Fifty years ago, my father, an American war reporter, climbed the walls of the US embassy in Saigon and scrambled onto a chopper who took off from the roof of the mission.
“My last view of Saigon passed through the helicopter tail door,” he wrote in the Chicago Daily News. “The door then closed, with the most humiliating chapter in American history.”
My father believed that the domino theory, the cascade of communism, could flood Asia. The World War II veteran wrote a book titled “Not Without Americans.”
In April 1975, the US Embassy in Saigon, Vietnam, was in a white shirt and glasses, and on the left side of the Kees Beach.
The title seems anachronistic from a time when paternalistic Americans were confident in their own flawed democracy and imagined a world shaped by their own image. Half a century after the last American troops retreated from Vietnam, it is clear how Asia is learning to live in China, a new great power, even without the Americans.
Beijing imprints can be found everywhere, from contested seas in the South China Sea, where delicate coral reefs burned to build Chinese military bases, to remote villages in Nepal, where Chinese goods are flooding markets via roads built in China.
President Trump’s tariffs, slowing American diplomacy, and dismantling American aid agencies, and the dismantling of hundreds of Asian programs feel like yet another withdrawal, even unforced by military forces.
When the earthquake struck Myanmar in late March, killing more than 3,700 people, the US was far slower than China and sent support. Then they fired the American aid workers while they were there on the ground.
“The US once supported hope and democracy, but when we needed them most, they are now missing,” said Koun Nairing Sun, a resident of Sagar, the earthquake-ravaged epicenter. “China sent out help immediately.”
However, in his next breath, Aung Nain questioned Beijing’s intentions in Myanmar. He was worried that China would plunder Myanmar’s natural resources and called on the US for help. When the junta overthrew an elected leader four years ago, democratic resistance begged America to do something to repel the dictators.
Washington will not intervene in Myanmar. Another Southeast Asia quagmire is the last thing the US administration wants. But America’s ideals and image continue to resonate overseas, including Hollywood, blue jeans and the concept of freedom gossey, even when its bedrock institutions may be threatened at home.
In March, I interviewed General Cham Sochito, Cambodia’s Deputy Minister of Defense. The United States supported the renovation of some of the military bases there, but the Cambodian government later relied on China instead for full modernization. The construction of the United States was destroyed, and the Chinese-made facility was announced in early April with the attendance of Chinese military officers.
When we were out of the interview, General Cham Sochito, who spent an hour protecting the authoritarian leader in Cambodia, gently tapped my arm.
“Is your American democracy a little difficult now?” he asked with astonishing concern.
It made a vague noise. He pushed against me.
He said Cambodia is still recovering from the destruction of the Khmer Rouge era. Meanwhile, radical communists destroyed society and overseen the deaths of up to a fifth of the country’s population.
“We are developing democracy like America, but we need peace and stability first,” he said.
I suspect that Cambodia, whose genetic dictatorship erased political opposition, has taken away free speech, is indeed on a democratic trajectory. And one of the reasons Cambodians accepted the Khmer Rouge in 1975 was the brutal American bombing campaign that spilled out of the Vietnam War.
Still, the Deputy Minister’s reference to American democracy meant something enduring about ideals. General Chhum Socheat said he wanted America a lot, and urged me to believe it against the important evidence that Cambodia also wanted to be with the Americans.
About 25 years ago, shortly before the big anniversary before the Americans left what is now Ho Chi Minh City, I met my father’s colleague in Vietnam, Pham Xuan An. My uncle sat in a cafe where foreign correspondents, spies and occasional novelists like Graham Green were used to drink thick coffee sweetened with condensed milk when he instructed me to call him.
He breathed in a mess from emphysema. This is the same smoking-related illness that killed my father many years ago. My uncle wore a big watch on his slender wrists, a gift from my father, he said.
“Mr. Beech was a patriot,” he said.
My uncle was also a patriot. He worked as a correspondent for Time magazine, but secretly retained the rank of a colonel in the North Vietnamese army, sending intelligence to the Communists with invisible ink. He believed that Vietnam should strive for true independence and not pawn in the Imperial Game.
Despite his long-standing loyal spy, his uncle may have been contaminated by his long-standing relationship with the Americans. His career in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam never reached the height he wanted. His son studied in the United States and went home, just like he once had.
One day, on the closing day of the Vietnam War, my uncle told me, my father wanted to go to the battlefield. My father, a former US Marine, was drawn to a trench filled with young men drafted in the war, who had already been obsessed with Bywards due to American defeat. My uncle told my father to go somewhere.
That day, the North Vietnamese attacked a place where my father had not gone to his uncle’s advice. My father lived during the death of the American soldiers.
“I like Americans,” the uncle said.
