Wednesday marked the 30th year since the fall of Saigon in the Vietnam War. To commemorate the war and share Vietnam's culture and history, the Vietnamese Students Association hosted a workshop with guest speaker Thai Nguyen, professor of the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies department.
"Most of your parents probably don't want to talk about it," Nguyen said to the Vietnamese students in the crowd, who made up approximately half of the audience. Because of that, Nguyen continued, he was there to help them better understand their own history.
The Vietnam War began in 1957 with growing conflicts between the communist North Vietnam and the republican South. The United States government, which feared the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, gradually increased its involvement over the years.
The United States withdrew its troops in 1973 and the war ended in 1975 after the fall of Saigon.
Nguyen, who had served as the as a high-ranking education official for the South Vietnamese government before it collapsed, believed that the "U.S. abandoned the South" in the latter years of the war, and that "it would've been much better ... if Vietnam was left alone."
According to Nguyen, there have been documents discovered which reveal that there had been negotiations for peace between the South and the North before full-scale war.
If the United States had not become involved, Nguyen said, it "could've avoided [losing] a lot of lives."
Nguyen also shared an alternate theory to the reason behind U.S. involvement other than the fear of communism.
Emphasizing that it is just a theory, Nguyen said that there has been speculation that the United States deliberately lowered the sophistication of its arms so that its defense industry would prosper thanks to a prolonged war.
The workshop also featured the documentary Regret to Inform, which was produced by an American widow who lost her husband in the war. The film documented effects of the war through interviews of other women, both American and Vietnamese, who also lost their husbands in the war.
In the film, Barbara Sonneborn, the producer, pointed out that Vietnamese refer to the war as the "American War."
College sophomore John Nguyen felt that both sides were well portrayed, and that the film was interesting as well.
"It showed the war's effects on [the common] people," he said.
