Webb Floor Remarks: Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon

"Before I address the subject of my amendment, I would like to point out, as I have every April 30 since I have been in the Senate, that today is the day--now 35 years ago--South Vietnam fell to a Communist offensive and the Vietnam war officially ended.
   
"April 30, 1975, has a very unique meaning among Vietnamese and the 2 million Americans of Vietnamese descent in this country. It is almost as strong as the way many people feel in this country about B.C. and A.D. It is a very clear demarcation line in terms of an effort that was made for many years to assist an incipient democracy in South Vietnam from coming under a different form of government, just as clearly as we attempted to assist South Korea from coming under the form of government that today we see in North Korea and just as clearly as we spent many years and much national treasure preserving the democratic principles in West Germany after the Cold War began, with the hope and the eventual result of the unification of that country.
   
"This is not a time, all these years later, to debate the merits of the American involvement in Vietnam. I am one who is very proud to have served in that war as a U.S. marine. I still believe strongly in what we attempted to do. And we have heard from some of the really great thinkers of our generation--the Asian thinkers, such as Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore--that the attempt of the United States to staunch the flow of communism in Vietnam allowed the other countries in Southeast Asia--Singapore strongly among them but a number of the other countries in Southeast Asia--to build governmental systems and free market economies that eventually have had a dramatic impact in that part of the world.
   
"Today we see organizations such as ASEAN, the 10 nations of Southeast Asia, having begun to come together and think with commonality about free market principles and different sorts of governments. A great deal of that did come out of the position the United States took during the Vietnam war.
   
"This war is not taught in American schools. It goes by so fast in school systems that sometimes it is dealt with in a matter of an hour or two. The contributions of our men and women in Vietnam in the military are generally dismissed or downplayed. We put 2.7 million American military people into that country against a very capable enemy. We fought for years. We lost 58,000 Americans on the battlefield. We lost another 300,000 wounded.
   
"The U.S. Marine Corps lost more total casualties in Vietnam than even in World War II. They lost three times as many as in Korea. They lost five times as many combat dead as in World War I. The experience, because of the division in this country, went right past the American populace. It is still not plugged into the comprehension, the quality of the service and the quality--against a very highly capable enemy--the results we brought onto the battlefield as measured by the standards that our leaders placed upon us. Mr. President, 1.4 million Communist soldiers died in this war--by the admission of the Hanoi government in 1995, not these arguments about whether body counts coming from the battlefield were inflated or not, 1.4 million soldiers. This was a brutal war.
   
"The aftermath of the war is almost never discussed in this country. It is as if everything ended in 1975. One million South Vietnamese, the cream of South Vietnam's young leadership, were put into reeducation camps; 240,000 of them remained in those camps for longer than 4 years; an estimated 56,000 died. Another 1 million Vietnamese jumped into the sea, followed by others, including my wife's family. This day, 35 years ago, her family was on a boat having escaped from North Vietnam in 1954 and South Vietnam in 1975, facing unknown futures. The Soviet Union gained a strong foothold which did not expire until the Soviet Union expired, putting into place a command economy and basically a Stalinist system. When I first started going back to Vietnam in 1991, the system was extremely rigid and could only be called a Stalinist system.
   
"But the other piece of this, which a number of people in this country--and I count myself among them--have worked assiduously for decades to bring about is the healing of that war here, in Vietnam, between the 2 million people of Vietnamese descent in this country and the existing forces in Vietnam. This has been a very arduous and successful, for the most part, process.
   
When I look at the Vietnam of today--and I have spent a great deal of time there not only during the war but after the war--I am very optimistic. I have always believed, even in my younger days as a marine, that Vietnam was one of the four or five most important countries to the United States when we look at our relations in Asia. This is evolving. The countries, as our trade relations have evolved, as our contacts have evolved, and as the trust level has evolved, our countries are working very well together to assure the stability of this region.

"I feel compelled to make these points on a day that has such an impact on Vietnamese around the world, and to say I am hopeful that with the progress we have made over the past several years that we can achieve the objectives that we once were trying to achieve at the time on the battlefield--a strong relationship with a country whose government will become more open and more mature, with a people who have a tremendous level of entrepreneurship and energy, and in the end, a relationship that can assure greater stability in east Asia and Southeast Asia."