Viet Nam had a genius for surprise, an exquisite gift for defeating ! expectations. Rudyard Kipling once issued a sort of regional warning about that: "And the end of the fight is a tombstone white/ with the name of the late deceased,/ And the epitaph drear: 'A Fool lies here who/ tried to hustle the East.' "
The enemy had been invisible in an earlier part of the war, hiding in jungles, in tunnels, ghosting around in the pre-dawn: killer shadows. They dissolved by day into the villages, into the other Vietnamese. They maddened the Americans with the mystery of who they were--the unseen man who shot from the tree line, or laid a wire across the trail with a Claymore mine at the other end, the mama-san who did the wash, the child concealing a grenade.
But by 1975 the Americans were mostly gone. They left after the Potemkin peace set up by the Paris accords of two years earlier, for which Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. The conflict had been "Vietnamized." And with the Americans out, the war of the lethal vanishings, the surreptitious strikes, was past.
And so ten years ago this month, the North Vietnamese swept down the map like the blade of a guillotine. They came in full divisions, with artillery and tanks. They banged across the countryside like Patton. It was no longer the endless, hallucinatory Viet Nam at all, but blitzkrieg, Western war, all of those years of inconclusive struggle finished off briskly in a short, surreal spring.
The Northerners' progress was weirdly effortless. They rolled across the Central Highlands. There the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) collapsed in headlong panic. The ARVN soldiers fought bravely elsewhere, notably around Xuan Loc, but the Communists drove steadily south. They overwhelmed all the place-names that had become so improbably familiar: Quang Tri, Hue, Danang, Kontum, Pleiku, Nha Trang.
Before them the Northerners drove long, miserable columns of refugees, civilians, ARVN soldiers, the old and young, all terrified, struggling numbly south toward Saigon. The Communists shelled and machine-gunned some columns. The refugees stumbled on across the corpses and the dying. From the Danang airfield, the last plane took off with men clinging to the landing gear and stairs. Some who went aloft crouched in the wheel housings were crushed as the landing gear cranked up. Along the coast, ARVN soldiers deserted their families and in some cases shot civilians for a place on a boat.
South Viet Nam's President Nguyen Van Thieu appealed for the American help to which he was entitled by the Paris treaty--and to which South Viet Nam had grown addicted. But the U.S. Congress, long since weary of Viet Nam, refused it. On April 21, Thieu resigned and a few days later flew to Taipei, reportedly shipping out a retirement fund of 3 1/2 tons of gold.
One day toward the end, the Americans tried to evacuate some 240 orphans, and their plane crashed in a paddyfield outside Saigon; only 100 or so survived. That seemed to be the fate of even the best American intentions in Viet Nam. As an early French colonialist reported home from Viet Nam in the 19th century: "Everything here tends toward ruin."