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The Bloodbath That Wasn't

By W. D. Ehrhart (reviewer)

Those Who Stayed: A Vietnam Diary
by Claudia Krich
(University of Virginia Press, 2025)

From the very beginning of Richard Nixon's presidency until the end of the Vietnam War and after, Americans and Vietnamese were told over and over again that if the Saigon regime lost the war, there would be a communist "bloodbath" in the South.

In a 1972 speech, for instance, Nixon declared that if the war were lost, an "inevitable bloodbath . . . would follow for hundreds of thousands who have dared to oppose Communist aggression."

Speaking at Brandeis University after the war ended, historian Howard Zinn stated that "rumors of a 'bloodbath' by the advancing armies spread panic in Saigon and brought thousands of Vietnamese crowding hysterically around the American Embassy, seeking evacuation. Secretary of Defense [James] Schlesinger spoke of 200,000 killed if the communists won. The American armed forces newspaper Stars and Stripes, in one of the last issues to arrive in Saigon, carried a headline: 'At Least a Million Vietnamese Will Be Slaughtered.'"

The "proof" of these assertions was the so-called Hue Massacre during Tet 1968, where occupying Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers supposedly rounded up 3,000 to 5,000 innocent civilians and executed them. This incident has been absorbed wholesale into American mythology, though no tangible evidence—no documents, no photographs—nothing has been provided to substantiate the accusation.

Indeed, the story of this "communist massacre" never even emerged until 18 months later when the American massacre at My Lai—amply documented and photographed—became public.

Moreover, I was there in Hue City during Tet, and I can tell you that a lot of civilians were killed, not deliberately but because they happened to get caught in the middle of the biggest battle of the Vietnam War. And something had to be done with all those bodies when the battle ended.

Years later, in 1990, I was back in Hue, where a former Viet Cong fighter told me that several hundred Vietnamese who had actively collaborated with the Saigon government and the Americans were indeed executed. Still, they were hardly innocent; it was a few hundred, not thousands. And the man I spoke with observed, "Look what the French did to those who collaborated with the Nazis."

All of this is a very long but useful—I think—preface to a new book called Those Who Stayed: A Vietnam Diary by Claudia Krich. Krich arrived in Vietnam in the spring of 1973 with her husband, Keith Brinton, to take over as director of the Quaker Rehabilitation Center run by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) at Quang Ngai Province Hospital.

The center manufactured prosthetic limbs for civilians injured in the war, provided those prostheses free of charge, trained amputees in the use of their new limbs, and even offered some vocational training.

Krich and Brinton were never in danger from local National Liberation Front (NLF) guerrillas, who knew they did not take sides in the war and were doing good things for the Vietnamese. But in the spring of 1975, as the Saigon armies fell apart and retreated from the northern provinces in complete disarray, Krich and Brinton decided to leave for fear that either vengeful Saigon soldiers (Army of the Republic of Vietnam or ARVN) would shoot them for spite, or North Vietnamese Army (NVA) soldiers would not realize they were neutral and shoot them by mistake.

So Krich and Brinton ended up in Saigon in the last two months of the war, where they encountered Vietnamese—especially well-to-do Vietnamese—who were convinced that women would be raped, those with painted fingernails would have their nails pulled out with pliers. Men and women would have their throats slit by marauding and merciless communist soldiers.

But there was little fighting in Saigon itself. And when the end finally came, NVA tanks rolled into the city to be greeted by smiling and cheering civilians—a lot of Vietnamese, by then, were tired of Nguyen Van Thieu and the Americans and only wanted the war to end. The tanks were followed by buses and trucks carrying bo doi (soldiers), who smiled and waved back at those who were smiling and waving at them.

Indeed, over the next days and weeks, a kind of euphoria descended upon the city, a festive atmosphere of relief, joy, and hopeful expectation. There was also more than a little chaos as the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) struggled to take over the reins of government that had fallen into their hands far faster and sooner than anyone had anticipated.

The greatest threats to public safety, it turned out, were embittered former ARVN and secret police and the infamous "Saigon Cowboys" (draft dodgers, thugs, and hoodlums who had inhabited the shadows for years). Just about every Westerner Krich knew in Saigon that spring had been robbed on the street; shoulder bags snatched, purses slit open, cameras stolen.

More than a few Vietnamese they encountered tried—often successfully, if temporarily—to pass themselves off as long-time NLF operatives or recently released political prisoners or both.

And it turns out that many of the bo doi were just young country kids who'd never been to any city, let alone cosmopolitan Saigon, and found themselves awestruck as they wandered around—seldom armed—exploring the wonders they were seeing. Sadly, many Saigonese took advantage of their naivete to sell them items such as cheap watches that were badly overpriced and as often as not stolen.

In the first few days, looting was also a serious problem. And this was done not only by armed ARVN but also by unarmed men, women, and boys. Almost anything portable was looted from stores, houses abandoned by those who'd fled the country, even embassies.

Eventually, some form of order began to take shape. But this led to a level of bureaucratic red tape Krich found maddeningly frustrating. Trying to get permission to send boxes of supplies to the rehab center in Quang Ngai, obtaining permission to change her residence in Saigon, registering AFSC with the new government, even sending a telegram would result in being sent from one office to another to another, or "come back tomorrow." (Reading page after page of these endless delays reminded me of Macbeth's "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy.)

At least, Krich observed wryly, unlike in the days of the old regime, officials weren't demanding bribes to get anything done. Everyone, rich or poor, was being handled at the same slow snail's pace.

And best of all, there was no bloodbath. Krich did hear rumors of a few executions in Quang Ngai and other provinces that had been communist strongholds for decades, going back to the French war and where Saigon officials had, therefore, acted with special brutality. And there were probably some local vendettas played out when the tables were turned on the oppressors.

But the mass killings of thousands, let alone hundreds of thousands, never happened. While the re-education camps that many former collaborators were sent to could not have been any fun, one need only remember what the Russians, the Chinese, and even the Spaniards did to those who fought on the wrong side in their civil wars to realize that Vietnamese postwar policies were relatively benign.

Krich's book, based on a diary she had kept at the time, is a useful and long-overdue corrective to the historical record. And it's a good read.

W. D. Ehrhart is a long-time VVAW member, poet, and author.

South Vietnamese soldiers arrive on May 1, 1975, at Van Hanh University in Saigon, where they discarded their uniforms and guns, then left as ordinary civilians. Photo from Claudia Krich.