A Marine from 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines, moves a Vietnamese peasant during a search and clear operation 15 miles west of Da Nang Air Base, 1965. Photo: PFC G. Durbin, US Marine Corps.

“The Vietnamese national character is rapidly changing. Our value system is falling apart. Gangsters are making incredible fortunes on the black market.”

–Professor Hoang Ngoc Hien, Hanoi intellectual, 1995

“We’re getting wonderful cooperation from the Communist Party. What we need now is more accountability on the part of the Vietnamese.”

–Bradely Babson, Director, World Bank, Hanoi office, 1995.

The War in Vietnam pushed me out of academia, turned me into an anti-imperialist and cast a long shadow on my life. The March on the Pentagon, the 1968 Tet Offensive, May Day in 1971, and helicopters hovering above Saigon— all of them seem like yesterday. For my parents and for members of their generation who survived the Depression of the 1930s and the Red Scare of the 1950s, “the” war was World War II when fascism was defeated and the atomic age began with the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For my generation and at least two generations that followed it, “the” war was Vietnam, which lasted more than a decade and brought about the loss of millions of lives, both Vietnamese and Americans.

I never served in the military and was never drafted. A lucky bastard. Along with tens of millions of people around the world I protested against the war beginning in 1964 and until the war’s end in 1975. I wrote and distributed leaflets, marched, rioted, burned my draft card and went to jail. The war in Vietnam, which the Vietnamese call “the American war” — to distinguish it from the wars against the French and the Japanese—divided American society between pro-war “hawks” and militarists and anti-war “doves” and pacifists.

I remember when Che Guevara called for “Two, Three, Many Vietnams.” I remember he went to the Congo and to Bolivia to foment guerrilla warfare that he hoped would provoke and overextend the US militarily and lead to the end of American hegemony. With help from the CIA, Bolivian troops captured and assassinated him; his dream of a global anti-imperialist revolution driven by the Third World fizzled. What’s difficult to conjure is the zeitgeist, the sense of being permanently on the edge and on fire.

Didn’t the U.S. teeter on the brink of a civil war. I was sure it did and that was prompted by rise of Black Power, bloody riots in big cities like Detroit, the assassinations of Malcolm and Martin, the Kennedys and more, the women’s and the gay liberation movements, young men who went into exile in Canada and France rather than go to Vietnam, and a counterculture that lured a generation or two away from white American values and into the world of sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and rebellion.

For a time it seemed to me and to my circle of self-proclaimed revolutionaries, and to the circles beyond that circle, as though the American Empire, like the Roman and British empires before it, was destined to decline and fall. We were waiting for an end that never came. Maybe imperialism wasn’t the highest stage of capitalism.

Maybe Lenin was wrong,........

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