From Saigon to Gaza: War, Memory, and the Politics of Solidarity
Why Vietnamese Americans Are Speaking Up for Gaza
"All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory," writes Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnamese-American author Viet Thanh Nguyen in his book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Nguyen fled Vietnam with his family as a child refugee which inspired his life's work of exploring how war trauma echoes across generations, and how conflicts leave imprints that outlast bullets and bombs.
As we mark the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon while watching the devastation unfold in Gaza, Nguyen’s insights feel less like academic theory and more like a painful truth we're living through in real time. The connections between Vietnam and Gaza—separated by decades but linked through patterns of displacement, resistance, and imperial violence, show us how historical memory becomes not just reflection, but illumination.
On April 30, 1975, Saigon—once the capital of South Vietnam and the center of U.S.-backed anti-communist power—fell. The city was overtaken by North Vietnamese forces, marking the end of a brutal, decades-long war. What followed was a collapse of American policy, a refugee exodus, and a humanitarian reckoning. But the Vietnam War didn't just end in defeat—it left a legacy of state violence, historical amnesia, and political awakening that continues to shape American and diasporic consciousness today.
Half a century later, that memory is being reactivated—this time in Gaza.
Since October 2023, Israel's U.S.-funded military assault on Gaza has killed over 50,000 Palestinians, displaced more than a million people, and razed entire neighborhoods. Human rights experts warn that what is unfolding may constitute genocide. And just as the United States once justified mass bombings in Vietnam as necessary to fight communism, it now supports Israel's actions under the pretext of counterterrorism.
For many Vietnamese Americans—especially those raised on stories of war, flight, and survival—the parallels are impossible to ignore.
Civilians as Collateral
The United States began its involvement in Vietnam as early as the 1950s, propping up the South Vietnamese regime with weapons, money, and military advisors. By the mid-1960s, it escalated into a full-scale war—one that killed an estimated three million Vietnamese people, most of them civilians. The U.S. deployed napalm, cluster bombs, and Agent Orange, a toxic herbicide that still affects generations through cancer and birth defects.
At the time, this violence was framed as regrettable but necessary. Vietnam was cast as a battlefield of democracy versus communism—and in that binary, Vietnamese civilian life became expendable.
Today, in Gaza, the same logic persists.
Israel's military campaign is couched in language familiar to Americans: surgical strikes, collateral damage, the fight against terrorism. But beneath that rhetoric is a pattern of unrelenting bombardment and collective punishment—all enabled by $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid. Palestinians, like the Vietnamese before them, are caught in the crossfire of empire and framed as threats rather than human beings.
The Criminalization of Protests
The Vietnam War also ignited one of the largest protest movements in U.S. history. Students organized campus strikes. Veterans threw away their medals. Black and Indigenous activists linked U.S. imperialism abroad with racial injustice at home.
How did the government respond? With surveillance, infiltration, and criminalization.
The FBI's COINTELPRO program spied on antiwar leaders, labeled protest groups as subversive threats, and collaborated with local police to dismantle radical movements. Antiwar students were killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State and Jackson State. Activists were beaten, arrested, and blacklisted.
Today, we see echoes of that repression in the wave of university crackdowns against students protesting the war on Gaza. From Columbia to UCLA to Emory, students—many of them Muslim, Arab, and Jewish—are being suspended, arrested, and vilified for calling for a ceasefire and divestment. Like the Vietnam era, the state is responding to mass dissent not with dialogue, but with punishment.
Vietnamese-Palestinian Solidarity in the U.S.
While official histories of the Vietnam War often sideline refugee voices, a growing number of Vietnamese American activists are reclaiming their narratives—and building bridges to other displaced and occupied communities. From Los Angeles to New York, young Vietnamese Americans have organized teach-ins, spoken at rallies, and joined calls to end U.S. military aid to Israel. Many of them are second or third-generation refugees, shaped by stories of exodus and survival but also politicized by the silences in their families.
Groups like Viet Solidarity & Action Network (VSAN) are engaging in cross-movement coalition-building, emphasizing the interconnectedness of struggles against militarism, colonialism, and displacement.
Loan Tran, a 28-year-old Vietnamese American and national director of the advocacy group Rising Majority, sees a direct connection between Vietnam and Gaza. “My grandfather was a U.S. soldier. My grandmother’s friends fought for North Vietnam,” Tran told The New York Times. “When Palestinians draw parallels to Vietnam and U.S. imperialism, I feel it in my body—and so do many in our community. We know what it means to resist war and occupation.”
Genocide and the American Empire
The Vietnam War was never officially declared a genocide by the U.S. but many scholars, including Vietnamese historians, have long argued that its scope and intent fit the definition. The mass killing of civilians, the destruction of entire villages, and the use of chemical weapons on food sources were not incidental. They were tactics of control and annihilation.
In Gaza, the accusations of genocide are mounting. The International Court of Justice has issued a preliminary ruling indicating that genocide is plausible, and human rights watchdogs have documented deliberate targeting of civilians and infrastructure necessary for life.
What binds these two conflicts across time is not just their brutality—but the role of the United States in making them possible.
Memory as a Political Act
In Vietnamese, there is a word for remembering: nhớ. It does not simply mean recall. It means to long for, to feel the absence of, to hold something that is gone.
For many children of refugees, remembering the Vietnam War is not about nostalgia — it is about responsibility. To remember is to resist erasure. To remember is to notice the repetition. To remember is to act.
Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, we're still living in the long shadow of U.S. militarism. Back then, it was napalm and Agent Orange in Vietnam. Today, it's Hellfire missiles and bunker busters in Gaza. In both cases, U.S. policy enabled mass displacement, civilian casualties, and decades of trauma—all justified in the name of "national security."
🧭 Policy Watch: How U.S. Foreign Policy Recycles War—and Repression
Then: The Vietnam War
The U.S. spent over $141 billion (adjusted for inflation) on the war, funding South Vietnam's military and deploying over 500,000 American troops.
Civilian massacres, chemical warfare, and mass displacement were justified in the name of fighting communism.
Antiwar activists were surveilled, criminalized, and in some cases, killed. The state framed dissent as unpatriotic or dangerous.
The war ended in 1975—but its aftershocks still reverberate through refugee communities and American foreign policy.
Now: The War on Gaza
The U.S. gives Israel $3.8 billion in military aid every year, with no conditions on how it's used—even as civilian casualties mount.
Since October 2023, over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, and over a million displaced. Entire neighborhoods have been leveled.
Ceasefire resolutions at the UN have been repeatedly blocked by U.S. vetoes.
On college campuses, students—many of them Palestinian, Jewish, Black, and Muslim—are facing mass arrests, suspensions, and doxxing for calling for an end to the war.
What hasn’t changed? The U.S. government still funds violence abroad while cracking down on those who protest it at home.
📣 What You Can Do
✅ Tell Congress: Support H.Res. 786 calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Use tools like 5calls.org or ContactCongress.org to make it quick and effective.
✅ Defend student protestors: Donate to legal defense funds (Palestine Legal, National Lawyers Guild), amplify their demands, and pressure universities to uphold—rather than silence—free speech.
✅ Follow the money: Urge pension funds, universities, and city governments to divest from weapons manufacturers and Israeli military contractors. Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and Adalah Justice Project offer toolkits and campaigns.
Thank you for writing this. I’ve been drawing similar lines in my own research between what the French did in Algeria and what we’re witnessing now in Gaza. I’m especially struck by the decades-long amnesia that followed the Algerian War -- and yet here I am, the daughter of a Vietnam veteran, forced to admit how little I truly and understand know about the Vietnam War itself.
I do know that France entered Algeria after its defeat in Indochina, determined to hold onto its last “jewel” of empire — which makes the echoes between these histories all the more haunting.
It’s astonishing how much history we’re never taught.