April 30 marked the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, and the end of a war that has profoundly shaped Vietnam and its place in the world. Today’s Vietnam is a world away from 1975; it is a young, dynamic country of 100 million increasingly tied into the global economy, and seeking strategic partnerships with former enemies like the United States. Beneath this façade of modernity, however, the country continues to struggle over what Vietnam’s war, and its aftermath, mean – and how that memory is wielded today.
Jubilant scenes marked the anniversary in Vietnam. The streets were filled with flag-waving throngs, and fighter jets flew overhead amid social media posts branding the state parade the “concert of the Fatherland.” But mass participation does not always mean political consensus. Parades compress history into choreography. They’re mobile and hypnotic, but also intended to foster solidarity and limit dissent. You can get swept up in collective emotion and still ask: Who is being remembered, who is being left out, and who gets to tell the story?
In an anniversary article in the state media, To Lam, the head of the Communist Party of Vietnam and now Vietnam’s most powerful leader, cast the war’s conclusion not as a military triumph so much as a moment for national reconciliation. “After 50 years of national reunification, we have enough courage, enough confidence, enough pride and enough tolerance to overcome the pain together and look forward,” he wrote. National reconciliation, he argued, does not mean “forgetting history or erasing differences, but rather accepting different perspectives in the spirit of tolerance and respect, to jointly aim for the greater goal: building a peaceful, unified, powerful, civilized, and prosperous Vietnam.”
This is a strikingly new tone for the April 30 anniversary. For decades, official history depicted 1975 as an unambiguous “great liberation.” While Vietnam’s outreach to the diaspora has been underway for years, official speeches marking the end of the war have rarely mentioned reconciliation. What stood out this year was that Lam explicitly called for a “a policy of national harmony and reconciliation.” He called on the nation to “close the past, respect differences, look towards the future” to build “a peaceful, unified, happy, prosperous and developed Vietnam.”
Still, no honest reckoning is possible without confronting the United States’ role in Vietnam’s wars. The United States bears significant responsibility not only for the carnage of the war but for the divisions it helped entrench. In sabotaging the 1954 Geneva Accords, which had guaranteed national elections, and establishing a staunchly anti-communist state in southern Vietnam, Washington contributed to freezing and escalating what might otherwise have been a limited civil conflict. The subsequent military escalation made Vietnam the site of Cold War rivalries. Yet any full accounting must also recognize the genuine fears that shaped American decision-making, and the Cold War lens through which Washington viewed Southeast Asia.
For many Americans, memories of Vietnam are fused to their own national trauma: the body counts, the angry protests, the helicopters taking off from the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. But for many in Vietnam, the war was more than tragic; it was an epic battle for national survival, which succeeded due to the North’s great endurance and strength, albeit at a terrible price.
This history requires humility from both sides. The path to national reconciliation in Vietnam is a crucial test of the Communist Party’s national legitimacy. America’s reckoning involves confronting past mistakes, not as distant errors, but as part of a shared history, which should guide us toward a more honest relationship in the future.
Lam’s article also emphasized the importance of diaspora relationships. Speaking to Vietnamese abroad, even those who “stood on the other side of history,” he appealed for unity: “The Vietnamese people – with all the lessons from the past, with all the solidarity today – will certainly continue to write brilliant new chapters in their development journey.” Such language matters. There are no more official expectations for them to renounce their pasts. Instead, it suggests a way forward rooted in mutual pride and identity rather than ideological homogeneity. “We can’t change history,” Lam wrote, “but we can construct the future together.”
Lam echoed and reinforced this conciliatory sentiment during his remarks at the commemorative parade on April 30. Speaking to Party leaders, veterans and international guests, he listed national harmony and transcending the past as among the key lessons of the 1975 victory, up there with the importance of the Party’s military strategy and political leadership. His speech noted that reconciliation has now entered into the Party’s official historical line.
Rhetoric is one thing. Real reconciliation will require facing painful and politically sensitive truths, not least the ordeal of the hundreds of thousands who fled into exile after the fall of Saigon, often at great personal cost. For many in the Vietnamese diaspora, such comments will remain hollow without greater acknowledgment of the suffering and dislocation caused by postwar policies.
There are many ways in which postwar Vietnam is remarkable. It has grown from a ravaged battlefield into a rising middle power. But the true strength of a nation is not economic or military; it is moral. The true test of the Party’s political maturity will be its ability to enshrine a national memory of the war that does justice to all Vietnamese, not just those who emerged victorious.