[On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks entered the Presidential Palace in Saigon, a symbolic but significant moment to reflect the end of the war. That conclusion has been represented frequently & complicatedly in American media, so this week for its 50th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such representations!]
On how a
maritime crisis turned military conflict can be connected to the war’s end, and
how it should be separated from it.
Each of
the other posts in this week’s series will focus on a cultural work—two films,
a musical, and a song, although not in that order so you’ll have to keep
reading I suppose!—that depicts the historical events around the end of the
Vietnam War, but today’s subject was a very real historical event in its own
right. On May
12th, 1975, the American merchant ship the SS Mayaguez
was seized in disputed Southeast Asian waters by forces of the Khmer Rouge, the
Cambodian junta that had taken control of that nation’s government less
than a month before (toppling the US-supported Khmer Republic in the
process). The U.S. Marines mounted a
rescue operation, retook the ship, and besieged the nearby island of Koh
Tang where the hostages were wrongly believed to be held, but were met with intense
resistance by Khmer Rouge forces. After extensive
and destructive battles with the Khmer Rouge that left dozens of Americans
dead and many more wounded, the Marines were evacuated on May 15; the Khmer
Rouge would themselves release
the unharmed hostages.
While the
initial seizure of the ship didn’t necessarily have to do with the end of the
Vietnam War a couple weeks before (the Mayaguez was apparently much
closer to Cambodian/Khmer-controlled waters than it should have been), it’s
impossible to say that the timing of the incident overall was coincidental. In
his book The
Last Battle: The Mayaguez Incident and the End of the Vietnam War (2002),
historian Ralph Wetterhahn traces just how focused President
Gerald Ford and his National Security Council were on perceptions of the
U.S. military and America as a whole in the immediate aftermath of the withdrawal
of troops from not
only South Vietnam, but also Cambodia
(which had been its own evacuation operation but one closely tied to the
Vietnam evacuation). In his book The Mayaguez Crisis, Mission Command, and Civil-Military Relations
(2018), military historian Christopher Lamb quotes Vice President Nelson Rockefeller
as arguing, “this will be seen as a test case,” and adding, “I think a violent response
is in order.” There can be no doubt that the administration saw the incident as
a chance to rewrite the narrative of the Vietnam War’s conclusion—nor that the
rescue’s failures would instead amplify those images.
If that’s
how the Mayaguez incident was perceived in its own moment, it certainly
has to be part of how we remember this history. But the main reason why I
wanted to include this real historical event in a weeklong series focused on
cultural texts is that I think it’s important to add that this vision of the Mayaguez
is likewise a narrative frame, rather than an intrinsic layer to the events themselves.
While the U.S. had attacked
Cambodia in the course of the Vietnam War (illegally
attacked, I should add), the two nations were of course in actuality
entirely distinct, and moreover the Khmer Rouge saw the North Vietnamese (as of
April 1975 just the Vietnamese) regime as an enemy (and the two nations would in
fact go to war a few
years later, contributing to the end of the Khmer Rouge’s rule). Moreover,
while it’s questionable at best whether the North Vietnamese regime were “the
bad guys” in the Vietnam War (I’d personally put Henry
Kissinger at the top of that list), the Khmer Rouge were quite simply one
of the most
brutal regimes of the 20th century, making the U.S. conflict
with them quite distinct from the morass that was the Vietnam War. All
reminders that our narratives for historical events are often, if not always,
just that.
Next portrayal
tomorrow,
Ben
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