AT THE OCCASION OF THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY
OF THE END OF THE VIETNAM WAR

“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.” – Former US President Richard Nixon, in the New York Times, March 28, 1985.

The Vietnam War will forever be etched in the world’s collective memories. American troops fighting in endless forests, B-52s lumbering through the skies, and North Vietnamese tanks braving the dangerous Annamese Cordillera are among the indelible images that still linger today, issuing silent warnings of the destruction, bloodshed, and horror of war. Yet, even now, many aspects of the war are misunderstood, shrouded in decades of secrecy and shared trauma.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War and the reunification of the country, Secret Indochina has crafted a unique educational program that aims to foster a better understanding of its complexities. Learning discussions and visits to key sites invite reflection on the causes, course, consequences, and legacy of this controversial war. At the same time, the program highlights the resilience of modern Vietnam, the matchless hospitality of its people, and rich cultural heritage.

The program is structured around classic and exclusive experiences, including a jungle immersion on Hill 937 (A Luoi), camping at A Shau, exclusive access to the legendary COSVN area, lectures by experts such as prolific author Prof. Jean-Michel Filippi, and encounters with Vietnamese and American veterans.

Section 2 of this publication outlines a detailed two-week itinerary starting in Hanoi and concluding in Saigon. Upon request, Secret Indochina may also consider additional places of interest.

Section 3 includes an overview of special extensions that may be organized around sites such as:

• Areas of special operations, including Junction City, Lang Son 719
• Major battlefields, such as Ap Bac, Ia Drang and Hill 875
• Former bases and landing zones, such as Camp Radcliff in Vietnam and Thonglek, Phu Pha Thi and Long Tieng in Laos.

Section 4 provides information about extensions in Angkor and other regions, while Section 5 suggests resorts and family-friendly experiences.


READ THE BROCHURE

 

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As a follow-up to our March article on the fall of the Central Highlands, in this issue we explore the fall of Saigon, the major event that brought the Vietnam War to a close on April 30, 1975.

The quick collapse of the Central Highlands and the debacle of its evacuation took most observers – Americans, South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese and their Soviet allies – by surprise. It was followed by the fall of Hue on March 25 and Danang on March 28. On April 8, the Hanoi Politburo demanded “unwavering vigor in the attack to the heart of Saigon,” and the campaign was renamed the Ho Chi Minh Campaign.

On April 9, North Vietnamese forces reached Xuân Loc, the last line of defense for Southern forces before Saigon, where the 18th ARVN division put up a last stand and held the town for 11 days of fierce fighting. The ARVN finally withdrew on April 20 after inflicting heavy losses on the North Vietnamese army. On April 21, President Nguyen Van Thieu resigned in a tearful televised announcement in which he denounced the United States for not coming to aid of the South. The fall of Xuân Loc was a fatal blow to South Vietnam’s military strength, which lost almost all its reserve units. Some 2,036 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed and wounded, and a further 2,731 captured. The number of casualties on the North Vietnamese side is not known; the 4th Corps alone claimed 460 killed in action and 1,428 wounded, while other sources put the figure at 5,000 dead and 37 tanks destroyed. Xuân Loc paved the way for the encirclement of Saigon, and the city’s fate was sealed.
 

In film culture, the fall of Saigon is depicted in Love and Death in Saigon, Miss Saigon, The Deer Hunter, Liberate Saigon, and the mini-series The Sympathizer, based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s award-winning novel.

Today, an urban module allows visitors to immerse themselves in the final days of the fall of Saigon. From the center of District 1, departing from the Opera House, maps and old photographs explain the triangle of the Opera House and three hotels: the Rex, the Continental, and the Caravelle. Learn about the history of the United States Information Service (USIS) at the Rex and visit the Continental’s bunker, where the French and Vietnamese hid their treasures.

Walk to the former CIA building used as an evacuation point during Operation Frequent Wind and gain exclusive access to the rooftop site of Van Es’ famous photograph. Nearby, visit the Palace of Independence and its park, then the Hô Chi Minh Campaign Museum. End the day with a drink on the 9th floor of the Caravelle, a café famous in the American era that offers a superb view of the central triangle.

Module duration: 3 hours.
Transfer: vehicle and walk approx. 3 km.

 

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Not many people today have heard of Paul Mus (1902–1969). Apart from a handful of specialists who reference his Indian studies – all fundamental texts on India, Champa, and Cambodia – the French writer and scholar’s works are largely unknown.

From intellectual training to a man of action

Born in 1902 in Bourges, France, Mus spent his childhood in Tonkin, where his father, Cyprien Mus, was a school administrator. It was in North Vietnam where his insatiable intellectual curiosity would initially be applied, and his “Vietnamese prism” would be formed.

Following brilliant studies in the University of Paris, he returned to Vietnam in 1927, where he worked for the French School of the Far East (EFEO) until 1940. During this time, produced numerous works on archaeological research he carried out on Champa.

If we had to characterize his early works, and Paul Mus was prolific, the term “eclecticism” comes to mind. He wrote avidly on philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and the history of religions in studies such as India Seen from the East: Indian and Indigenous Cults in Champa (1934) and Barabudur: Outline of a History of Buddhism Based on the Archaeological Criticism of Texts (1935). The breadth of his early work solidified Mus’ reputation as a serious intellectual, leading to his appointment to the Collège de France in 1946 and Yale University in 1950.

In addition to his intellectual pursuits, Paul Mus was also a man of action. Mobilized during the Second World War, he was sent to Africa by the Vichy regime. He eventually joined the Allied forces and was sent to Ceylon, where he trained with the British commandos. Mus then parachuted into Tonkin, where he worked for the resistance.

From loss of face to the end of the mandate of heaven

When the Japanese staged a coup on March 9, 1945, Mus managed to escape from Hanoi. He reached the Chinese border and finally arrived in Kunming, protected by the Vietnamese peasants he knew so well. From this episode, Paul Mus drew some scathing conclusions about the future of the French presence in Indochina in A Hard Blow on the Red River (1946):

“...the most serious thing was less the torture [that the French suffered at the hands of the Japanese] than the ‘loss of face’...there are many things under this expression that only a long familiarity with local history and beliefs allows us to appreciate at their practical value...The French administration, when it was in place, was therefore accepted... Once it was overthrown, not only did it no longer have any supporters, but opinion about it changed completely.”

His conclusion is obvious when viewed through the lens of the Vietnamese triad that influenced Mus’ thought – Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism, with an emphasis on what could then best explain collective behavior, namely Vietnamese Confucianism:

“Do not simply see in this the expression of a courtly mentality, which would follow success: this notion is European. The Far East of Chinese culture does not worship force so simply. It is not what it was instructed in. But for it, force and its outward sign, success, all contained in one word: face, are a sign: the visible sign of the mandate of heaven. Success is an investiture. Defeat, the loss of face, is a revocation... heaven has spoken. Impious who would go against its decree!”

The message was clear: France should have stopped indulging in wishful thinking in 1945, a theme Mus echoed in his 1946 pamphlet Vietnam at Home.

The Vietnamese and their Revolution

Mus strengthened this message in his work The Vietnamese and their Revolution, published in 1952 [rewritten by Paul Mus and Paul Mc Allister from the French: Vietnam, Sociologie d’une guerre].

It was not a history book published after the fact, but written in the heat of action between two key events: the start of the first Indochina war on December 19, 1946, and the end of the Battle of Dien Biên Phu on May 7, 1954.

Mus left no room for “ifs” and showed the inevitable defeat that would soon await the French. In almost 400 pages, to support his thesis on Vietnamese nationalism, he used his immense experience in the social sciences to analyze all aspects of Vietnamese civilization: from the village to the top of the state, the competing ideologies, the perception of the French presence since the beginning, the Vietminh and the nationalist parties, Buddhism and Confucianism, Marxism and its cosmogony, the religious sects (Hoa Hao, Caodai) of the South... The verdict, stated paradoxically from the first pages, is unequivocal:

“Our statesmen have apparently not paid enough attention to the work of Pierre Gourou and Charles Robequain, or their Vietnamese emulators, such as Nguyen Van Huyen. They have more than once ignored it, at decisive moments.”

When the Japanese army surrendered, Mus was at the side of General Leclerc, for whom he was political advisor. In 1945, carrying a message from the French government for negotiations, he went to meet Ho Chi Minh. The conditions set by the French were deemed unacceptable by Ho Chi Minh and by Mus himself, who explained his views in the book Ho Chi Minh. Vietnam, Asia (published posthumously in 1971) as well as in the remarkable documentary film by Emile de Antonio “In the Year of the Pig” (1968):

“Now this is the thing on which I would insist because it is still very much alive in his [Ho Chi Minh's] memory and in mine. For every time Ho Chi Minh had trusted us, we betrayed him.”

As a conclusion

There are not two separate versions of Paul Mus. As we have seen only too briefly, the man of action and the intellectual come together, just as his scholarly research on the Indianized world and texts written in the heat of the action are based on a unique methodology.

Why read Mus? His most accessible works are factually anchored in French Indochina and the first Indochinese conflict, but the general knowledge he provides us, and his methodology, are essential to our understanding of the Asian continent and remain relevant today.

Jean-Michel Filippi.

 

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THE LOWER MEKONG BASIN 
A LAND OF HISTORY

The Lower Mekong Basin is the result of more than a thousand years of human occupation, the scene of constant changes in population and landscape. Today, the region’s charms will enchant even the most indifferent wanderer who has come to soak up the indolent grace of Laos.

Located in the southwest of Champassak province in southern Laos, the Lower Mekong Basin is notable for the hundreds of islands formed by the Mekong River and its Angkorian temples, people, forest heritage, as well as the towns of Paksé, the capital of southern Laos, and Champassak, an old Muong town from the colonial era.

To the west, the region is formed by Mount Champassak, overlooked by the Thai border and the Isan plateau, and due west by the Dangrek range (literally translated as Rempart du Royaume, or Monts de la Muraille). To the east, it is dominated by the foothills of the Bolovens plateau, the base of the Annamite range, and the Sayphou Damlek and Sayphou Kiou mountains. The north is formed by the Phu Xieng Thong range, where the Mekong forces its way through the mountains, carving out gorges. Towards the center, the basin opens up at Paksé, an area of peneplains where a few rivers flow into the Mekong. The Champassak massif itself is a small eminence whose summit, Phu Bassac, rises to 1416 meters; to the south it is extended by Phu Kao (1397 meters or Mount Lingaparvata), a granite peak with the appearance of a linga. To the north, the massif is formed by a narrow, high plateau a few kilometers long and no more than 500 meters wide, tapering northwards to the foot of Phu Luang (1282 meters) and Phu Phaphine. At the southern end of the region, on the border with Cambodia, the Mekong widens, forming a myriad of islands and islets and the famous Khône (Khong) cataracts, in the middle of an archipelago commonly known as the Four Thousand Islands, or ‘si phan don’ in Lao.

The region was originally inhabited by Austroasiatics, whose remains can be found at various mysterious rock sites. It later became a major pre-Angkorian site and the northern part of the Khmer kingdom, whose remnants include the temple of Vat Phu (Wat Phu), wedged between the eastern foothills and the Mekong, and the small temple of Tômô, on the banks of the river.

Originally, Vat Phu was associated with the town of Shrestapura on the bank of the Mekong, to the east of Phu Kao. Towards the end of the 5th century, the town was the capital of a kingdom that texts and inscriptions link to the Chenla kingdom and Champa. The first structure on the mountain was built at this time, and it was considered sacred because of the linga-shaped protuberance on its summit, believed to be the abode of Shiva. Vat Phu is dedicated to Shiva, and the springs in the heights are sacred. The site faces east, an axis determined mainly by the orientation of the mountain and the river. Including the barays (reservoirs), it stretches for 1.4 kilometers to the east of the sacred spring, at the foot of a 100-meter cliff. In the past, the Royal Way linked Vat Phu to Angkor.
 

Later came the Kingdom of Champasak or Kingdom of Bassac (1713-1904), a small Lao kingdom founded under the reign of Nokasad, grandson of King Sourigna Vongsa, the last king of Lan Xang (or Lan Chang) and the so-called Kingdom of the Million Elephants founded in the 14th century by Prince Fa Ngum. Bassac and the neighboring principalities of Attapeu and Stung Treng emerged as centers of power (Mandala).

It was in this area of contrasting history and landscape that La Folie Lodge emerged in 2007. This charming family-run hotel in the middle of Don Daeng (Red Island in Lao), a tropical island surrounded by the timeless flow of the Mekong, comprises 26 rooms and villas in traditional Lao style, built using local materials. More than a peaceful retreat, La Folie Lodge is a catalyst for employment for the surrounding communities, who make up the majority of the staff and work daily to recreate the vernacular hospitality of southern Laos. This languid melding of nature, culture, spirituality and sacredness is designed to delight lovers of well-being and contemplation; the locality is renowned for the magnificent sunsets that can be admired from its beaches.

From this charming base, a whole range of experiences opens up on the horizon, including a trip to the island of Loppadi, a light-hearted interlude where the life of the island communities seems timeless. On the program, you’ll discover riverside hamlets dotted with traditional temples and pagodas, as well as a number of craft workshops specializing in basketry, rice wine, rice noodles, charcoal and fishing nets. Enjoy a lunch of local specialties in a family-run guest house run by Miss Nui and her young son on the banks of the Mekong, surrounded by food plantations, including plants, pulses, tubers and fruit trees, with the papaya taking pride of place. After lunch, enjoy a swim on one of the island’s small beaches before continuing on to the Khône Falls, over 20 meters high in some places, stretching in rapids for several kilometers and with one of the highest flows in the world. It was here that the colonial administration’s unsuccessful attempts to develop river trade with Cambodia stalled at the end of the 19th century. For those with a taste for the mountains, explore the Bolaven Plateau, home to an interweaving of proto-Indochinese languages including katu, laven, alak and ta oi, against a backdrop of tea, coffee, rubber and banana plantations, majestic waterfalls and dormant volcanoes.

CAPTION 

- Illustration: The Royal Procession by Sompaseuth Chounlamany