ACT3 Victorio

BRIX BOYD B.
VICTORIO
BS INTERIOR 1ST YEAR
Activity 3 - Chosen Events in Southeast Asian History

The Vietnam War and active U.S. involvement in the war began in 1954, though
ongoing conflict in the region had stretched back several decades.
After Ho’s communist forces took power in the north, armed conflict between northern
and southern armies continued until the northern Viet Minh’s decisive victory in the
Battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. The French loss at the battle ended almost a
century of French colonial rule in Indochina. The subsequent treaty signed in July 1954
at a Geneva conference split Vietnam along the latitude known as the 17th Parallel (17
degrees north latitude), with Ho in control in the North and Bao in the South. The treaty
also called for nationwide elections for reunification to be held in 1956. In 1955,
however, the strongly anti-communist politician Ngo Dinh Diem pushed Emperor Bao
aside to become president of the Government of the Republic of Vietnam (GVN), often
referred to during that era as South Vietnam. With the Cold War intensifying worldwide,
the United States hardened its policies against any allies of the Soviet Union, and by
1955 President Dwight D. Eisenhower had pledged his firm support to Diem and South
Vietnam. With training and equipment from American military and the CIA, Diem’s
security forces cracked down on Viet Minh sympathizers in the south, whom he
derisively called Viet Cong (or Vietnamese Communist), arresting some 100,000
people, many of whom were brutally tortured and executed. By 1957, the Viet Cong and
other opponents of Diem’s repressive regime began fighting back with attacks on
government officials and other targets, and by 1959 they had begun engaging the South
Vietnamese army in firefights. In December 1960, Diem’s many opponents within South
Vietnam both communist and non-communist formed the National Liberation Front
(NLF) to organize resistance to the regime. Though the NLF claimed to be autonomous
and that most of its members were not communists, many in Washington assumed it
was a puppet of Hanoi. The ensuing political instability in South Vietnam persuaded
Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara
to further increase U.S. military and economic support. In August of 1964, after DRV
torpedo boats attacked two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, Johnson ordered the
retaliatory bombing of military targets in North Vietnam. Congress soon passed the Gulf
of Tonkin Resolution, which gave Johnson broad war-making powers, and U.S. planes
began regular bombing raids, codenamed Operation Rolling Thunder, the following
year. The bombing was not limited to Vietnam; from 1964-1973, the United States
covertly dropped two million tons of bombs on neighboring, neutral Laos during the CIA-
led “Secret War” in Laos. The bombing campaign was meant to disrupt the flow of
supplies across the Ho Chi Minh trail into Vietnam and to prevent the rise of the Pathet
Lao, or Lao communist forces. The U.S. bombings made Laos the most heavily bombed
country per capita in the world.
In March 1965, Johnson made the decision—with solid support from the American
public—to send U.S. combat forces into battle in Vietnam. By June, 82,000 combat
troops were stationed in Vietnam, and military leaders were calling for 175,000 more by
the end of 1965 to shore up the struggling South Vietnamese army. Despite the
concerns of some of his advisers about this escalation, and about the entire war effort
amid a growing anti-war movement, Johnson authorized the immediate dispatch of
100,000 troops at the end of July 1965 and another 100,000 in 1966. In addition to the
United States, South Korea, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand also committed
troops to fight in South Vietnam (albeit on a much smaller scale). By November 1967,
the number of American troops in Vietnam was approaching 500,000, and U.S.
casualties had reached 15,058 killed and 109,527 wounded. As the war stretched on,
some soldiers came to mistrust the government’s reasons for keeping them there, as
well as Washington’s repeated claims that the war was being won. The later years of
the war saw increased physical and psychological deterioration among American
soldiers both volunteers and draftees—including drug use, post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD), mutinies and attacks by soldiers against officers and
noncommissioned officers.

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BRIX BOYD B.

Activity 3 - Chosen Events in Southeast Asian History

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