Vietnam's military celebrates communist forces that ended decades-long conflict and delivered painful blow to the US.
30 Apr 2015 04:44 GMT | Vietnam, United States, Asia Pacific

Vietnam has marked the 40th anniversary of Saigon's fall with a huge military parade celebrating the moment communist forces ended a decades-long conflict and delivered a painful blow to American moral and military prestige.
The centre of Vietnam's usually bustling southern business hub was sealed off on Thursday so that regiments of goose-stepping soldiers in dress uniform could march past all the country's flag-waving top leadership as a marching band played.
Elaborate floats, including one bearing a giant portrait of founding president Ho Chi Minh, made their way slowly through the city streets, celebrating the moment 40 years ago when tanks smashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace in the then southern capital of Saigon - now named Ho Chi Minh City.
"The April 30 victory was a golden turning point for the Vietnamese people," Army Lieutenant-General Nguyen Quoc Khanh told the crowds at the event, which was being broadcast live nationwide.
The victory was a symbol of the country's hard-won independence, he said, adding that the army "is ready to sacrifice" anything to defend this.
The Northern victors reunited the country under a communist government after a war which eviscerated much of Vietnam, killing millions of its people as well as 58,000 American servicemen.
The conflict was also bitterly divisive in the US and still haunts the country.
As the first Cold War conflict to be extensively covered by the Western press - and the first to be lost by a modern superpower that thought itself unbeatable - it remains seared into the public imagination, most often as a tragic waste.
No American official will attend the anniversary parade, but the US Ambassador will attend a small ceremony at the consulate in HCMC with The Fall of Saigon Marine's Association, embassy spokesman Terry White told AFP news agency.
Victory means 'legitimacy'
The winning side has also struggled with the meaning of the war as the nominally communist government deepens its embrace of market capitalism.
For decades, Hanoi has celebrated its military victory as a means to legitimise its ongoing authoritarian rule.
The communists' 1975 victory was a moment of global historic importance, said Vietnam expert Jonathan London, at City University of Hong Kong.
With the parade the party is trying to both commemorate victory and "erase any possibility that its achievements over the last 40 years have fallen short of the mark", he said.
Vietnam has come a long way since the end of the war, and especially over the last 20 years since the adoption of market reforms, London added, but wartime anniversaries still play a key role for the older generation.

Yet increasingly, the public is indifferent or even hostile to such shows of official patriotism.
"I don't care about this parade -- it's bad for business," said Nguyen Thi Dieu, 25, a vendor who sells cold water and snacks in the city centre told AFP.
"The parade is just for the TV cameras and for the top leaders, not for people like me."
Vietnam remains a one-party state where dissent is not tolerated and all media is state-controlled.
Local press has run fawning stories ahead of the anniversary, heavy on wartime heroism.
But online, where many citizens now prefer to read their news, criticism of the anniversary is more widespread.
"Let the past go, it's been 40 years," wrote businessman Tran Minh Chien on his Facebook page in a typical comment, urging the government not to waste time and money on a major military parade.
Source: AFP




Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam - Pham Quoc Hung felt calm when the end finally came.
It was the morning of April 30, 1975, and North Vietnamese tanks were rumbling towards their final military objective: Saigon.
Those tanks were a sign that the war in Vietnam was finally over, said Hung, recounting the last hours, 40 years ago today, of the country once known as the Republic of Vietnam, and the fall of its former capital, Saigon, to North Vietnamese forces.
"I felt calm because I could expect the result," said the 75-year-old Hung, who was a battlefield photographer with the defeated South Vietnamese army at that time.
After years covering the war that brought so much death and destruction on his country, Hung said he wasn't filled with dread at the prospect of a Communist victory. He was just relieved that peace would finally arrive.
"I wasn't afraid because I never had a gun. I was a reporter," he said. "I had nothing to regret."
When the last American helicopter flew out of Saigon on the morning of April 30, 1975, more than 58,000 US military personnel had been killed in the war. So many more Vietnamese had died that it is difficult to calculate. Estimates range from 1.5 million to more than 3.5 million Vietnamese killed in fighting from the mid-1950s until the war's end in 1975.
Predictions of a bloodbath after the fall of Saigon proved entirely false. Hung and other low-ranking soldiers of the defeated South Vietnam spent time undergoing "hoc tap", or re-education.
Hung spent just a few days undergoing re-education. Senior officers and other officials of the defeated South would have to spend longer in hoc tap, and in harsh conditions. Some never returned.
The war seems like a very distant memory among the gleaming high-rise buildings in downtown Ho Chi Minh City, the new name for the old Saigon. High-end stores sell Hugo Boss, Chanel, and Chopard to the city's nouveau riche, and McDonald's caters to the aspiring middle class.
Old symbols still have their place in this one-party state though.
In preparation for what is officially called Reunification Day, the city's streets were awash in newly made hammer and sickle flags and rousing billboards and posters, featuring tanks and soldiers with AK-47 rifles, extolled the military victory of four decades ago and the glory of the Communist Party.
A huge digital screen on the front of the luxury, twin-towered Vincom shopping mall beamed the same propaganda messages across the city's skyline: Marxist slogans with capitalist spending power never looked so good.

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