# data[].attributes.body
Explanation: This political cartoon portrays  the careless and eager way leaders set up their troops. It is symbolizing the bowling pins as the soldiers, setting them up, and knocking them down like a big game.

# data[].attributes.body
Explanation: This political cartoon shows the Domino Theory as a result of the Vietcong's goal to spread communism. The U.S. feared that if communism spread to a certain point, surrounding countries would also become communists. The Vietcong is showed as pushing the dominoes as the American Soldier is trying to keep them up.

# data[].attributes.body
#2

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By Professor Robert K. Brigham, Vassar College The Second Indochina War, 1954-1975, grew out of the long conflict between France and Vietnam. In July 1954, after one hundred years of colonial rule, a defeated France was forced to leave Vietnam.

# data[].attributes.headline
Vietnam Enjoying Economic Recovery 30 Years After War -   10/29/09 

# data[].attributes.subject
Vietnam Enjoying Economic Recovery 30 Years After War -   10/29/09 

# data[].attributes.body
It has been 30 years since the end of the Vietnam War, and the country once known for strife and crushing poverty has emerged as one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.

Foreign investors flooded into Vietnam in the early 1990's, betting that the communist nation's "doi moi" economic reforms could make it the next Asian tiger economy. But by the late 1990's, the investors were pulling out almost as fast as they had come in. Doi moi, which means "renewal", was seen as too slow moving, and investors turned their attention to neighboring China.

Yet, in the past five years, Vietnam's cautious policy on reforms has quietly yielded results. Annual GDP growth has averaged nearly 7 percent a year. Poverty, which once plagued two-thirds of the population, has been cut in half. Average income for Vietnamese has doubled in the last 10 years.

Klaus Rohland, country representative for the World Bank, says those numbers are impressive by any standard.

"Vietnam is a major success story. As of 1992 until now, they have grown on average, by more than 6 percent," he said. "Last year they grew by like 7.5, 7.8 percent. And that is way above average growth. And it's probably, with the exception of China, the best performing economy in the world.

For all its success, Vietnam remains a poor country. Average income may have doubled, but it is still only about $600 a year - far behind wealthier neighbors like Thailand and Malaysia. Still, the mood is optimistic.

In Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, the sound of construction has become almost constant. Property prices have jumped by more than half in the past three years, as just about everyone seems to be renovating houses and building new office buildings. Real estate experts say office space in Ho Chi Minh City now costs the same as in suburban Tokyo or Paris.

Much of Vietnam's newfound prosperity comes from commodities exports like oil and agricultural products. The International Monetary Fund says Vietnam is the world's largest pepper exporter, and the second-largest exporter of rice, coffee and cocoa. Tourist arrivals reached three million visitors last year. That is only about a quarter of the tourists that Thailand welcomes, but is still up 50 percent from just three years previously. Nguyen Thanh Huong runs a souvenir shop in Hanoi's busy Hang Gai Street.

"Around late winter and early spring, there are many tourists Vietnam. Business is very good and I have a lot of customers," he said.

Economists say Vietnam still has a long way to go before its economy can match its more developed neighbors. Its expected entry into the World Trade Organization later this year could help. But first the government must further reform its banking and investment sectors - which now lend most of their funds to money-losing state-owned companies instead of private entrepreneurs.

Still, even foreign investors are beginning to regain confidence in Vietnam. This year's foreign direct investment is up by 30 percent. As the Communist Party touts its 30-year-old victory in the Vietnam War this week, Vietnam's economy gives the country something else to celebrate.

# data[].attributes.body
1/7/17   Vietnam: The War That Killed Trust      NY TIMES MAGAZINE

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
And yet even as Vietnam continues to shape our country, its place in our national consciousness is slipping. Some 65 percent of Americans are under 45 and so unable to even remember the war. Meanwhile, our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our involvement in Syria, our struggle with terrorism - these conflicts are pushing Vietnam further into the background.

All the more reason, then, for us to revisit the war and its consequences for today. This essay inaugurates a new series by The Times, Vietnam '67, that will examine how the events of 1967 and early 1968 shaped Vietnam, America and the world. Hopefully, it will generate renewed conversation around that history, now half a century past.

What readers take away from that conversation is another matter. If all we do is debate why we lost, or why we were there at all, we will miss the truly important question: What did the war do to us as Americans?

CYNICISM

Vietnam changed the way we looked at politics. We became inured to our leaders lying in the war: the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident, the number of "pacified provinces" (and what did "pacified" mean, anyway?), the inflated body counts.

People talked about Johnson's "credibility gap." This was a genteel way of saying that the president was lying. Then, however, a credibility gap was considered unusual and bad. By the end of the war, it was still considered bad, but it was no longer unusual. When politicians lie today, fact checkers might point out what is true, but then everyone moves on.

We have switched from naïveté to cynicism. One could argue that they are opposites, but I think not. With naïveté you risk disillusionment, which is what happened to me and many of my generation. Cynicism, however, stops you before you start. It alienates us from "the government," a phrase that today connotes bureaucratic quagmire. It threatens democracy, because it destroys the power of the people to even want to make change.

You don't finish the world's largest highway system, build huge numbers of public schools and universities, institute the Great Society, fight a major war, and go to the moon, which we did in the 1960s - simultaneously - if you're cynical about government and politicians.

I live near Seattle, hardly Donald J. Trump territory. Most of my friends cynically deride Mr. Trump's slogan, Make America Great Again, citing all that was wrong in the olden days. Indeed, it wasn't paradise, particularly for minorities. But there's some truth to it. We were greater then. It was the war - not liberalism, not immigration, not globalization - that changed us.

RACE

In December 1968, I was on a blasted and remote jungle hilltop about a kilometer from the demilitarized zone. A chopper dropped off about three weeks of sodden mail and crumpled care packages. In that pile was a package for Ray Delgado, an 18-year-old Hispanic kid from Texas. I watched Ray tear into the aluminum foil wrapping and, smiling broadly, hold something up for me to see.

"What's that?" I asked.

"It's tamales. From my mother."

"What are tamales?"

"You want to try one?" he asked.

"Sure." I looked at it, turned it over, then stuck it in my mouth and started chewing. Ray and his other Hispanic friends were barely containing themselves as I was gamely chewing away and thinking, "No wonder these Mexicans have such great teeth."

"Lieutenant," Ray finally said. "You take the corn husk off."

I was from a logging town on the Oregon coast. I'd heard of tamales, but I'd never seen one. Until I joined my company of Marines in Vietnam, I'd never even talked to a Mexican. Yes, people like me called people like Ray "Mexicans," even though they were as American as apple pie - and tamales. Racial tension where I grew up was the Swedes and Norwegians squaring off against the Finns every Saturday night in the parking lot outside the dance at the Labor Temple.

President Harry Truman ordered the integration of the military in 1948. By the time of the Vietnam War, the races were serving together. But putting everyone in the same units is very different than having them work together as a unit.

Our national memory of integration is mostly about the brave people of the civil rights movement. Imagine arming all those high school students from Birmingham, Ala. - white and black - with automatic weapons in an environment where using these weapons was as common as having lunch and they are all jacked up on testosterone. That's racial tension.

During the war there were over 200 fraggings in the American military - murders carried out by fragmentation grenades, which made it impossible to identify the killer. Almost all fraggings, at least when the perpetrator was caught, were found to be racially motivated.

And yet the more common experience in combat was cooperation and respect. If I was pinned down by enemy fire and I needed an M-79 man, I'd scream for Thompson, because he was the best. I didn't even think about what color Thompson was.

White guys had to listen to soul music and black guys had to listen to country music. We didn't fear one another. And the experience stuck with us. Hundreds of thousands of young men came home from Vietnam with different ideas about race - some for the worse, but most for the better. Racism wasn't solved in Vietnam, but I believe it was where our country finally learned that it just might be possible for us all to get along.

SERVICE

I was at a reading recently in Fayetteville, N.C., when a young couple appeared at the signing table. He was standing straight and tall in Army fatigues. She was holding a baby in one arm and hauling a toddler with the other. They both looked to be about two years out of high school. The woman started to cry. I asked her what was wrong, and she said, "My husband is shipping out again, tomorrow." I turned to him and said, "Wow, your second tour?"

"No, sir," he replied. "My seventh."

My heart sank. Is this a republic?

The Vietnam War ushered in the end of the draft, and the creation of what the Pentagon calls the "all-volunteer military." But I don't. I call it the all-recruited military. Volunteers are people who rush down to the post office to sign up after Pearl Harbor or the World Trade Center gets bombed. Recruits, well, it's more complicated.

When I was growing up, almost every friend's father or uncle had served in World War II. All the women in town knew that a destroyer was smaller than a cruiser and a platoon was smaller than a company, because their husbands had all been on destroyers or in platoons. Back then it was called "the service." Today, we call it "the military."

That shift in language indicates a profound shift in the attitudes of the republic toward its armed forces. The draft was unfair. Only males got drafted. And men who could afford to go to college did not get drafted until late in the war, when the fighting had fallen off.

But getting rid of the draft did not solve unfairness.

America's elites have mostly dropped out of military service. Engraved on the walls of Woolsey Hall at Yale are the names of hundreds of Yalies who died in World Wars I and II. Thirty-five died in Vietnam, and none since.

Instead, the American working class has increasingly borne the burden of death and casualties since World War II. In a study in The University of Memphis Law Review, Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen looked at the income casualty gap, the difference between the median household incomes (in constant 2000 dollars) of communities with the highest casualties (the top 25 percent) and all the other communities. Starting from almost dead-even in World War II, the casualty gap was $5,000 in the Korean War, $8,200 in the Vietnam War, and is now more than $11,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan. Put another way, the lowest three income deciles have suffered 50 percent more casualties than the highest three.

If these inequities continue to grow, resentment will grow with it. With growing resentment, the already wide divide between the military and civilians will also widen. This is how republics fall, with armies and parts of the country more loyal to their commander than their country.

We need to return to the spirit of the military draft, and how people felt about service to their country. The military draft was viewed by most of us the same way we view income tax. I wouldn't pay my taxes if there wasn't the threat of jail. But as a responsible citizen, I also see that paying taxes is necessary to fund the government - my government.

People would still grumble. We grumble about taxes. People would still try to pull strings to get more pleasant assignments. But everyone would serve. They'd work for "the government," and maybe start to see it as "our government." It's a lot harder to be cynical about your country if you devoted two years of your life making it a better place.

Let the armed services be just one of many ways young people can serve their country. With universal service, some boy from Seattle could find himself sharing a tamale with some Hispanic girl from El Paso. Conservatives and liberals would learn to work together for a common cause. We could return to the spirit of people of different races learning to work together in combat during the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War continues to define us, even if we have forgotten how. But it's not too late to remember, and to do something about it.

Correction: January 15, 2017

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
united states defense and military forces

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | Vietnam: The War That Killed Trust

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
And yet even as Vietnam continues to shape our country, its place in our national consciousness is slipping. Some 65 percent of Americans are under 45 and so unable to even remember the war. Meanwhile, our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our involvement in Syria, our struggle with terrorism - these conflicts are pushing Vietnam further into the background.

# data[].attributes.headline
1965 Newspaper reports on bombing over North Vietnam

# data[].attributes.subject
1965 Newspaper reports on bombing over North Vietnam

# data[].attributes.body
An article in the New York Times asserts that the U.S. bombing campaign has neither destabilized North Vietnam’s economy nor appreciably reduced the flow of its forces into South Vietnam.

These observations were strikingly similar to an earlier Defense Intelligence Agency analysis, which concluded that “the idea that destroying, or threatening to destroy, North Vietnam’s industry would pressure Hanoi into calling it quits seems, in retrospect, a colossal misjudgement.”

The first air strikes against North Vietnam were flown in the fall of 1964, in retaliation for two attacks on American warships in the Gulf of Tonkin (although the second reported attack has never been verified). Additional strikes, carried out under the name Operation Flaming Dart, were ordered in February 1965 in response to Viet Cong attacks on a U.S. Army barracks at Pleiku and a nearby helicopter base, which resulted in the deaths of nine Americans. When the Viet Cong attacked other U.S. facilities in South Vietnam, President Johnson initiated Operation Rolling Thunder in March 1965, an intensified air campaign against North Vietnam. He hoped that this campaign would relieve some of the pressure on South Vietnam, where the situation was rapidly deteriorating. Unfortunately, the bombing campaign did not have the desired results and Johnson had to commit U.S. ground troops to stabilize the situation.

# data[].attributes.headline
Article about Kennedy's Letter regarding Vietnam

# data[].attributes.subject
Article about Kennedy's Letter regarding Vietnam

# data[].attributes.body
Below is the 1961 letter from U.S. President John Kennedy in which he remarked to President Diem that North Vietnam was in violation of the 1954 Geneva Accords that it was obliged to respect. President Kennedy acknowledged that the relentless offensives launched by the North Vietnamese Communists against South Vietnam needed to be stopped and as a result his administration intended to increase American military aid.

# data[].attributes.body
This article originally appeared in the May 12, 1975, edition of U.S. News & World Report.

For the U.S., it was an ignominious end to a bitter, ill-starred war.

After a decade of dissension that nearly tore the country apart, of nearly 57,000 lives lost and 150 billion dollars spent, the last Americans fled from Saigon in disarray – just one step ahead of victorious Communist troops.

The dramatic contrast was there for all the world to see: America's first defeat in war, set against the formation of yet another Communist government in Asia.

People everywhere witnessed in near disbelief the disturbing spectacle of Americans scrambling frantically into helicopters designed to fly U.S. fighting men into battle – not meant to evacuate Americans under cover of darkness.

From Tokyo to London, from Moscow to Buenos Aires, serious questions were raised about the impact the humiliation would have on American morale and on U.S. steadfastness in the face of future challenges elsewhere in the world.

Major capitals also kept a wary eye on any moves that the two Communist powers – Russia and China – might make to exploit the Communist victories in Indo-China.

President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made it evident that the dangers - both at home and overseas – were much on their minds.

Trouble Yet to Come

Mr. Kissinger – who won a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating with North Vietnam the 1973 cease-fire agreement that supposedly ended the Vietnam War – warned at a news conference in Washington of trouble yet to come.

"There is no question," he said, "that the outcome in Indo-China will have consequences not only in Asia, but in many other parts of the world."

Knowledgeable U.S. officials feared that American prestige had been badly tarnished in Asia, where there are burgeoning doubts over reliability of American promises. As they see it:

The closer a nation is to Vietnam, the more urgent the doubts become. Thailand, immediately under the Communist gun, is ordering U.S. forces out of the country and cozying up to China and North Vietnam. The Philippines is re-examining its security treaties with the U.S. Even Japan suspects the permanence of the American nuclear "umbrella" protecting that nation.

"North Korea must also be watched carefully," one top authority cautioned. "Kim II Sung is not very sophisticated. He may decide that the time has come to launch another invasion of South Korea." The U.S. still has about 40,000 troops in South Korea.

A Clear Lesson

To Asians, the lesson seemed clear. Forces of the U.S., strongest and richest nation on earth, had been driven away by an impoverished country that in its 30-year existence has barely moved into the industrialized twentieth century in anything but military capability. The memory of U.S.-South Vietnamese shortcomings still was strong:

The more than a half million U.S. combat troops who fought America's longest war in what turned out to be a costly and futile effort to keep South Vietnam out of Communist hands.

The failure of American war planes – the most potent aerial strike force ever assembled – to destroy the peasant-based economy of North Vietnam. Proponents of all-out air war insisted that Washington had kept U.S. air power under wraps until it was much too late in the conflict.

The startling, almost-overnight crumbling of South Vietnam's 1.1-million-man military machine. Trained and armed by America but left on their own after the U.S. military withdrawal in March, 1973, the South Vietnamese were no match for a Communist army richly equipped by Russia and China.

A City's Name

Less than three hours after completion of the American evacuation on April 30, the Saigon Government surrendered unconditionally. Communist soldiers marched triumphantly into the city behind Russian-made tanks and captured U.S.-made jeeps. Scattered pockets of resistance by a few diehard South Vietnamese defenders were quickly wiped out.

One of the conquerors' first acts: Their "revolutionaries" are to call Saigon "Ho Chi Minh City" in honor of the North Vietnamese leader who died in 1969 without achieving his lifelong goal of bringing all Indo-China under Communist domination.

U.S. experts predicted that North Vietnam, after masterminding victories in Cambodia and South Vietnam, now will retreat temporarily into its shell to pull things together.

"Most likely there will be a deep freeze for a while," said an American with long experience in Indo-China. "The area will stay out of the world while the Communists consolidate their control."

At the same time, American officials, smarting under accusations by some Asians that the U.S. had abandoned Saigon, were deeply worried over what will happen when the Viet Cong - with behind-the-scenes direction from Hanoi - establish a working government in the South.

The "Death List"

Of particular concern was the fate of thousands of South Vietnamese who may be on a Communist "death list" because of their past association with Americans or anti-Communist activities.

Many of these Vietnamese – called "high risks" by the U.S. and "social negatives" by the Communists – were among more than 100,000 who escaped by aircraft, helicopter and ship. But tens of thousands remained behind. Communist diplomats in other countries expected the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese to put up to 100,000 South Vietnamese on trial as "war criminals."

Before Saigon's capture, reports trickling into the capital from the northern two thirds of the country then held by North Vietnam indicated that the Communists had not yet initiated the "blood bath" that had long been predicted by American and South Vietnamese officials. But some authorities argued that the Communists were only delaying – not abandoning – the wholesale execution of "social negatives."

In the first days of the Saigon occupation, there were few signs of bloodletting. Viet Cong soldiers, many of them teen-aged men and women, treated civilians politely, while other Communist troops cleaned out South Vietnamese pockets of resistance in the Mekong Delta. Communist leaders warned their troops against touching "even a needle or a thread of the people."
Still, there were disturbing omens of a crackdown to come. The new regime took over all industrial, agricultural and commercial firms and issued a series of 20 decrees warning of "severe punishment" for anyone disobeying orders. Among forbidden pursuits: "acting like Americans or participation in American-style activities."

Top Viet Cong leaders delayed their entrance into Saigon, but deputies moved rapidly to put the Communist stamp on the country. On May 2, they abolished the national employees’ association, formed a "revolutionary labor federation" and ordered workers to return to factories to resume production.

The Communists also organized a "young people's self-defense force" composed of men and women from 15 to 38 in age. Their assigned duties: to "explain" policies of the new Saigon Government to the people.

Picture of Panic

The relatively quiet Communist seizure of Saigon was anti-climactic in contrast with the confusion and disorder that marked the final American pullout from South Vietnam, starting at midday April 29 and ending about 8 a.m. April 30.

With Communist troops already in the outskirts of the capital, Saigon was a city of panic. Thousands of South Vietnamese jammed the runways at Tan Son Nhut Airport, preventing use of large C-130 transport planes. Realizing the end was only hours away, President Ford in Washington ordered "Option Four" put into operation – the helicopter rescue of all Americans and as many "high risk" South Vietnamese as could be carried.

A force of 800 Marines was airlifted in to protect the withdrawal. Then an armada of 81 helicopters from American aircraft carriers standing by off the coast swooped down to begin the evacuation from two landing zones at the airport and the U.S. Embassy in downtown Saigon. Carrier-based jet fighter-bombers provided air cover.

Vietnamese of all ages, desperate to escape the Communists, massed in front of the Embassy, pleading to be flown to safety. Some crawled over the barbed wire that topped a 10-foot wall surrounding the Embassy compound. Marines and U.S. officials used rifle and pistol butts to smash the fingers of others trying to climb the Embassy gates.

Soldiers, police, civilians and gangs of young toughs smashed cars abandoned by Americans. Mobs broke into deserted American offices, apartments and homes to loot them of furniture, refrigerators, air conditioners and other valuables. After the last American had left the Embassy, rampaging Vietnamese tore through the six-story building to steal and destroy. Ripped from the lobby wall was a bronze plaque honoring five U.S. servicemen who had died defending the Embassy during the Communists' Tet offensive of 1968.

"We Want to Go"

Despite fears that enraged South Vietnamese would turn on the departing allies, there were few serious incidents of anti-Americanism. Some Americans were pushed off airport-bound buses by fear-stricken Vietnamese, and a few airport guards fired at the buses shouting, "We want to go, too." Some of the helicopters also came under fire by either South Vietnamese or Communist troops.

One French news correspondent said he was stopped by a jeepload of South Vietnamese paratroopers who demanded to know his nationality. When told he was French, a trooper replied: "That's okay. If you had been American, we would have killed you."

South Vietnamese pilots mounted an air evacuation of their own, flying a ragtag fleet of fighter planes, transports and helicopters to Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan.

Thousands more South Vietnamese took to sea in a motley group of boats, junks, rafts and sampans. U.S. officials said American vessels saved about 18,000 of these ocean-going refugees.

By the time the last Marine guard was airlifted from the Embassy, more than 7,000 persons, including 1,373 Americans, had been flown to U.S. ships offshore. A few Americans – mainly news correspondents and missionaries – stayed behind.

The operation cost the lives of four U.S. Marines. Two were killed during a pre-evacuation bombardment at the airport, and two pilots died when their helicopter crashed at sea.

Final shots by Americans in the Vietnam War were believed to have come from two Navy jets. They attracted – and silenced – an antiaircraft gun which had fired on the planes.

In taking over South Vietnam, the Communist inherited a tremendous military arsenal, which ranged from small arms to modern jet-fighter planes – all supplied to Saigon's forces by the U.S. at a cost estimated at about 5 billion dollars.

According to London's authoritative International Institute of Strategic Studies, South Vietnam's military strength at the beginning of 1975 included: 600 tanks, 1,400 armored cars and personnel carriers, 1,675 artillery pieces, 509 combat planes, hundreds of other aircraft and helicopters and 70 frigates, mine-sweepers, patrol ships and gunboats.

Also handed over to the Communists was a massive military complex of roads, bridges, airfields, ports, supply centers and other bases with a value that could reach 25 billion dollars.

Private American investment - held down over the years by South Vietnam's uncertain future - was much lower. The U.S. State Department estimated that value of U.S. private property in the country totaled just 30 million dollars. Some companies, however, said their investments were much higher. For instance, Exxon Corporation alone put its losses at 25 million dollars.

Also forfeited: about 100 million dollars that major U.S. and other foreign oil companies paid the South Vietnamese Government for offshore leases.

Irony of War

In an ironic twist of warfare, the American imprint is likely to remain in Communist-ruled South Vietnam for years to come. In one example of this, Associated Press writer Daniel de Luce reported from Da Nang – captured by North Vietnam in late March – that the U.S.-built air base there had become a key transport center for the new Saigon Government. He wrote:

"A half dozen American-made helicopters were visible in a maze of revetments near the air-passenger lounge.

"In front of an intact hanger stood a large yellow mobile crane. Nearby was a red tank truck. Both were American-made. In the glass-walled control tower the equipment which Americans installed and the Saigon Government Air Force left behind now serves the new governmental power here."

How could the massive U.S. effort in Indo-China end in military debacle?

Adm. Noel Gayler, Commander of U.S. military forces in the Pacific, summed up the American failure in South Vietnam this way in a comment at his Honolulu headquarters:

"We really meant to help and to stabilize but went awry in a lot of ways."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Media's Effect On The Support For The Vietnam War

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Uploaded by Daniel Laskowski on 2015-05-28.

# data[].attributes.headline
America in Vietnam, 1963: Deeper Into War- Article LIFE MAGAZINE

# data[].attributes.subject
America in Vietnam, 1963: Deeper Into War- Article LIFE MAGAZINE

# data[].attributes.body
By early 1963, the number of American military personnel in Vietnam had grown from several hundred to more than 10,000 in a few short years. The ramifications of the United States’ direct involvement in a conflict halfway around the globe — less than a decade after the ceasefire in another brutal war in Korea — were certainly part of the national conversation, but in ’63 America’s growing role in Vietnam was not even close to the all-encompassing, divisive issue it would become by the middle of the decade.

Vietnam was on people’s radar, of course, but not as a constant, alarming blip. Military families were learning first-hand (before everyone else, as they always do) that this was no “police action; but for millions of Americans, Vietnam was a mystery, a riddle that no doubt would be resolved and forgotten in time: a little place far away where inscrutable strangers were fighting over . . . something.

All the more remarkable that in January of 1963, LIFE magazine published the powerful cover article, “We Wade Deeper Into Jungle War,” and illustrated it with not one or two photos but with a dozen pictures — most of them in color — by the great photojournalist, Larry Burrows.

Burrows, seen at left in Vietnam in 1963, worked steadily — although not exclusively — in Southeast Asia from 1962 until his death in 1971. His work is often cited as the most searing and the most consistently excellent photography from the war, and several of his pictures (“Reaching Out,” for example, featuring a wounded Marine desperately trying to comfort a stricken comrade after a fierce 1966 firefight) and photo essays (like 1965’s harrowing “One Ride With Yankee Papa 13”) both encompassed and defined the long, polarizing catastrophe in Vietnam.

He and three fellow photojournalists died when their helicopter was shot down during operations in Laos. Burrows was 44.

The pictures here, meanwhile, are striking not only for the clarity with which they document a scary, widening conflict, but for how graphic they are. To American eyes, long accustomed to having their news sanitized by the major media, the notion that these and similarly gruesome pictures routinely ran in a popular weekly magazine five decades ago will likely come as something of a shock. Today, a photograph of blood stains and broken glass on a street after a car bombing is about the extent of what most Americans will ever see on the nightly news, on bale shows or in their newspapers. (Raggedly severed limbs, torched corpses and viscera-covered walls evidently being deemed too upsetting to the fragile American sensibility.)

But it’s worth recalling — or reminding those who weren’t alive at the time — that, starting even before the January 25, 1963, issue in which the photos in this gallery appeared, and throughout the war in Vietnam, LIFE and other major, mainstream American news outlets, in print and on TV, regularly published and broadcast what today would be considered graphic, unsettling content.

That LIFE considered this a significant, indeed a groundbreaking article is evidenced by the highly unusual treatment it received on the magazine’s cover. The first slide in this gallery illustrates this perfectly: rather than the customary horizontal, one-sheet image found on literally thousands of other LIFE covers, the January 25, 1963, issue featured an exceedingly rare fold-out, giving full play to Burrows’ powerful portrait.

# data[].attributes.body
#1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Mark Moyar holds the Kim T. Adamson Chair of Insurgency and Terrorism at the U.S. Marine Corps University, Quantico, VA 22134; moyars@mindspring.com

By the early 1990s, when I began studying the Vietnam War, the American public had largely lost interest in the history of that conflict. The Civil War and World War II were the wars that historians were advised to cover if they wanted to reach the public. Among government officials, military officers, and political scientists, Vietnam was considered irrelevant, because the United States would never get caught in protracted counterinsurgency warfare again. Iraq changed all that. Ever since the outbreak of insurgency in the former empire of Saddam Hussein, people of all persuasions have been mining the history of Vietnam for information that will support their preferred Iraq policies. Hundreds of thousands of American troops sent to Iraq and Afghanistan have received more instruction on Vietnam than on any other historical subject.

Although more than thirty years have passed since the end of the Vietnam War, historians today are as divided on what happened as the American people were during the war itself. During the 1960s and 1970s, huge numbers of antiwar Americans entered academia and the media, while few Vietnam veterans and other supporters of the war obtained jobs in those professions, in many cases because veteran status or pro-war sentiments were considered unacceptable. As a result, most academic and journalistic accounts of the war written during and shortly afterwards depicted Vietnam as a bad war that the United States should not have fought. Antiwar history of the Vietnam War thus acquired the label of "orthodox" history.

A small group of veterans and academic historians who rejected the fundamental tenets of the antiwar movement were, from the beginning, producing works that became known as "revisionist." Over time, the number of revisionists would increase, but the movement has never made major inroads into academia. Some academics have attempted to explain that fact by arguing that revisionists are irrational or dimwitted. David L. Anderson, the president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and an orthodox historian of the Vietnam War, stated in his 2005 presidential address that revisionists interpret the war based on an "uncritical acceptance" of American cold war policy rather than analysis of the facts, whereas orthodox historians rely exclusively on "reasoned analysis" in reaching their conclusions. ¹ Some orthodox scholars have maintained that the revisionists' primary ambition is not to find the truth but to twist the facts of the Vietnam War to justify contemporary wars or other policies. University of Iowa history professor Colin Gordon, for example, said with respect to revisionists and those who based foreign policy decisions on their interpretations, "History is temporarily useful to those who willfully misinterpret it, but genuinely useful only to those who make an effort to understand it. The historical memory of recent American foreign policy is shallow, cynical and selective. It shapes the past for present purposes, retrieving only those historical fragments which reinforce present assumptions." ²

While such comments may hold some truth with respect to a few individuals, they most definitely do not apply to the most prominent of the revisionists. Why, then, do historians keep making them? A leading possibility is the ideological imbalance among today's academic history departments. History faculty tirelessly profess commitment to "diversity," but within their own ranks one finds near uniformity of political sentiment. For example, at the University of Iowa history department, of which Professor Gordon is the chair, Democrats outnumber Republicans 27 to 0. ³ As analysts of group-think have observed, people in such environments are led toward the conclusion that every reasonable person shares their views, and hence any outsider who disagrees is not reasonable. Historians who oppose the orthodoxy on Vietnam, or on other politically-charged subjects like Soviet espionage in America or feminism are likely to be received by these departments as if they were crank propagandists or foolish eccentrics.

Another problem that impedes the study of Vietnam is a politically correct contraction of allowable inquiry. Within history departments, there is a generally recognized spectrum of subject matter respectability. At its left end, denoting maximum political correctness, lies the history of race, class, and gender. Between that end and the center lie such fields as cultural history, immigration history, and environmental history. At the other end of the spectrum political history stands at moderate incorrectness, diplomatic history at serious incorrectness, and military history at maximum incorrectness. As a result, military history has suffered more than any other field at the hands of the radicals, with military history jobs disappearing from most history departments as soon as their elderly military historians retire.

Political correctness has also banished certain crucial ideas from the academic discussion of Vietnam. When a revisionist contends that the Vietnamese had an authoritarian political culture that allowed strong men like Ho Chi Minh to thrive and made democracy unfeasible, orthodox professors often hurl accusations ranging from insensitivity to racism. The only instance in which authoritarian cultures may be discussed is Iraq-the existence of an authoritarian culture in Iraq can be used to highlight the foolishness of George Bush's invasion of that country.

Another weakness of the contemporary university that affects the study of the Vietnam War is excessive compartmentalization. When it became fashionable several decades ago for historians to focus on niche topics, proponents argued that this research would shed new light on big historical questions. That may have been true in certain cases, but the overall effect has been to reduce interest in the big questions and drive historians into compartments that bear little relation to each other except for their political ideology.

The diplomatic historians who study the Vietnam War often gravitate toward niche topics, such as the role of American universities in Vietnam, Vietnamese and American ideas of nation building, or the operations of the National Security Council. ⁴ Those who address the broad policies of the United States or other great powers usually give only cursory treatment to events in Vietnam or the rest of Southeast Asia. Yet one often cannot pass sound judgment on decisions in Washington without knowing the details in Southeast Asia. ⁵ Historians of Vietnam who cover the war tend to focus on narrow issues of culture and politics and avoid strategy or warfare. ⁶ Knowing what is most important in culture and politics in wartime is impossible without knowing the strategic and military context. Studies of the American media in Vietnam generally devote little attention to South Vietnamese culture and politics. ⁷ Yet it is wrong to judge the American press or American press policies without understanding South Vietnamese politics and culture.

Some compartmentalized historians would respond to the foregoing by contending that they can get the necessary contextual information from the many wider histories that have already been written about Vietnam. When I began working on a broad history of Vietnam, I was told more than once by publishers and other scholars that there was no need for another broad history because people like David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and Stanley Karnow had already written everything that needed to be written about the political and military events.

Therein lies one of the worst problems concerning the study of the Vietnam War-the uncritical acceptance of the "big picture" presented in dated and dubious writings. Most of what today is considered the conventional wisdom originated with the triumvirate of Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow, journalists who reported on the war as it was happening and afterwards wrote best-selling books. Halberstam began writing books well before the others, publishing The Making of a Quagmire in 1964, Ho in 1971, and The Best and the Brightest, which sold more than a million copies, in 1972. ⁸ Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History, published in 1983, also sold over one million copies and was accompanied by a multivolume PBS documentary that attracted Ken Burns-size audiences. ⁹ Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie arrived in 1988 and promptly won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. ¹⁰ All three of these journalists were entertaining writers, and awful historians.

The narrative that emerged from their books is relatively straightforward. The United States was wrong to fight the war, the story goes, for American policymakers mistook Ho Chi Minh for a member of an international Communist conspiracy when in reality he was merely a proud nationalist who disdained his Chinese Communist neighbors. American leaders were completely ignorant of South Vietnam and mindlessly optimistic about progress in the war. America's South Vietnamese allies were corrupt and cowardly, in contrast to the patriotic and dedicated North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. The only real American heroes of the war were the reporters and the few servicemen who recognized that the enterprise was doomed from the start.

Some prominent journalists criticized Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow from the early stages of the war. In a September 1963 article, Joseph Alsop likened the American correspondents in Saigon to the American journalists of the 1940s who had denigrated Chiang Kai-Shek and praised Mao Tse-Tung as a "great and humane man," as well as to Herbert Matthews, the reporter who had idealized Fidel Castro during the Cuban revolution. Alsop accused these reporters of portraying the situation in unduly negative terms, asserting that "it is easy enough to paint a dark, indignant picture, without departing from the facts, if you ignore the majority of Americans who admire the Vietnamese as fighters and seek out the one U.S. officer in ten who inevitably thinks all foreigners fight badly." ¹¹

Marguerite Higgins, who had become the first female war correspondent to win the Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the Korean War, found that Halberstam's articles contained many glaring inaccuracies, most of which were intended to tarnish the image of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem. After Higgins authored a string of New York Herald Tribune stories eviscerating various claims Halberstam had made in the New York Times, an editor at the Times went so far as to send Halberstam a letter stating: "Some of what she has been writing would tend to balance the material we have been getting from Saigon recently....I am sure that you will take care of this aspect of the Vietnamese story as soon as you can." The letter prompted Halberstam to shoot back, "If you send me one more cable referring to that woman's copy you will have my resignation forthwith by return cable and I mean it repeat mean it." ¹² Higgins went on to write a terrific book entitled Our Vietnam Nightmare, which was published in 1965.

Unfortunately, Higgins's book did not achieve the popularity of the books by Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow, and within a few years it faded into obscurity. One reason is that she contracted black fever and died shortly after the book was published. Another is that the turn of the American intelligentsia against the war in the late 1960s made Higgins's views into the most dangerous sort of heresy.

The orthodox historians of the late 1970s and 1980s largely adhered to the narrative passed down by Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow. Histories covering John F. Kennedy's presidency echoed the journalists in depicting South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem as a hopeless reactionary whose tyranny deprived the South Vietnamese government of legitimacy and whose discrimination against Buddhists brought his government to a much-deserved ruin. ¹³ Those covering Lyndon Johnson's presidency repeated the view that America's vital interests were not at stake in Vietnam and that the war could not have been won by any means and hence Johnson should not have intervened in 1965. ¹⁴ Some of the histories modified the image of Johnson and other top figures as documentary evidence made clear that the media's portrayal of these figures were gross caricatures, but these changes did not alter the main features of the narrative. Rather, they augmented it and were incorporated into the books by Karnow and Sheehan. ¹⁵

Historians who addressed American military performance accused the U.S. military of fighting unlawfully and unsuccessfully against a wily adversary that regularly outwitted it, and they alleged that the war inflicted long-term psychological damage on huge numbers of American veterans. ¹⁶ These claims made the war appear even more reprehensible, which also made draft dodging appear more sensible. Nothing was said about the psychological impact on the enemy, enhancing the impression that the North Vietnamese did no wrong in sending hundreds of thousands of young men to die in countless military defeats in South Vietnam.

A small but strong group of revisionist books emerged during this same period. Although a substantial proportion of their authors had doctorates, few had permanent academic appointments, and the only one of those who worked in a history department was employed in Britain, which has not been as badly afflicted by faculty politicization as the United States. Robert F. Turner, a Vietnam veteran and Hoover Institution fellow who later obtained a non-tenured position at the University of Virginia Law School, disputed the portrayal of the Vietnamese Communists as devoted nationalists in his book Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development. ¹⁷ In an international history of the war, distinguished British professor Ralph Smith argued that Vietnamese Communism posed a serious threat to the United States and hence the United States was right in trying to hold the line in South Vietnam. ¹⁸ Norman Podhoretz, the American pundit, made the same argument in a work geared more for the public than academia. ¹⁹ The works of Ellen Hammer and William Colby, an American scholar living in France and a former CIA director, respectively, charged that South Vietnam was viable under Ngo Dinh Diem and that the United States erred catastrophically in encouraging his overthrow. ²⁰ Reiterating points made during the war by senior U.S. military officers, veterans like Harry Summers and former politicians like Richard Nixon argued that the war could have been won had the United States taken more aggressive military actions, such as severing the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and bombing North Vietnam massively from the start instead of escalating the bombing gradually. ²¹ A different group, led by a military officer with a Ph.D. named Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., concluded that the war could have been won had the United States been more delicate, rather than more forceful. According to the Krepinevich school, the United States focused on fighting a conventional war in the hinterlands because the U.S. military had been designed to fight such a war, when in fact much greater attention should have been given to securing the populous areas. ²²

The most influential of the early revisionist books was Guenter Lewy's America and Vietnam, the only work of its vintage that remains highly important to historians today. ²³ Of Lewy's many contributions, his greatest was the refutation of antiwar arguments about the immorality, inhumanity, and illegality of American military actions in Vietnam. A political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Lewy never received the open acclaim from academia or the media that he deserved, but he effected great changes to the war's history in quiet ways. After the appearance of his book, countless fashionable antiwar arguments stopped appearing in the articles and books written by those who continued to adhere to the antiwar orthodoxy.

Since 1990, the quality of scholarship, both orthodox and revisionist, has improved as more documentation has become available and scholars have been able to make use of previous discoveries. The orthodox history, however, has not ventured very far from the Halberstam-Sheehan-Karnow narrative. Much of that narrative has continued to evade serious questioning from orthodox historians, who have preferred to remain focused on a fairly narrow set of questions. Orthodox scholars have continued to assert that Vietnam was not strategically important without examining most of the relevant information that has become available. In one of the most celebrated of recent orthodox histories, Cornell University history professor Fredrik Logevall announced that most scholars, himself included, consider it "axiomatic" that the United States erred in deciding to intervene in Vietnam. ²⁴ The United States did not need to fight Ho Chi Minh, proponents of the orthodoxy still maintain, because he would have become an Asian Tito had the Americans not pestered him. ²⁵ Hanoi's dedication to conquering the South, they add, ensured that no American strategy would have succeeded. ²⁶ For orthodox scholars, Ngo Dinh Diem remains a poor leader who senselessly antagonized his people. ²⁷ The portrayal of American veterans as perpetrators of horrible actions during the war and psychological wrecks after the war has continued. ²⁸

The areas that have received the greatest attention recently from orthodox historians possess considerable historical significance but relatively minor import in the orthodox-revisionist debate. Amongst prominent orthodox historians there is an ongoing debate over whether Kennedy would have withdrawn from Vietnam had he not been assassinated. ²⁹ They also disagree about why Johnson intervened. ³⁰ Their biases and lack of knowledge on other aspects of the war, however, have allowed revisionists to overtake them on these topics. The most lasting orthodox contributions since 1990, therefore, are books of even narrower scope. Although largely wrong about the big picture, these books provide some valuable small pictures. Clemson history professor Edwin Moïse unearthed a large amount of new information on the Tonkin Gulf incidents, ³¹ and George Herring, who recently retired from the University of Kentucky history department, did the same for Lyndon Johnson's relations with the U.S. military. ³² Harold P. Ford, a former CIA officer, incorporated into his history documents that are not normally available to researchers. ³³ In a relatively favorable history of Ngo Dinh Diem's nation-building enterprises, Professor Philip Catton of Stephen F. Austin State University went the farthest in challenging conventional views without chopping down the overarching tenets of the orthodox school. ³⁴

Some other valuable books have provided new insights into smaller matters while largely steering clear of the big points of disagreement between orthodox and revisionist historians. Of these, several of the best have incorporated important evidence from Soviet and Chinese archives to illuminate the roles of the Soviet Union and China. ³⁵ Studies of other countries and regions have enhanced understanding of the international dimensions of the war. ³⁶ As Vietnamese and French sources have become more accessible, new publications on Vietnamese Communism have appeared. ³⁷ Recent biographies of American leaders have brought new discoveries on strategic decision-making. ³⁸

The recent revisionist histories, in contrast to some earlier revisionist works, have generally been backed by voluminous research, captured in numerous footnotes. Although not all of their authors are excellent scholars, they are generally more rigorous in their analysis than their orthodox counterparts, because they are so often challenged that they have become adept at anticipating and countering contrary assertions. Because experience has given revisionists a better understanding of the importance of wrestling with differently minded people, they have also been much more willing than orthodox historians to invite the opposing side to conferences they organize.

The lengthiest contribution of recent revisionism, coming in at over eleven hundred pages, is Arthur Dommen's The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans: Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Dommen had worked as a journalist in Vietnam and Laos during the war, but, as the length of his book indicates, he was closer to a scholar than a journalist by temperament, and after the war obtained a Ph.D. in agricultural economics. Having spent many years gathering information, including a considerable amount on the Vietnamese side, Dommen shot some sizeable holes in the Halberstam-Sheehan-Karnow account. He highlighted nefarious aspects of Vietnamese Communism that orthodox historians had missed or ignored, and concluded that Vietnamese nationalists like Ngo Dinh Diem offered a viable alternative to Communism. He was also among the first to note that the Buddhist protesters, whose charges of religious oppression crippled the South Vietnamese government from 1963 to 1965, had fabricated evidence of oppression and were more concerned with gaining political power than religious freedom. ³⁹

Col. H.R. McMaster, a highly distinguished U.S. Army officer who holds a Ph.D. in history, attracted much attention with his 1997 book Dereliction of Duty, in which he showed that Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara disregarded and abused the Joint Chiefs of Staff at a time when they had much sounder ideas on American strategy than the civilian leadership did. ⁴⁰ In the late 1990s, Francis X. Winters, a professor emeritus at the Georgetown University Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, and Geoffrey Shaw, a Canadian with a Ph.D. who has been unable to land a tenure-track position, further advanced the interpretations of Ellen Hammer and William Colby on the Diem government and the 1963 coup. ⁴¹ Think tank fellow Michael Lind of the New America Foundation and political scientist C. Dale Walton of the University of Reading offered strong challenges to the conventional wisdom, although they did less historical research than other revisionists because they were policy analysts by background rather than historians. Lind's book was particularly strong on the domino theory, demonstrating that there really was an international Communist conspiracy to take Vietnam and then other countries in succession. ⁴² Walton concluded that the United States would have done much better had it chosen different strategic options. ⁴³

As with orthodox historians, revisionists have tended to focus on select aspects of the conflict rather than covering the war holistically. In designing my recent book, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965, I sought to fill the gap by analyzing every significant facet of the war, from military to diplomatic to political to social, and every country that had a significant influence on the war, of which there were many. Because too few reliable histories had been written previously, I relied almost entirely on primary sources for information, which required much more time than the research for the average general history but also yielded many more discoveries than I would otherwise have found. Some of my research produced solid evidence for assertions that other revisionists had made previously but without supporting facts, for instance the commitment of Ho Chi Minh to global Communist revolution or the feasibility of severing the North Vietnamese supply routes through Laos, the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail. Other parts revealed new facts that have forced alteration of central interpretations, such as the remarkable success of South Vietnam's counterinsurgency initiatives in 1962 and 1963, or the strong support for American intervention in Vietnam among the other nations of Asia and Oceania. ⁴⁴

Some of the most important discoveries involved the behavior of Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow during the war and its impact on what they later wrote in their best-selling books. In 1963, unlike later, the American journalists in Vietnam generally favored U.S. involvement in Vietnam, but believed that South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem had to be replaced because he was not liberal enough in handling the press and non-Communist oppositionists, especially Buddhist protesters who were calling for huge concessions from the government. They disbelieved Diem's assertion that the Communists had infiltrated the Buddhists, an assertion that the Communists, much later, admitted to be true.

In the fall of 1963, Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow publicly derided the Diem government and suggested that South Vietnam would be better off if Diem were removed from power. Both South Vietnamese and American officials, they claimed, desired the ousting of Diem. Their reporting relied heavily upon biased and dishonest sources, including two who, unbeknownst to the reporters, were Vietnamese Communist agents. Translated rapidly into Vietnamese, their anti-Diem stories were read by the Vietnamese elites, who mistakenly thought they were expressions of official U.S. policy. These articles did much to convince both South Vietnamese generals and U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge that Diem had to go, and that replacing Diem would lead to major improvements in the war effort. Those generals, with Lodge's blessing, overthrew and murdered Diem on November 2, 1963.

Instead of improving the war effort, however, the coup resulted in a dramatic downturn, for the new leaders were weak and purged huge numbers of good officers for their past loyalty to Diem. Halberstam, Sheehan, and Karnow now faced accusations that they had helped wreck the South Vietnamese government. They cunningly devised a defense that deflected the criticism and profoundly influenced everything they, and many others, wrote thereafter. They asserted that the South Vietnamese war effort had been ruined before Diem's death, something they had not claimed before the coup, and therefore their support for overthrowing Diem made little difference. Later, they would use this point to argue that the war was hopeless from the beginning, for in the latter stages of the war they backed away from their earlier support of American intervention and, in Halberstam's case, denied that they had ever supported it. By sifting through masses of American and North Vietnamese documents as well as American press reports, I determined that South Vietnam was actually winning the war until Diem's death, and began losing as soon as he was gone.

The books by Halberstam, Sheehan, Karnow and nearly every other orthodox author concentrated on the period from the division of Vietnam in 1954 to the Tet Offensive of 1968, providing minimal coverage of the years 1969 to 1975. Revisionists began fixing that problem in the late 1990s with histories arguing that the South Vietnamese government grew much stronger during this period and that by the early 1970s it had, with the help of the United States, wiped out the Viet Cong insurgents. In my first book, Phoenix and the Birds of Prey, I examined how South Vietnamese and American forces destroyed the insurgency at the village level, and showed that the counterinsurgency programs supported by the United States were not the exercises in indiscriminate murder of antiwar legend. ⁴⁵ Lewis Sorley, a veteran of the U.S. Army and the CIA who also has a Ph.D. but no academic affiliation, addressed both the regular and irregular elements of the war during its latter years in his book A Better War. As American forces gradually withdrew, Sorley showed, South Vietnamese forces improved to such a degree that they were able to defeat a massive offensive by fourteen North Vietnamese divisions in the spring of 1972-an event that orthodox historians have almost completely ignored. ⁴⁶ These revelations have bolstered the interpretation of some earlier revisionists that South Vietnam was a viable country and could have survived had the United States not cut aid to the South Vietnamese government in the war's final years.

B.G. Burkett, a Vietnam veteran and a stockbroker by profession, demolished most of the mythology surrounding Vietnam veterans in one fell swoop. Burkett's book, Stolen Valor, extraordinary for both its detailed research and its nationwide popularity, revealed that several hundred supposed Vietnam veterans in the public spotlight were frauds. Many of these false veterans had appeared on TV and in books to recount stories of atrocities and psychological injuries, providing the evidence desired by antiwar historians. In addition, Burkett used statistics and detective work to disprove long-held generalizations of orthodox historians about Vietnam veterans, such as that these veterans had much higher rates of unemployment, homelessness, and suicide than non-veterans. ⁴⁷

Slowly but surely, the revisionist view is gaining ground. The official reading lists of the U.S. armed forces are peppered with books by revisionists. In recent speeches, President Bush has invoked some revisionist arguments. Substantial elements of the American media have espoused or provided a forum for revisionism. Only among college faculties are there large blocs of people who still refuse to give serious consideration to revisionists and try to prevent others from hearing what the revisionists have to say. Of course, these faculties have not yet caught up with the rest of humanity in fully accepting the ramifications of Soviet Communism's collapse, so one should expect that a good deal more time must pass before the truth will permeate their corridors.

Image: "Vietnam War Memorial" by Little Koshka // CC BY-SA
_____________________________________ Notes

1. Colin Gordon, "The Cloak of Power," New Internationalist (September 1993), http://www.newint.org/issue247/cloak.htm.

2. Mark Bauerlein, "History Department at U of I Flunks Test of Political Diversity," Des Moines Register, 10 October 2007.

3. John Ernst, Forging a Fateful Alliance: Michigan State University and the Vietnam War (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998); Edward Miller, "Grand Designs: Vision, Power and Nation Building in America's Alliance with Ngo Dinh Diem, 1954-1960" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2004); Andrew Preston, The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). This note and most of the other notes contain only a representative sample of sources, for the great volume of Vietnam books renders a comprehensive listing impractical in an article of this size.

4. Kim N. B. Ninh, A World Transformed: The Politics of Culture in Revolutionary Vietnam, 1945-1965 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); Shawn Frederick McHale, Print and Power: Confucianism, Communism, and Buddhism in the Making of Modern Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003).

5. William M. Hammond, Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1962-1968 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988); William Prochnau, Once Upon a Distant War: David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett-Young War Correspondents and Their Early Vietnam Battles (New York: Times Books, 1995).

6. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin Books, 1983).

7. Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988).

8. Joseph Alsop, "The Crusaders," Washington Post, 23 September 1963.

9. Prochnau, Once Upon a Distant War, 397-98.

10. William Turley, The Second Indochina War: A Short Political and Military History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986); Herring, America's Longest War.

11. Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982); George McT. Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (New York: Knopf, 1986).

12. Loren Baritz, Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (New York: William Morrow, 1985); James William Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986).

13. Robert Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1975).

14. Ralph B. Smith, An International History of the Vietnam War, vol. 2 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986).

15. Norman Podhoretz, Why We Were in Vietnam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982).

16. Ellen J. Hammer, A Death in November: America in Vietnam, 1963 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1987); William Colby with James McCargar, Lost Victory: A Firsthand Account of America's Sixteen-Year Involvement in Vietnam (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989).

17. Harry G. Summers, Jr., On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1982); Richard Nixon, No More Vietnams (New York: Arbor House, 1985); Norman B. Hannah, The Key to Failure: Laos and the Vietnam War (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1987); Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam At War: The History, 1945-1975 (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1988).

18. Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

19. Guenter Lewy, America and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

20. Logevall, Choosing War, xiii.

21. Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Jonathan Shays, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Atheneum, 1994).

22. Recent histories alleging that Kennedy was planning to withdraw from Vietnam include John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (New York: Warner Books, 1992); Jones, Death of a Generation; Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Opponents of the withdrawal thesis include Larry Berman, "NSAM 263 and NSAM 273: Manipulating History," in Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted Gittinger, eds., Vietnam: The Early Decisions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 177-203; Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture (Boston: South End Press, 1993); Logevall, Choosing War.

23. Edwin Moïse, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

24. George C. Herring, LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994).

25. Harold P. Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes, 1962-1968 (Langley, VA: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1998).

26. Philip E. Catton, Diem's Final Failure: Prelude to America's War in Vietnam (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002).

27. Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted. Gittinger, eds., International Perspectives on Vietnam (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999); Ronald Bruce Frankum, The United States and Australia in Vietnam, 1954-1968: Silent Partners (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001); Christopher Goscha and Maurice Vaïsse, La guerre du Vietnam et l'Europe, 1963-1973 (Bruxelles: Bruylant, 2003); Thomas Alan Schwartz, LBJ and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

28. Arthur J. Dommen, The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans: Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

29. H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that Led to Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).

30. Francis X. Winters, The Year of the Hare: America in Vietnam, January 25, 1963-February 15, 1964 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997); Geoffrey Shaw, "Ambassador Frederick Nolting's Role in American Diplomatic and Military Policy toward the Government of South Vietnam" (Ph.D. diss., University of Manitoba, 1999).

31. Michael Lind, Vietnam, The Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1999).

32. C. Dale Walton, The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat in Vietnam (London: Frank Cass, 2002).

33. Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

34. Mark Moyar, Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: The CIA's Secret Campaign to Destroy the Viet Cong (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1997); Mark Moyar, Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism in Vietnam, new ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007).

35. Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999).

36. B.G. Burkett, Stolen Valor (Dallas: Verity Press, 1998).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Mark Moyar holds the Kim T. Adamson Chair of Insurgency and Terrorism at the U.S. Marine Corps University, Quantico, VA 22134; moyars@mindspring.com By the early 1990s, when I began studying the Vietnam War, the American public had largely lost interest in the history of that conflict.

# data[].attributes.headline
Soldiers walking through waist-high waters

# data[].attributes.subject
Soldiers walking through waist-high waters

# data[].attributes.body
Time Magazine

More Than 200,000 Vietnam Vets Still Have PTSD

The team determined that even now—40 years after the war ended—about 271,000 Vietnam vets have full war-zone-related PTSD plus war-zone PTSD that meets some diagnostic criteria. More than a third of the veterans who have current war-zone PTSD also have major depressive disorder.

Men who served in the Vietnam war had a war-zone-related PTSD prevalence of 4.5%; when factoring in vets who met some of the criteria, that number climbed to almost 11%. For women veterans, those prevalences were about 6% and 9%, respectively.

“An important minority of Vietnam veterans are symptomatic after four decades, with more than twice as many deteriorating as improving,” the study authors write. “Policy implications include the need for greater access to evidence-based mental health services; the importance of integrating mental health treatment into primary care in light of the nearly 20 percent mortality; attention to the stresses of aging, including retirement, chronic illness, declining social support and cognitive changes that create difficulties with the management of unwanted memories; and anticipating challenges that lie ahead for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.” - Mandy Oaklander   7/22/15

# data[].attributes.body
60's peace sign movement

# data[].attributes.body
Vietnam War

# data[].attributes.body
President Johnson gives this speech, "Why We Are in Vietnam" on July 28, 1965 to tell the public the reasons why he is sending multiple troops to vietnam in persuit of ending Communism there.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
President Lyndon B. Johnson, "Why We Are in Vietnam"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
President Lyndon B. Johnson, "Why We Are in Vietnam" Press conference, July 28, 1965

# data[].attributes.body
The Round Trip: by Lance Pinamonte

Some things stick with you longer than needed...

Recently, I found myself wondering why I am filled with a deep dread whenever I think of a "Round trip Ticket".

The reason finally dawned on me the other day when I was discussing prices for round trip packages with a friend.

In other posts, I have told the world what a normal day was for a flight crew in the RVN.  We started our days before daylight with pre-flight, our mission, or missions, fairly set before takeoff. On many days, our mission would change as the day went on, by changing courses, or schedules, as needed to support, or lift, troops and supplies.

This is an example of one of those days ...

It was a simple day. We were taking off from our revetment with a "Clear Left, Clear Right" from the Gunner, and Crew Chief, hovering to the main strip, calling for clearance, and quickly going into transitional lift, then climbing to 1500'.

Our day was set:  lift an LLRP team into an area near Nui Ba Ra, then fly some resupply to various units in the field. So we flew into Lai Khe to pickup the LRRP's and dropped them without problems. We then went back to Lai Khe, and loaded C's and water for the first resupply run.

After a couple of sorties, we got a call for an emergency Medivac.  We were in the area, so we turned around, turned on the speed, contacted the unit, and realized it was the LRRP's we had dropped earlier.

We came in high and they popped smoke, then dropped down to the tree tops and came in hot to the small clearing.  We picked up a few tracers as we cleared the trees, but nothing heavy.

Carrying an Injured LRRP The LRRP's had two wounded.  One was serious, with a sucking chest wound.  Another had schrapnel in his leg.

I helped load them up and gave the pilots a green light to DiDiMoa!

We cleared the LZ and climbed quickly to 1500', heading at top speed to the Lai Khe Medivac pad.

My gunner and I swung around and checked our passengers. Both were fairly stable and it looked like they would make it home.

We landed shortly, and the medics came out to the pad to help evac our passengers. I was most worried about the guy with the chest wound as his pulse was not very stable.

I then told the pilots I wanted to check the ship out, before we started back to the resupply pad, so they hovered off the pad and set down on the ready pad nearby.

After going over the ship, I found no holes, and we took off to finish our missions for the day.

The rest of the day went smooth, except for a short message from our headquarters, saying we had night On Call, so we came in.  I finished my daily inspection, and we settled into a night in our hammocks on the ship.

It was about midnight when the pilots woke us up. We had a Black Cross mission, Black Cross from Lai Khe to Bein Hoa.  Black Cross meant transporting our dead, and it was done at night.

We landed on the Black Cross pad in Lai Khe and helped the guys load up the body bags. I could see the tags under the marker lights of the ship. One of them was the LRRP we had Medivac'd earlier that day...

As I sat down in the gun well, my Gunner said, "He has gotten a round trip ticket today, God Damn It!"  It is the simple statements that stick with people sometimes ...

We can watch a politician spout paragraphs of hyperbole, and maybe one sentence will hit us as meaningful. Or as my old gunner would say, "They don't pay us enough to give a shit, but many a shit has been given!"

# data[].attributes.body
derogatory term for an Asian person

# data[].attributes.body
U.S. Special Forces

# data[].attributes.body
hike carrying a rucksack; to perform any arduous task

# data[].attributes.body
a soldier just out of boot camp; inexperienced, untested

# data[].attributes.body
any aircraft, usually refering to helicopters

# data[].attributes.body
an operation or a contact

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Johnny Wright - Hello Vietnam 1965 (Kitty Wells) (Songs Of Tom T. Hall)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Decca Records (From Hello Vietnam Album 1965) Johnnie Wright - Hello Vietnam 1965 (A #1 Hit for Johnnie) Johnnie Robert Wright, Jr. (May 13, 1914 - September 27, 2011), known by his stage name Johnny Wright, was an American country music singer-songwriter, who spent much of his career working with Jack Anglin as the popular duo Johnnie & Jack, and was also the husband of Kitty Wells.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"Blowin' in the Wind" - Bob Dylan | Vietnam War Montage

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Country Joe's Anti Vietnam War Song Woodstock

# data[].attributes.body
-Leah Bobby                 January 23, 2017

# data[].attributes.body
Picture 4

# data[].attributes.body
Picture 3

# data[].attributes.body
Picture 2

# data[].attributes.body
Picture 1