On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese troops entered Saigon, officially ending a 17-year war that claimed 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 American lives. In the days that followed, known in the United States as the fall of Saigon, U.S. troops and press were withdrawn; Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City; and the Vietnam War was history.
"Vietnam Remembered," an event to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, will be held on Saturday, April 30, at 11 a.m. in Kresge Auditorium. It is free and open to the public.
Institute Professor Noam Chomsky and Ngo Ving Long, professor of history at the University of Maine, will speak, and a documentary film about life inside the tunnels of Cu Chi will follow.
Chomsky is a world-renowned linguist and a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy. His 1969 book, "American Power and the New Mandarins," presented a scathing argument against American involvement in Vietnam and the liberals who justified it. Chomsky will address how language is used to contort the history of American involvement in Vietnam.
Long, an author and former cartographer with the American counterinsurgency effort in South Vietnam, will reflect on his personal experiences in an effort to shed light on what "counterinsurgency" means.
"The Cu Chi Tunnels," a documentary film by Mickey Grant, documents the lives of Vietnamese men and women who survived the American bombardment by living inside tunnels and conducting their war from below ground.
The event is organized by The thistle, ARCADE at MIT, the MIT Fund, the MIT history faculty and the Technology and Culture Forum.
