Vietnam (31 page)

Pol Pot's first wife, the ideologue whose crazy ideas had underpinned Year Zero, went mad. Pol Pot himself abandoned Phnom Penh and took to the jungles where, with the backing of the US, Chinese and British governments, he and his cohorts continued to exercise considerable political influence. The Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia was not the end of Pol Pot's atrocities. For arcane political reasons, the world embargoed Vietnam until it withdrew its troops. The Khmer Rouge fought on, killing and maiming with the indiscriminate use of land mines. It was only in 1998 that Pol Pot was captured. He was tried, but he died of natural causes before he could be punished for the atrocities he had committed.

No one knows how many people died in the killing fields of Pol Pot's Kampuchea, or what proportion of deaths were due to malnutrition and disease – much of which was cause by ideology-led dislocation – as against deliberate execution. But available figures suggest that around 21 per cent of the population of Cambodia died under Pol Pot's regime. Some 50 per cent of the country's Chinese population were slaughtered, along with 30 per cent of the Islamic Cham. A quarter of the Khmer forcibly evacuated from the urban areas perished. Khmer peasant 'base people' lost probably 15 per cent. Of the Khmer Republic elite and the original CPK cadre, 75 per cent or more were exterminated. Perhaps as many as two million people died at the hands of their own countrymen, making Cambodia's Year Zero a greater human catastrophe, per capita, than Hitler's Germany. Unexploded ordinance and the indiscriminate use of land mines has ensured that the Khmer Rouge's toll of death and maiming will also continue to rise for a long time to come.

DURING THE VIETNAM WAR
46,370 US servicemen died in battle. More than 10,000 died from noncombat-related causes, while a further 300,000 were wounded. Australian casualties ran at 496 killed and 2,398 wounded, and the ARVN lost 2.5 per cent of its manpower each year, amounting to 185,000 soldiers killed between 1961 and the January 1973 ceasefire.

Accurate figures for NVA losses have never been established but estimates have put the figure as high as 900,000 – that is over 15 times US losses and nearly five times the South Vietnamese army's losses. That did not prevent them from invading into Cambodia to put an end to the murderous regime of Pol Pot in 1978 and stoutly defending Vietnam's northern border against a Chinese attack in 1979.

Senator Edward Kennedy's committee on refugees estimated that around 430,000 South Vietnamese civilians were killed between 1965 and 1974, and over a million injured or wounded. Later estimates reduced this to 250,000 killed and 900,000 wounded. Even this lower estimate means that five civilians lost their lives for each American killed in South Vietnam alone. Estimates for the number of civilians killed in Southeast Asia during the American involvement there stand at over a million.

In June 1974, the US Department of Defense estimated that the total cost of the war had been $145 billion at 1974 prices. However, there were other hidden costs – the inflation that the war economy brought, lost production, interest on loans, and continuing benefits for Vietnam veterans. The true cost of the war, it has been estimated, was something like $300 billion – around $1,100 for every American citizen. Aircraft losses were particularly expensive: the US lost 4,865 helicopters, costing a quarter of a million dollars each.

Shells cost around $100 each, but at the height of the fighting ten thousand – a million dollars' worth – were being loosed off each day. Two millions tons of shells were expended in all. Eight million tons of bombs were dropped on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, four times the amount dropped during the whole of World War II. A B-52 dropped $800,000-worth of bombs out of its bomb-bay doors on each mission. During 1966 alone, 148,000 missions were flown over North Vietnam, costing $1.25 billion, even leaving aside the cost of the 818 aircraft lost. A further 3,720 fixed wing aircraft were lost. That year, American bombing was estimated to have caused $130 million of damage. In other words, for every dollar's-worth of damage it caused the US had to spend $9.6.

Between 1965 and 1971 North Vietnam's defence budget ran to $3.56 billion. The Soviet Union contributed a further $1.66 billion and the Chinese $670 million. That gave the Communists a total of $5.89 billion. They won. The South, who lost, spent seventeen times that amount, while the US squandered fifty times the Communists' outlay. The Australian government got off lightly, spending something in the order of $A500 million.

There were other costs for the Vietnamese. Around eighteen million of them lost their homes because of the war. Some 3 per cent of the area of the South was totally devastated, while 32 per cent was severely damaged by explosives and defoliants. One fifth of all the timberland was destroyed and, by 1975, there were more than twenty million bomb and shell craters covering some 350,000 acres in all. At the end of the war an estimated 27,000 tons of unexploded bombs and shells were littered throughout the country, which remain an ever-present danger to farmers tilling their fields, people walking in the jungle and children out playing. There were seventeen million pieces of live ordinance cleared from the area along the DMZ and the McNamara line. They were removed in the cheapest way possible, using human mine detectors, mostly former AVRN soldiers. It is said more than 1,700 men were killed or maimed in this operation. And the widespread use of defoliants – 18 million gallons in all – has left a legacy of severely handicapped and malformed babies.

The imposition of a strict Communist regime in the South meant that former soldiers, government officials and businessmen, along with bar girls and prostitutes were sent to re-education camps. It has been estimated that as many as 50,000 were still being detained as political prisoners in 1986. To transform Saigon, now renamed Ho Chi Minh City, to a socialist haven 700,000 were forced to move out into the 'New Economic Zones'. It is estimated that, in all, 1.3 million people were relocated from urban areas to make a life for themselves in the countryside, with all its attendant hardships, while the lasts remnants of Western culture were rooted out. Religion was suppressed and there was inevitable friction as Southerners resented being ordered around by Northerners. In 1977, the US vetoed Vietnam's application to join the United Nations. After the invasion of Cambodia, the rest of the world shunned Vietnam as an aggressor. America imposed a trade embargo and the US and Japan blocked loans to Vietnam from the IMF and the World Bank. The Vietnamese economy became a basket case and, by August 1979, an estimated 865,000 people had fled the country. Some 250,000 of these were ethnic Chinese who found themselves persecuted by the Hanoi government and made the long trek north into China. The rest took to the open sea in open craft in the hope of washing up on friendly shores. Many of these 'boat people' did not make it, falling victim to storms, matchwood boats and pirates, but by 1979, over 120,000 had reached Malaysia and 60,000 were in Hong Kong, then still a British colony. There were 40,000 in Indonesia, 30,000 in Thailand and 11,000 in the Philippines. Simply providing them with food and shelter put enormous strains on their hosts. In July 1979, a conference was convened in Geneva to try to persuade the Vietnamese to stem the flow of refugees. But in 1984, a fresh round of repression unleashed a new wave of boat people on the high seas. Some were forcibly returned, but most were found permanent homes in non-Communist countries.

While much of Southeast Asia had been devastated by the war, America had benefited economically – government bonds floated to support the war effort fuelled the boom of the 1980s and 1990s. However, politically and psychologically the US had been damaged. It had been split in two by the anti-war movement and, in the end, a super-power had been humiliated by what America itself had dismissed as an army of peasants. In the process, the high ideals that were enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution had been tarnished. By the time the war was over, the politicians who had prosecuted it were out of office. Lyndon Johnson himself died on 22 January 1973, just as the Paris Peace Accords were being finalised. Those who bore the guilt for the war were the veterans, many of whom found themselves shunned for years after.

America's trauma was reflected most vividly in the attitude of Hollywood, which had avoided the awkward topic of Vietnam since the shameless propaganda of
The Green Berets
in 1968. Although
In the Year of the Pig
, putting the anti-war case, won an Oscar the following year, this was hardly mass market entertainment. Even though a younger generation of movie makers began producing movies with a distinctly hippy vision of the world, such as
Easy Rider
and
Alice's Restaurant
in 1969, Vietnam was conspicuous by its absence. Instead directors made their comments through black comedies such as
Catch 22
and
M*A*S*H
, both made in 1970 and set in World War II and Korea respectively. Westerns such as
The Wild Bunch
(1969),
Soldier Blue
(1970) and
Ulzana's Raid
(1972) also betray anti-war sympathies.

After the war, the Vietnam veteran became a shorthand for madman as in the vengeful psychopath of
Taxi Driver
(1976), played by Robert DeNiro, or the crazed visionary of
Birdy
(1984), though in
Tracks
in 1976 Hollywood began to take a sideways look at the Vietnam War through the eyes of a veteran travelling across the US with the remains of his dead buddy. The crazed Vietnam veteran became a stock character in cop operas such as
Kojak
, though the eponymous protagonist of the Hawaii-based detective show
Magnum P.I.
was relatively sane. And then there was
The A-Team
, a show about a Special Forces A-Team who had served honourably in Vietnam, but had had to go on the run to prove their innocence after heinous accusations. Along the way, they earned their keep by helping out people in trouble, even though they rarely accepted money for their services. This was Robin Hood updated, with incompetent generals, self-serving politicians, and fat cats on the make back home taking the roles of King John, the Sheriff of Nottingham, and the evil Guy of Gisborne.

In 1977, Hollywood tackled the war directly with
The Boys in Company C
, which took a low budget World War II-style movie and infused it with the Vietnam War cynicism – an exploitation movie, 'like dirty TV,' said
The New York Times
. Then in 1978, Jane Fonda got to parade her anti-war credentials once more with John Voight in
Coming Home
, a story about an embittered, disabled veteran who falls for the wife of a serving Marine, winning Oscars for Best Actress and Best Actor. The movie also won Best Screenplay.

The same year, old-time movie star Burt Lancaster discovered for himself that the American effort in Vietnam was doomed in
Go Tell the Spartans
and the corruption caused by the war was revealed in
Who'll Stop the Rain
(released as
Dog Soldiers
in the UK) about a Vietnam veteran smuggling heroin back to the US. Another 1978 movie, Michael Cimino's
The Deer Hunter
, again starring Robert DeNiro, won three Oscars. It told the story of three buddies from a steel town in western Pennsylvania who went to fight in Vietnam. Criticised for portraying the Vietcong as blood-thirsty killers while the Americans were innocents, it is really a story about how second-generation blue-collar immigrants fit into American society with Vietnam as part of the backdrop.

The following year, Francis Ford Coppola spent $31 million on
Apocalypse Now
. But instead of taking a straightforward look at Vietnam he transposed Joseph Conrad's short novel
Heart of Darkness
from Africa to Southeast Asia. The movie fancied itself as high art and took so long to make that it was known in Hollywood as Apocalypse Later. In 1984, a British production company squared up to the horrors of the Cambodian holocaust in
The Killing Fields
. Then in 1986, Vietnam veteran Oliver Stone made
Platoon
for just $7 million in eleven weeks in the Philippines. Filmed from the point of view of the grunt, it did not shy away from the shocking realism of gang-rape, village burning, and fragging. It was quickly followed in 1987 by Stanley Kubrick's
Full Metal Jacket
, which followed a group of Marines from boot camp through the battle of Hué; Coppola's
Gardens of Stone
, set in the Arlington National Cemetery;
Hanoi Hilton
, a POW drama set in North Vietnam's Hoa Lo prison; and
Hamburger Hill
, a portrayal of one of the war's bloodiest battles. Hollywood and America were coming to terms with the war.

The Vietnam genre also threw up the phenomenon of the Rambo movies. In
First Blood
in 1982, the muscle-bound, inarticulate Sylvester Stallone plays John Rambo, a former Green Beret who discovers that his status as a Vietnam combat veteran excites only contempt on the part of the sheriff's office of a small town in California, and on which office he wreaks a terrible vengeance. Then in
Rambo: First Blood, Part II
in 1985, Stallone takes on the entire US political and military establishment – not to mention the whole Vietnamese army – to rescue some American POWs left behind in Vietnam. According to the movie, they had been held in captivity in appalling conditions for more than ten years after the American withdrawal. It was a box office smash and one of the most pirated videos of all time.

Other films, such as
Uncommon Valor
in 1983 with Gene Hackman, had already covered the same ground: that the Vietnamese were holding American POWs and lying about it, that there were American heroes still languishing in jail in Southeast Asia, waiting to be rescued, and that the lily-livered sons-of-bitches in the White House, the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill were conniving in a cover-up. What you needed was a muscle-bound celluloid action man – such as Chuck Norris in
Missing in Action
in 1984 – to go in and get the boys home.