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User account | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

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Was American involvement in the Vietnam War justified? Another intriguing question comes to many people's minds when talking about the lengthy and bloody war in Vietnam.

On the one hand, many believe that the U.S. should not have involved in Vietnam in the first place.

First, before Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam from France in September 1945, he had asked President Harry S. Truman and the U.S. for assistance and recognition. Upon being blatantly ignored by the U.S. - the "Democratic" side, it could be argued that Ho had no choice but to seek assistance from Russia and China - the communist side, to gain independence from the French colonial rule.

Second, Vietnam had been a unified country. The division of Vietnam at the 17th parallel as a result of the 1954 Geneva Accords was supposed to be temporary. Should America not have involved, Vietnam should have been unified in the general election in 1956. Hence, American involvement in Vietnam could be considered highly politically motivated. Vietnam was just a "proxy" in the Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Union.

Third, seven million tons of bombs were dropped on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia - more than twice the amount dropped in the whole World War II. By using infamous Agent Orange and other defoliants, the U.S. army destroyed about 7,700 square miles of forests - six percent of Vietnam's total land area, which also caused adverse health effects on millions of people. Many question U.S. policy of saving Vietnam (from the communist) by destroying it.

Last but not least, the undeclared war cost the United States some 58,000 lives, impeded many welfare programs and brought down its economy to the crisis of the 1970s - just to name a few. Those severe consequences put a big question mark over American benefits of its deep involvement in Vietnam.

On the other hand, many think that American involvement in the Vietnam war was a justified action to take.

Strong alliance with the French

France has long been a close ally of the U.S. In fact, it was the first ally of the new U.S. in the wake of the American Revolutionary War and the Statue of Liberty is indeed a gift from the French to American people to the memory of U.S. Declaration of Independence. Hence, President Truman's decision to ignore Ho's request for assistance and American very first involvement in Vietnam to aid the French in their war against the communist Viet Minh were rather justified.

Domino theory

The Domino theory might be understated now. But the fact is after the the world war II, communism spread worldwide to Eastern Europe, Africa, Cuba and East Asia under the influence of the Soviet Union (USSR) and to a certain extent China. The assumption that if Vietnam fell, other Southeast Asian countries could fall as well in a domino effect is understandably legitimate. As a matter of fact, former Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew argued that the U.S. involvement in Indochina had given other Southeast Asian countries time to consolidate and engage in economic growth, and therefore, stopped further communist spread.

It is also arguable that the U.S. intervention in Korea and particularly in Vietnam, which prevented South Vietnamese "domino" from falling for more than 20 years, not only stopped the communist spread but also helped exhaust the economies of the USSR and China which contributed to the Soviet Union's dissolution and the end of the Cold War in 1991.

Obligation

The U.S. had been supporting South Vietnam to defend its independence since 1954. As in President Johnson's words, to leave South Vietnam to its fate would undervalue America's words & commitment and ultimately shake its credibility in the world. The U.S., therefore, was obligated to keep their promise of helping South Vietnamese people in their war against the North communists. They had fought hard for a "noble cause".

Totalitarian North Communist Regime

Diem regime might be terrible but the totalitarian regime from the North, contrary to popular belief, did not get any better if not even worse. They had arrested, tortured and executed thousands of their own people who were all of a sudden labelled as "land lords" during their "land reform" and "re-education" programs from 1953 to 1956 - just before they decided to "liberate" the South. Ironically, many of the so-called "cruel and barbaric landlords" were actively supporting them in their war against the French.

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Was American involvement in the Vietnam War justified? - The Vietnam War

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Was American involvement in the Vietnam War justified? Another intriguing question comes to many people's minds when talking about the lengthy and bloody war in Vietnam. On the one hand, many believe that the U.S. should not have involved in Vietnam in the first place.

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The Art of Protest: From Vietnam to AIDS

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Conceptual and performance art challenged the formal remoteness of the abstract expressionists by forcing audiences to engage with political messages in the works. For example, Chris Burden's intentional wounds--having an associate shoot him with a rifle, crawling over broken glass, or having his hand nailed to the roof of a Volkswagen--challenged the audience to consider their responsibilities: "Should you watch someone doing this to themselves?

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http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB6.1B.GIF

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Electronic Records Reference Report

Introduction

Tables containing record counts that were generated from the Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files (as of April 29, 2008 ) by the following field categories:

Contact Information (for information regarding these tables)

Introduction

The following tables were generated from the Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files, which is current as of April 29, 2008.

The Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files contains records of 58,220 U.S. military fatal casualties of the Vietnam War. These records were transferred into the custody of the National Archives and Records Administration in 2008. The earliest casualty record contains a date of death of June 8, 1956, and the most recent casualty record contains a date of death of May 28, 2006. The Defense Casualty Analysis System Extract Files were created by the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The records correspond to the Vietnam Conflict statistics on the DMDC web site, which is accessible online at https://www.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/pages/main.xhtml.

The Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files is the successor database to the Combat Area Casualties Current File. The Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the DCAS contains 27 more records than the Combat Area Casualties Current File as of December 1998, which contains 58,193 records. Additionally, there are some changes to the fields between the two files, most notably in the respective date-of-death fields. The date-of-death reported in the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files is either the actual date-of-death or the date-of-incident, whereas the date-of-death for the Combat Area Casualties Current File is either the actual date-of-death or the date on which the casualty was declared dead.

The full casualty records of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files are accessible online for name searches (as well as for searches using any of the other fields identified in the data layout of the files in this series) for records of specific casualties via the Access to Archival Databases (AAD) resource.

The following casualty tables were created by using AAD to query the Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the DCAS. These tables represent statistics for a selection of categories based on the fields of the file. The selections of fields used in creating these tables were made on the basis of usefulness and interest to prospective researchers and the general public. These tables are for informational purposes and do not answer all questions of a statistical nature regarding U. S. casualties of the Vietnam War. Note that AAD can also be used to query the Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the DCAS for more complex Vietnam War casualty statistics than what are provided on this page, such as the number of casualties by race for a specific home state of record.

A full series description for the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files is accessible online via the National Archives Catalog under the National Archives Identifier 2163536. The Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File is also accessible for direct download via the National Archives Catalog file-level description, National Archives Identifier 2240992.

Alternatively to the download option, we can provide reproduction copies of the Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File on removable media (CD or DVD) on a cost-recovery basis upon request. Information regarding the ordering of electronic records is provided online on our Ordering Information page.

DCAS Vietnam Conflict Extract File record counts by CASUALTY CATEGORY (as of April 29, 2008 )

This table contains record counts based on the codes recorded in the "CASUALTY CATEGORY" field of the Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File. In the case of the "PRESUMED DEAD (BODY REMAINS RECOVERED)" and "PRESUMED DEAD (BODY REMAINS NOT RECOVERED)" categories of the table, the record counts are based on the codes in both the "CASUALTY CATEGORY" and "REMAINS RECOVERED" fields.

Record counts provided for informational purposes only, not official statistics.

DCAS Vietnam Conflict Extract File record counts by CASUALTY COUNTRY/OVER WATER CODE (Country of Casualty) (as of April 29, 2008 )
Record counts provided for informational purposes only, not official statistics.
DCAS Vietnam Conflict Extract File record counts by HOME OF RECORD STATE CODE (as of April 29, 2008 )

Note that State Lists of Fatal Casualties of the Vietnam War sorted alphabetically by the last name of casualty are available online at www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/casualty-lists/.

Record counts provided for informational purposes only, not official statistics.

DCAS Vietnam Conflict Extract File record counts by HOSTILE OR NON-HOSTILE DEATH INDICATOR (as of April 29, 2008 )

Record counts provided for informational purposes only, not official statistics.

DCAS Vietnam Conflict Extract File record counts by INCIDENT OR DEATH DATE (Year) (as of April 29, 2008 )

Researchers may note substantial differences between the above record counts generated from the Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files and those previously posted online that were generated from the Combat Area Casualties Current File. The reason for the differences is due to the fact that the date reported for the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files is the date-of-death or the date-of-incident, whereas the date for the Combat Area Casualties Current File is the date-of-death or the date on which the casualty was declared dead. The difference in the dates reported is reflected in the names of the respective fields for the two files, which for the Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the DCAS is named "INCIDENT OR DEATH DATE", whereas for the Combat Area Casualties Current File the field is named "DATE OF DEATH or DATE DECLARED DEAD".

Record counts provided for informational purposes only, not official statistics.

DCAS Vietnam Conflict Extract File record counts by MEMBER'S GENDER (as of April 29, 2008 )

Record counts provided for informational purposes only, not official statistics.

DCAS Vietnam Conflict Extract File record counts by MEMBER COMPONENT CODE ( Service Component) (as of April 29, 2008 )

Record counts provided for informational purposes only, not official statistics.

DCAS Vietnam Conflict Extract File record counts by MEMBER PAYGRADE (as of April 29, 2008 )

This table contains record counts based on the codes recorded in the "MEMBER PAYGRADE" field of the Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File . Note that the code list for this field does not distinguish Officers from Warrant Officers. The code list provided by the creating agency gives the meaning "OFFICER" for the codes O01, O02, O03, O04, O05, O06, O07, and O08. This code list also gives the meaning "OFFICER" for the codes W01, W02, W03, and W04. 1,274 records of the 1,277 records that contain the codes W01, W02, W03, or W04 in the "MEMBER PAYGRADE" field also contain one of the codes for Warrant Officers in the "MEMBER RANK OR RATE" field.

Record counts provided for informational purposes only, not official statistics.

DCAS Vietnam Conflict Extract File record counts by MEMBER SERVICE CODE (Branch of Service) (as of April 29, 2008 )

Record counts provided for informational purposes only, not official statistics.

DCAS Vietnam Conflict Extract File record counts by RACE OMB NAME ( Race) (as of April 29, 2008 )

Record counts provided for informational purposes only, not official statistics.

DCAS Vietnam Conflict Extract File record counts by RELIGION CODE (as of April 29, 2008 )

Record counts provided for informational purposes only, not official statistics.

Contact Information

For more information, please contact:
Reference Services, Electronic Records
Email: cer@nara.gov
Telephone: (301) 837-0470
Mail: 8601 Adelphi Road
College Park, MD 20740-6001.

August 2013

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Statistical information about casualties of the Vietnam War

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Electronic Records Reference Report Introduction Tables containing record counts that were generated from the Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files (as of April 29, 2008 ) by the following field categories: Casualty Category Casualty Country/Over Water Code (Country of Casualty) Home of Record State Code

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U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War didn't successfully thwart the spread of Communism.

The United States involvement in the Vietnam War is debatable and controversial. Some hold to the notion that U.S. intervention was necessary and critical to the suppression of Communism and vital to prevent South Vietnam from coming under North Vietnamese rule. However, those who oppose U.S. involvement in the conflict have steadfast reasons for rejecting the U.S.'s participation in a war that didn't directly affect the U.S. and resulted in a high number of casualties at a tremendous financial expense.

Not a U.S. Concern

Anti-involvement theorists argue that the U.S. shouldn't have invaded Vietnam because Vietnam's internal conflicts and political battles didn't directly influence or affect America. Even though U.S. politicians, military experts and leaders of foreign affairs generally agreed that Communism violated democracy and infringed on political freedoms, conflicts in Vietnam posed no direct threat to the U.S. government or to the freedoms Americans enjoyed. Some believe that the U.S.'s invasion of North Vietnam was a form of bullying, designed to make the U.S. appear as the dominant world power, even though it had nothing to gain from engaging in the conflicts. Vietnam's civil war was not the U.S.'s business and it should have stayed out of the conflict.

Cost of War

The cost of the Vietnam War was astronomical. Economists report that the Vietnam War cost the U.S. $111 billion during war time, which calculates to $738 billion by 2011 standards, according to the Congressional Research Service. World War II and the 2003-2010 wars in Iraq were the only U.S. conflicts that were more costly than the Vietnam War. When that much money is spent on foreign interests, it increases America's debt and leaves fewer resources for programs and interests at home. Some argue that the cost should have inhibited the U.S. from getting involved.

Casualties

Vietnam War-related American deaths totaled 90,220, including those who died on battlefields and those who died from other causes related to the war, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Some 47,434 soldiers died in battle. Only the American Civil War and World War II had more U.S. deaths than the Vietnam War. Some political theorists argue that the loss of life wasn't worth the sacrifice, and soldiers weren't adequately prepared to face the enemy. U.S. soldiers fought on foreign soil in jungles, often engaging in hand-to-hand combat, and weren't trained or equipped to handle those conditions. U.S. soldiers were often ambushed by the Viet Cong and strategic North Vietnamese troops who knew how to maneuver in the jungles and use guerrilla tactics. U.S. troops weren't prepared to face this style of warfare.

Unwinnable Battle

The U.S. invaded Vietnam and engaged in a war that was unwinnable. Half a million U.S. troops and 700,000 South Vietnamese troops were no match for the 250,000 soldiers in North Vietnam, according to Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 speech, published at ABC-CLIO.com. Even if the U.S. sent more troops to support the South Vietnamese, the South Vietnamese wouldn't be able to protect or sustain their post-war military successes. Their lands had been ravaged by war and they had few resources to rebuild their nation. War left the nation in ruins.

National Conscience

The Vietnam War didn't just result in the deaths of American and Vietnamese military personnel -- including U.S. soldiers who were drafted by the U.S. government. Many innocent Vietnamese, Laotian, Hmong and Cambodian civilians, including women and children, were victims of the bloody battles, bombings and raids. Military strategists and politicians, such as Robert Kennedy, stated that the invasion of Vietnam and continued U.S. support would only lead to the extended slaughter of civilians -- a weight on American's conscience that couldn't be ignored or overlooked. America shouldn't have involved itself in a war that contradicted its national conscience.

Photodisc/Photodisc/Getty Images

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Five Reasons Why the U.S. Should Not Have Invaded Vietnam | Synonym

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U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War didn't successfully thwart the spread of Communism. The United States involvement in the Vietnam War is debatable and controversial. Some hold to the notion that U.S. intervention was necessary and critical to the suppression of Communism and vital to prevent South Vietnam from coming under North Vietnamese rule.

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Overview of the Vietnam War Digital History ID 2925

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Al Bahari Architectural Consultant & Interior Design
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Dicusses

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Intercollegiate Studies Institute: Educating for Liberty

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The U.S. war against the insurgents in Iraq has raised the specter of the war fought four decades ago against insurgents in South Vietnam. Critics of the Iraq War contend that the Iraqi insurgency now is like the Vietnamese insurgency then, and that the United States today faces a similar defeat. Conversely, supporters of the Iraq War contend that Iraq bears no similarity to Vietnam and that the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War therefore need not be repeated, especially if the United States demonstrates persistence in its military and political efforts in Iraq.

A very few supporters of the current war (e.g., Melvin Laird, who was Secretary of Defense in the Nixon Administration during the Vietnam War) argue that the two wars are indeed similar, but that the United States had actually won its war in Vietnam by 1973 and it can do so again in much the same way in Iraq.1 While I disagree with Laird about the similarity of the Vietnam War and the Iraq War-I think they are very different-I believe Laird is correct in his observation that the United States won the Vietnam War in 1973. Of course, this is not the received opinion. If we are to reckon by the "memory" of Vietnam, we had best get the history right.

A Tale of Two Prisms

At the time of the Vietnam War, recent history had provided two very different prisms through which Americans could view the conflict in that strange land which was so remote from any earlier American experience. The first was the prism of the Chinese Revolution of the late 1940s. In this perspective, what had happened in China was best explained by an internal dynamic: a repressive government, acting on behalf of exploitative landlords, was challenged by a revolutionary Communist party, acting on behalf of a repressed and exploited peasantry. The ultimate success of the Communist insurgents was due to domestic conditions, particularly their popular cause, and not due to Soviet support and intervention from the outside. In brief, the Chinese Communists were more Chinese than Communist.

From this perspective, what was true of China in the 1940s was understood to be true of Indochina in the 1960s. The conflict there should be seen as the Vietnamese Revolution, with the Vietnamese Communists being more Vietnamese than Communist. Their ultimate (and inevitable) victory, therefore, would pose no real threat to the United States in its great Cold-War struggle with the Soviet Union, or with the very different China. At the time, most academic area specialists dealing with Southeast Asia subscribed to this perspective.

The second prism was the Korean War of the early 1950s. In this perspective, what had happened in Korea was best explained by an external dynamic: an aggressive Communist regime in the North, acting with the direct support first of the Soviet Union and then of Communist China, had invaded a vulnerable country and potential democracy in the South. The initial success of the North Korean army was due to Soviet and Chinese support from the outside and not to any popular cause within Korea. In brief, the North Korean Communists were more Communist than Korean.

From this perspective, what was true of Korea and Northeast Asia in the 1950s was understood to be true of Vietnam and Southeast Asia in the 1960s. The conflict there should be seen as a Communist aggression. The Communist North's victory, which was by no means inevitable, would pose a real threat to the United States in its great struggle with the Soviet Union and Communist China. At the time, most academic generalists dealing with international politics subscribed to this position.

Now, many years after the end of the Vietnam War, a good case can be made that both perspectives were right, but that they were so at different times: the war began in the early 1960s like the Chinese Revolution, but it ended in the mid-1970s like the Korean War. The turning point between the two prisms was the mid-point of the war: 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive, the de facto abdication of President Lyndon Johnson, and the election of Richard Nixon.

Political Defeat versus Military Victory

The Tet Offensive of January-February 1968 was obviously a U.S. political defeat, but most military analysts have long agreed that it was actually a very significant U.S. military victory.2 The counterattack operations of the U.S. military not only seriously damaged the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), but they effectively destroyed the South Vietnamese insurgents known as the National Liberation Front (NLF) or Viet Cong (VC). Thereafter, the real threat to South Vietnam came not from the local insurgents, which were repressed or contained by effective U.S. and South Vietnamese counterinsurgency operations, but from massive infiltration or invasion by NVA conventional forces, which had to be deterred or contained by U.S. conventional military forces. Despite this U.S. military victory, however, after Tet the political will of the United States, and especially the will of the Democratic Party, was greatly eroded. Of course, it had been the Democratic administrations of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson that had taken the United States into the Vietnam War in the first place.

The Strategic Innovations of the Nixon Administration

The Nixon Administration consequently faced a difficult dilemma when it took office in 1969. On the one hand, U.S. military power remained essential in order to win the war, but the sustained use of U.S. ground forces was no longer politically feasible given domestic U.S. opposition. On the other hand, South Vietnamese (SVN) military forces were also essential in order to win the war, specifically the counterinsurgency part of it, but their effective use was not yet militarily feasible. The obvious solution was to expand and improve the SVN forces, not only to the point that they could effectively cooperate with U.S. forces in counterinsurgency operations, but beyond that to the point that they could effectively repress or contain the Communist insurgents by themselves. This solution was called the Vietnamization Program.

Yet even when this SVN counterinsurgency capability was achieved, the United States would still have to provide conventional military forces to deter and contain the power of North Vietnam's conventional army. Earlier, the Johnson Administration had also tried to deter and contain North Vietnamese intervention. However, its strategy had been largely to fight North Vietnam within South Vietnam. It had engaged in some limited and fitful bombing of the North, but it refrained from going after the "center of gravity" of North Vietnam (the capital of Hanoi, the port of Haiphong, and the population concentration in the Red River Delta) for fear of provoking military intervention by China or the Soviet Union. The Johnson administration was haunted by the memory of what had happened in 1950 during the Korean War, when U.S. military forces "went North" (crossing the 38th Parallel, which had been the border between South Korea and North Korea) and the Chinese intervened. In a sense, one of the most decisive battles of the Vietnam War had actually been fought a decade-and-a-half before, in Korea.

The new Nixon Administration saw that the solution to the dilemma which it had inherited from the Johnson Administration was composed of two parts: First, superpower diplomacy could separate China and the Soviet Union from North Vietnam and strip away the protective umbrella which each provided to the North. The opportunities for a strategy of dividing one's Communist enemies were greatly enhanced after the Chinese and the Soviets nearly went to war over border and nuclear issues in the fall of 1969. Both China and the Soviet Union wanted something from the United States. For China, this was some kind of diplomatic recognition, and for the Soviets, it was an arms control treaty. For these U.S. concessions, each was willing to withdraw its protection of North Vietnam. The diplomatic maneuvers of President Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger achieved their aims, and in the spring of 1972 the United States concluded its grand strategic bargain with each of the two Communist superpowers.

Second, a vigorous Vietnamization program could create an effective South Vietnamese counterinsurgency capacity and permit the U.S. military to withdraw from this kind of operation. In 1969, most Americans did not take the idea of Vietnamization seriously, and when Americans now look back at Vietnam they usually think that it had no real prospect of success. However, it is instructive to compare the U.S. project of building up the security forces in Iraq since 2003 (Iraqization, so to speak) with the U.S. project of Vietnamization after 1968. At every point during the long Vietnam War (1961-1975), South Vietnam had a more unified and organized government and military than any that has existed in Iraq since the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime and the abolition of Saddam's army in the spring of 2003. The problem in South Vietnam was just that its government and military were nonetheless far less unified and organized than those of North Vietnam.

In fact, the underlying social foundations to support political stability were far better in South Vietnam than they are today in Iraq. There were religious and ethnic divisions in South Vietnam (principally between an 80 percent Buddhist majority, a 10 percent Catholic minority, and a 10 percent composed of other religious minorities), but these divisions did not correlate with territorial ones. There was no prospect of one or more sections of the country seceding from the others. In contrast, in Iraq the intense religious and ethnic divisions between the Shiites, the Sunnis, and the Kurds do correlate with territorial ones. Secessionist projects are a constant threat, and ethnic cleansing operations are a constant experience. One consequence is that in Iraq, while there are many militias that are truly religious or ethnic, there will probably never be a military that is truly Iraqi. This was not true of South Vietnam.

In any event, by 1969 several developments had come together within South Vietnam to increase the probability of a successful Vietnamization program:

(1) The aforementioned devastation of the Viet Cong insurgents after Tet.
(2) Major recent improvements in the stability of the SVN government and the effectiveness of the SVN counterinsurgency forces.
(3) An effective land reform program, which gave legitimacy to the SVN government and caused peasants to withdraw their support from the Communist insurgents.

As a result of the above three developments, when the U.S. counterinsurgency forces began to stand down, the SVN counterinsurgency forces were able to stand up. The Administration generalized this positive development into the "Nixon Doctrine," the idea that the United States would not deploy its ground forces in foreign countries in tasks where and when local ground forces were able to perform those tasks. With respect to the specific task of counterinsurgency in South Vietnam, the Vietnamization strategy had largely achieved its aims by the spring of 1972.3

Meanwhile, back in the United States, there were intense and widespread student protests against the Vietnam War, especially in 1969 and 1970-the American emergence of the "Generation of '68," or the Baby Boomers. These dramatic protests certainly reinforced the conclusion that the sustained use of U.S. ground forces in South Vietnam was no longer politically feasible and that the Vietnamization program was a political necessity. Nixon and Kissinger persisted, despite the protests, in their long-term strategy to win the war. And indeed, after a giant surge of campus protests in the spring of 1970, the student movement greatly declined within the next year. The major reason for this decline was that the Administration moved to end the military draft. No longer facing the prospect of their own deaths in the war-only the deaths of the Vietnamese-the students returned to their other, more traditional student priorities. And so, the Administration's Vietnam strategy continued on its steady course.
The U.S. Bombings of 1972
In 1972, North Vietnam tried to abort the progress of the Vietnamization program with its Spring Offensive, a conventional invasion by the North Vietnamese Army across the 17th Parallel separating North and South Vietnam. However, Nixon and Kissinger had largely completed their diplomatic project and had neutralized both China and the Soviet Union. They were thus able to retaliate against the NVA invasion by bombing Hanoi and Haiphong, the first time that this had occurred in the war. Reeling from the attack, the North had to halt its invasion.

Having demonstrated that it could now bomb Hanoi and Haiphong-the center of gravity of the North-if it chose to do so, the Nixon Administration had greatly improved its position in its ongoing negotiations with North Vietnam over the future of South Vietnam. The U.S. position was further strengthened in November 1972 with Nixon's re-election by a landslide and in December 1972 with new and massive air strikes upon Hanoi and Haiphong ("the Christmas bombings"). In January 1973, North Vietnam and the United States, along with an anxious South Vietnam, reached agreement in Paris on the Vietnam Peace Accords.
The Vietnam Armistice of 1973
The Accords provided for a cease-fire or armistice; this would enable the United States to withdraw its military forces from South Vietnam with a semblance of "peace with honor." (The Korean War had also ended with an armistice in 1953-but not with the withdrawal of U.S. troops.) The Accords also allowed North Vietnam to keep some of its troops on the territory of South Vietnam, an obviously risky situation for the South.4

The United States sought to reassure the South with a commitment to provide large-scale and long-term assistance to South Vietnam's economy and to its military, which would continue the buildup of the South and complete the project of Vietnamization. (This too was similar to what the United States had provided South Korea after the end of the Korean War.) This assistance would enable South Vietnam to deal successfully with any future Communist insurgency using its own ground forces.

The most important element of the Vietnam settlement, however, drew upon the bombing experiences of 1972. In order to enforce the armistice, and in order to deter or contain future conventional aggression by the NVA, the United States promised South Vietnam-and informed North Vietnam- that if the North should once again undertake such aggression, the United States would also once again engage in a massive bombing of the North. (This kind of threat has also always been an implied part of the armistice in Korea.) This would enable the United States to successfully deal with any future North Vietnamese conventional invasionby means of the U.S. Air Force alone.

The NVA forces left within South Vietnam made this last element problematic, however. This weakness or flaw would need to be outweighed or overcome by high U.S. persistence in its economic and military assistance to South Vietnam and by high U.S. credibility in its bombing threat to North Vietnam. But Nixon's impressive landslide re-election in November 1972, which he took to provide him with a mandate, seemed to make this persistence and this credibility likely well into the future.

In short, as of January 1973, a good case could be made that the strategy of the Nixon Administration had enabled the United States to win its war in Vietnam. As with its earlier war in Korea, the U.S. had not exactly defeated the North, but it had achieved its war aims of preserving the basic territorial integrity, military security, and political stability of the South. All in all, it could be seen as a very impressive achievement, one purchased at great cost in American blood and treasure, and accomplished with the Administration's great diplomatic skill and sustained political will.

The Reversal of the U.S. Victory

What aborted this grand strategy for Vietnam was Watergate. At the very moment that the Nixon Administration concluded the Vietnam Peace Accords in Paris (January 1973), it was called into federal court because of its burglary of a Democratic Party office in the Watergate building in Washington, D.C., along with its other covert activities directed at the Administration's political opponents. This devastating political development radically shifted the balance of power between the President and the Congress (which was controlled by the Democratic Party), and therefore the balance between the Republicans and the Democrats. By this time, the Democrats were dominated by activists who wanted America out of Vietnam as soon as possible and unconditionally. They cared little about the security and liberty of the people of South Vietnam or even about the reputation and credibility of the United States in international politics; they mocked the notion that Communism presented a threat to America and to the world. On the contrary, they cared most about the antiwar (and sometimes anti-American) views of the media and the student protestors, many of whom were now becoming prominent within the Democratic Party. Although the Democratic Party's approach toward the Vietnam War had been rejected in two Presidential elections-1968 and 1972-that party now achieved effective control of U.S. foreign policy through its control of Congress.

Congress soon imposed a very substantial reduction in U.S. economic and military assistance to South Vietnam, greatly weakening the Vietnamization and counterinsurgency element of the Vietnam settlement. It then passed the War Powers Act of 1973, which sought to limit the President's independent use of military force, seriously weakening the deterrence and counter-conventional element of the armistice. The threat of impeachment by Congress then drove Nixon to resign the Presidency in August 1974. Shortly thereafter, the North Vietnamese leadership decided on a major NVA conventional offensive in South Vietnam, to be undertaken in the spring of 1975.5

When that offensive came, Gerald Ford, who was now President, and Henry Kissinger, who was now Secretary of State, sought to execute the bombing threat which had underlain the Vietnam armistice and settlement. But this course of action now required the approval of Congress, and Congress denied the Administration's pleas. Left alone and left without hope, SVN forces were soon overrun, South Vietnam collapsed, and North Vietnam finally achieved total victory in its long and costly war.6 Contrary to a popular impression among many today, the Vietnam War was lost, not to an insurgency, but to a massive conventional invasion across a border recognized in international treaties.

What If?

What would have happened if there had been no Watergate affair and therefore no repeal of Nixon's 1972 electoral mandate, and if there had been no Congressional thwarting of the Nixon Administration's Vietnam strategy but instead a continuing support of the same?

Strategic flaws inside South Vietnam: The NVA Presence. On the one hand, by leaving NVA forces within some parts of South Vietnam, the Nixon strategy had allowed a serious internal problem of deterrence and containment to remain, one that was not as easy to solve as was the external problem presented by NVA forces within North Vietnam itself. On the other hand, the two elements of the strategy (the Vietnamization program and the bombing threat, backed by U.S. persistence and credibility) might have been strengthened so that even the internal threat could have been successfully deterred and contained. The U.S. effort along these lines in Vietnam after 1973 would have to have been even greater than the comparable U.S. effort in Korea after 1953. But if American political will had been behind the Nixon strategy, the strategy probably could have succeeded.

Strategic flaws near South Vietnam: The Cambodian Communists. On the one hand, the U.S.-supported regime in Cambodia almost certainly would have fallen to the Cambodian Communist insurgents (the Khmer Rouge) in 1975 or not long thereaf ter. This in itself would have presented a serious threat to the security of South Vietnam, because it exposed the entire, vulnerable South Vietnamese border area near Cambodia to Communist infiltration. On the other hand, after the Khmer Rouge actually took power in Cambodia in 1975 they quickly turned upon and massacred any Vietnamese within Cambodia-Communists as well as non-Communists. Had South Vietnam remained independent, the Khmer Rouge themselves might have denied infiltration opportunities to the North Vietnamese Communist forces.
The Consequences of the North Vietnamese Victory: Then and Now
The initial consequences. In the actual event, all three non-Communist states in Indochina-South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos-fell to victorious Communist forces in 1975. South Vietnam was quickly merged with the North into a united, Communist Vietnam. The new regime rounded up and sent off to jungle concentration camps ("re-education centers") about one million South Vietnamese who had been associated with the old SVN government and military; half of these would be detained for two to five years, and thousands would die in these camps. In subsequent years, moreover, more than one million Vietnamese fled from Communist Vietnam as "boat people," preferring the risks of death at sea to life under the Communist regime.

In Cambodia, the consequences of the Communist victory were far worse: the Khmer Rouge executed more than two million Cambodians from all sectors of society, or more than 25 percent of the population. In Laos, where it had been presumed that the Communists would be more moderate than elsewhere, most of the old political and social elite were put in prison, where many died, including theformer king and his family. In short, the first few years after the Communist victories saw a vast wave of retribution and executions roll over the countries of Indochina-another horrifying chapter in what we now recognize as "the Black Book of Communism."

The response of the United States-and particularly of the Democratic Party and, after 1976, of the Democratic Administration of Jimmy Carter-to all this was to say very little and to do absolutely nothing.7 They were joined in their indifference by the now-adults who had been the student antiwar protestors of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Boomer students who had always been so eager to condemn human rights abuses by the U.S.-backed governments of South Vietnam. At the time of the protests, critics had often accused the students of being self-indulgent and simpleminded. Then, when the protests rapidly declined after the end of the military draft, the students were accused of being feckless and hypocritical as well. If there had ever been reasons to doubt the truth of these accusations, they ceased to exist in the midst of the great silence of the ex-protesters now that Communism took its toll throughout Southeast Asia.

Even today, many Boomers (particularly aging members of university faculties) look back on their days of anti-war protesting as the best, most moral moment of their lives, and they proudly take credit for ending the U.S. efforts in the war. But as such, they are morally responsible for the U.S. abandonment of the peoples of Indochina, and they are morally responsible-indeed, because of their great silence after 1975, doubly responsible-for the retribution and executions which were the results of the Communist victories there.

The later consequences. The waves of history continued to roll on over Indochina, however. By late 1978, the disputes between the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists had reached the point that Vietnam invaded Cambodia and installed a new regime composed of its Communist allies. The ousted Khmer Rouge then began a new insurgency, which the Vietnamese military tried to put down with its own counterinsurgency war. In response, Communist China, which had long supported the Khmer Rouge, invaded the northern border region of Vietnam in early 1980. The Vietnamese military was successful in blunting this offensive, and the Chinese quickly withdrew. In short, within five years after the Communist victories in Indochina, each of the Asian Communist powers or movements which the United States had sought to contain by its military intervention in the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1973-China, North Vietnam, and the Khmer Rouge-had gone to war with each other. In the end, the expansion of Communism in Southeast Asia was indeed effectively contained-not by the United States, but by the Communists themselves.

The eventual consequences. The waves of history still continued to roll on. By the early 1990s, the Communist regime in Vietnam had arrived at the conclusion that it too had to reconcile itself with the post- Cold-War economic program of opening one's country to the world market and to globalization. And thus, by 1995, the twentieth anniversary of the great North Vietnamese victory in South Vietnam, a united and Communist Vietnam was providing very attractive economic incentives to multinational corporations from the United States, Japan, and other capitalist countries so that they would enter Vietnam and establish manufacturing plants there. These incentives were so attractive that many American and other corporations did so, and have continued to do so, down to the present day.

And so, today, if we ask the question, Who won the Vietnam War?, we might get a different answer than we would have gotten in earlier years. In 1973, it was reasonable to think that the United States had won the war. In 1975, it was clear that Communism, and North Vietnam more particularly, had won the war. In 1980, it was still clear that North Vietnam had won the war, but, given the new wars between the Asian Communist states, it was no longer clear that Communism in general had won the war. And today, given the mutually beneficial and profitable relationship between the Vietnamese Communist regime and American corporations, it is reasonable to conclude that both North Vietnam and the United States, each in their own way, won the Vietnam War. But since Vietnam today is very much an active and cooperative participant in the U.S.-led global economic system, and even in the developing U.S. security system for Southeast Asia, perhaps it might be said that, in the end, the United States won, most of all.

But then there is that other question, Who lost the Vietnam War? And here the answer is clear: all those South Vietnamese who, during the war, had allied with the United States and relied upon its promises and who, after 1975, paid dearly with their freedom or even with their lives for having done so. Their loss was tragic because their faith in an eventual U.S. victory had proven to be in vain. It had been especially tragic because when victory was actually achieved by the Americans-by the Nixon Administration and the American soldiers in particular- it was then cavalierly thrown away-by the Democratic Party and the student protestors. And with it were thrown away those many thousands upon thousands of South Vietnamese of whom it might truly be said: They lost the Vietnam War.

1. Melvin R. Laird, "Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam," Foreign Affairs (November/December2005), 22-43.

2. Harry G. Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1982).

3. Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), chapters 5-6; Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), chapter 13.

4. James H. Willbanks, Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004), chapter 7.

5. Ang Cheng Guan, Ending the Vietnam War: The Vietnamese Communists' Perspective (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 156-158.

6. P. Edward Haley, Congress and the Fall of South Vietnam and Cambodia (London: Associated University Presses, 1982); Stephen T. Hosmer, Konrad Kellen, and Brian M. Jenkins, The Fall of South Vietnam: Statements by Vietnamese Military and Civilian Leaders (New York: Crane, Russak and Company, 1980).

7. There was an honorable exception in the Democratic Party: George McGovern, who in 1978 publicly urged U.S. military intervention against the Khmer Rouge. See Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell: America and The Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 132-136.

The U.S. war against the insurgents in Iraq has raised the specter of the war fought four decades ago against insurgents in South Vietnam. Critics of the Iraq War contend that the Iraqi insurgency now is like the Vietnamese insurgency then, and that the United States today faces a similar defeat. Conversely, supporters of the Iraq War contend that Iraq bears no similarity to Vietnam and that the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War therefore need not be repeated, especially if the United States demonstrates persistence in its military and political efforts in Iraq.

A very few supporters of the current war (e.g., Melvin Laird, who was Secretary of Defense in the Nixon Administration during the Vietnam War) argue that the two wars are indeed similar, but that the United States had actually won its war in Vietnam by 1973 and it can do so again in much the same way in Iraq.1 While I disagree with Laird about the similarity of the Vietnam War and the Iraq War-I think they are very different-I believe Laird is correct in his observation that the United States won the Vietnam War in 1973. Of course, this is not the received opinion. If we are to reckon by the "memory" of Vietnam, we had best get the history right.

A Tale of Two Prisms

At the time of the Vietnam War, recent history had provided two very different prisms through which Americans could view the conflict in that strange land which was so remote from any earlier American experience. The first was the prism of the Chinese Revolution of the late 1940s. In this perspective, what had happened in China was best explained by an internal dynamic: a repressive government, acting on behalf of exploitative landlords, was challenged by a revolutionary Communist party, acting on behalf of a repressed and exploited peasantry. The ultimate success of the Communist insurgents was due to domestic conditions, particularly their popular cause, and not due to Soviet support and intervention from the outside. In brief, the Chinese Communists were more Chinese than Communist.

From this perspective, what was true of China in the 1940s was understood to be true of Indochina in the 1960s. The conflict there should be seen as the Vietnamese Revolution, with the Vietnamese Communists being more Vietnamese than Communist. Their ultimate (and inevitable) victory, therefore, would pose no real threat to the United States in its great Cold-War struggle with the Soviet Union, or with the very different China. At the time, most academic area specialists dealing with Southeast Asia subscribed to this perspective.

The second prism was the Korean War of the early 1950s. In this perspective, what had happened in Korea was best explained by an external dynamic: an aggressive Communist regime in the North, acting with the direct support first of the Soviet Union and then of Communist China, had invaded a vulnerable country and potential democracy in the South. The initial success of the North Korean army was due to Soviet and Chinese support from the outside and not to any popular cause within Korea. In brief, the North Korean Communists were more Communist than Korean.

From this perspective, what was true of Korea and Northeast Asia in the 1950s was understood to be true of Vietnam and Southeast Asia in the 1960s. The conflict there should be seen as a Communist aggression. The Communist North's victory, which was by no means inevitable, would pose a real threat to the United States in its great struggle with the Soviet Union and Communist China. At the time, most academic generalists dealing with international politics subscribed to this position.

Now, many years after the end of the Vietnam War, a good case can be made that both perspectives were right, but that they were so at different times: the war began in the early 1960s like the Chinese Revolution, but it ended in the mid-1970s like the Korean War. The turning point between the two prisms was the mid-point of the war: 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive, the de facto abdication of President Lyndon Johnson, and the election of Richard Nixon.

Political Defeat versus Military Victory

The Tet Offensive of January-February 1968 was obviously a U.S. political defeat, but most military analysts have long agreed that it was actually a very significant U.S. military victory.2 The counterattack operations of the U.S. military not only seriously damaged the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), but they effectively destroyed the South Vietnamese insurgents known as the National Liberation Front (NLF) or Viet Cong (VC). Thereafter, the real threat to South Vietnam came not from the local insurgents, which were repressed or contained by effective U.S. and South Vietnamese counterinsurgency operations, but from massive infiltration or invasion by NVA conventional forces, which had to be deterred or contained by U.S. conventional military forces. Despite this U.S. military victory, however, after Tet the political will of the United States, and especially the will of the Democratic Party, was greatly eroded. Of course, it had been the Democratic administrations of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson that had taken the United States into the Vietnam War in the first place.

The Strategic Innovations of the Nixon Administration

The Nixon Administration consequently faced a difficult dilemma when it took office in 1969. On the one hand, U.S. military power remained essential in order to win the war, but the sustained use of U.S. ground forces was no longer politically feasible given domestic U.S. opposition. On the other hand, South Vietnamese (SVN) military forces were also essential in order to win the war, specifically the counterinsurgency part of it, but their effective use was not yet militarily feasible. The obvious solution was to expand and improve the SVN forces, not only to the point that they could effectively cooperate with U.S. forces in counterinsurgency operations, but beyond that to the point that they could effectively repress or contain the Communist insurgents by themselves. This solution was called the Vietnamization Program.

Yet even when this SVN counterinsurgency capability was achieved, the United States would still have to provide conventional military forces to deter and contain the power of North Vietnam's conventional army. Earlier, the Johnson Administration had also tried to deter and contain North Vietnamese intervention. However, its strategy had been largely to fight North Vietnam within South Vietnam. It had engaged in some limited and fitful bombing of the North, but it refrained from going after the "center of gravity" of North Vietnam (the capital of Hanoi, the port of Haiphong, and the population concentration in the Red River Delta) for fear of provoking military intervention by China or the Soviet Union. The Johnson administration was haunted by the memory of what had happened in 1950 during the Korean War, when U.S. military forces "went North" (crossing the 38th Parallel, which had been the border between South Korea and North Korea) and the Chinese intervened. In a sense, one of the most decisive battles of the Vietnam War had actually been fought a decade-and-a-half before, in Korea.

The new Nixon Administration saw that the solution to the dilemma which it had inherited from the Johnson Administration was composed of two parts: First, superpower diplomacy could separate China and the Soviet Union from North Vietnam and strip away the protective umbrella which each provided to the North. The opportunities for a strategy of dividing one's Communist enemies were greatly enhanced after the Chinese and the Soviets nearly went to war over border and nuclear issues in the fall of 1969. Both China and the Soviet Union wanted something from the United States. For China, this was some kind of diplomatic recognition, and for the Soviets, it was an arms control treaty. For these U.S. concessions, each was willing to withdraw its protection of North Vietnam. The diplomatic maneuvers of President Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger achieved their aims, and in the spring of 1972 the United States concluded its grand strategic bargain with each of the two Communist superpowers.

Second, a vigorous Vietnamization program could create an effective South Vietnamese counterinsurgency capacity and permit the U.S. military to withdraw from this kind of operation. In 1969, most Americans did not take the idea of Vietnamization seriously, and when Americans now look back at Vietnam they usually think that it had no real prospect of success. However, it is instructive to compare the U.S. project of building up the security forces in Iraq since 2003 (Iraqization, so to speak) with the U.S. project of Vietnamization after 1968. At every point during the long Vietnam War (1961-1975), South Vietnam had a more unified and organized government and military than any that has existed in Iraq since the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime and the abolition of Saddam's army in the spring of 2003. The problem in South Vietnam was just that its government and military were nonetheless far less unified and organized than those of North Vietnam.

In fact, the underlying social foundations to support political stability were far better in South Vietnam than they are today in Iraq. There were religious and ethnic divisions in South Vietnam (principally between an 80 percent Buddhist majority, a 10 percent Catholic minority, and a 10 percent composed of other religious minorities), but these divisions did not correlate with territorial ones. There was no prospect of one or more sections of the country seceding from the others. In contrast, in Iraq the intense religious and ethnic divisions between the Shiites, the Sunnis, and the Kurds do correlate with territorial ones. Secessionist projects are a constant threat, and ethnic cleansing operations are a constant experience. One consequence is that in Iraq, while there are many militias that are truly religious or ethnic, there will probably never be a military that is truly Iraqi. This was not true of South Vietnam.

In any event, by 1969 several developments had come together within South Vietnam to increase the probability of a successful Vietnamization program:

(1) The aforementioned devastation of the Viet Cong insurgents after Tet.
(2) Major recent improvements in the stability of the SVN government and the effectiveness of the SVN counterinsurgency forces.
(3) An effective land reform program, which gave legitimacy to the SVN government and caused peasants to withdraw their support from the Communist insurgents.

As a result of the above three developments, when the U.S. counterinsurgency forces began to stand down, the SVN counterinsurgency forces were able to stand up. The Administration generalized this positive development into the "Nixon Doctrine," the idea that the United States would not deploy its ground forces in foreign countries in tasks where and when local ground forces were able to perform those tasks. With respect to the specific task of counterinsurgency in South Vietnam, the Vietnamization strategy had largely achieved its aims by the spring of 1972.3

Meanwhile, back in the United States, there were intense and widespread student protests against the Vietnam War, especially in 1969 and 1970-the American emergence of the "Generation of '68," or the Baby Boomers. These dramatic protests certainly reinforced the conclusion that the sustained use of U.S. ground forces in South Vietnam was no longer politically feasible and that the Vietnamization program was a political necessity. Nixon and Kissinger persisted, despite the protests, in their long-term strategy to win the war. And indeed, after a giant surge of campus protests in the spring of 1970, the student movement greatly declined within the next year. The major reason for this decline was that the Administration moved to end the military draft. No longer facing the prospect of their own deaths in the war-only the deaths of the Vietnamese-the students returned to their other, more traditional student priorities. And so, the Administration's Vietnam strategy continued on its steady course.
The U.S. Bombings of 1972
In 1972, North Vietnam tried to abort the progress of the Vietnamization program with its Spring Offensive, a conventional invasion by the North Vietnamese Army across the 17th Parallel separating North and South Vietnam. However, Nixon and Kissinger had largely completed their diplomatic project and had neutralized both China and the Soviet Union. They were thus able to retaliate against the NVA invasion by bombing Hanoi and Haiphong, the first time that this had occurred in the war. Reeling from the attack, the North had to halt its invasion.

Having demonstrated that it could now bomb Hanoi and Haiphong-the center of gravity of the North-if it chose to do so, the Nixon Administration had greatly improved its position in its ongoing negotiations with North Vietnam over the future of South Vietnam. The U.S. position was further strengthened in November 1972 with Nixon's re-election by a landslide and in December 1972 with new and massive air strikes upon Hanoi and Haiphong ("the Christmas bombings"). In January 1973, North Vietnam and the United States, along with an anxious South Vietnam, reached agreement in Paris on the Vietnam Peace Accords.
The Vietnam Armistice of 1973
The Accords provided for a cease-fire or armistice; this would enable the United States to withdraw its military forces from South Vietnam with a semblance of "peace with honor." (The Korean War had also ended with an armistice in 1953-but not with the withdrawal of U.S. troops.) The Accords also allowed North Vietnam to keep some of its troops on the territory of South Vietnam, an obviously risky situation for the South.4

The United States sought to reassure the South with a commitment to provide large-scale and long-term assistance to South Vietnam's economy and to its military, which would continue the buildup of the South and complete the project of Vietnamization. (This too was similar to what the United States had provided South Korea after the end of the Korean War.) This assistance would enable South Vietnam to deal successfully with any future Communist insurgency using its own ground forces.

The most important element of the Vietnam settlement, however, drew upon the bombing experiences of 1972. In order to enforce the armistice, and in order to deter or contain future conventional aggression by the NVA, the United States promised South Vietnam-and informed North Vietnam- that if the North should once again undertake such aggression, the United States would also once again engage in a massive bombing of the North. (This kind of threat has also always been an implied part of the armistice in Korea.) This would enable the United States to successfully deal with any future North Vietnamese conventional invasionby means of the U.S. Air Force alone.

The NVA forces left within South Vietnam made this last element problematic, however. This weakness or flaw would need to be outweighed or overcome by high U.S. persistence in its economic and military assistance to South Vietnam and by high U.S. credibility in its bombing threat to North Vietnam. But Nixon's impressive landslide re-election in November 1972, which he took to provide him with a mandate, seemed to make this persistence and this credibility likely well into the future.

In short, as of January 1973, a good case could be made that the strategy of the Nixon Administration had enabled the United States to win its war in Vietnam. As with its earlier war in Korea, the U.S. had not exactly defeated the North, but it had achieved its war aims of preserving the basic territorial integrity, military security, and political stability of the South. All in all, it could be seen as a very impressive achievement, one purchased at great cost in American blood and treasure, and accomplished with the Administration's great diplomatic skill and sustained political will.

The Reversal of the U.S. Victory

What aborted this grand strategy for Vietnam was Watergate. At the very moment that the Nixon Administration concluded the Vietnam Peace Accords in Paris (January 1973), it was called into federal court because of its burglary of a Democratic Party office in the Watergate building in Washington, D.C., along with its other covert activities directed at the Administration's political opponents. This devastating political development radically shifted the balance of power between the President and the Congress (which was controlled by the Democratic Party), and therefore the balance between the Republicans and the Democrats. By this time, the Democrats were dominated by activists who wanted America out of Vietnam as soon as possible and unconditionally. They cared little about the security and liberty of the people of South Vietnam or even about the reputation and credibility of the United States in international politics; they mocked the notion that Communism presented a threat to America and to the world. On the contrary, they cared most about the antiwar (and sometimes anti-American) views of the media and the student protestors, many of whom were now becoming prominent within the Democratic Party. Although the Democratic Party's approach toward the Vietnam War had been rejected in two Presidential elections-1968 and 1972-that party now achieved effective control of U.S. foreign policy through its control of Congress.

Congress soon imposed a very substantial reduction in U.S. economic and military assistance to South Vietnam, greatly weakening the Vietnamization and counterinsurgency element of the Vietnam settlement. It then passed the War Powers Act of 1973, which sought to limit the President's independent use of military force, seriously weakening the deterrence and counter-conventional element of the armistice. The threat of impeachment by Congress then drove Nixon to resign the Presidency in August 1974. Shortly thereafter, the North Vietnamese leadership decided on a major NVA conventional offensive in South Vietnam, to be undertaken in the spring of 1975.5

When that offensive came, Gerald Ford, who was now President, and Henry Kissinger, who was now Secretary of State, sought to execute the bombing threat which had underlain the Vietnam armistice and settlement. But this course of action now required the approval of Congress, and Congress denied the Administration's pleas. Left alone and left without hope, SVN forces were soon overrun, South Vietnam collapsed, and North Vietnam finally achieved total victory in its long and costly war.6 Contrary to a popular impression among many today, the Vietnam War was lost, not to an insurgency, but to a massive conventional invasion across a border recognized in international treaties.

What If?

What would have happened if there had been no Watergate affair and therefore no repeal of Nixon's 1972 electoral mandate, and if there had been no Congressional thwarting of the Nixon Administration's Vietnam strategy but instead a continuing support of the same?

Strategic flaws inside South Vietnam: The NVA Presence. On the one hand, by leaving NVA forces within some parts of South Vietnam, the Nixon strategy had allowed a serious internal problem of deterrence and containment to remain, one that was not as easy to solve as was the external problem presented by NVA forces within North Vietnam itself. On the other hand, the two elements of the strategy (the Vietnamization program and the bombing threat, backed by U.S. persistence and credibility) might have been strengthened so that even the internal threat could have been successfully deterred and contained. The U.S. effort along these lines in Vietnam after 1973 would have to have been even greater than the comparable U.S. effort in Korea after 1953. But if American political will had been behind the Nixon strategy, the strategy probably could have succeeded.

Strategic flaws near South Vietnam: The Cambodian Communists. On the one hand, the U.S.-supported regime in Cambodia almost certainly would have fallen to the Cambodian Communist insurgents (the Khmer Rouge) in 1975 or not long thereaf ter. This in itself would have presented a serious threat to the security of South Vietnam, because it exposed the entire, vulnerable South Vietnamese border area near Cambodia to Communist infiltration. On the other hand, after the Khmer Rouge actually took power in Cambodia in 1975 they quickly turned upon and massacred any Vietnamese within Cambodia-Communists as well as non-Communists. Had South Vietnam remained independent, the Khmer Rouge themselves might have denied infiltration opportunities to the North Vietnamese Communist forces.
The Consequences of the North Vietnamese Victory: Then and Now
The initial consequences. In the actual event, all three non-Communist states in Indochina-South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos-fell to victorious Communist forces in 1975. South Vietnam was quickly merged with the North into a united, Communist Vietnam. The new regime rounded up and sent off to jungle concentration camps ("re-education centers") about one million South Vietnamese who had been associated with the old SVN government and military; half of these would be detained for two to five years, and thousands would die in these camps. In subsequent years, moreover, more than one million Vietnamese fled from Communist Vietnam as "boat people," preferring the risks of death at sea to life under the Communist regime.

In Cambodia, the consequences of the Communist victory were far worse: the Khmer Rouge executed more than two million Cambodians from all sectors of society, or more than 25 percent of the population. In Laos, where it had been presumed that the Communists would be more moderate than elsewhere, most of the old political and social elite were put in prison, where many died, including theformer king and his family. In short, the first few years after the Communist victories saw a vast wave of retribution and executions roll over the countries of Indochina-another horrifying chapter in what we now recognize as "the Black Book of Communism."

The response of the United States-and particularly of the Democratic Party and, after 1976, of the Democratic Administration of Jimmy Carter-to all this was to say very little and to do absolutely nothing.7 They were joined in their indifference by the now-adults who had been the student antiwar protestors of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Boomer students who had always been so eager to condemn human rights abuses by the U.S.-backed governments of South Vietnam. At the time of the protests, critics had often accused the students of being self-indulgent and simpleminded. Then, when the protests rapidly declined after the end of the military draft, the students were accused of being feckless and hypocritical as well. If there had ever been reasons to doubt the truth of these accusations, they ceased to exist in the midst of the great silence of the ex-protesters now that Communism took its toll throughout Southeast Asia.

Even today, many Boomers (particularly aging members of university faculties) look back on their days of anti-war protesting as the best, most moral moment of their lives, and they proudly take credit for ending the U.S. efforts in the war. But as such, they are morally responsible for the U.S. abandonment of the peoples of Indochina, and they are morally responsible-indeed, because of their great silence after 1975, doubly responsible-for the retribution and executions which were the results of the Communist victories there.

The later consequences. The waves of history continued to roll on over Indochina, however. By late 1978, the disputes between the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists had reached the point that Vietnam invaded Cambodia and installed a new regime composed of its Communist allies. The ousted Khmer Rouge then began a new insurgency, which the Vietnamese military tried to put down with its own counterinsurgency war. In response, Communist China, which had long supported the Khmer Rouge, invaded the northern border region of Vietnam in early 1980. The Vietnamese military was successful in blunting this offensive, and the Chinese quickly withdrew. In short, within five years after the Communist victories in Indochina, each of the Asian Communist powers or movements which the United States had sought to contain by its military intervention in the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1973-China, North Vietnam, and the Khmer Rouge-had gone to war with each other. In the end, the expansion of Communism in Southeast Asia was indeed effectively contained-not by the United States, but by the Communists themselves.

The eventual consequences. The waves of history still continued to roll on. By the early 1990s, the Communist regime in Vietnam had arrived at the conclusion that it too had to reconcile itself with the post- Cold-War economic program of opening one's country to the world market and to globalization. And thus, by 1995, the twentieth anniversary of the great North Vietnamese victory in South Vietnam, a united and Communist Vietnam was providing very attractive economic incentives to multinational corporations from the United States, Japan, and other capitalist countries so that they would enter Vietnam and establish manufacturing plants there. These incentives were so attractive that many American and other corporations did so, and have continued to do so, down to the present day.

And so, today, if we ask the question, Who won the Vietnam War?, we might get a different answer than we would have gotten in earlier years. In 1973, it was reasonable to think that the United States had won the war. In 1975, it was clear that Communism, and North Vietnam more particularly, had won the war. In 1980, it was still clear that North Vietnam had won the war, but, given the new wars between the Asian Communist states, it was no longer clear that Communism in general had won the war. And today, given the mutually beneficial and profitable relationship between the Vietnamese Communist regime and American corporations, it is reasonable to conclude that both North Vietnam and the United States, each in their own way, won the Vietnam War. But since Vietnam today is very much an active and cooperative participant in the U.S.-led global economic system, and even in the developing U.S. security system for Southeast Asia, perhaps it might be said that, in the end, the United States won, most of all.

But then there is that other question, Who lost the Vietnam War? And here the answer is clear: all those South Vietnamese who, during the war, had allied with the United States and relied upon its promises and who, after 1975, paid dearly with their freedom or even with their lives for having done so. Their loss was tragic because their faith in an eventual U.S. victory had proven to be in vain. It had been especially tragic because when victory was actually achieved by the Americans-by the Nixon Administration and the American soldiers in particular- it was then cavalierly thrown away-by the Democratic Party and the student protestors. And with it were thrown away those many thousands upon thousands of South Vietnamese of whom it might truly be said: They lost the Vietnam War.

1. Melvin R. Laird, "Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam," Foreign Affairs (November/December2005), 22-43.

2. Harry G. Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1982).

3. Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), chapters 5-6; Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), chapter 13.

4. James H. Willbanks, Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004), chapter 7.

5. Ang Cheng Guan, Ending the Vietnam War: The Vietnamese Communists' Perspective (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 156-158.

6. P. Edward Haley, Congress and the Fall of South Vietnam and Cambodia (London: Associated University Presses, 1982); Stephen T. Hosmer, Konrad Kellen, and Brian M. Jenkins, The Fall of South Vietnam: Statements by Vietnamese Military and Civilian Leaders (New York: Crane, Russak and Company, 1980).

7. There was an honorable exception in the Democratic Party: George McGovern, who in 1978 publicly urged U.S. military intervention against the Khmer Rouge. See Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell: America and The Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 132-136.

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The U.S. Victory in Vietnam: Lost and Found

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The U.S. war against the insurgents in Iraq has raised the specter of the war fought four decades ago against insurgents in South Vietnam. Critics of the Iraq War contend that the Iraqi insurgency now is like the Vietnamese insurgency then, and that the United States today faces a similar defeat.

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From Wikipedia https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8f/Vietnam_War_protesters._1967._Wichita%2C_Kans_-_NARA_-_283627.jpg/220px-Vietnam_War_protesters._1967._Wichita%2C_Kans_-_NARA_-_283627.jpg

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Discusses the media's involvement within the war

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Discusses the media's involvement within the war

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Media helped contribute to the public's opposition as they watched the war develop and get gruesome

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Vietnam was America's most divisive and unsuccessful foreign war. It was also the first to be televised and the first of the modern era fought without military censorship. From the earliest days of the Kennedy-Johnson escalation right up to the American withdrawal, and even today, the media's role in Vietnam has continued to be intensely controversial.

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Newly Declassified National Security Agency History Questions Early Vietnam War Communications Intelligence

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Hanyok further argues that Agency officials had "mishandled" SIGINT concerning the events of August 4 and provided top level officials with "skewed" intelligence supporting claims of an August 4 attack. "The overwhelming body of reports, if used, would have told the story that no attack occurred."

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LBJ Tapes on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident

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LBJ Tapes on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident Source: John Prados, The White House Tapes (New York: The New Press, 2003)

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Discusses our goals were achieved yet we still failed

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Discusses our goals were achieved yet we still failed

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Summer's inspired analysis of America's war in Vietnam answers the most pressing questions remaining from that terrible conflict more than a decade before Robert McNamara's painful admissions.

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Discusses public opposition and the effects of the war at home and the world

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Discusses public opposition and the effects of the war at home and the world

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Forty years ago, on April 30 at 7:53 in the morning, the Marine helicopter Swift 2-2 departed from the United States embassy in Saigon, capital of South Vietnam. The helicopter carried the last batch of soldiers who had been waging a brutal, protracted war against the revolutionary peasant uprising of Hồ Chí Minh's Việt Cộng guerrillas. Two and a half hours after the departure of Swift 2-2, the U.S. puppet regime in South Vietnam formally surrendered to Hồ. By the afternoon, Ho announced that the South Vietnamese government was "completely dissolved at all levels". The Vietnam War was over.

Vietnam was the first time in history that the United States lost a war. A country armed to the teeth with the latest in modern weaponry which had marched to victory in two world wars found itself stopped in its tracks against a poor, colonized peasant nation struggling for freedom. The U.S. military was faced with a different kind of enemy: the popular resistance of the Vietnamese workers and peasants, a rising tide of social struggles at home, and increasing dissatisfaction within its own army. As the socialist historian Howard Zinn put it, "it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won".

The story of how the humans won is highly relevant today as we face a ruling elite that has carried out a policy of constant foreign wars for 14 years while attacking democratic rights at home and concentrating unimaginable wealth in its hands. If ordinary people stood up and stopped the war machine 40 years ago, we can build a mass movement to end the rule of the billionaires in our time.

A History of Resistance

For over a century, the history of Vietnam was one of colonial conquest and anti-colonial resistance. Between 1859 and 1885, the French government instigated a series of military conquests in Southeast Asia, eventually establishing the colony of French Indochina in what is now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. France ruthlessly exploited its colony through an oppressive plantation system. By World War II, the rising imperial power of Japan briefly drove out the French and established an even more ruthless colonial rule. It was during this time that Hồ Chí Minh, founder of the Communist Party of Indochina, formed the Việt Minh, an alliance with nationalist forces against Japanese rule.

Hồ became a socialist while living in France in 1921 and, inspired by the Russian Revolution, he joined the communist movement. But by the time Hồ came to prominence in the Vietnamese anti-colonial movement, the Russian Revolution had degenerated and the Soviet Union was under the bureaucratic dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. Capitalism remained abolished and real social gains were achieved. but the political power was taken away from working class people and concentrated in the hands of a privileged, parasitic caste at the top of society.

Hồ adopted Stalin's bureaucratic, brutal and dictatorial methods, and embraced his political turn away from working class internationalism. Hồ followed the Stalinist advice to subordinate workers' struggles to a nationalist alliance with "progressive" capitalists.

But there was also a genuine revolutionary socialist movement developing in Vietnam, lead by Tạ Thu Thâu, which supported Leon Trotsky's fight against Stalinism and called for the working class to lead the struggle against colonialism. The Vietnamese Trotskyists established a powerful base among the workers of Saigon. When the Japanese were driven out of Indochina in 1945, the Trotskyists played a prominent role in a general strike in Saigon against the return of French rule. But Hồ's Stalinists, at this point, looked to British, French, and American imperialism as a "progressive" ally against Japan. After the general strike, the Việt Minh, the fighters for independence under Hồ's leadership, had the Trotskyists slaughtered and facilitated the return of French rule.

While Hồ Chí Minh saw French imperialism as an ally facilitating independence, French imperialism didn't see things that way. As France re-established its colonial rule, the Việt Minh was pushed to the left by the force of events and waged a guerrilla struggle against French rule. This culminated in the battle of Điện Biên Phủ in 1954, which forced out the French and established Hồ's rule in North Vietnam. Hồ's regime overthrew capitalism and launched a massive land reform program that vastly improved the standard of living for the majority of the population. But, politically, North Vietnam was a bureaucratic dictatorship made in the Soviet Union's image. Nevertheless, given the nightmare of capitalist stagnation and poverty in the colonial and neo-colonial world, it is understandable that the Vietnamese Revolution was enormously attractive to millions of people around the world.

In South Vietnam, however, an entirely different regime was established. The U.S. emerged from World War II as the world's biggest superpower, with the Soviet Union as its biggest rival. Despite the willingness of the Stalinists to cut deals with the U.S. and other imperialist powers, the U.S. ruling elite feared the spread of further revolutionary upheavals. In particular they believed that a Việt Minh victory would lead to a "domino effect" with more countries leaving the sphere of capitalism across Southeast Asia. The U.S. therefore propped up the corrupt and repressive South Vietnamese puppet dictator Ngô Đình Diệm. This regime had nothing to do with democracy, independence or self-determination.

In response, the Việt Cộng guerrilla movement was formed, backed by North Vietnam and, in 1959, a new guerrilla war was launched against the South Vietnamese regime.

American War Drive

Ostensibly, the Vietnam War was not a war at all, but a "police action". The process began under Eisenhower, who secretly sent military advisers to South Vietnam. Under Kennedy, the number of secret advisers rose to sixteen thousand. But it was Kennedy's successor Johnson who, under the guise of the manufactured "Gulf of Tonkin incident" in 1964, stepped up the intervention into a full-scale war.

The scale of the war was massive. A total of 2.7 million American soldiers served in the war, representing 9.7% of their generation. Vietnam and its neighbors Laos and Cambodia were hit by 7 million tons of American bombs, more than twice the amount of bombs dropped on Europe and Asia in World War II. As part of Operation Ranch Hand, almost 20 million gallons of chemical herbicides were sprayed as well, including the notorious Agent Orange. This was part of a policy of "forced draft urbanization", destroying the peasants' crops to starve guerrillas out of the countryside. In addition, 338,000 tons of napalm bombs were dropped in the region, all to back and defend a hated dictatorial regime.

As the U.S. military effort became bogged down because of the mass opposition of the Vietnamese people, the brutality of the occupation inevitably increased. In one infamous incident, American troops entered the hamlet of My Lai on March 16, 1968, rounded up the inhabitants, children included. They were then ordered into a ditch, 500 in all, and methodically shot to death. The My Lai Massacre was only the most well-known incident of this sort. As Colonel David H. Hackworth put it, "There were hundreds of My Lais. You got your card punched by the numbers of bodies you counted."

On January 31, 1968, the Việt Cộng launched the Tet Offensive, a military assault on over 100 cities in South Vietnam designed to provoke a national uprising. Although the US was able to militarily defeat the Tet Offensive, the war began to look increasingly like a quagmire. That year, Richard Nixon was elected on the slogan of "peace with honor". Despite promising to wind down the war, he instead expanded it. The bombing campaign was expanded from Vietnam to the country's neutral neighbors of Laos and Cambodia. But this simply took the US deeper into the quagmire. By the end of the war, 58,220 American soldiers had been killed, and over 150,000 wounded.

The War at Home

Ultimately, the United States was defeated because it was fighting a popular resistance. But it wasn't just the resistance of the Vietnamese peasants, but also the massive anti-war movement in the U.S. itself. The movement began slowly in the early 1960s. Serious anti-war organizing first took place on university campuses, with groups like the Students for a Democratic Society holding anti-war teach-ins across the country and organizing demonstrations. Soon the movement would balloon into the biggest anti-war movement in U.S. history.

Establishment accounts of the anti-Vietnam war movement portray it as dominated by privileged students with the working class making up the "silent majority" that backed Nixon. However, this is a gross distortion of how consciousness actually developed. Due to the nature of the draft, the vast majority of soldiers were drawn from the ranks of the working class and oppressed. And they were the ones who witnessed the horrors of the war first hand. It's true that conservative union leaders supported the war but this position faced internal dissent. By the end of the war opposition to the war was higher in the working class than the middle class and particularly strong among poor workers and African Americans.

The most significant working class resistance occurred within the army itself. A number of radical groups actively pursued a policy of entering the army to carry out anti-war activity among the soldiers. Other left-wing activists on the civilian side set up a network of coffeehouses, storefronts, and bookstores outside military bases, which became centers for dissent within the military. Anti-war GI papers flourished, with names like Fatigue Press, Harass the Brass, and The Star-Spangled Bummer. These organizing efforts helped bring the army into a state of disarray. In 1971, Marine Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr. wrote:

"By every conceivable indicator, our army that remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers...Sedition, coupled with disaffection from within the ranks, and externally fomented with an audacity and intensity previously inconceivable, infest the Armed Services..."

This disintegration of the armed forces proved to be the final nail in the coffin and rendered the war unwinnable for the U.S.

Aftermath

It was the power of collective struggle, in the U.S. and Vietnam, that led to the defeat of U.S. imperialism. This had immediate consequences for the future of U.S. foreign policy. The draft was abolished and the military switched to an all-volunteer army. And an overall hostility to war among ordinary people led to "Vietnam Syndrome" where the U.S. government became unwilling to engage in direct warfare for fear of provoking immediate massive opposition.

But with the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, capitalism proclaimed itself triumphant. More slowly, Vietnam also headed towards the restoration of capitalism. Globally, the workers' movement went into retreat. George Bush used the 9/11 attack as the pretext to launch the "War on Terror" and the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. This temporarily and partially helped to overcome the Vietnam Syndrome but the occupation of Iraq has led to a full scale disaster for U.S. policy, now spawning the new conflict with ISIS. Bush faced a sizable anti-war movement but, with fewer "boots on the ground", Obama has pursued the same aims with less opposition.

But there is increasing resistance to the war being waged on working people and people of color here at home. This will inevitably lead to a greater understanding of the need to oppose U.S. intervention abroad which serves the interests of the corporate elite. Just as in the 1960s, what is needed is the international solidarity of working people fighting to end the domination of the planet by capitalism. The heroic resistance of the Vietnamese people and the mass movement against the war inside the U.S. remain a shining inspiration for this generation.

Deep Crisis Within U.S. Society
by Tom Crean
In 1975, as Saigon fell to the NLF, the US was in the middle of the most profound political, social and economic crisis it had faced since World War II. There were a number of elements comparable to what we have seen in recent years.

Beginning in 1973, the US experienced a sharp economic downturn which marked the end of the huge postwar economic expansion. By May 1975, official unemployment had reached 9%. The ruling elite were unsure of how to respond to this crisis.

All the institutions of American capitalism increasingly came into question. This process culminated in the constitutional crisis caused by the Watergate break-in. In August 1974, Richard Nixon, facing the threat of Congressional impeachment, was forced to resign because of Watergate.

But the most important feature of the situation was the development of a whole series of mass struggles that pointed in the direction of fundamental change. Besides the mass movement against the war, society had been rocked by a powerful movement for civil rights and black liberation which also helped spur movements for women's liberation and gay liberation.

There was an enormous radicalization of young people who were inspired by revolutionary movements against colonialism and capitalism around the world. Hundreds of thousands considered themselves socialists. In 1968 there was a month-long general strike by workers in France, followed by Italy's "hot autumn" in 1969 and the Portuguese Revolution of 1974.

The U.S. working class had not drawn such far reaching conclusions but there was upheaval in workplaces here as well. Between the mid-60s and mid-70s there was a huge wave of class struggle. In 1974 alone, nearly 1.8 million workers were out on strike and nearly 32 million workdays were lost due to strikes! Many of these were "wildcat" strikes taken without union sanction because of the frustration of workers with their leadership for not fighting back against attacks on living standards and working conditions.

What was missing was a political force with sufficient authority to galvanize the massive discontent in the working class and throughout American society. Even an initially small multiracial workers party with a clear socialist program could have rapidly reached and led millions in this period. The key lesson for today, as we witness a new wave of social struggle, is precisely the urgency of laying the basis for an independent political party to challenge the rule of the billionaires and within that the need to build a cohesive socialist force.
9/11 Afghanistan African Americans Agent Orange antiwar movement Barack Obama Battle of Điện Biên Phủ black freedom movement Black youth bombing Bureaucracy Cambodia capitalis Civil Rights Movement class struggle colonialism Communism Communist Party of Indochina containment policy demonstrations dictatorship draft Dwight D. Eisenhower economic downturn feature foreign policy France French Indochina George W. Bush guerrilla warfare Gulf of Tonkin Incident Ho Chi Minh Iraq Isis Japan John F. Kennedy land reform Laos Lyndon Johnson mass movement mass resistance My Lai Massacre napalm National Liberation Front Ngô Đình Diệm North Vietnam occupation Operation Ranch Hand poverty radicalization Richard Nixon Russian Revolution Saigon socialism South Vietnam Southeast Asia Soviet Union Stalinism Students for a Democratic Society Ta thu Thau teach-ins Tet Offensive Trotskyism U.S. Armed Forces unemployment union leadership Việt Cộng Việt Minh Vietnam Vietnam Syndrome Vietnam War War on Terror wildcat strikes working class World War II

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How the War Machine Was Stopped: 40 Years Since The Vietnam War

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Forty years ago, on April 30 at 7:53 in the morning, the Marine helicopter Swift 2-2 departed from the United States embassy in Saigon, capital of South Vietnam. The helicopter carried the last batch of soldiers who had been waging a brutal, protracted war against the revolutionary peasant uprising of Hồ Chí Minh's Việt Cộng guerrillas.

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[excerpted from Patriotism, Peace and Vietnam: A Memoir by Peggy Hanna (Left to Write, Springfield, Ohio), 2003]

Background
" In 1858, the French occupied Vietnam. During France's entire rule, there were constant peasant uprisings but to no avail. In 1930 and 1931 thousands of Vietnamese were executed and imprisoned by the French Legion in an attempt to suppress all nationalist parties. A young man named Ngo Dinh Diem assisted the French during this time and would later be chosen by the United States to be president of South Vietnam.

Japan, with no resistance from the French, occupied Vietnam in 1940. During the 1940 to 1945 period, all Vietnamese groups struggling for independence from the French and the Japanese formed a coalition under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. They called themselves the League for Independence or the Vietminh.

On September 2, 1945, the day Japan surrendered to the Allies, Ho Chi Minh announced the formation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and read to the crowds in Hanoi the Vietnamese "Declaration of Independence." At that time, the new republic included all of Vietnam. Three weeks later, the British were helping to re-establish French rule and forced the Vietminh out of Saigon. During this time, Ho Chi Minh tried to gain support from President Truman but received none.

By 1947, French troops occupied Hanoi and the fight for independence was on again. In early 1950, the French brought in the former Vietnamese emperor, Bao Dai, to serve as president, thus the United States could recognize Bao Dai (the French puppet government) and help the French without appearing to bolster colonialism. By 1954, 250,000 Frenchmen were fighting in Vietnam and the United States was financing most of the cost of the war. Finally in the spring of 1954, the Vietnamese defeated the French at Dien Bien Pu.

The warring parties, including the United States, France, China, Great Britain, Laos, Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh and the Vietminh) and the "State" of Vietnam (Bao Dai), attempted to settle the political problems following the end of French colonial rule. Even though the Democratic Republic of Vietnam controlled over three-fourths of Vietnam ground, they agreed to a temporary administrative separation of north and south Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel. This was never to be seen as a permanent division.

It was also agreed that elections would be held within two years to unify the country. Neither zone would receive help or enter into international alliances. The United States and the Bao Dai regime were the only ones not to accept the Geneva Agreements, but the United States did promise not to go against them. The United States then pressured the French to replace Bai Dai with Ngo Dinh Diem as prime minister of the Republic of Vietnam.

The Vietnamese, as a united country, were to decide for themselves in 1956 which government they preferred, but the United States knew Communist Ho Chi Minh would be elected by a landslide so they refused to allow the elections to be held. This was in violation of the Geneva Agreements that recognized Vietnam as one country and one people.

Our involvement grew while Diem's rule became a ruthless, mercenary dictatorship supposedly aimed at communists but actually brutalizing any opposition. At the same time, the American people were led to believe Diem was a dedicated, respected advocate of freedom and democracy.

By December 1960, the National Liberation Front (NLF), a resistance movement in the south, organized their armed forces (Vietcong). Within two years, the NLF controlled eighty percent of the countryside. By 1965, the United States was forced to admit defeat or widen the war in an effort for victory. President Johnson then initiated the bombing of North Vietnam and committed U.S. ground troops to South Vietnam. Victory was ever elusive."

[from p. 113-115]

Vietnam War Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam)
Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam)
Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam (PRG) / National Liberation Front (NLF) / Vietcong [3 names for the same entity]
[from p. 62]

Chronology:
"1961 - Newly elected President John F. Kennedy continues aid to South Vietnam.
1963 - 16,000 American military personnel in South Vietnam, up from Eisenhower's 900 advisors. Kennedy assassinated. Vice President Johnson becomes president.
1964 - Tonkin Gulf Resolution opens door to war. Johnson says, 'Our response...will be limited... We seek no wider war.' Johnson wins presidential election as peace candidate. By the end of 1964, United States has about 23,000 military personnel in South Vietnam, serving in a full but undeclared war, with fighting also in Laos and Cambodia. America casualties for the year total 1,278.
1965 - Communist Vietnamese troops attack American military camp killing 8 Americans and wounding 109. Johnson responds with Operation "Rolling Thunder" bombing raids on North Vietnam through 1968. U.S. military personnel in South Vietnam rises to 184,300 by 1965. Americans killed in action for the year number 1,369 with 5,300 wounded. Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (South Vietnam) killed in action for 1965 was 11,242." [from p. 1]
"1968 - The National Front for Liberation of South Vietnam...and North Vietnamese troops attack South Vietnam cities in the Tet Offensive. Between 1965 and 1968, 30,343 American troops killed in action; 14,314 in 1968 itself. The cost of the war is approximately $30 billion. President Johnson withdraws from the presidential race. Johnson calls a halt to the bombing and begins negotiations with North Vietnam. American troops in South Vietnam number 536,000. Rev Martin Luther King Jr., and Bobby Kennedy are both assassinated... Tet Offensive heightens popular doubt about war.... Richard Nixon wins election." [from p. 7, 21]
"1969 - Nixon authorizes bombing of North Vietnam and, secretly, Cambodia. Antiwar sentiment continues to mount with dramatic demonstrations in the fall when news of the 1968 My Lai massacre breaks.... Nixon begins to withdraw troops while turning war over to South Vietnamese. By year's end, U.S. military personnel in South Vietnam was reduced by 61,000.... Over 9,000 American troops killed in action in 1969. American troops killed in action 1965 through 1969 totals 39,757." [from p. 21, 30, 35]
"1970 - Nixon announces invasion of Cambodia.... Congress repeals Tonkin Gulf Resolution in June, an action Nixon disregards. U.S. troop strength in South Vietnam at end of 1970 is 334,600. Of them, 4,221 killed in action." [from p. 41, 50]
"1971 - Nixon continues to withdraw troops but resumes and intensifies the bombing campaign. Agent Orange defoliant used since 1962 discontinued. Nixon encourages a tactical South Vietnamese invasion of Laos.... [Paris Peace Talks begin.] In the fall, President Nixon orders U.S. soldiers to be assigned only to defensive roles. U.S. military personnel in South Vietnam at the end of the year [number] 156,800. Vietnam Veterans Against the War hold a large demonstration in Washington, D.C. that is part of one of the largest mass demonstrations in U.S. history. Publication of stolen portions of the Pentagon Papers, a defense department analysis of the war through 1967, exposes government lies about the war. United States drops three times the total tonnage of bombs during all of World War II on Vietnam during the thirty months of Nixon's presidency." [from p. 56, 60, 78, 82, 85]
"1972 - Nixon visits China and Russia as North Vietnam opens a major offensive in the south. The United States responds with massive bombings in the south as well as in the north, including Hanoi. The last U.S. combat unit is withdrawn in August, leaving 44,000 American military personnel in South Vietnam. Jane Fonda goes to Hanoi.... Nixon wins re-election. The Paris Peace Talks resume after a lengthy disruption. Nixon initiates the "Christmas Bombings" of North Vietnam until December 31 when negotiations are resumed." [from p. 93, 104]
"1973 - The Paris Peace Accords are signed. Military draft ends. U.S. troops are withdrawn, although U.S. military commitment to the South Vietnamese government extends through the continuing war until Hanoi's final, successful offensive in the spring of 1975." [from p. 105]

Statistics Re: Total Dead From War

This page by Anne M. Yoder, Archivist, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Nov. 2007

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Overview of Vietnam War, Swarthmore College Peace Collection

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excerpted from Patriotism, Peace and Vietnam: A Memoir by Peggy Hanna (Left to Write, Springfield, Ohio), 2003] Background " In 1858, the French occupied Vietnam. During France's entire rule, there were constant peasant uprisings but to no avail. In 1930 and 1931 thousands of Vietnamese were executed and imprisoned by the French Legion in an attempt to suppress all nationalist parties.

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America further commits to fight in Vietnam

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Check out mrdickey.net During the Johnson Presidency, troop levels soared to over 1/2 million fighting in Vietnam. How did this go from a few hundred in a support role, to hundreds of thousands on patrol, flying missions, and dropping bombs, napalm, and Agent Orange?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_WVZErHg_Q

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Check out mrdickey.net Basics of how the United States got involved and committed to fighting in Vietnam.

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Why Was the U S  Involved in the Vietnam War  U S

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Following Richard Nixon's announcement that U.S. troops would be sent into Cambodia, protests began on college campuses throughout the nation. At Kent State University in Ohio, four demonstrators were killed by shots fired by the Ohio National Guard.

Of all the lessons learned from Vietnam, one rings louder than all the rest - it is impossible to win a long, protracted war without popular support.

When the war in Vietnam began, many Americans believed that defending South Vietnam from communist aggression was in the national interest. Communism was threatening free governments across the globe. Any sign of non-intervention from the United States might encourage revolutions elsewhere.

As the war dragged on, more and more Americans grew weary of mounting casualties and escalating costs. The small antiwar movement grew into an unstoppable force, pressuring American leaders to reconsider its commitment.

Peace movement leaders opposed the war on moral and economic grounds. The North Vietnamese, they argued, were fighting a patriotic war to rid themselves of foreign aggressors. Innocent Vietnamese peasants were being killed in the crossfire. American planes wrought environmental damage by dropping their defoliating chemicals.

Ho Chi Minh was the most popular leader in all of Vietnam, and the United States was supporting an undemocratic, corrupt military regime. Young American soldiers were suffering and dying. Their economic arguments were less complex, but as critical of the war effort. Military spending simply took money away from Great Society social programs such as welfare, housing, and urban renewal.

The Draft

The draft was another major source of resentment among college students. The age of the average American soldier serving in Vietnam was 19, seven years younger than its World War II counterpart. Students observed that young Americans were legally old enough to fight and die, but were not permitted to vote or drink alcohol. Such criticism led to the 26th Amendment, which granted suffrage to 18-year-olds.

Slogans like "How Many More?," "I'm a Viet Nam Dropout" and "Ship the GI's Home Now!" graced the buttons, flags and banners of the anti-war movement.

Because draft deferments were granted to college students, the less affluent and less educated made up a disproportionate percentage of combat troops. Once drafted, Americans with higher levels of education were often given military office jobs. About 80 percent of American ground troops in Vietnam came from the lower classes. Latino and African American males were assigned to combat more regularly than drafted white Americans.

Antiwar demonstrations were few at first, with active participants numbering in the low thousands when Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Events in Southeast Asia and at home caused those numbers to grow as the years passed. As the Johnson Administration escalated the commitment, the peace movement grew. Television changed many minds. Millions of Americans watched body bags leave the Asian rice paddies every night in their living rooms.

Give Peace a Chance

The late 1960s became increasingly radical as the activists felt their demands were ignored. Peaceful demonstrations turned violent. When the police arrived to arrest protesters, the crowds often retaliated. Students occupied buildings across college campuses forcing many schools to cancel classes. Roads were blocked and ROTC buildings were burned. Doves clashed with police and the National Guard in August 1968, when antiwar demonstrators flocked to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to prevent the nomination of a prowar candidate.

Massive gatherings of anti-war demonstrators helped bring attention to the public resentment of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The confrontation seen above took place at the Pentagon in 1967.

Despite the growing antiwar movement, a silent majority of Americans still supported the Vietnam effort. Many admitted that involvement was a mistake, but military defeat was unthinkable.

When Richard Nixon was inaugurated in January 1969, the nation was bitterly divided over what course of action to follow next.

Rise and Fall of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement in the U.S.
The Vietnam War divided America along all age, race, and gender lines with it came to support for the war. In many places, college campuses and political conventions in particular, the attitude was one of 'us vs. them,' bringing sometimes peaceful, sometimes violent results. Read this text by a Montclair professor to learn how the anti-war movement was more than love beads and peace signs.

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Vietnam Veterans Against the War Homepage
Over 30,000 Vietnam Veterans were protesting the war while it was still going on. They knew better than anyone else the horrors of war, post-traumatic stress disorder, health problems caused by agent orange and other chemicals. Here is a page explaining their reasons, as well as a history of the war, publications, images, and links.

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Jane Fonda in North Vietnam
In 1972, Jane Fonda made an ill-advised broadcast from North Vietnam, slamming Richard Nixon and the American war effort. In doing so, she made many enemies among active soldiers, veterans, and the American political establishment. Read her broadcast from Hanoi, as well as reactions to it at this site.

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Yeah, come on all of you, big strong men / Uncle Sam needs your help again / He's got himself in a terrible jam / Way down yonder in Vietnam / So put down your books and pick up a gun, / We're gonna have a whole lotta fun. -Country Joe's "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag"
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During World War II, the Hollywood movie machine was turning out a war movie almost every week. Why did the studios wait until 1978 to make the first major Vietnam War movie, The Deer Hunter?
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Following Richard Nixon's announcement that U.S. troops would be sent into Cambodia, protests began on college campuses throughout the nation. At Kent State University in Ohio, four demonstrators were killed by shots fired by the Ohio National Guard.

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The struggle against the Japanese in World War II led the United States to focus its attention on Asia, including Indochina. US involvement in Vietnam increased during the 1950s and 1960s, following the communist revolution in China and the rise of Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh.

US and the Viet Minh

In December 1941, Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbour and Washington declared war on Japan. The Viet Minh was formed the same year to resist both the French and Japanese.

By 1944, agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), were operating in southern China and northern Vietnam. These agents formed a working alliance with Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh, who assisted with safeguarding and repatriating American pilots downed over Vietnamese territory. In return, the OSS supplied Ho's men with weapons and equipment.

It was an arrangement based on wartime expedience rather than political patronage. Nevertheless, Ho Chi Minh hoped that cooperating with the United States might lead to Washington's support for an independent post-war Vietnam.

When Ho attempted to initiate Vietnamese independence in late 1945, he drew heavily on the United States' own Declaration of Independence, citing its Enlightenment values of nationalism, popular sovereignty and self-determination. The Viet Minh leader hoped to demonstrate that his own political values were not far removed from those of the US.

The Domino Theory

After 1945, American involvement in Vietnam was driven and shaped by the Cold War. American foreign policy was largely shaped by the Truman Doctrine. Outlined in 1947, the Truman Doctrine argued that communism must be contained and governments susceptible to communist infiltration and takeover should be assisted. If this did not occur, communism would expand its global reach, taking root in one nation before jumping to its neighbours (the Domino Theory).

This was particularly relevant in Asia, where national governments were weaker and borders were poorly controlled. Asian nations, is was believed, had a lower capacity for resisting communist infiltration and invasion. Having spread from China to North Korea, American planners believed that communism would continue its movement further south to nations like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Malaya and Indonesia.

If these countries fell then communists would rule more than one-quarter of the globe - from East Germany to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. These fears were espoused by US vice president Richard Nixon, speaking in December 1953:

"Let us turn now to another area of the world: Indochina. And many of you ask this question: Why is the United States spending hundreds of millions of dollars supporting the forces of the French Union in the fight against communism in Indochina? If Indochina falls, Thailand is put in an almost impossible position. The same is true of Malaya, with its rubber and tin. The same is true of Indonesia. If this whole part of south-east Asia goes under communist domination or communist influence, Japan, who trade and must trade with this area in order to exist, must inevitably be oriented towards the communist regime. That indicates to you and to all of us why it is vitally important that Indochina not go behind the Iron Curtain."

Washington backs the French

From 1947 the United States, determined to halt the growth of communism in Asia, backed the return of the French in Vietnam. This was not universally popular with Americans, many of whom despised colonialism and believed that Asian nations should be free to govern themselves.

In Washington, however, the revival of French colonialism in Indochina was seen a lesser evil than communist-ruled Vietnam. France, after all, was a democratic capitalist state and an important Cold War ally.

The Viet Minh, on the other hand, could not be trusted. The movement was riddled with communists and both its motives and political loyalties were unclear. The US considered Ho Chi Minh to be unreliable and possibly deceitful. He mouthed the slogans of a nationalist but Washington considered him a communist. There was some evidence to support this view, such as Ho's work within the Soviet Union, the Comintern and the Chinese Communist Party.

US military aid increases

In late 1945, Washington's formal position on Vietnam was vague but by early 1947, the US was tacitly supporting France. Later that year, US president Harry Truman authorised a moderate amount of funding ($160 million) to assist the French war effort. American administrators also turned a blind eye when Paris diverted some Marshall Plan funds to supply the war in Indochina.

By 1951, US military aid to the French had tripled to $450 million. By 1953, it was up to $785 million. French forces in Vietnam were using ships and aircraft on loan from the US. CIA agents were conducting covert operations in Vietnam in support of the French, like carrying out 700 supply drops to CEFEO troops trapped at Dien Bien Phu (1954).

By the time French forces surrendered to the Viet Minh in mid-1954, Washington had invested almost $3 billion in 'saving' Indochina from the spectre of communism.

The Geneva Accords

The French surrender at Dien Bien Phu and France's withdrawal from Vietnam opened the way for greater direct US involvement. American delegates attended the Geneva conference of April-July 1954 but refused to sign the final agreement.

The Geneva Accords (1954) arranged for a two-year division of Vietnam until elections and reunification in 1956. The Americans preferred this temporary division become permanent. Washington wanted a nationalist, democratic state in the south to provide a buffer against communists further north.

Washington searched for an indigenous Vietnamese leader with pro-Western, anti-communist values to take charge in South Vietnam. They found a candidate in Ngo Dinh Diem, a minor political figure who had been living in North America since 1951.

American politicians and policymakers took a shine to Diem; he seemed exactly the person needed to lead South Vietnam and transform it into a bulwark against communism. In 1954, the US parachuted Diem into power, persuading Vietnamese emperor Bao Dai to appoint him prime minister. Diem was provided with massive American support: recognition, intelligence, money, trade deals, military equipment and training.

Failed nation-building

America's mission in Vietnam now hinged on two things: Ngo Dinh Diem becoming a credible and effective leader, and North Vietnam accepting the north-south division of Vietnam.

By the end of the 1950s, it was clear that neither had occurred. The US government's state-building program in South Vietnam had not succeeded. South Vietnam was largely a failed state, ruled by brutal nepotists and propped up by American aid. The South Vietnamese military had grown and developed considerably but was still incapable of defending the new nation.

Meanwhile, in Hanoi, the Lao Dong government was plotting to achieve reunification by stealth. In the late 1950s, communist insurgents unleashed a wave of terror attacks in South Vietnam, attacking government forces, facilities and figures. It was clear that a war between North and South Vietnam was imminent.

American policy in the 1950s and early 1960s attempted to shape and manage the situation in Vietnam without any direct US military involvement - but the worsening situation there, coupled with the arrival of a new president, brought a significant change in tactics.

A historian's view:
"The US government became involved in Vietnam slowly. Each step of the way, for more than 20 years, policy-makers debated options, considered alternatives, and ultimately chose deeper involvement. By mid-1965, a series of incremental steps led to US ground troops facing combat in Vietnam. By 1968 the war had become a quagmire with no clear road to victory. Only in 1973, after laying waste to Vietnam and suffering massive casualties, would the United States ingloriously pull out the last of its troops. America's longest war tore the nation apart."
David R. Farber

1. The United States showed little interest in Vietnam until World War II when American agents worked with the Viet Minh against Japanese occupiers. Ho Chi Minh hoped this collaboration would convince the US to back Vietnamese independence.

2. After the war, Washington became concerned that Vietnam, among other Asian nations, was susceptible to communist infiltration and takeover. This view was informed by the Cold War, the Truman Doctrine and the Domino Theory.

3. Despite some misgivings about backing a colonial power, the US began to support the French in Vietnam. Washington aided the French during their war with the Viet Minh, investing almost $3 billion in the years prior to 1954.

4. The French withdrawal led to direct US involvement in Vietnam. The US did not sign the Geneva Accords and preferred to support the formation of a democratic South Vietnam, to serve as a buffer against communists in the North.

5. In 1954, the US parachuted Ngo Dinh Diem into the leadership of South Vietnam. American attempts to create a viable nation-state failed, and by the early 1960s, South Vietnam was at risk of infiltration and invasion by communists.

Citation information
Title: "US involvement in Vietnam"
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Jim Southey, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: https://alphahistory.com/vietnamwar/us-involvement-in-vietnam/
Date published: June 19, 2019
Date accessed: December 31, 2020
Copyright: The content on this page may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

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The struggle against the Japanese in World War II led the United States to focus its attention on Asia, including Indochina. US involvement in Vietnam increased during the 1950s and 1960s, following the communist revolution in China and the rise of Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh.

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The Vietnam War began in the decade before, butthe conflict, and especially U.S. involvement, escalated in the 1960s. For the first time, Americans witnessed the horrors of war, played out on television screens in their living rooms.

This week's episode of "The Sixties" explores the war and its impact on American culture, then and now. Here are five facts from the episode that may surprise those too young to remember the Vietnam War:

1. U.S. involvement in Vietnam began with Eisenhower.

In the late 1950s, during the Eisenhower administration, Vietnam had split into North Vietnam, which was communist, and South Vietnam. Cold War anxieties dictated that if the North Vietnamese communists prevailed, the rest of Southeast Asia would fall like dominoes.

When he took office in 1961, President John F. Kennedy vowed not to allow South Vietnam fall to communism.

2. The United States and South Vietnam had Catholic presidents who were shot to death in November 1963.

By the early 1960s,South Vietnam's conventionally trained army was no match for the Vietcong's guerrilla-style tactics.In addition, South Vietnam's Buddhist majority revolted against their president, Ngo Dinh Diem. They saw the Catholic ruler as a tyrant.

The Western-educated Diem, however, wielded absolute power and rose to dictator level by the summer of 1963. The CIA discussed toppling the regime.

With U.S. knowledge, Diem was killed by South Vietnamese generals on November 2, 1963. Kennedy immediately regretted Diem's death and U.S. support for the coup.

Less than three weeks later, on November 22, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson took the oath of office aboard Air Force One later that day. Soon after, Johnson told a grieving nation, "John Kennedy's death commands what his life conveyed, that America must move forward."

3. TV forever changed the way Americans viewed war

As casualties rose, the country increasingly turned against the war. The official line was that Americans were winning in Vietnam, but the evening news told a different story.

"What Vietnam did to America via television was introduce us to a new kind of America," said author Lawrence Wright. "One that was not pure, one that committed the same kinds of atrocities that are always committed in war, but we had never allowed ourselves to see them."

Reporter Morley Safer recalled the shock of witnessing Marines burn down 150 houses on the outskirts of the village of Cam Ne. An officer told the newsman that he had been ordered to level the area. Three women were wounded in the attack, one baby was killed, and four people were taken prisoner.

Safer asked a soldier if he had regrets about leaving people homeless, and the soldier replied, "You can't expect to do your job and feel pity for these people."

Another soldier told Safer, "I think it's sad in a way, but I don't think there's any other way you can get around it in this kind of a war."

Americans back home were stunned when the CBS report about the Cam Ne village hit the news.

After the broadcast, Johnson reportedly called then-CBS president, Frank Stanton, and said, "Frank, this is your President, your boys just s--t on the flag of the United States."

4. Some Americans resorted to self-mutilation to avoid the draft.

When the choices were Vietnam, jail or draft-dodging by going to Canada, some young men panicked and devised ways to fail the military's physical exam, including mutilating themselves, starving or pretending to be gay.

The compulsory draft, which had been initiated during World War II, meant registration for young men was mandatory at 18.

Working-class men were more likely to get drafted over those in the middle class because college students could get deferments.

In January 1965, 5,400 young men were called for the draft. By December of that year, more than 45,000 young men were called. When the monthly draft call rose from 17,000 to 35,000 per month, young people across the nation began engaging in civil disobedience.

On November 27, 1965, the March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam took place, attracting tens of thousands of protesters.

5. U.S. troops endured 120-degree temperatures while sitting in swamps.

Facing temperatures sometimes of up to 120 degrees F inthe wet jungle terrain, soldiers regularly became afflicted with infections such as ringworm.

Author and Vietnam veteran Karl Marlantes recalled the difficulty of dealing with losing his friends on the battlefield.

"You'd throw them on a chopper and that'd be the last you'd see of them," he said, "and so you were constantly shoving it down because if you didn't you couldn't function."

Bonus: LBJ feared being remembered for his handling of Vietnam

Johnson, who made great strides with civil rights legislation at home, did not want to be remembered as the American president who lost Southeast Asia.

In a taped 1965 conversation, Sen. Richard Russell told Johnson that he "couldn't have inherited a worse mess."

"Well, if they say I inherited it, I'd be lucky," Johnson said, "but they'll all say I created it. Dick, the trouble is, the great trouble I'm under, a man can fight if he can see daylight down the road somewhere, but there ain't no daylight in Vietnam. There's not a bit."

When CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, who was called the most trusted man in America, traveled to Vietnam in 1968 and announced it was time for America to pull out, Johnson reportedly old an aide, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."

Journalist Marvin Kalb noted that Johnson "realized he was no longer in charge of the war. The war was in charge of him."

In 1968, Johnson announced that he would not be running for re-election.

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the vietnam war: 5 things you might not know - cnn.com

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The Vietnam War: 5 things you might not know

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Here are five facts about the Vietnam War that may surprise those too young to remember the conflict.

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In the decades after the departure of the last U.S. combat troops from Vietnam in March 1973 and the fall of Saigon to communist North Vietnamese forces in April 1975, Americans have been unable to agree on how to characterize the long, costly and ultimately unsuccessful U.S. military involvement in Indochina. To some, the Vietnam War was a crime - an attempt by the United States to suppress a heroic Vietnamese national liberation movement that had driven French colonialism out of its country. To others, the Vietnam War was a forfeit, a just war needlessly lost by timid policymakers and a biased media. For many who study foreign affairs, the Vietnam War was a tragic mistake brought about by U.S. leaders who exaggerated the influence of communism and underestimated the power of nationalism.

Another interpretation, a fourth one, has recently emerged, now that the Vietnam War is history and can be studied dispassionately by scholars with greater, though not unlimited, access to records on all sides.

The emerging scholarly synthesis interprets the war in the global context of the Cold War that lasted from the aftermath of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In this view, Vietnam was neither a crime, a forfeit nor a tragic mistake. It was a proxy conflict in the Cold War.

The Cold War was the third world war of the 20th century - itself part of what some have called the Long War or the Seventy-Five Years' War of 1914-1989. Unlike the first two world wars, the Cold War began and ended without direct military conflict between the opposing sides, thanks to the deterrent provided by conventional forces as well as nuclear weapons. Instead, it was fought indirectly through economic embargoes, arms races, propaganda and proxy wars in peripheral nations like Vietnam.

The greatest prizes in the Cold War were the industrial economies of the advanced European and East Asian nations, most of all Germany and Japan. With the industrial might of demilitarized Japan and the prosperous western half of a divided Germany, the United States could hope to carry out its patient policy of containment of a communist bloc that was highly militarized but economically outmatched, until the Soviets sued for peace or underwent internal reform. The Soviet Union could prevail in the Cold War only if it divided the United States from its industrialized allies - not by sponsoring communist takeovers within their borders but by intimidating them into appeasement after convincing them that the United States lacked the resolve or the ability to defend its interests.

For this reason, most crises of the Cold War, from the Berlin Airlift and the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Korean and Vietnam wars, occurred when the United States responded to aggressive probing by communist bloc nations with dramatic displays of American resolve. The majority of these tests of American credibility took place in four countries divided between communist and non-communist regimes after World War II: Germany, China, Korea and Vietnam.

In an internal Johnson administration memo of March 1965, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton emphasized credibility as the most important of several U.S. objectives in Vietnam:
In a speech the following month, President Johnson stressed America's reputation as a guarantor: "Around the globe, from Berlin to Thailand, are people whose well-being rests, in part, on the belief that they can count on us if they are attacked. To leave Vietnam to its fate would shake the confidence of all these people in the value of America's commitment, the value of America's word."

Full-scale war was avoided despite repeated crises involving divided Berlin and Taiwan, where the remnant of China's Nationalist government took refuge after the 1949 victory of Mao Zedong's communists in China. The Cold War soon turned hot in divided Korea and Vietnam.

What Americans call the Vietnam War was the second of three wars in Indochina during the Cold War, in which the United States, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China intervened in shifting patterns of enmity and alliance. None of these would have occurred in the form that they did if Mao's communists had not come to power in China in 1949. Although the regimes in Moscow and Beijing were enemies of one another by the end of the Cold War, in the conflict's early years the triumph of the Chinese communists created a powerful Sino-Soviet bloc that opposed the United States and its allies around China's periphery: Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam. Direct Chinese military intervention in the Korean War ensured a bloody stalemate rather than reunification of the peninsula under a non-communist regime. At the same time, indirect Chinese and Soviet support in the First Indochina War (1946-1954) helped Ho Chi Minh's communists drive the French from their former colony.

Only a few years after the Geneva Accords in 1954 established the 17th parallel as the boundary between Vietnam's communist north and non-communist south, the Hanoi regime resumed war by means of infiltration and southern insurgents. After the conquest of the south in 1975, Communist Party historian Nguyen Khac Vien admitted, "The Provisional Revolutionary Government was always simply a group emanating from the DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam). If we had pretended otherwise for such a long period, it was only because during the war we were not obliged to unveil our cards."

The assassination in 1963 of South Vietnam's dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem, created anarchy that led to rising U.S. involvement - starting with advisers under President Kennedy, then turning to bombing and ultimately large-scale ground forces under Johnson. In 1964, the Johnson administration won congressional passage of the Southeast Asia Resolution after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, using as a pretext for U.S. military intervention the confrontation in which North Vietnam fired on the USS Maddox. The number of American forces peaked in 1968, when more than half a million U.S. troops were waging war in South Vietnam, as well as bombing North Vietnam and taking part in incursions into Laos and Cambodia. At great cost in American and Vietnamese lives, the attrition strategy of Gen. William Westmoreland succeeded in preventing the Saigon regime from being overthrown by insurgents. The Tet Offensive of January 1968, perceived in the United States as a setback for American war aims, was in fact a devastating military setback for the north. Thereafter, North Vietnam's only hope was to conquer South Vietnam by means of conventional military campaigns, which the United States successfully thwarted.

In the United States, public opinion grew opposed to the costs in blood and treasure of the controversial war. President Richard Nixon sought to achieve "peace with honor" by combining a policy of "Vietnamization," or South Vietnamese self-reliance, with a policy of détente with the Soviet Union and China, in the hope that the communist powers would pressure the north into ending the war. His strategy failed. Following the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, U.S. combat forces were removed, and the south, deprived by Congress of military aid, was invaded by the north. In 1975, upon uniting Vietnam under their rule in 1975, the victorious heirs of Ho Chi Minh imposed Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism on the south and helped their allies win power in Laos. The Third Indochina War soon followed. Mao's heirs in China viewed communist Vietnam as a Soviet satellite on their border, and in early 1979 China invaded Vietnam in a brief war, following the 1978 Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia, during which Vietnamese communists ousted the Chinese-backed regime of the murderous Pol Pot.

Of the three great powers that intervened in Indochina after the ouster of France in the 1950s, the Soviet Union gained the most. By backing Hanoi, Moscow simultaneously obtained an ally on China's border and reasserted its leadership of international Marxism-Leninism. The former U.S. base at Cam Ranh Bay became the largest Soviet military installation outside Eastern Europe. In "The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War" (1996), Russian historian Ilya Gaiduk wrote, "Inspired by its gains and by the decline of U.S. prestige resulting from Vietnam and domestic upheaval, the Soviet leadership adopted a more aggressive and rigid foreign policy, particularly in the Third World."

But in December 1979, only months after China was humiliated in its brief war with Moscow's Vietnamese ally, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. That decade-long conflict proved to be Moscow's Vietnam.

Just as the Soviets and Chinese had armed and equipped Vietnamese opponents of U.S. forces in Vietnam, the United States and China - now allies against Moscow - armed and equipped the insurgents who fought the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan. The Soviet war in Afghanistan was the third major proxy war in the Cold War.

In 1989, the year in which the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War effectively ended, the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, as the United States had withdrawn its troops from Indochina a decade and a half earlier.

The United States lost the proxy war in Indochina but prevailed on a global level in the Cold War. The USSR not only lost the Cold War but ceased to exist in 1991. The discredited secular creed of Marxism-Leninism has survived in only a few dictatorships, including China, North Korea and Vietnam.

As the narrative of the 20th century is interpreted, historians are regarding the Vietnam War in a global context that spans decades and concludes with the fall of the Soviet Union. No matter their differences of perspective, they will define the Vietnam War as the Cold War in Indochina.

The interventions of the United States, the Soviet Union and China turned civil wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia into proxy wars. This provides an answer to those who claim that the United States, by its intervention, mistakenly turned a pure civil war in Vietnam into part of the Cold War. The United States shared its belief that Indochina was a major theater in the global Cold War with the Soviet Union and China. In "Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam," Lien-Hang T. Nguyen writes, "While Moscow hoped to see Soviet technology defeat American arms in Vietnam, Beijing wanted to showcase the power of Mao's military strategy on the Vietnamese battlefield."

There is no evidence that Ho Chi Minh or his successors ever envisioned the kind of neutrality that Yugoslavia's communist dictator Josip Broz Tito pursued during the Cold War. On the contrary, the North Vietnamese communists identified themselves with the main communist bloc of nations, sought to maintain the support of the Soviets and the Chinese alike, and by the end of the Cold War had turned their country into the Soviet Union's major Asian ally.

Was South Vietnam too marginal an interest to justify a U.S. war in the 1960s and 1970s? To this day, the United States garrisons South Korea and provides arms to Taiwan. If you consider that in today's world, the United States could go to war if China attacks Taiwan and almost certainly would go to war if North Korea attacks South Korea, the use of U.S. military force to defend South Vietnam against North Vietnam at the height of the Cold War seems less puzzling. Indeed, a U.S. decision in the 1960s not to try to avert a communist takeover of South Vietnam would need explanation.

Viewing the Indochina wars as Cold War proxy wars, along with the conflicts of that era in Korea and Afghanistan, answers one set of critics: the realists. It also provides an answer to other critics who claim that the United States should have been more aggressive toward North Vietnam. In 1978, Adm. William Sharp wrote, "Why were we not permitted to win? In my view, it was partly because political and diplomatic circles in Washington were disproportionately concerned with the possibility of Chinese and Soviet intervention."

The late Col. Harry Summers Jr. argued that the United States allowed itself "to be bluffed by China throughout most of the war."

Undermining this critique is the fact that China and the Soviet Union played a much greater role in the Vietnam War than Americans realized at the time. Fifty percent of all Soviet foreign aid went to North Vietnam between 1965 and 1968. Soviet anti-aircraft teams in North Vietnam brought down dozens of U.S. planes. According to former Soviet colonel Alexei Vinogradov, "The Americans knew only too well that Vietnamese planes of Soviet design were often flown by Soviet pilots."

China's indirect role in Vietnam was even more massive and critical. It is now known that in a secret meeting between Ho Chi Minh and Mao in the summer of 1965, China agreed to enter the war directly if the United States invaded North Vietnam. As it was, China's indirect involvement in Vietnam was its greatest military effort after the Korean War. According to Beijing, between 1965 and 1973, there were 320,000 Chinese troops assigned to North Vietnam, with a maximum of 170,000 - roughly a third of the maximum number of U.S. forces - in the south at their peak. On Sept. 23, 1968, Mao asked North Vietnamese premier Pham Van Dong, "Why have the Americans not made a fuss about the fact that more than 100,000 Chinese troops help you building railways, roads and airports although they know about it?"

Historian Chen Jian concludes that "without the support, the history, even the outcome of the Vietnam War, might have been different."

Nobody can ever prove that the People's Liberation Army would have fought U.S. troops directly if the United States had invaded North Vietnam. But the depth of China's involvement in the war suggests that U.S. policymakers were being prudent, not pusillanimous, when they worried that China would send troops to fight directly in Vietnam as it had done in Korea. Reviewing the evidence, historian Qiang Zhai concludes, "If the actions recommended by (Col. Harry) Summers had been taken by Washington in Vietnam, there would have been a real danger of a Sino-American war with dire consequences for the world. In retrospect, it appears that Johnson had drawn the correct lesson from the Korean War and had been prudent in his approach to the Vietnam conflict."

From today's perspective, the Vietnam War looks less like a senseless blunder on the part of the United States than like a replay of the Korean War in a different region with a different outcome. Elsewhere in Asia, including the Philippines, Malaya and Indonesia, communist insurgencies were defeated by local governments, sometimes with the help of British or French advisers and combat troops. It may be that those insurgencies failed, while communist regimes survived in part of Korea and unified Vietnam, because of one factor: the absence of a land border with post-1949 communist China, which provided material support, manpower and deterrence of a U.S. escalation that might risk wider war with China.

Ever since the fall of Saigon, Americans have sought to draw lessons from Vietnam, but some have been short-lived. In the late 20th century, U.S. policymakers and military strategists, hoping to put the memory of Vietnam behind them, focused on swift, high-tech warfare against technologically advanced adversaries - only to painfully relearn forgotten lessons in Iraq and Afghanistan about counterinsurgency and nation-building.

In the aftermath of Vietnam, the United States sought to put Asian conflicts behind it. But the recently announced "pivot" away from the Middle East toward Asia is widely viewed as an American strategy of containing China, with which the United States fought bloody proxy wars in Vietnam and Korea in living memory. In a Sino-American conflict in the 21st century, Vietnam might even be an American ally.

As a historical event, the Vietnam War is an unchanging part of the past. As a symbol, it will continue to evolve, reflecting the values and priorities of later generations. In discussing and debating the nation's most controversial war, Americans would do well to remember the words of the poet T.S. Eliot: "There is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause."

Michael Lind is the author of "Vietnam: The Necessary War."

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In the decades after the departure of the last U.S. combat troops from Vietnam in March 1973 and the fall of Saigon to communist North Vietnamese forces in April 1975, Americans have been unable to agree on how to characterize the long, costly and ultimately unsuccessful U.S. military involvement in Indochina.

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The major initiative in the Lyndon Johnson presidency was the Vietnam War. By 1968, the United States had 548,000 troops in Vietnam and had already lost 30,000 Americans there. Johnson's approval ratings had dropped from 70 percent in mid-1965 to below 40 percent by 1967, and with it, his mastery of Congress. "I can't get out, I can't finish it with what I have got. So what the hell do I do?" he lamented to Lady Bird. Johnson never did figure out the answer to that question.

The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was a conflict between North and South Vietnam, but it had global ramifications. The North was led by a Communist and nationalist regime that had fought against the Japanese in World War II and against French colonial rule in the late 1940s. In 1954, it won control of North Vietnam when the French agreed to a partition in the Geneva Accords. The South was led by a non-Communist regime; after 1956, it was headed by Ngo Dinh Diem. A Catholic, Diem was unable to consolidate his rule with a predominantly Buddhist population. He governed with the support of a military supplied and trained by the United States and with substantial U.S. economic assistance. By the late 1950s, a Communist guerrilla force in the South, the Viet Cong, was fighting to overthrow the Diem regime. By the early 1960s, it was receiving substantial military and logistical assistance from the Communists in the North.

Thus the Vietnam conflict could be seen through three lenses: (1) it was a civil war between pro- and anti-Diem groups in the South; (2) it was a war of reunification waged by the North against the South; and (3) it was viewed by the United States as part of the conspiracy by the Sino-Soviet bloc to conquer the Third World and install Communist regimes. Throughout the conflict, American Presidents were unwilling to see South Vietnam conquered by Communist forces, and thus each of them made the same commitment to forestall a Communist victory. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower had commenced American involvement there by sending military advisers. Kennedy had begun assigning Special Forces military personnel to Vietnam, ostensibly in an advisory capacity as well, and there were about 20,000 there when he was assassinated in 1963.

For Johnson, the decision to continue the Vietnam commitment followed the path of his predecessors. He was committed to maintaining an independent South Vietnam and to achieving success in Southeast Asia. As a senator, he had embraced "containment theory," which predicted that if Vietnam fell to Communists, other Southeast Asian nations would do the same. Johnson was deeply sensitive about the judgment of history, and he did not want to be remembered as a President who lost Southeast Asia to Communism.

When Johnson took office, he affirmed the Kennedy administration's commitments. He quickly approved NSAM 273, a national security agency memorandum, on November 26, 1963, which directed the U.S. government "to assist the people and Government of South Vietnam to win their contest against the externally directed and supported Communist conspiracy." When counterinsurgency failed, Johnson began to escalate U.S. commitments. Johnson approved OPLAN 34A-64 on January 16, 1964, calling for stepped up infiltration and covert operations against the North to be transferred from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the military. After operation Hop Tac failed to clear Communist guerillas from areas near Saigon, Johnson approved NSAM 288 in late March 1964, calling for more U.S. involvement in South Vietnamese affairs and a greater use of U.S. force, including planning for air strikes against North Vietnam. In August 1964, after reports that U.S. naval vessels had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin, Johnson asked Congress for a resolution of support. By a vote of 98 to 2 in the Senate and a unanimous vote in the House, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing the President to take all measures necessary to protect the armed forces. Johnson would later use this as a "functional equivalent" to a declaration of war, though his critics would respond that he should have gone to Congress for a formal declaration.

During the summer and fall of 1964, Johnson campaigned on a peace platform and had no intention of escalating the war if it were not absolutely necessary. "Some others are eager to enlarge the conflict," Johnson warned his audiences. "They call upon the U.S. to supply American boys to do the job that Asian boys should do." But the President was full of reassurances: "We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves," Johnson explained to his audiences. "We don't want to get . . . tied down to a land war in Asia." Even so, Johnson was planning for just that contingency if the situation deteriorated-which it did.

On February 13, 1965, Johnson authorized Rolling Thunder, the sustained bombing of North Vietnam. On March 8, 1965, two Marine battalions, 3,500 troops, went ashore near Da Nang to protect the airfields, with orders to shoot only if shot at-this was the first time U.S. combat forces had been sent to mainland Asia since the Korean War. On April 3, Johnson authorized two additional Marine battalions, one Marine air squadron, and an increase in logistical support units of 20,000 men. He also authorized troops to go on active "search and destroy" missions. By mid-April, Marines had moved to full-scale offensive operations. By November 1965, there were 175,000 troops and by 1966, an additional 100,000. The number would surge to 535,000 by the end of Johnson's presidency.

Johnson's decisions were based on complicated political and military considerations. LBJ steered a middle course: The "hawks" in Congress and in the military wanted him to engage in massive bombing of enemy cities, threaten to use nuclear weapons, and even threaten to invade North Vietnam. This might have led to Chinese entry into the war, as had happened in the Korean War, or even Soviet engagement. "Doves" in Congress, the State Department, and even Vice President Hubert Humphrey wanted Johnson to negotiate with Hanoi for a "neutral" South Vietnam and eventual reunification with the North. The President's "middle way" involved a commitment of U.S. ground forces, designed to convince the regime in Hanoi that it could not win, and some punishing bombing campaigns, after which serious U.S. negotiations might ensue. One of Johnson's major problems was that Hanoi was willing to accept the costs of continuing the war indefinitely and of absorbing the punishing bombing. It would do so until the United States decided to give up its commitment to aid the South. McNamara and his "war game" analysts in the Department of Defense failed to account adequately for this eventuality.

Battles at Home

Fissures began to split American society. As so-called "hawk" and "dove" contingents took to constant, bitter debate over the war, antiwar activists began to demonstrate publicly against their country's involvement in the conflict. Another Democrat, Eugene McCarthy, did something all but unheard of: he announced his intentions to try to wrest the nomination from an incumbent wartime President in the 1968 election.

Six weeks into 1968 came the hammer blow to the Johnson presidency: The North Vietnamese, shrewdly discerning that America was losing heart for the endless bloodletting, staged dozens of near-suicidal attacks all over the South. Known as the Tet Offensive, it held some similarities to the unsuccessful strategy attempted by the Japanese two decades earlier with their kamikaze attacks: inflict great casualties regardless of cost to your own forces, sap enemy morale, and force the dispirited foe to adopt your terms. Only this time, the strategy worked. Despite fearsome losses by the North Vietnamese-nearly 100,000-American opposition to the war surged. Although the North Vietnamese Army was never able to defeat U.S. forces on the battlefields of Vietnam, Hanoi's political strategy defeated America's will to continue to escalate the war. Television screens brought images of endless and seemingly pointless battles to living rooms across the nation. Although Americans still supported the goal of a non-Communist Vietnam, public confidence in the President and Johnson's popularity continued their sharp declines.

Just weeks from the early presidential primaries, Johnson was utterly vilified by those opposing our involvement in Vietnam. LBJ complained to his cabinet that the only place he could give a campaign speech now was on an aircraft carrier. A month after the Tet Offensive came New Hampshire, the site of the first presidential primary: McCarthy ran astoundingly well against the beleaguered President, winning 41 percent of the vote, and John F. Kennedy's brother Robert entered the race as well. A few weeks later, Johnson stunned the nation by announcing that he would not seek another term as President. A terrible spring and summer ensued. The murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and a bloody confrontation between police and protesters at the Democratic Convention in Chicago sent shock waves through the nation. Just weeks before the elections, Johnson announced a halt in the bombings of North Vietnam in a desperate attempt to portray his administration as peacemakers. In the fall, Richard Nixon won the presidency, defeating the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, by claiming he had a "secret plan" to end the conflict. Meanwhile, the war dragged on.

The Vietnam War cut short the promise of the Great Society. Democrats took large losses in the midterm elections of 1966, though they retained majorities in the House and Senate. By late 1966, Johnson could no longer get most of his domestic measures through Congress.

Superpower Diplomacy

Although Johnson's relationship with the Soviets was colored by the Vietnam War, the President nonetheless made some progress on arms control. In January 1967, Johnson signed the Outer Space Treaty with Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin, which banned nuclear weapons in earth orbit, on the moon or other planets, or in deep space. In 1968, the U.S. became a party to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which prohibits the transfer of nuclear weapons to other nations and the assistance to enable other nations to join the "nuclear club."Johnson was able to defuse one potential nuclear crisis: In 1967, after the Arab-Israeli War, the President met with Soviet Premier Kosygin to sort out conflicting U.S. and Russian interests in the Middle East. The two sides agreed to defuse tensions in the area.

Relations in Latin America

Johnson faced a series of minor crises in Latin America, all of which he handled to maximize U.S. influence in the region. When Fidel Castro, the Cuban Communist dictator, demanded the return of Guantanamo Naval Base and shut off the water to the installation, Johnson had the Navy create its own water supply. The Cubans backed down. And when Panamanians rioted against U.S. control of the Panama Canal Zone, Johnson dealt firmly with the violence, but after it ended, he agreed to negotiations that eventually culminated in the return of the Canal Zone to Panama in 1999.

The blemish on Johnson's record in the region occurred in the Dominican Republic. Johnson backed an unpopular right-wing politician, Reid Cabral, who had taken power over the popularly elected Juan Bosch in 1962. A civil insurrection designed to restore Bosch was quelled when Johnson sent in 20,000 Marines. Later, troops from the Organization of American States replaced the Marines. But Johnson had not simply sent in forces to protect American lives and property, he had done so to quell what he described as "a band of communist conspirators." Johnson had acted to prevent "another Cuba" on the U.S. doorstep. Bosch, although a left-winger, was neither a Communist nor a Castro follower, and the move was highly unpopular in Latin America because of the history of U.S. intervention in the region.

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Lyndon B. Johnson: Foreign Affairs | Miller Center

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The major initiative in the Lyndon Johnson presidency was the Vietnam War. By 1968, the United States had 548,000 troops in Vietnam and had already lost 30,000 Americans there. Johnson's approval ratings had dropped from 70 percent in mid-1965 to below 40 percent by 1967, and with it, his mastery of Congress.

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Look at the Vietnam War reasons

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In the debate that preceded the 2003 Iraq War, we became enamored of the distinction between "wars of choice" and "wars of necessity." Opponents of the Iraq War decried it as a "choice," while supporters insisted on its "necessity." Unfortunately, like many aspects of that debate, that framing was entirely wrong; America has faced vanishingly few wars of "necessity," but some of our wars of "choice" have nevertheless been good choices. Some, sadly, have not.

As we would expect of any country, not all of America's wars have been wisely fought, and not all of them were wise to fight. Here are five wars that the United States could have, and should have, stayed out of.
War of 1812:
The American Revolutionary War took place against a background of Anglo-French conflict and competition. The French Revolution of 1789 only exacerbated this conflict, threatening to draw the weak, distant American republic into a colossal European War. Although the Adams administration become tangentially embroiled with the French in the late 1790s, the United States largely succeeded in staying out of the war, at least until 1812.

U.S. grievances in the War of 1812 were legitimate, if not overwhelming; British ships were impressing U.S. sailors, and Great Britain was stirring up trouble among Native Americans on the frontier. The war also had an opportunistic element, however, as many American policymakers saw Canada (or what would become Canada) as the unfinished business of the Revolutionary War.

It turned out that the United States was ill-prepared for the conflict. The invasions of Canada failed; U.S. Navy frigates scored some notable successes, but in general the Royal Navy did what it wanted, when it wanted; the British burned the American capital, with only heroic resistance preventing the incineration of Baltimore. The Republic nearly collapsed from internal dissension before Washington and London made peace.
The Black Hills War:
For the first 120 years of its existence, the United States government waged nearly continuous warfare against the Native American tribes that lived on the Western frontier, (and sometimes within U.S. jurisdiction). In some cases these wars came as a result of Indian attacks against settlements; in others, the wars were purely acquisitive efforts to gain territory and resources.

One of the most poorly conceived of these wars began in 1876. The Black Hills War came about because of white settler encroachment on lands allocated, by treaty, to the Cheyenne and Lakota Sioux. The U.S. government was unable (and largely unwilling) to restrict white migration into the Black Hills, and after unproductive negotiation simply decided to seize some of the most valuable area.

The war resulted in one of the most serious U.S. military defeats of the Indian Wars, the annihilation of the Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn. Eventually, however, a combination of military and diplomatic efforts forced most of the Cheyenne and Sioux to surrender, apart from a portion that fled to Canada. Sporadic fighting would continue for another fifteen years or so. In the end, the U.S. government "pacified" the Cheyenne and Sioux (who were in the process of becoming more agrarian in any case), and assumed full control over the eastern half of what would become South Dakota. The death and destruction caused by the war provided an appropriate coda for U.S. mistreatment of Native American tribes across the 19th century.
The Great War:
When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, American policymakers correctly saw the conflict as primarily a European affair. Despite the fact that the United States had the world's largest economy, official Washington had not yet come to the conclusion that it bore responsibility for global stability and conflict resolution. Accordingly, the United States watched, and profited from, the slow incineration of European civilization between 1914 and 1917.

President Woodrow Wilson promised, in the 1916 election campaign, to stay out of the war. German submarines and an ill-advised effort on the part of the German foreign service to enlist Mexico's support in the war changed that position. In eighteen months of war (with the most intense fighting concentrated in the summer of 1918), 116,000 Americans died. Scholars still debate whether U.S. intervention was decisive, but in the end the war resulted in the collapse of four empires (Germany, Russia, Ottoman, Austria-Hungary) and the aggrandizement of two others (Britain and France) without resolving any of the central issues of dispute.
Vietnam War:
From the mid-1940s on, U.S. policymakers kept tabs on the developing war in Southeast Asia. The first stage of this war involved a Vietnamese insurgency against the Japanese occupation. The second stage saw this insurgency transition to fighting against French colonial authorities. After the historic victory of Viet Minh forces at Dien Bien Phu, the French made clear their intent to withdraw.

From that point forward, the United States inexorably drew itself into the conflict. It helped prevent the unification of the country under Communist rule in the 1950s; supported the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem until it didn't; launched a strategic bombing campaign designed to bring Hanoi to its knees; and finally became engaged directly, on the ground, against Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops.

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Misfire: 5 Wars America Should Never Have Fought

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In the debate that preceded the 2003 Iraq War, we became enamored of the distinction between "wars of choice" and "wars of necessity." Opponents of the Iraq War decried it as a "choice," while supporters insisted on its "necessity."