam’s reunification - the flag disappeared and many southern Viet Cong were also purged.

The rest of us, what’s to remember and why? I was quite struck earlier today discovering Vietnamese writer-director Mai Huyền Chi’s just-released - and very timely - Vietnam: 50 years of forgetting on Al Jazeera and what a message she makes about remembering as she tracks down her family history. And she’s from the Winning Side too!

But I know exactly what she’s talking about. The Vietnam War was such a tragedy that it’s better not remembering. It’s just too painful.

And just forget that damned tourist cliché about how the Vietnamese don’t hate us anymore. How do you know what’s in their minds?

And Mai Huyền Chi does quite an amazing job - some great back & forth and personal turmoil - getting her relatives to remember and talk about war, including its particularly horrible legacy with one branch of her family. She ends up, seemingly for the first time, actually hating the Americans and what they did to Vietnam during the war.

And her message in the end: it’s okay for us to forget, but not for you who caused all this misery, America. Why should we remember when it’s you who should? It’s a powerful message. And I know they still haven’t learned.

But as the Grumpy Old Vietnam Hand that I am - and a stickler for getting facts right from the Vietnam War, especially short-handing modern-day journalists & commentators from whom you’ll be hearing heaps over the next two weeks - I must take her to task over something that immediately caught my eye: the black & white photo used to illustrate her documentary, and later footage.

The documentary’s opening image was an AP photo, but LIFE magazine was also there.

That image is from quite honestly the worst massacre that her side committed in the Vietnam War, the execution of 2800 to 10,000 South Vietnamese by the Viet Cong & North Vietnamese during the 1968 Tet Offensive in Huế, the bodies found months afterwards and sadly disappearing from most tellings of the war as the narrative switched to just ending the damned thing.

Unwittingly or not, the images clearly jar with her understandably biased story but, ironically one might say, a clear reminder of the war did have two Vietnamese sides, and not just an aunt who fell in love and married a South Vietnamese pilot.

The incident is certainly mentioned in my The Bite of the Lotus: an intimate memoir of the Vietnam War which you’ve been following here, most recently the infamous Christmas Bombing of Hanoi of 1972 but unfortunately given no historical context in the documentary. (I should send her a free copy of my memoir, actually!)

And while the historic footage is great, that Air America chopper - famously shot by my colleague Hugh Van Es, then with UPI - was not taking off from the American Embassy, nor was it the last to leave Saigon on 29 April 1975.

But the footage the documentary found on America’s horrific Operation Ranch Hand, its massive war-time defoliation program, is truly horrific and deliberately long leading into how own family has suffered from Agent Orange. (It’ll choke you up.)

And so it’s still 10 days away, but Ho Chi Minh City is getting all spruced up with 50th Anniversary and 30/4 (30th of April) signage everywhere around the city, practice flypasts by Russian-built fighters and helicopters, and nightly practice marches along the Saigon River and up behind the Saigon Cathedral where a closed-off, VIPs only and me too, parade will take place on the day. Fireworks and a huge drone display.

But don’t you dare remember too hard. It’s all just a show.

And around the Workers Memorial in Nga Bảy, or Seven Ways, a veritable plethora of billboards for the 50th Anniversary, never mind there really weren’t many kids waving flags around when this happened on 30 April 1975. And the workers are all in export factories!