Saigon fell 50 years ago this week on April 30, 1975 when U.S. Army Huey helicopters lifted off the roof of the American embassy the last remnants of our presence in South Vietnam ending a 14-year humiliating defeat. North Vietnam, a 3rd world nation, had defeated the greatest power on earth and rubbed this humiliation in America’s face by renaming Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City after the brutal communist victor. This, in a war that respected Senator Strom Thurmond, Armed Services Committee member, insisted ,“We could have been in and out of Vietnam in 4-6 months” (Cong. Record, June 6, 1975, p. S 9905). Thirty million people were lost to communism. Why?
Communist Viet Cong troops descend on the Capitol of Saigon taking complete control of it April 30, 1975, fifty years ago this week. The evacuation of around 7,000 South Vietnamese and Americans over two days preceded this, many fleeing before the invaders. Only 2,000 found refuge on the U.S. Midway stationed offshore. America was defined as the only enemy and only 1 of 4 signatories of the disastrous Vietnam Treaty signed January 24 1973 required to leave Vietnam. The other Treaty signatories were South Vietnam, North Vietnam and the Viet Cong shown in this photo coming in to take final control of South Vietnam.
Millions of Vietnamese and 58,281 Americans had died in the futile war to save them from the communist invasion and captivity. More millions died after we left. Subsequent investigations document our having left behind up to 1,205 prisoners of war. We soothed our conscience with movies like Rambo depicting what we should have done but did not.
Those who could not flee the following retribution were sent to reeducations camps for indoctrination. “As many as two million people fled Vietnam on boats. Anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 died” as they set sail on leaky boats for any country that would pluck them out of the water (“Vietnam 50 Years Later, Americans Are Still Paying for Vietnam War,” New American, April 28, 2025, pp. 6-11). They were called the boat people.
It was not our soldiers fault. The JFK files, recently released, revealed the CIA as a "State within a state" and most responsible for the Kennedy assassination ("John F. Kennedy, Assassination Files Reveals ‘A State Within a State’, " LibertyUnderFire.org, March 26, 2025). President Kennedy learned quickly that there existed another force to reckon with besides just the legislative and judicial branches—a real shadow government known today as the Deep State, but then as the CIA and/or the Eastern Establishment.
Kennedy opposed the CIA’s Bay Of Pigs invasion of Cuba and wanted America’s withdrawal from the Vietnam War. He had argued “If the American people do not want to use American troops to remove a Communist regime 90 miles away from our coast, how can I ask them to use troops to remove a Communist regime 9,000 miles away?” In 1963 Kennedy signed the National Security Action Memorandum 263 to begin the phaseout in Vietnam which implemented plans to withdraw 1,000 US military personnel by the end of 1963. Other withdrawals would come after the 1964 election and follow. Forty-two days after Kennedy signed this document initiating a withdrawal, he was assassinated” (“Why the Deep State Assassination of John F. Kennedy?” Dec. 6, 2023, LibertyUnderFire.org . He had also promised, “I will splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the wind,” but they got to him before he got to them.
If the CIA controlled foreign policy before the assassination they controlled it after as well under Lyndon Baines Johnson and throughout the Vietnam War. A lot of money and power is gained during war, the longer the more—especially by the military industrial complex—as President Eisenhower forewarned. Instead of withdrawal, recruitment was amplified from Kennedy’s 16,000 to Johnson’s 184,000 troops.
It is ludicrous that a government would create restrictions on it's military that would virtually leave them fighting with one hand tied behind their back. And yet that is exactly what our CIA shadow government did. According to U.S. News and World Report, June 30, 1975 citing the then just released formally top secret, “Rules of Engagement for the Vietnam War” our men had to fight under horrendous conditions not imposed from the enemy but from our own State Department (Cong. Record June 6, 1975, pp. S9897-S9904. View in full “Vietnam’s Rules of Engagement,” Freemen Report, Sept. 15, 1975).
“As many as two million people fled Vietnam on boats. Anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 died” as they set sail on leaky boats for any country that would pluck them out of the water. The boat people faced danger and hardship from pirates, overcrowded boats, and storms. The great majority of them were settled in developed countries, more than half in the United States and most of the remainder in France, Canada, Australia, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
What follows are some of those rules. On-ground assaults in urban areas “known to shelter enemy forces generally had to be preceded by loud-speaker warnings and leaflet drops.” Our troops could return fire “only when the enemy was positively identified and in close contact. Sniper and mortar fire were not counted as 'contact' unless 'such fire interferes with the scheme of maneuver or is inflicting casualties or damage to equipment.’” Only flat-trajectory weapons (rifles, machine guns, grenades and recoilless rifles) could be used in civilian-populated areas, which largely exposed our men, and “then only if there was a specific, identifiable target.” Obviously on the ground, U. S superiority in firepower was deliberately not exploited.
Nor was it in the air. Pilots were not allowed to fire where they thought the enemy was hidden—even when fired upon—until they were “sure the strike would be positively oriented against the source.” And in many areas there was the nightmare of getting approval at higher levels even if you spotted the enemy or you were taking ground fire. The chain of command often went through the “province chief, district chief, sector commander and a battalion or higher command” which by the time this was completed, the enemy had disappeared. Enemy airfields were off limits if a “plane with a third nation's markings was present.” Dams, locks, dikes and targets within 11 1/2 miles of the enemy's major cities were “banned without prior approval of the Joint Chiefs of Staff” (Ibid.). Good luck on that one.
Perhaps the most detrimental rule imposed on our men dealt with where the blame would lie for mistakes. “The final decision on engagement will be at the discretion of the senior tactical commander present.” Present meant in the field and made commanders there very cautious because it “removed responsibility from the top leadership if anything went wrong…” These rules actually aided the enemy, and it is because of them that this 14-year-long-war lasted so long —from our first sending ‘advisors' under President John F. Kennedy to the evacuation of Saigon ending the war under President Gerald Ford.
Dr. Harold Pease is an expert on the United States Constitution and a syndicated columnist. Read his weekly columns at www.LibertyUnderFire.org Column #818.
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As a nation under the U.S. Constitution we are 236 years old. The first 124 of these years we had no federal income tax and handled our national expenses quite well, most of those years without a national debt. Today most are assessed a fifth to a fourth of their gross income. Prior to 1913 we kept what is now taken from us. We first advocated a return to this system on Dec. 13 2013,“Blows to Liberty 100 Years Ago Still Impact You” (LibertyUnderFire.org).
The then existing Deep State, then called Internationalist, prompted this. They wanted this financial “water faucet” that they could turn on at will. They could purchase anything—even people. They created a private corporation, the Federal Reserve, and pushed for the 16th Amendment to the Constitution which now funded the government from the taxpayer, an internal source, rather than by tariffs from other countries, an external source.
What would you spend it on were it not taken from you? Normally not on the basics such as food, housing, and utilities as they likely are covered in what you are allowed to retain. You would spend the extra fourth of your salary on hundreds of items that are made by others as well as services you might like. This not only would enrich your life but it would provide jobs for others making those items or providing those services.
Would you spend it more wisely than the federal government? Likely! Most of the money taken from you by the federal government is spent on perpetual war, foreign aid, grants to privileged portions of our society, and endless unconstitutional subsidized programs; the last two of which basically take the money of those who produce and redistribute it to those who do not. Even some non-tax payers get income tax refunds as we have reported—so corrupt is the system.
Of course, those receiving and benefiting from these programs will defend them. But the fact remains that tax monies provide largely government jobs, which are almost entirely consumption jobs (jobs that consume the production of society but produce little consumable). Such jobs cannot produce for public consumption a potato, a carton of milk, or even a can of hair spray. They bring another person to the table to eat, but not another to produce something to eat.
What largely brought about the vast give-away programs of the Twentieth Century was the now 112-year-old 16th Amendment—the federal income tax. All three 1912 presidential candidates Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, their respective parties, and the then existing Deep State, then called Internationalist, did this to us. They wanted this financial “water faucet” that they could turn on at will. They could purchase anything—even people.
Prior to 1913 the federal government remained mostly faithful to her grants of power in Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, which left them with only four powers: 1) to tax, 2) pay the debts, 3) provide for the general welfare and 4) provide for the common defense. Because the federal government has the inclination to grow their authority the last two power grants, general welfare and common defense, each had eight qualifiers to harness them more fully. Outside these qualifiers the federal government had no power to tax or spend—still doesn’t.
General welfare then meant everyone equally (general) as opposed to “specific welfare” or “privileged welfare” as it is today, targeting those to forfeit and those to receive monies. The Constitution did not deny states, counties, or cities from having such programs, only the federal government. But politicians soon learned that the more they promised to the people, from the money of others, the easier it was to get elected and stay elected.
The problem with the federal government going off the list and funding things clearly not on it was that each time they did so the stronger the inclination to do so again. One minor departure begets another until one notices that what the federal government does has little or no relationship to the list in the Constitution. I ask my students what would happen if they took one lollypop to kindergarten and gave it to one child? What would the others say? Where is mine? Try taking away long provided benefits from a privileged welfare group, as for example food stamps, and see how popular you are with that voting group in the next election.
So why does the government now need a fourth of everything you make and it is still not enough? Answer, because we went off the listed powers of the Constitution and every departure required more taxpayer funding. The solution to less tax is less government. A side benefit is more freedom. The productive classes would not be hurt as might be supposed. Seldom do they qualify for the federally subsidized programs anyway. The fourth taken from the productive classes would be spent by them creating a plethora of jobs for those who wished to work and give them no excuse not to. The cycle of dependency would be drastically reduced. The federal government would no longer be an enabler to those not working. States would decide for themselves what assistance programs they could afford and generate with some states offering more and others less as the Tenth Amendment mandates.
One side benefit of tariffs is that it stimulates domestic production and industries giving them an advantage.
I have a friend who freely admits that he became a Democrat as a young man because they offered more. His departure from the Constitution began with that choice. The Democrat Party since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has always offered more freebies, confiscated from the “haves” and redistributed to the “have nots” to paraphrase Karl Marx and his socialist ideology.
So, how did we cover the expenses of the federal government—even wars—our first 124 years? Products coming into the country were assessed a fee to market in the U.S. called a tariff. We got product producers in other countries to cover our national expenses and thus we were able to spend on ourselves every cent of what the federal government now takes, which inadvertently stimulated the economy. No one should be able to argue that our present approximately $36 trillion national debt (up from $20 trillion just 8 years ago) is fair, has really worked for any of us, and is a better plan. It also enslaves our posterity who is required to pay it back amplified with interest charges, enabling us to bask in the sunshine of fake prosperity. Imagine what you could purchase annually with the money confiscated from you in federal taxes.
To protect prosperity and the Constitution for all, three things must happen. 1) We must identify and remove all waste and fraud in the present government identified by DOGE with ALL excess money from cancelled contracts to immediately be returned to liquidate the national debt. 2) We must remove the 16th Amendment and restore the tariff as our source of financing the federal government as it was our first 124 years. 3) We must return to Article I, Section 8 and the listed powers of government with ALL expenditures specifically tied to one of those powers. Yes this will hurt for a time, all surgeries do, otherwise we eventually self destruct as a free people.
Dr. Harold Pease is an expert on the United States Constitution and a syndicated columnist. Read his weekly columns at www.LibertyUnderFire.org Column # 817
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