The article describes how Americans had reacted to the defeat from the Vietnam Congs
By Nazarul Islam | USA
People born six decades ago, have seen this iconic picture. An American helicopter perches atop a building as would-be evacuees clamber up a ladder to the roof. They’re desperate to flee Saigon, capital of a doomed South Vietnam, before it falls to the communist troops advancing somewhere out of shot below.
A Dutch news agency photographer, Hugh van Es, snapped that picture from his office balcony, on 29 April 1975. The roof belonged to a nearby apartment building where senior CIA staffers were based. It was not the US Embassy, though that’s how it’s been misremembered ever since. Exactly half a century later, van Es’ shot remains engraved in memory as the defining image of how America made its exit.
It also points to something more. In the decades after 1945, the helicopter became the embodiment of the United States’ nimble superpower modernity, descending from on high to bring salvation, or vengeance.
Presidents had ducked under the rotating blades to be buzzed from the White House lawn to Camp David, to decide the fate of nations.
Aerospace corporations kept thousands at work in places such as Fort Worth, Texas, the home of Bell Helicopter, which made the UH-1 Iroquois, nicknamed the ‘Huey’. It was one of those Hueys up on that the Saigon roof – at one point, Bell was making 150 every week.
Imagine a movie where war came to America itself? And, imagine a scenario where the Soviets nuke the largest cities, amidst chaos business leaders are busy planning to pile into choppers and flee to the luxury bunkers awaiting them beneath a popular location in the countryside.
When young protesters rebelled against what they saw as their authoritarian, militaristic elders, those same authorities retaliated by sending in the choppers. In August 1968, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago became a fortress. Outside, furious, thwarted left-wing activists demanded a say in the selection of the party’s candidate for president.
Mayor Richard Daley sent in baton-wielding cops – and ’copters. In No One Was Killed, his book-length report on the mayhem that followed, the journalist-novelist John Schultz detected the shadow of the hated war in Asia looming over the protesters below:
Overhead, a helicopter hummed up and down the length of Michigan Avenue from the Hilton to 18th Street, playing its searchlight on the crowd rushing north and on the alleys. Perhaps the helicopter was radioing information to the [National] Guard and the cops, but mainly it was there to frighten, to intimidate. Everyone in the crowd knew that in Vietnam a machine gun could be working away behind the searchlight.
America’s film director George Shultz, is angrily shaking his fist at the cop behind the bulb, imagining him ‘curling his lip at my affront, fingering a trigger and saying, “Oh, what I could do, buddy boy, oh, yes, what I could do”’.
Likewise, nine months later, to disperse huge campus protests at Berkeley, Governor Ronald Reagan dispatched the National Guard. They surrounded the students, while a helicopter swooped in past the university bell tower, pumping out tear gas.
No wonder that, by 1970, such images had come to symbolize implacable, centralized force. In EL Doctorow’s novel The Book of Daniel, the military-industrial complex is described as ‘highly visible’. On a dystopic Californian plain, the protagonist watches a mysterious dark green helicopter track back and forth across the sky all day, ‘its compressions beating the white air till it’s thick’.
Around this time, the US military formalized its long-standing practice of naming its helicopters after Native American tribes (Iroquois, Apache, Chinook) and leaders (Black Hawk). This was reportedly meant to invoke American history while evoking the aircrafts’ stealth and speed. It also underlines the power of the state that was commissioning them. It’s not hard to imagine what the 19th-century federal government would have done with Apache helicopters to actual Apaches.
All the same, these images are more ambiguous than they seem. Helicopters may have left John Schultz feeling powerless as he stared up from the ground, but finally it’s just another person up there, trying to control a tiny, vulnerable vehicle. The helicopter is irreducibly hubristic. It is this that makes it such a potent symbol of the image America presents to itself, and to the rest of us. It hovers, all-powerful, over everything, but sometimes seems a shot away from calamity.
The historian Christian Appy has pointed out that it was helicopters, rather than the far more destructive B-52 bombers, that came to symbolize America’s war in Vietnam. But this is not just because they were incessantly visible over Vietnam itself, and on television: it’s because they embody both sides of the US intervention – omnipotent, and impotent. In Chickenhawk, his bestselling memoir of his year spent flying Hueys early in the war, Robert Mason recalls watching a Viet Cong soldier with a rifle hopelessly trying ‘to take on our entire air-assault battalion, machine guns blazing’.
He also describes the intense fear induced by flying low, his ‘chickenshit’ commander hunched low in the seat beside him, and how other Viet Cong fighters took out US pilots – such as Mason’s successor – by shooting vertically through the cockpit from the ground.
This duality was captured in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 movie Apocalypse Now, in another spin on these images that are seared into the collective memory. The ascending Wagnerian strings of ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ are blasted from a helicopter convoy as it swoops in across the sea, effortlessly wiping out scurrying Vietnamese peasants. Yet as soon as one of the choppers lands, a Vietnamese woman runs up and throws in a grenade. And of course that photo from the Saigon roof was only partly an image of American power. It also signified defeat.
More dispiriting images followed. In 1980, with Apocalypse Now still in cinemas, President Carter sent commandos from the Delta Force special missions unit to carry out ‘Operation Eagle Claw’. This was a bid to rescue American diplomats being held hostage in Iran. Three of the eight helicopters malfunctioned. The mission was aborted, in the course of which another crashed into a cargo aircraft, killing eight servicemen.
Three years later, under Ronald Reagan, Delta Force landed in another debacle. ‘Operation Urgent Fury’ was a plan to invade Grenada on the dubious premise that this small Caribbean island, a member of the British Commonwealth, had become a ‘Soviet-Cuban colony’, and a Launchpad for terrorism. At one point, Delta Force descended in daylight in Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawks, struggling through anti-aircraft fire at point-blank range on a mission to liberate political prisoners – only to find the prison empty.
Overall, the invasion amounted to something of a political triumph, but, as Reagan’s biographer Max Boot writes, it ‘suffered from many of the same dysfunctions as Operation Eagle Claw’. As if to rub the point in, Robert Mason’s groundbreaking account of the Viet Cong shooting US pilots had touched down in bookstores just weeks before.
By far the most devastating such incident arrived under President Clinton, in October 1993. US forces operating with the United Nations in the war-torn Somalia capital Mogadishu attempted to capture an insurgent leader who had ordered the ambush of a peacekeeping convoy. Once again, Delta Force led the operation in Black Hawks – which had become a focus of Somalis’ anger towards the UN forces. According to the New York Times, even when they weren’t visiting deadly force from the air, their rotors ‘whipped the roofs of whole neighborhoods’.
The operation, ‘Gothic Serpent’, was a disaster. A soldier fell to the ground from 70 feet up. One Black Hawk crashed; another was shot down. Two Delta Force snipers, deployed by helicopter to secure one of the crash sites, were among the 18 Americans killed. The mutilated body of a US soldier was dragged through the city streets. A helicopter pilot was captured. Images of both men horrified Americans back home: it felt like Vietnam all over again.
After Saigon fell, the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that America’s ill-fated intervention ‘was exclusively guided by the needs of a superpower to create for itself an image which would convince the world that it was indeed “the mightiest power on earth”’. Yet that was not shattered by what happened in Iran, Grenada and Somalia. Instead, the image of American power that had once spooked many on the 1960s left began to spook many more in the 1990s, this time on the political right.
When America won the Cold War, it lost its unifying enemy. The ‘New World Order’ that emerged instead felt to some Americans less like victory than defeat, shaped as it was by globalization, disappearing jobs, the closure of defense manufacturing plants, and then the ascent of Bill Clinton to the presidency: a man they cast as a Vietnam draft-dodger, hell-bent on confiscating patriots’ guns. In reaction against all this, and the violent resolution of sieges at Waco and elsewhere, a large-scale militia movement emerged, some of whose leaders had served in Vietnam.
The beliefs that shaped the movement varied from the extreme right to a much more general discontent, but some of those involved harbored a remarkably detailed vision of imminent tyranny, in which a treacherous federal government, in cahoots with the United Nations, would carve up the republic.
This was an early sign of the worldview that has now come to dominate US politics, with its fears of a phantom ‘deep state’, rooted in unease about the federal government’s power. In the 1990s, the image that crystallized this fear was a sinister apparition on the skyline: the unmarked black helicopter.
Read: Reviving Islamic Discourse and Rationalism
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The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his articles.
