Remembering Vietnam And Cambodia 50 Years On During ANZAC Week

Wednesday, 23 April 2025, 12:18 pm
Opinion: Frances Palmer

Fifty years ago, April 1975 saw the end of a long brutal war in Vietnam and the beginning of five years of harsh Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia. Both countries were heavily bombed for years by US, killing and displacing millions. In 1975 I nursed with a Save the Children team in Hue, Vietnam, going north to Quang Tri daily. As Quang Tri had been ‘razed’ by US bombs, we worked in makeshift clinics along the Noth /South border. Memories remain of brave mothers, sad orphans, begging amputees of all ages in Hue and Da Nang. Eugene Doyle’s article records the terrible extent of atrocities. My Lai was the tip of the iceberg.

An account of my experience in 1975 as the North Vietnamese Army moved south to unify Vietnam is on NZ Ministry for Culture and Heritage website. Army officer veteran John Moller who served in Vietnam, is a war poet from that era. His poems should be read at ANZAC ceremonies and be on view in all War Memorial Museums.

April 50 years ago was also the month the Khmer Rouge, their ranks swelling under massive US bombing, took power in Cambodia. The US ‘Freedom Deal’ bombing campaign there included Operation Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Desert, each one literally consuming civilians and causing massive displacement. (Auckland History Teachers Assn printed a resource I compiled on this for schools visiting South East Asia). Four years later, when the Vietnamese Army pushed the Khmer Rouge into Thailand late 1979, I was sent with NZ SCF nurse Barbara Heasley to run feeding centres in a Thai refugee camp for Khmers trying to flee Khmer Rouge persecution and starvation. But Khmer Rouge still had considerable control in Sa Kaeo camp. In some families, most children had died. My Chinese Cambodian clinic interpreter, the only survivor in his family, said he managed the journey out of Cambodia only because Vietnamese soldiers gave him rice.

As NGO Liaison officer with MFAT in 1991, I returned to Quang Tri, Vietnam to find potential development aid projects in fragile communities where SIPRI estimated 88,000 land mines continued to maim or kill those trying to reclaim their land. Aging women cared for adult ‘children’ severely disabled by Agent Orange. Medical staff from NZ’s Surgical team in Qui Nhon supported its hospital for many years. We will never forget struggles to build lives fit for humans after appalling destruction of families, villages, cities, and agricultural land.

In 2010 Barbara and I visited Cambodia to support aid projects including NZ VSA’s work in schools and a centre for trafficked girls. We also visited Tuol Sleng Museum, first a high school, then torture centre under Khmer Rouge, now a museum supported by UNESCO.

It’s distressing as a paediatric nurse, to see the horrors humans create for civilians, out of thirst for power (‘forward defense’) or in reaction to attacks (‘pure revolution’ of Khmer Rouge). During ANZAC week, let’s not be seduced into ‘unseeing’ decades of manipulation of foreign policy by military industry (MIC) promoting enemy ideology, confrontation, perpetual war and ‘enhanced lethality’ - deadly for targets; profitable for weapon producers.

Eugene Doyle is absolutely on point to criticize the banal stupidity of failing to learn from our mistakes. Our Minister of Defence has the gall to announce during ANZAC week, that 'Defense' spending is about to increase because 'it's a dangerous world'. Is the logic here that by adding fuel to the fire, we will make it safer?? I hope thoughtful New Zealanders strongly resist being reeled into 21st century killing fields under the pseudonym of ‘Defence’. It would not end well.

Frances Palmer, NZRN, MA

JOHN MOLLER’S POEMS 

(John Moller  has given the author permission include his work 'in any media when writing for schools, as another war veteran (though civilian)

Aotearoa NZ 1890s to 1990s participation and resistance to international war

This free history resource, being posted to NZ school History Depts in Term 4, includes responses to 20th century international conflict often overlooked in the past. The resource views systems and the range of responses to systems through multiple lenses. It looks at past government policies on international war, cooperation and resistance to these policies, government responses to resistance and the impacts these had on people, and how individuals and groups sought to assert their rights. The Mau movement in Samoa and nuclear-free movement in New Zealand are examples of how social action and political engagement brought about changes which impacted political decisions and national identity.

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