THE VIETNAM WAR

Aurora Rojer
History 583
Professor Ponce
December 19, 2017
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Introduction

The Vietnam War was until recently America’s longest war.1 It also led to one of the

largest mass movements—the antiwar struggle—in our history. And yet this crucial moment is

still poorly understood by most. Why did the United States fight in this small, insignificant

country? And why did they, the most powerful army in the world, lose to these guerilla fighters?

Part I: Prehistory of the Vietnam War: The Vietnamese and the French

Vietnam to many Americans signifies a war more than a place; the war is often taught as

an American conflict that led to discontent at home and horrors for the veterans, as well as a

great waste of American resources. All this is true, but it also discounts the broader context of

the conflict and the massive impact it had in the land where it was fought.

To start, the war in Vietnam, to the Vietnamese, is referred to as the “War of National

Salvation Against the Americans.”2 The Vietnamese understood the war not as a Cold War

conflict but rather as a continuation of their struggle against colonialism and for independence.

Vietnamese legend claims an independent prehistory of 4,000 years before being conquered by

the Han Dynasty of China in 111 BC.3 During the millennium of Chinese rule that followed, the

Vietnamese rebelled and resisted on numerous occasions, and defeated the Mongol conqueror

Kublai Khan in 1288. After centuries of independence, the Vietnamese were again conquered,

this time by the French starting in 1858. By 1885, there remained no pretense that Vietnam was

independent, and the French ruled over the territory that they named L’Union indochiniose,

which included Cambodia and Laos.4 The French profited greatly from Vietnam, but at the

expense of the Vietnamese people, who were exploited and subjected to harsh treatment. The

Vietnamese resisted French rule through periodic revolts that mounted to full-scale guerilla

warfare.5 Out of this struggle for independence grew a communist-nationalist movement led by
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Ho Chi Minh. Ho and his followers wanted a Vietnam that was not only independent but also

equitable in distribution of wealth and resources.

During World War II, Vietnam was administered by Japan. At the war’s end, the North,

led by Ho Chi Minh, immediately issued a Declaration of Independence, in which he quoted the

American Declaration. Ho appealed to the United States for support of their independence, but

received no reply; the United States, along with the British, took the French side of the conflict.

The French fought to retain their colony, but, like the United States after them, could not defeat

the powerful guerrilla forces motivated by their sacred struggle. In 1954, after a brutal defeat at

Dien Bien Phu, the French withdrew. The peace was negotiated in Geneva and led to the end of

French control in Indochina. Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam were separated and North and South

Vietnam were divided until a future election that would could the country. But the only power

capable of unifying Vietnam was Ho Chi Minh and his Communist Party (The Laodong Party)

and their armed forces, the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN). Though they were centered in

the North, there was a great deal of support for the communists in the South as well, and these

supporters would become in 1960 the Viet Cong, or the National Liberation Front, which would

work with the PAVN to defeat South Vietnam and the United States.

Part II: Giants and Dominoes: American Politics and Vietnam

Why did the United States fight a war in a country so far removed, geographically and

politically, from itself? The story of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam begins with the

end of the Second World War. Eager to restore stability in Europe, the United States quietly

supported France in trying to regain its former colony.6 However with the Chinese Revolution,

the Korean War, and the blossoming of the Cold War, the United States began to conceive of
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Vietnam not as a means towards French recovery, but rather as a crucial battlefield against the

spread of communism.7

By 1954, the Vietnamese had defeated the French and won their independence. However

the United States under President Dwight D. Eisenhower knew that were Vietnam to freely elect

their own government, they would elect Ho Chi Minh, the Communist and Nationalist who led

Vietnam to independence. And were Vietnam to become Communist, Eisenhower’s advisors

warned, it would act as a falling domino, toppling capitalism and freedom in the rest of Asia and

eventually the world.8 In order to prevent this “domino effect,” the CIA built in South Vietnam a

pro-US government under the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem.9 Eisenhower did not want to get

involved militarily in Vietnam, but provided a great deal of aid to Diem’s government and,

ignoring how deeply unpopular Diem was to the Vietnamese, increasingly “tied America’s honor

to Diem’s diminishing political fortunes.”10 When Eisenhower left office in 1961, he famously

warned the country of the danger of its own “military industrial complex.”11 But his staunch

anticommunist policy and support of the unsustainable Diem government paved the way for

future U.S. military involvement.

President John F. Kennedy inherited this legacy of anticommunism, and after dealing

with the dangers of communist Cuba, was even more set on preventing countries from becoming

communist. His strategy in Vietnam was “flexible response,” meaning he employed numerous

tactics in order to combat communism’s development.12 On the one hand was counterinsurgency,

where an elite group of “Green Berets” were trained to dismantle the communist movement,

while on the other a team of social scientists worked to “nation-build” a viable alternative to

communism in South Vietnam. However Diem’s government proved to be so unpopular that the
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C.I.A. eventually allowed and encouraged a military coup to overthrow him. Rather than appease

the populace, this coup led to even greater political instability.13

Kennedy was assassinated before he could significantly alter U.S. policy in Vietnam.

Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson succeeded Kennedy, and with the presidency came the

commitment to Vietnam. The National Liberation Front was increasing in popularity and power,

and without escalation of U.S. involvement, they would be able to seize power. American

credibility was at stake, and Johnson wanted to increase U.S. involvement. However, as was later

leaked in the Pentagon Papers, “public opinion on… Southeast Asia policy was badly divided in

the United States at the moment and that, therefore, the President needed an affirmation of

support”14 The Gulf of Tonkin incident proved to be the perfect impetus for Congress’s approval

of intervention; on August 1, 1961, the US Maddox traded shots with North Vietnamese torpedo

boats. Three days later, U.S. officials reported more torpedo attacks, though the reports were

later proven to be unfounded.15 This act of what Johnson called “unprovoked aggression”

(although, of course, the United States fired first) led him to ask Congress to sign his Gulf of

Tonkin Resolution, giving him the power to do whatever was necessary in Southeast Asia,

effectively power to wage war without a formal declaration.16

With public outrage over the Gulf of Tonkin incident and Congressional support for

increased intervention, Johnson was able to increase bombing, though he maintained that he was

against a land war. His advisors were split on whether the United States could defeat Vietnam

and what it would take to do so, but he was swayed by political calculations and continued to

escalate intervention.17 Showing few signs of victory, America had to continually increase

involvement, bombing the South as well as the North, deploying more troops, and encouraging

indiscriminate killing and a scorched earth policy. The war became so brutal and so removed
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from American interest that the public openly expressed their discontent and Johnson, in shame,

decided not to run for re-election.

President Richard Nixon won the election in 1968 with talk of ending the war.18 However

the path to peace with a U.S. victory was as unclear as ever. Nixon shifted from Johnson’s policy

of “Americanization,” where the majority of the war was fought by American troops, to

“Vietnamization,” in which U.S. troops would be withdrawn but not U.S. support for South

Vietnam. But before putting that policy into practice, Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry

Kissinger led a military excursion into the neutral neighboring country of Cambodia. This move

was so unpopular that the Senate ended the powers granted under the Gulf of Tonkin resolution,

and with little gain, the U.S. withdrew from Cambodia.19 But the bombing in Vietnam continued,

and public unrest grew, until in 1972 Nixon finally advanced “Vietnamization” on a large scale,

removing U.S. troops. By January of 1973, The United States and the North Vietnamese signed a

peace agreement, and U.S. troops continued to pull out while the South Vietnamese carried on

their fight. But without U.S., the South was weak and fell to the North in spring of 1975.20 The

United States failed in its attempt to stop communism in its tracks, and paid a mighty price for

trying.

Part III: “The Things They Carried:” Soldiers and Veterans of the Vietnam War21

There is no single experience that encompasses fighting in the Vietnam War. Thousands

of memoirs have been published, all with different stories.22 But a few common themes run

throughout many of them, including a sense of futility, fear, and revulsion. 2.15 million

American men went to Vietnam, and 1.6 million of those men were in combat. Most of those

who fought were poor, young, and disproportionately people of color. Until 1971, college

students were able to defer their draft. High school dropouts who enlisted had a 70 chance of
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being sent to Vietnam, while college graduates had only a 42 percent chance. And those who

went were much younger than in other American wars: 60 percent of the fatalities in Vietnam

were between seventeen and twenty-one.23

The war itself was brutal. Broadly, as George Herring describes, GIs suffered through

“Dense jungles and deep swamps, fire ants and leeches, booby traps and ambushes, an elusive

but deadly enemy.”24 In order to get at that elusive guerrilla enemy, the United States used brute

force and a great deal of weaponry. Through the strategy of “search and destroy,” Americans

bombed South Vietnam as well as North, claiming that certain “free-fire zones” in the South

were fair game for bombing, forcing Southern Vietnamese people to relocate from their ancestral

villages. Howard Zinn writes that “7 million tons of bombs had been dropped on Vietnam, more

than twice the total bombs dropped on Europe and Asia in World War II.”25 And beyond

bombing, Americans were ordered to burn crops and destroy forests so that enemy troops could

not hide there. Further, poisonous gasses such as Agent Orange were sprayed over Vietnam, not

only destroying current crops but also causing birth defects in future generations.26

American military advisors calculated that a victory could be achieved if the United

States reached a killing ratio of 10 to 1, and body counts, including civilians, were how the

administration measured progress.27 Thinking in terms of body counts led American troops to

commit heinous atrocities. The most famous was a massacre of over 200 people, mostly women

and children, in the hamlet of My Lai.28 A Colonel who was charged with helping to cover up the

My Lai killings told reporters that “every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden

somewhere.”29 Meanwhile the C.I.A. executed over twenty thousand civilians without a trial in

Vietnam during “Operation Phoenix” for being suspected Communists.30 Many of the accounts

of veterans center on the guilt and shame that these ruthless civilian murders burdened GIs with.
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But even with massive bombing campaigns, massacres, and chemical warfare, the United

States could not beat the North Vietnamese; the enemy was unified behind an ideal, and the war

was a sacred one to them. Whereas the American troops were fighting in an unfamiliar land

against a shadowy enemy without a clear unifying purpose. 31 As a result, there was a great deal

of strain in the army, including desertion, drug addiction, racial discord, refusal to go to battle,

and even the practice of “fragging” or “rolling fragmentation bombs under the tents of officers

who were ordering them into combat.”32 “Between 1960 and 1973, over 58,000 Americans and

between 1.5-3 million Vietnamese died. There were hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in

Cambodia and Laos.33 And when those who survived came home, they often suffered from Post-

Traumatic Stress Disorder, plagued with anxiety, depression, and flashbacks that were a steady

reminder of the pain that they had suffered and inflicted.

Part IV: Hell No, We Won’t Go: The Anti-War Movement at Home

The Vietnam War was costly, bloody, and difficult to justify. While politicians felt

trapped and committed in the conflict, many at home saw that U.S. intervention was a bad idea.

Congress initially tried to control how the war was covered in the media, particularly because

war had not officially been declared.34 However with a TV in every living room and reporters

broadcasting straight from Vietnam, the distant war was brought home.

Organized opposition to the war began with activist groups that had already been

mobilized towards other movements, most famously the Students for a Democratic Society

(SDS). SDS was a part of a broader movement of the “New Left,” which sought to distance itself

from bureaucratic and dogmatic Marxism and instead embraced direct democracy and grass-

roots organizing.35 The 1960s saw the blossoming of a powerful counter-culture movement that

rejected consumerism and the general antipathy of the post-war mainstream society. Instead, they
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experimented with sexual freedom, drug usage, and new forms of music and self-expression.

College campuses became a site for questioning the dominant structures. White liberal students

were inspired by the Civil Rights movements in the South and, when the war broke out, students

were some of the most prominent organizers against it. Students and professors alike organized

teach-ins, rallies, marches, and vigils against the war. Their activities were publicized widely,

particularly when they confronted the authorities. The most famous example was during the

summer of 1970 at Kent State University in Ohio, where National Guard troops murdered four

students at an anti-war demonstration.36

The protests moved beyond college campuses, including massive marches like the

Moratorium march in Washington D.C. on November 15, 1969, where over 500,000 people,

many of whom were not students, demonstrated. The prevailing image in the media of the anti-

war movement was an upper-middle class, educated, white, radical hippy, epitomized in the

long-haired figure of Abbie Hoffman. Though this demographic did play a large role in the

movement, it is not the whole story.

In fact, the movement was diverse in terms of age, race, and class. Civil rights

movements, black power, Chicano-rights movements, and other identity-based groups had their

own anti-war analyses and participated and organized their own struggle against the war.37 Civil

Rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Bayard Rustin spoke out forcefully against the

war and boxer Muhammad Ali famously refused the draft, stating “Man, I ain't got no quarrel

with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger."38 In 1970, a group of around 200

construction workers attacked demonstrators in New York City who were protesting the Kent

State shootings. This event, which became known as the Hard-Hat Riot, was at the time and has

since been cited as proof that the working class was largely for the war and that all doves were
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liberal elites. However this understanding of “working class” implicitly excludes workers of

color. Further, even white workers were largely against the war; many studies show that it was

actually the elites who were most pro-war, and that support for withdrawal from the war was

highest with those with lower socio-economic statuses.39

Perhaps the most poignant of antiwar protests were those conducted by veterans of the

war. Opposition to an American war from those who fought or were fighting in it had never

before been seen at such a scale.40 Initially the opposition took the form of individuals protesting

commands. But soon GIs and veterans began joining antiwar marches. Desertions increased, and

GIs began to organize themselves by creating “GI coffeehouses,” antiwar bookstores, and

underground newspapers. Veterans formed a group called Veterans Against the War and in the

“Winter Soldier” investigations they testified about the atrocities that American soldiers

committed against the Vietnamese.41

By the early 1970s, the clear majority of the American population was opposed to the

war.42 Not all of those opposed to the war joined the movement against it, but participation was

impressive and, more importantly, powerful; though it took some time, the people in power

eventually recognized that they could not continue waging this despised conflict. Nixon wrote in

his memoir that “Although publicly I continued to ignore the raging antiwar controversy… I

knew, however that after all the protests and the Moratorium, American public opinion would be

seriously divided by any military escalation of the war.”43 Public expression of dissent went a

long way towards ending the war.

Conclusion

South Vietnam fell to the North in 1975. Though the fighting may have ceased, peace and

stability was not forthcoming. The country had been brutalized by its decades spent at war; as

Young describes,

“in the South, 9,000 out of 15,000 hamlets, 25 million acres of farmland, 12 million acres
of forest were destroyed, and 1.5 million farm animals had been killed; there were an
estimated 200,000 prostitutes, 879,000 orphans, 181,000 disabled people, and 1 million
widows; all six industrial cities in the North had been badly damaged, as were provincial
and district towns, and 4,000 out of 5,800 agricultural communes.”44

The land was covered in craters from the bombs, and there were tons of unexploded materiel that

maimed Vietnamese civilians long after the war. The U.S. had sprayed nineteen million gallons

of herbicide during the war, causing birth defects, miscarriages, and likely more health plights.

Though the United States was undeniably to blame for much of this destruction, they

took no responsibility, and refused to give any economic aid for rebuilding, despite that President

Nixon had promised such reconstruction aid in secret in 1973. In June 1977, “an amendment to a

foreign aid bill explicitly renounced Nixon’s promise of aid.”45 Meanwhile in Cambodia, after

the American invasion and bombing campaign, the communist Khmer Rouge was able to gain a

massive following and would eventually commit a genocide of between 1-3 million Cambodians.

In the United States, effects of the war were more psychological than physical. Veterans

of course suffered from PTSD, but even those who had not fought were scarred by the

experience, and Young writes that “Many Americans born during the decade of the war grew up

not believing anything their government told them.”46 Politicians began to refer to this distrust as

“Vietnam syndrome,” the major symptom of which was a nearly universal popular reluctance to

send American troops abroad to intervene. Collective memory reached a consensus that there

should be “no more Vietnams,” but what that meant in practice was much harder to define.47
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What lessons were to be taken away from the war? That the United States ought not to

intervene? That they ought not to send troops? That they ought to do so quickly and with great

force? Historians, politicians, and citizens still debate these possible implications today.

In recent times, these debates have been all-the-more relevant, as America’s war in

Afghanistan, or “Operation Enduring Freedom,” has surpassed the Vietnam War as the longest in

U.S. history, with no clear end in sight. We are once more engaged in a conflict (more than one,

in fact), in a far-away place where there is no clear path to victory. Even without a consensus on

the lessons of Vietnam, it seems crucial for students, as citizens, to puzzle over the history in

order to reach a clearer understanding of the present.

References

Duiker, William J. Sacred War: Nationalism and Revolution in a Divided Vietnam. New York:

McGraw-Hill, 1995.

Eisenhower, Dwight D. "The President's News Conference," April 7, 1954. Online by Gerhard

Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. Retrieved December 14,

2017. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=10202.

Herring, George C. America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975. 3Rd ed.

New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996.

Ho Chi Minh. “Declaration of Independence, Democratic Republic of Vietnam.” Declaration,

Hanoi, 2 September 1945. Ho Chi Minh, Selected Works (Hanoi, 1960-1962), Vol. 3, pp.

17-21. Retrieved online December 14, 2017.

http://www.unc.edu/courses/2009fall/hist/140/006/Documents/VietnameseDocs.pdf.

Lien, Vu Hong, and Sharrock, Peter. Descending Dragon, Rising Tiger: A History of Vietnam.

London: Reaktion Books, Limited, 2014.

Lewis, Penny. Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: the Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and

Memory. Ithaca: ILR Press, 2013.

Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got

Wrong. 2nd ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Murrin, John M. Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People. 2nd Edition. Fort

Worth, TX: Harcourt, 2002.

Norton, Mary Beth. A People & a Nation: A History of the United States. Tenth edition, Student

edition. Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2015.

O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction. Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour

Lawrence, 1990.

Tully, John Day, Matthew Masur, and Brad Austin, eds. Understanding and Teaching the

Vietnam War. Madison, Wisc.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2013.

Young, Marilyn Blatt. The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990. New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins

Publishers, 1991.

Zinn, Howard. “The Impossible Victory: Vietnam.” From A People’s History of the United

States. New York, N.Y.: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.

1
George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, 3rd ed. (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1996).
2
John Day Tully, Matthew Masur, and Brad Austin, Understanding and Teaching the Vietnam War (Madison, WI.:
The University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), p. 4.
3
Whether the inhabitants of the land that is now Vietnam were culturally homogenous and culturally independent
from Chinese influence is debated. Lien, Vu Hong, and Sharrock, Peter. Descending Dragon, Rising Tiger: A
History of Vietnam. London: Reaktion Books, Limited, 2014.
4
Vu Hong Lien and Peter Sharrock, Descending Dragon, Rising Tiger: A History of Vietnam (London: Reaktion
Books, Limited, 2014), Pg. 176.
5
Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991), p. 2.
6
Ibid., p. 22.
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7
Ibid., p. 27.
8
Dwight D. Eisenhower, "The President's News Conference," April 7, 1954, online by Gerhard Peters and John T.
Woolley, The American Presidency Project, retrieved December 14, 2017,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=10202.
9
John M. Murrin, Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People, 2nd Edition (Fort Worth, TX:
Harcourt, 2002), p. 781.
10
Ibid., p. 762.
11
Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell Address,” speech, January 17, 1961, Abilene, Kansas, retrieved December 19,
2017, https://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/research/online_documents/farewell_address.html. Cited in Murrin,
Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People, p. 762.
12
Murrin, Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People, p. 781.
13
Ibid.
14
Dean Rusk, in The Pentagon Papers, quoted in Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, (New
York, N.Y.: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005), p. 476.
15
Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990, p. 120.
16
Murrin, Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People, p. 791.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid., p. 802.
19
Mary Beth Norton, A People & a Nation: A History of the United States, Tenth edition (Stamford, CT: Cengage
Learning, 2015) p. 859.
20
Murrin, Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People, p. 808.
21
Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction (Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1990).
22
See for example Frederick Downs, The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War (New York, NY: Norton, 1978).
23
Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990, p. 319.
24
Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, p. 170.
25
Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, p. 478.
26
Ibid.
27
Murrin, Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People, p. 793-4.
28
Ibid., p. 807.
29
Colonel Oran Henderson, quoted in Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, p. 479.
30
Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, p. 478.
31
William J. Duiker, Sacred War: Nationalism and Revolution in a Divided Vietnam (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1995), p. 3.
32
Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, p. 495.
33
Norton, A People & a Nation: A History of the United States, p. 860.
34
Murrin, Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People, p. 795.
35
Ibid., p. 796.
36
Ibid., p. 806-7.
37
Penny Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: the Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory (Ithaca: ILR
Press, 2013), p. 80.
38
Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, p. 485.
39
Ibid., p. 492.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid., p. 495.
42
Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: the Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory, p. 14.
43
Richard Nixon, quoted Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, p. 501.
44
Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990, p. 302.
45
Ibid., p. 303.
46
Ibid., p. 314.
47
David Fitzgerald and David Ryan, “Teaching the Collective Memory and Lessons of the Vietnam War,” from
John Day Tully, Matthew Masur, and Brad Austin, eds., Understanding and Teaching the Vietnam War (Madison,
WI.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), p. 298.