I was helping a garment workers labor union with a consumer boycott of a company that tried to break the union. I was handing out leaflets asking people not to buy Van Heusen shirts in front of Gilchrist’s Department store in downtown Boston. May 1st in 1975 was being celebrated as the defeat of US Imperialism in Vietnam. The US Marines had helped the US Ambassador to South Vietnam get up the ladder as a helicopter on the roof of the US embassy in Saigon as victorious Communist forces moved across the city. A tank with a Viet Cong flag broke through the unopened gate of the hastily abandoned US embassy as communist flags were raised all over the city soon to be re-named ‘HoChiMihn City.’

I was a Leftist, and a socialist. But, I did not like the Stalinism of the Vietnamese Communist Party and North Vietnamese state. I thought it was a good thing that the US imperialists were defeated after so many years of fighting. A small country with a small working class had stood up to the richest capitalist regime in history. True, Russia and China offered major help, and the Soviets probably stopped the US from dropping nuclear bombs when the US was being defeated on the battlefield because the Soviets could hit back hard. Some said at the time that the North Vietnamese soldiers were the most effective combat forces in the world. The Vietnamese had been fighting for two decades and they were still improving and motivated. The US forces were a spent force with almost 2,000 US officers killed by their own troops in ‘fragging’ incidents as the drafted soldiers lost any notion of what they were fighting for besides the murderous whims of the elite.

I saw the news as the cowardly South Vietnamese capitalist army ran away from the front lines of the communist offensive faster than civilians could. One of the most heavily armed military forces in the world simply would not fight. The US had spent ten years training the South Vietnamese, and all they seemed to learn was what the Americans do best – call in airstrikes.

Some of the other young Leftist activists I worked with on the leafleting campaign were raising issues of refugees fleeing communist dictatorship. The US news featured a flight of Vietnamese orphaned babies who were loaded on a plane to fly to the US for adoption and then crashed at the airport killing hundreds of Vietnamese babies. People were getting in boats to go to the US ships offshore. South Vietnamese pilots in million dollar helicopters were landing on US ships to run away from fighting and had to help push the helicopter into the ocean because more US allies were running away.

The US spent billions to defeat an army of workers and peasants who were often in flip-flops fighting with outdated weapons. Yet, the poor people’s army beat the richest most advanced technological army the world had ever seen. Despite Stalinist misleaders.

So, I was thinking of the issues of Vietnam on that May Day when a tan skin man came up to me as I stood on Washington Street and Sumner Street with a leaflet out. The man happily embraced me and I could smell a little alcohol on his breath. I was confused. But, he spoke of Vietnam. “We won! The workers won! The imperialists lost!” He told me he was from Nicaragua. I suppose as he walked through the streets of Boston and saw me handing out pro-labor union leaflets he saw me as a fellow Leftist. As he left I was thinking that his simple recognition of the victory of workers over capitalists was the top lesson to learn from the defeat of US Imperialism in Vietnam.

Revolutions have long tails, and the defeat of the Yankee Imperialists gave hope to people in Central America to resist the local bosses and the Americans who kept them in power. I thought of the man from Nicaragua who hugged me on the street four years later when there was a revolution in Nicaragua and the US backed dictatorship was overthrown. I would have hugged my Leftist friend then.