Vietnam and Kokoda. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: Two articles in the November Quadrant may tend to reinforce dangerously ahistorical mythologies.

Trudi Tate's "Stop Whispering" claims of Vietnam:

 
   Why were we fighting for a 
   South Viemamese government 
   which was neither democratic 
   nor popular, some soldiers 
   began to wonder, and why were 
   we opposing the communists, 
   who had considerable local 
   support? Should not Vietnam be 
   allowed to choose its own 
   government and settle its own 
   disputes, like other nations? 

To leave this as if it were the last word on the matter would be very wrong, comforting as it may be to those who played a part in selling South Vietnam into slavery. North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam, after the South Vietnamese communists--who were never able to hold a population centre--had been comprehensively defeated, with a full-scale invasion by about twenty Soviet-equipped regular divisions. The South Vietnamese fled in hundreds of thousands by putting to sea in leaky boats, something not one had tried to do under the allegedly "neither democratic nor popular" South Vietnamese regime. With Hanoi's victory there was no shadow of "choosing its own government". It was a case of one state conquering and subsequently plundering and enslaving another by naked aggression.

Vietnam under Hanoi's rule remains a totalitarian one-party state and it is only the inefficiency of communism, the unpopularity of the regime and the indomitable spirit of the South Vietnamese which now allows at least a degree of de facto private enterprise and other fairly small-scale economic, if not political, pluralism in the south. The Western defence of South Vietnam was absolutely morally correct, and events after the withdrawal of Western troops proved this to the hilt. We could do worse for the Australian veterans of the war than remind them--and the present generation--that they fought in a good and indefeasibly right cause. There was not the slightest reason for the Vietnam veterans to feel "guilt and remorse", rather the opposite.

It was also, very arguably, a winning cause: the war in Vietnam bought time for the rest of South-East Asia that was used well--and just what did supporting North Vietnam do to the Soviet economy? I refer readers to the first-person article by Vietnam veteran Dr John J. Coe published in Amity, September 2002.

In his article on Kokoda, Neil ...