The United States left South Vietnam. In the Western world, this meant that Saigon “fell.” From the perspective of Hanoi, the Vietnamese had only achieved what they should have gotten, through the referendum that Washington had helped cancel, back in 1956. Three million had died, the entire nation was militarized, and huge swathes of the country’s lush jungles were rendered poisonous for generations because of US chemical warfare. After the fall of Saigon, there was no communist-led mass murder of civilians in Vietnam.
