VIETNAMESE refugees aboard a U.S. Navy ship in the evacuations during “Black April” in 1975 (Wikipedia photo).

This week many in our Vietnamese community are observing – you surely couldn’t call it “celebrating” – the end of what we call the Vietnam War, a long-running tragedy that spanned three decades, killed several million people and changed the world.

Among those old enough to have lived through that time, it remains a series of images on a TV screen – protests in the streets, mounting casualties in the jungles and hills outside the cities of South Vietnam, the burning of draft cards, political posturing.

But for those who actually fought the war it was more than a report on the evening news. For some there was emotional as well as physical pain. For others it was a sense of loss – perhaps shame – in losing their homeland.

I was just young enough to miss being drafted. But my brother was conscripted and was sent – to his considerable relief – to Korea instead.

Years later when I joined the military, some of my fellow soldiers were Vietnam vets. They didn’t care to talk about it except for the one who found it amusing to tell that his Purple Heart was for getting artillery shrapnel in his behind, not unlike Forrest Gump.

Looking at the war’s end from the distance of 50 years, the question that comes to mind is this: what were we – on all sides – fighting for?

Our side was trying to stop Communism – their goal was to unify their country and stop capitalism.

Ironically, it looks like both sides won something. There is one Vietnam and it flies a red flag, but it’s no more “communist” than Nebraska. It remains an unfree dictatorship, it also has a huge capitalistic economy where Nike is venerated alongside Ho Chi Minh.

Vietnam and the U.S. are tied together in many ways. Vietnam’s traditional historic enemy is China, which is looking like a big rival to the United States. Vietnam is among America’s leading trading partners and the amount of Yankee dollars that flood into Southeast Asia from refugees who came to America penniless and returned well-off to visit the nation of their birth is incalcuable.

Concern about “the domino effect” that would bring Karl Marx all the way to Brisbane never developed, except for the horror that struck when the communist Khmer Rouge seized power and committed near-genocide against their own people, killing millions.

Today the “Kingdom of Cambodia” is a constitutional monarchy and multi-party state, not rich but not a graveyard, either.

So this is a week to remember – perhaps to grieve – and also to consider that once war is unleashed there’s no way of telling how it will all turn out.