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This song highlights the experience of very young Australian soldiers in the Vietnam War. It provides specific details such on key places: Puckapunyul where training took place, Townsville where they shipped off from and Vung Tai where Chinook helicopters departed to fight the Viet Cong

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Vietnamese children with skin peeling from napalm attacks 

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Vietnamese children with skin peeling from napalm attacks 

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To me, this image illustrates the horrific civilian cost of the Vietnam War. I am horrified by the severe nature of the napalm burns and question the morality of the US Army and Government that condoned the use of these abhorrent weapons

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New York Times: What was the Vietnam War About? 

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New York Times: What was the Vietnam War About? 

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Key question: Was America’s war in Vietnam a noble struggle against Communist aggression, a tragic intervention in a civil conflict, or an imperialist counterrevolution to crush a movement of national liberation?

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Vietnam '67

A group of South Vietnamese army soldiers and an American soldier with two captured Vietcong suspects, in Plaines des Joncs, South Vietnam. Credit... Tim Page/Corbis, via Getty Images

Was America's war in Vietnam a noble struggle against Communist aggression, a tragic intervention in a civil conflict, or an imperialist counterrevolution to crush a movement of national liberation? Those competing interpretations ignited fiery debates in the 1960s and remain unresolved today. How we name and define this most controversial of American wars is not a narrow scholarly exercise, but profoundly shapes public memory of its meaning and ongoing significance to American national identity and foreign policy.

During the war years, America's leaders insisted that military force was necessary to defend a sovereign nation - South Vietnam - from external Communist aggression. As President Lyndon B. Johnson put it in 1965, "The first reality is that North Vietnam has attacked the independent nation of South Vietnam. Its object is total conquest."

Even more disturbing, Johnson quickly added (following a script written by his predecessors Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy), the Communists in Vietnam were supported and guided by the Soviet Union and China. Therefore, the war in South Vietnam was not an isolated, local conflict, irrelevant to American national security, but rather one that was inseparable from the nation's highest priority - the Cold War struggle to contain Communism around the globe. Further raising the stakes, policymakers warned that if South Vietnam fell to Communism, neighboring countries would inevitably fall in turn, one after another, like a row of dominoes.

Three decades later, Robert McNamara, a key architect of the Vietnam War who served as defense secretary for both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, renounced those wartime claims - the very ones he and others had invoked to justify the war. In two books, "In Retrospect" (1995) and "Argument Without End" (2000), McNamara conceded that the United States had been "terribly wrong" to intervene in Vietnam. He attributed the failure to a lack of knowledge and judgment. If only he had understood the fervor of Vietnamese nationalism, he wrote, if only he had known that Hanoi was not the pawn of Beijing or Moscow, if only he had realized that the domino theory was wrong, he might have persuaded his presidential bosses to withdraw from Vietnam. Millions of lives would have been saved. If only.

In fact, however, in the 1960s, when McNamara advocated massive military escalation in Vietnam, he simply rejected or ignored any evidence that contradicted Cold War orthodoxy. It's not as if contrary views were unavailable. In the work of the scholar-journalist Bernard Fall, the pages of I. F. Stone's Weekly, speeches at university teach-ins and antiwar rallies and countless other venues, critics pointed out that after World War II the United States made a clear choice to support the French effort to re-establish its colonial rule in Indochina, and eventually assumed the bulk of France's cost for the first Indochina War. It should have been no surprise, therefore, that Vietnamese revolutionaries perceived the United States as a neocolonial power when it committed its own military forces in the next war.

Moreover, critics argued, the primary roots of opposition to the American-backed government in Saigon were indigenous and deep rooted, not just in North Vietnam, but throughout the South.

Indeed, from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s the bulk of Communist-led fighting was carried out by southern guerrillas of the National Liberation Front, known to its enemies as the Vietcong. Only after the war was well underway did large units from North Vietnam arrive on the southern front. Antiwar opponents also challenged the claim that South Vietnam was an "independent nation" established by the Geneva Accords of 1954. Those agreements called for a temporary partition of Vietnam to be shortly followed by a nationwide election to choose a single leader for a unified Vietnam. When it became clear to both Saigon and Washington that the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh would be the overwhelming victor, the South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem, with American support, decided to cancel the election.

Thus began a two-decade failed effort to build a permanent country called "South Vietnam." The government in Saigon was never a malleable puppet of the United States, but it was nonetheless wholly dependent on American military and economic support to survive against its enemies, including many non-Communist parties and factions in the South.

Armed with these criticisms, many opponents of American policy in the 1960s described Vietnam as a civil war - not like the relatively clear-cut North-South division of the American Civil War, but a nationwide struggle of Communist-led forces of the South and North against the American-backed government in the South. By 1966, this analysis was even embraced by some mainstream politicians, including Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Senator Eugene McCarthy, who ran as an antiwar presidential candidate in 1968. Both men called attention to the "South Vietnamese civil war" to emphasize the strength of the southern insurgency and the failure of the Saigon government to gain the broad support of its own people.

By 1972, the idea that Vietnam posed a threat to Cold War America was so discredited, it sometimes sounded as if America's only remaining war aim was to get back its P.O.W.s (President Richard Nixon bizarrely claimed that Hanoi was using them as "negotiating pawns"). Even more mind-boggling were Nixon's historic 1972 trips to Beijing and Moscow. Many Americans wondered how Nixon could offer toasts of peace to Mao Zedong and Leonid Brezhnev while still waging war in Vietnam. As the journalist Jonathan Schell put it, "If these great powers were not, after all, the true foe," then the war in Vietnam "really was a civil war in a small country, as its opponents had always said, and the United States had no business taking part in it."

But alongside the "civil war" interpretation, a more radical critique developed - the view that America's enemy in Vietnam was engaged in a long-term war for national liberation and independence, first from the French and then the United States. According to this position, the war was best understood not as a Cold War struggle between East and West, or a Vietnamese civil war, but as an anticolonial struggle, similar to dozens of others that erupted throughout the Third World in the wake of World War II. When the French were defeated by Vietnamese revolutionaries (despite enormous American support), the United States stepped in directly to wage a counterrevolutionary war against an enemy determined to achieve full and final independence from foreign control.

This interpretation was shared by many on the antiwar left, including Daniel Ellsberg, the once-hawkish defense analyst who turned so strongly against the war that he was willing to sabotage his career by making public 7,000 pages of classified documents about the history of the Vietnam War, the so-called Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg made his argument most succinctly in the 1974 documentary "Hearts and Minds."

"The name for a conflict in which you are opposing a revolution is counterrevolution," he said. "A war in which one side is entirely financed and equipped and supported by foreigners is not a civil war." The question used to be, he added, "might it be possible that we were on the wrong side in the Vietnamese war. We weren't on the wrong side; we are the wrong side."

In the decades since 1975, all three major interpretations have persisted. Some writers and historians have embraced President Ronald Reagan's view that the war was a "noble cause" that might have been won. That position has failed to persuade most specialists in the field, in large part because it greatly exaggerates the military and political virtues and success of the United States and the government of South Vietnam. It also falls short because it depends on counterfactual claims that victory would have been achieved if only the United States had extended its support for Diem (instead of greenlighting his overthrow), or tried a different military strategy, or done a better job winning hearts and minds. However, the war as it was actually conducted by the United States and its allies was a disaster by every measure.

In recent decades, a number of historians - particularly younger scholars trained in Vietnamese and other languages - have developed various versions of the civil war interpretation. Some of them view the period after the French defeat in 1954 as "post-colonial," a time in which long-brewing internal conflicts between competing versions of Vietnamese nationalism came to a head. As the historian Jessica Chapman of Williams College puts it, "The Vietnam War was, at its core, a civil war greatly exacerbated by foreign intervention." Others have described it as a civil war that became "internationalized."

While these scholars have greatly enhanced our knowledge of the complexity and conflict in Vietnamese history, politics and culture, they don't, in my view, assign enough responsibility to the United States for causing and expanding the war as a neocolonial power.

Let's try a thought experiment. What if our own Civil War bore some resemblance to the Vietnamese "civil war"? For starters, we would have to imagine that in 1860 a global superpower - say Britain - had strongly promoted Southern secession, provided virtually all of the funding for the ensuing war and dedicated its vast military to the battle. We must also imagine that in every Southern state, local, pro-Union forces took up arms against the Confederacy. Despite enormous British support, Union forces prevailed. What would Americans call such a war? Most, I think, would remember it as the Second War of Independence. Perhaps African-Americans would call it the First War of Liberation. Only former Confederates and the British might recall it as a "civil war."

I would reverse Chapman's formula and say that the Vietnam War was, at its core, an American war that exacerbated Vietnamese divisions and internationalized the conflict. It is true, of course, that many Vietnamese opposed the Communist path to national liberation, but no other nationalist party or faction proved capable of gaining enough support to hold power. Without American intervention, it is hard to imagine that South Vietnam would have come into being or, if it did, that it would have endured for long.

Moreover, no other foreign nation deployed millions of troops to South Vietnam (although the United States did pressure or pay a handful of other nations, Australia and South Korea most notably, to send smaller military forces). And no other foreign nation or opponent dropped bombs (eight million tons!) on South and North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The introduction of that staggering lethality was the primary driver of a war that cost three million lives, half of them civilians.

If we continue to excuse American conduct in Vietnam as a well-intentioned, if tragic, intervention rather than a purposeful assertion of imperial power, we are less likely to challenge current war managers who have again mired us in apparently endless wars based on false or deeply misleading pretexts. Just as in the Vietnam era, American leaders have ordered troops to distant lands based on boundless abstractions ("the global war on terror" instead of the global threat of "international Communism"). And once again, their mission is to prop up governments that demonstrate no capacity to gain the necessary support of their people. Once again, the United States has waged brutal counterinsurgencies guaranteed to maim, kill or displace countless civilians. It has exacerbated international violence and provoked violent retaliation.

Our leaders, then and now, have insisted that the United States is "the greatest force for good in the world" that wants nothing for itself, only to defeat "terror" and bring peace, stability and self-determination to other lands. The evidence does not support such a claim. We need a new, cleareyed vision of our global conduct. A more critical appraisal of the past is one place to start.

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Opinion | What Was the Vietnam War About? (Published 2018)

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Vietnam '67 Was America's war in Vietnam a noble struggle against Communist aggression, a tragic intervention in a civil conflict, or an imperialist counterrevolution to crush a movement of national liberation? Those competing interpretations ignited fiery debates in the 1960s and remain unresolved today.

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To me, this image illustrates the evil in the look of a soldier

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during the vietnam war, many families were torn apart. Soldiers had to leave their homes,

and some didn't come back. Kids grew up without their moms or dad, and this picture shows

how they were torturing him.

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To me this illustrate an act of attack. Bunch of helicoptors attacking an area. This portrays chaos as well

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The song's lyrics criticize the privilege that wealthy people, particularly during times of war got. It shows the difference between the experiences of those who are privileged and those who are less privileged , especially in terms of being drafted into the military. The song shows a message of political criticism.

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For me, this picture illustrates the terrifying deaths that was happening, every day.

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This song is good for Vietnamese people

because it helps them see good things in the world,

even during hard times like the Vietnam War.

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"Hãy tiếp tục đoàn kết với Việt Nam" - Vietnamese War Song

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During the Vietnam War, there were several songs that became associated with the conflict. The song delivers a powerful message with lyrics like “(War, huh) yeah! (What is it good for?) absolutely nothing.” It is a psychedelic funk that captures the sentiment of many who felt the war was unjust. Edwin Starr's charismatic delivery and performance make this song a significant piece reflecting the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War.

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This image shows a soldier in the water, possibly looking for enemies, or trying to hide from the enemies. It can also suggest that the soldier might be trying to cool off from all the trauma or trying to find peace by going into the water.

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this article talks about everything that happened

during and before the war, and all the people that played an

important role in the war.

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The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States.

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Vietnam 7/8 year old, holding his sister of 7 months.

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Vietnam 7/8 year old, holding his sister of 7 months.

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To me, this image shows the horrible things the children have went through during the war. Many of them have lost their parents and became orphans who live in the streets with no food and no roof to keep them protected from the cold and the danger.

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This song was created by a band of singers, trying to portray a humorous mood to the people that experienced bad things in the war.

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The Fish Cheer / I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To Die Rag

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The image illustrates a scene from the Vietnam War showing U.S. Army UH-1H Hueys helicopters inserting ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) troops in Khâm Đức, Vietnam, on July 12, 1970. This image captures a moment of military operations during the conflict, which shows the use of helicopters to transport troops to and from combat zones. The presence of helicopters played a significant role in the Vietnam War, contributing to the unique character of the conflict and influencing military strategies of the time.

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The songs highlights the tragedy and deaths that were happening. It also talks about how they will never get over their past.

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This article talks about everything that caused the Vietname war and how people were affected in the war. And how it impacted the people during it.

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The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States.

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The article talks about how political decisions, both in the United States and Vietnam, shaped the course of the war. It also discusses the horrible impact of the war on Vietnamese civilians and the environment.

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The military historian Max Boot takes on the counter-insurgency maven Edward Lansdale.

For almost thirty years, by means financial, military, and diplomatic, the United States tried to prevent Vietnam from becoming a Communist state. Millions died in that struggle. By the time active American military engagement ended, the United States had dropped more than three times as many tons of bombs on Vietnam, a country the size of New Mexico, as the Allies dropped in all of the Second World War. At the height of the bombing, it was costing us ten dollars for every dollar of damage we inflicted. We got nothing for it.

We got nothing for pretty much everything we tried in Vietnam, and it's hard to pick out a moment in those thirty years when anti-Communist forces were on a sustainable track to prevailing. Political and military leaders misunderstood the enemy's motives; they misread conditions on the ground; they tried to beat unconventional fighters with conventional tactics; they massacred civilians. They pursued strategies that seemed designed to produce neither a victory nor a settlement, only what Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers but once a passionate supporter of American intervention, called "the stalemate machine."

Could the United States have found a strategic through line to the outcome we wanted? Could we have adopted a different strategy that would have yielded a secure non-Communist South Vietnam? Max Boot's " The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam " (Liveright) is an argument that there was a winning strategy-or, at least, a strategy with better odds than the one we followed.

There were two major wars against the Communists in Vietnam. The first was an anticolonial war between Communist nationalists and France, which, except for a period during the Second World War, when the Japanese took over, had ruled the country since the eighteen-eighties. That war lasted from 1946 to 1954, when the French lost the battle of Dien Bien Phu and negotiated a settlement, the Geneva Accords, that partitioned the country at the seventeenth parallel. The United States had funded France's military failure to the tune of about $2.5 billion.

The second war was a civil war between the two zones created at Geneva: North Vietnam, governed by Vietnamese Communists, and South Vietnam, backed by American aid and, eventually, by American troops. That war lasted from 1954 (or 1955 or 1959, depending on your definition of an "act of war") to 1975, when Communist forces entered Saigon and unified the country. The second war is the Vietnam War, "our" war.

The more we look at American decision-making in Vietnam, the less sense it makes. Geopolitics helps explain our concerns about the fate of Vietnam in the nineteen-forties and fifties. Relations with the Soviet Union and China were hostile, and Southeast Asia and the Korean peninsula were in political turmoil. Still, paying for France to reclaim its colony just as the world was about to experience a wave of decolonization was a dubious undertaking.

By 1963, however, "peaceful coexistence" was the policy of the American and Soviet governments, Korea had effectively been partitioned, and the Sino-Soviet split made the threat of a global Communist movement seem no longer a pressing concern. And yet that was when the United States embarked on a policy of military escalation. There were sixteen thousand American advisers in South Vietnam in 1963; during the next ten years, some three million American soldiers would serve there.

Historians argue about whether a given battle was a success or a failure, but, over-all, the military mission was catastrophic on many levels. The average age of American G.I.s in Vietnam was about twenty-two. By 1971, thousands of them were on opium or heroin, and more than three hundred incidents of fragging-officers wounded or killed by their own troops-were reported. Half a million Vietnam veterans would suffer from P.T.S.D., a higher proportion than for the Second World War.

People sometimes assume that Western opinion leaders turned against the war only after U.S. marines waded ashore at Da Nang, in 1965, and the body counts began to rise. That's not the case. As Fredrik Logevall points out in his study of American decision-making, " Choosing War " (1999), the United States was warned repeatedly about the folly of involvement.

Intervention in Southeast Asia would be "an entanglement without end," France's President, Charles de Gaulle, speaking from his own nation's long experience in Indochina, told President Kennedy. The United States, he said, would find itself in a "bottomless military and political swamp." Jawaharlal Nehru, the Prime Minister of India, told Kennedy that sending in American troops would be a disastrous decision. Walter Lippmann, the dean of American political commentators back when political commentary had such titles, warned, in 1963, "The price of a military victory in the Vietnamese war is higher than American vital interests can justify."

De Gaulle and Nehru had reasons of their own for wanting the United States to keep out of Southeast Asia. But Kennedy himself was keenly aware of the risks of entrapment, and so was his successor. "There ain't no daylight in Vietnam, there's not a bit," Lyndon Johnson said in 1965. "The more bombs you drop, the more nations you scare, the more people you make mad." Three years later, he was forced to withdraw from his reëlection campaign, his political career destroyed by his inability to end the war. The first time someone claimed to see a "light at the end of the tunnel" in Vietnam was in 1953. People were still using that expression in 1967. By then, American public opinion and much of the media were antiwar. Yet we continued to send men to fight there for six more years.

Our international standing was never dependent on our commitment to South Vietnam. We might have been accused of inconstancy for abandoning an ally, but everyone would have understood. In fact, the longer the war went on the more our image suffered. The United States engaged in a number of high-handed and extralegal interventions in the affairs of other nations during the Cold War, but nothing damaged our reputation like Vietnam. It not only shattered our image of invincibility. It meant that a whole generation grew up looking upon the United States as an imperialist, militarist, and racist power. The political capital we accumulated after leading the alliance against Fascism in the Second World War and then helping rebuild Japan and Western Europe we burned through in Southeast Asia.

American Presidents were not imperialists. They genuinely wanted a free and independent South Vietnam, yet the gap between that aspiration and the reality of the military and political situation in-country was unbridgeable. They could see the problem, but they could not solve it. Political terms are short, and so politics is short-term. The main consideration that seems to have presented itself to those Presidents, from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon, who insisted on staying the course was domestic politics-the fear of being blamed by voters for losing Southeast Asia to Communism. If Southeast Asia was going to be lost to Communism, they preferred that it be on another President's head. It was a costly calculation.

There were some American officials, even some diplomats and generals, who believed in the mission but saw that the strategy wasn't working and had an idea why. One of these was John Paul Vann, a lieutenant colonel in the Army who was assigned to a South Vietnamese commander in 1962, at a time when Americans restricted themselves to an advisory role. It seemed to Vann that South Vietnamese officers were trying to keep their troops out of combat. They would call in air strikes whenever they could, which raised body counts but killed civilians or drove them to the Vietcong. Vann cultivated some young American journalists-among them David Halberstam, of the New York Times, and Neil Sheehan, of United Press International, who had just arrived in Vietnam-to get out his story that the war was not going well.

Vann didn't want the United States to withdraw. He wanted the United States to win. He was all about killing the enemy. But his efforts to persuade his superiors in Vietnam and Washington failed, and he resigned from the Army in 1963. He returned to Vietnam as a civilian in 1965, and was killed there, in a helicopter crash, in 1972. In 1988, Sheehan published a book about him, " A Bright Shining Lie," which won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and is a classic of Vietnam literature.

"The Road Not Taken" is the story of another military figure sympathetic to the mission and critical of the strategy, Major General Edward Lansdale, and Boot says that his intention is to do for Lansdale what Sheehan "so memorably accomplished for John Paul Vann." Boot's task is tougher. Sheehan was in Vietnam, and he knew Vann and the people Vann worked with. He also knew some secrets about Vann's private life. Boot did not know Lansdale, who died in 1987, but he interviewed people who did; he read formerly classified documents; and he had access to Lansdale's personal correspondence, including letters to his longtime Filipina mistress, Patrocinio (Pat) Yapcinco Kelly.

Lansdale was at various times an officer in the Army and the Air Force, but those jobs were usually covers. For much of his career, he worked for the C.I.A. He was brought up in California. He attended U.C.L.A. but failed to graduate, and then got married and went into advertising, where he had some success. In 1942, with the United States at war with the Axis powers, he joined the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.), the nation's first civilian intelligence service and the precursor of the C.I.A. During the war, Lansdale worked Stateside, but in 1945, shortly after the Japanese surrender, he was sent to the Philippines.

It was there that he had the first of his professional triumphs. He ran covert operations to help the Philippine government defeat a small-scale Communist uprising, and he supervised the candidacy of a Filipino politician named Ramon Magsaysay and got him elected President, in 1953. To assist in that effort, Lansdale created an outfit called the National Movement for Free Elections. It was funded by the C.I.A.

This was Lansdale's modus operandi. He was a fabricator of fronts, the man behind the curtain. He manipulated events-through payoffs, propaganda, and sometimes more nefarious means-to insure that indigenous politicians friendly to the United States would be "freely" elected. Internal opposition to these leaders could then be characterized as "an insurgency" (in Vietnam, it would be termed "aggression"), a situation that called for the United States to intervene in order to save democracy. Magsaysay's speeches as a Presidential candidate, for example, were written by a C.I.A. agent. (The Soviets, of course, operated in exactly the same way, through fronts and election-fixing. The Cold War was a looking-glass war.)

In 1954, fresh from his success with Magsaysay, Lansdale was sent to South Vietnam by the director of the C.I.A., Allen Dulles, with instructions to do there what he had done in the Philippines: see to the establishment of a pro-Western government and assist it in finding ways to check Communist encroachment. (The Communists in question were, of course, Vietnamese opposed to a government put in place and propped up by foreign powers.)

As Boot explains, Vietnam was a different level of the game. The Philippines was a former American colony. Almost all Filipinos were Christians. They liked Americans and had fought with them in the war against Japan. English was the language used by the government. The Vietnamese, by contrast, had had almost no experience with Americans and were proud of their two-thousand-year history of resistance to foreign invaders, from the Chinese and the Mongols to the French and the Japanese. There were more than a million Vietnamese Catholics, but, in a population of twenty-five million, eighty per cent practiced some form of Buddhism.

The South Vietnamese who welcomed the American presence after 1954 were mainly urbanites and people who had prospered under French rule. Eighty per cent of the population lived in the countryside, though, and it was the strategy of the Vietcong to convince them that the United States was just one more foreign invader, no different from the Japanese or the French, or from Kublai Khan.

In 1954, Ho Chi Minh, the President of North Vietnam, was a popular figure. He was a Communist, but he was a Communist because he was a nationalist. Twice he had appealed to American Presidents to support his independence movement-to Woodrow Wilson after the First World War, and Truman at the end of the Second-and twice he had been ignored. Only the Communists, he had concluded, were truly committed to the principle of self-determination in Asia. The Geneva Accords called for a national election to be held in Vietnam in 1956; that election was not held, but many people in the American government thought that Ho would have won.

Lansdale knew neither French nor Vietnamese. For that matter, he couldn't even speak Tagalog, the native language of the Philippines. (In the Philippines, he is said to have sometimes communicated by charades, or by drawing pictures in the sand.) Yet, as he had done in the Philippines, he managed to get close to a local political figure and become his consigliere. In the Philippines, Lansdale could choose the politician he wanted to work with; in Vietnam, he had to play the card he was dealt. The card's name was Ngo Dinh Diem.

Diem was the personification of the paradoxes of American designs in Southeast Asia. "A curious blend of heroism mixed with a narrowness of view and of egotism . . . a messiah without a message" is how one American diplomat described him. He was a devout Catholic who hated the Communists. One of his brothers had been killed in 1945 by the Vietminh-the Communist-dominated nationalist party. During the war with France, he had spent two years in the United States, where he impressed a number of American politicians, including the young John F. Kennedy. In 1954, the year of the French defeat, he was appointed Prime Minister by the Emperor, Bao Dai, a French puppet who lived luxuriously in Europe and did not speak Vietnamese well.

Diem was a workaholic who could hold forth for hours before journalists and other visitors to the Presidential Palace. A two-hour Diem monologue was considered a quickie, and he didn't like to be interrupted. But Diem did not see himself as a Western puppet. He was a genuine nationalist-on paper, the plausible leader of an independent non-Communist South Vietnam.

On the other hand, Diem was no champion of representative democracy. His political philosophy was a not entirely intelligible blend of personalism (a quasi-spiritual French school of thought), Confucianism, and authoritarianism. He aspired to be a benevolent autocrat, but he had little understanding of the condition Vietnamese society was in after seventy years of colonial rule.

The French had replaced the Confucian educational system and had tried to manufacture a new national identity: Franco-Vietnamese. They were only partly successful. It was not obvious how Diem and the Americans were supposed to forge a nation from the fractured society the French left behind. Diem's idea was to create a cult of himself and the nation. "A sacred respect is due to the person of the sovereign," he claimed. "He is the mediator between the people and heaven." He had altars featuring his picture put up in the streets, and a hymn praising him was sung along with the national anthem.

This ambition may have been naïve. What made it poisonous was nepotism. Diem was deeply loyal to and dependent on his family, and his family were an unloved bunch. One of his brothers was the Catholic bishop of the coastal city of Hue. Another was the boss-the warlord, really-of central Vietnam. A third brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, lived in the Presidential Palace with his wife, Tran Le Xuan, a woman known to the press, and thus to the world, as the Dragon Lady, Madame Nhu. She operated as Diem's hostess (he was celibate) and was free with her usually inflammatory political opinions. American officials in Saigon prayed that the Nhus would somehow disappear, but they were the only people Diem trusted.

Nhu ran the underside of the Diem regime. He created a shadowy political party, the Can Lao, whose members swore loyalty to Diem, and he made membership a prerequisite for career advancement. According to Frances FitzGerald's book " Fire in the Lake " (1972), he funded the party by means of piracy, extortion, opium trading, and currency-exchange manipulation. He also created a series of secret-police and intelligence organizations. Thousands of Vietnamese suspected of disloyalty were arrested, tortured, and executed by beheading or disembowelment. Political opponents were imprisoned. For nine years, the Ngo family was the wobbling pivot on which we rested our hopes for a non-Communist South Vietnam.

The United States had declined to be a signatory to the Geneva Accords-which had, after all, effectively created a new Communist state-but Lansdale's arrival in Saigon on the eve of Diem's official appointment was a signal that we intended to supervise the outcome. And the American government was always prepared to swap out South Vietnamese leaders when one seemed to falter-a privilege we bought with enormous amounts of aid, some $1.5 billion between 1955 and 1961. It is to Lansdale's credit that Diem survived as long as he did.

After landing in Saigon and setting up a front, the Saigon Military Mission, Lansdale began sending infiltrators into North Vietnam (violating a promise that the United States had made about respecting the ceasefire agreed to at Geneva, though the North Vietnamese were violating the accord, too). The agents were instructed to carry out sabotage and other subversive activities, standard C.I.A. procedure around the world. But almost every agent the agency sent in underground somewhere was captured, tortured, and killed, usually quickly, and this is what happened to most of Lansdale's agents. People survive in totalitarian regimes by becoming informers, and those regimes were often tipped off by double agents.

The Geneva Accords provided for a three-hundred-day grace period before the partition in order to allow Vietnamese to move from North to South or vice versa, and Lansdale, using American ships and an airline secretly owned by the C.I.A., arranged for some nine hundred thousand Vietnamese, most of them Catholics and many of them people who had collaborated with the French, to emigrate below the seventeenth parallel. (A much smaller number immigrated to the North.) These émigrés provided Diem with a political base.

Lansdale's most important accomplishment was helping Diem win the so-called battle of the sects. The French defeat had left a power vacuum, and groups besides the Vietminh were jockeying for turf. In 1955, three of them united in opposition to Diem: the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao, religious sects, and the Binh Xuyen, an organized-crime society with a private army of ten thousand men.

Diem neutralized the religious sects by the expedient of having Lansdale use C.I.A. funds to buy them off. Boot says the amount may have been as high as twelve million dollars, which would be a hundred million dollars today. But the Binh Xuyen, which controlled the Saigon police, remained a threat. Worried that Diem was not strong enough to hold the country together, the U.S. Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, sent cables to the American embassies in Saigon and Paris authorizing officials to find a replacement. Lansdale warned Diem that U.S. support was waning, prompting him to launch an attack on the Binh Xuyen. The Binh Xuyen was routed, and Dulles countermanded his order.

To secure his winnings, Diem called for a referendum to determine whether he or Bao Dai, the former Emperor, should be head of state. Diem won, supposedly with 98.2 per cent of the vote. He carried Saigon with 605,025 votes out of 450,000 registered voters. Lansdale's main contribution to the campaign was to suggest that the ballots for Diem be printed in red (considered a lucky color) and the ballots for Bao Dai in green (a color associated with cuckolds). Boot does not mention that this simplified Nhu's instructions to his poll watchers: he told them to throw out all the green ballots.

With Diem's consolidation of authority, Boot says, Lansdale reached "the apogee of his power and influence." In 1956, he left Southeast Asia and took a position in the Pentagon helping to develop special forces like the Navy SEALS and the Green Berets. He enjoyed a brief resurgence with Kennedy's election, in 1960. Kennedy was a Cold Warrior, but he was not locked into a Cold War mentality. He liked outside-the-box types, and he liked Lansdale and even considered appointing him Ambassador to South Vietnam. But the State Department and the Pentagon did not like outside-the-box types and they certainly did not like Lansdale, who remained in the States and was assigned to head Operation Mongoose, charged with devising methods for overthrowing Fidel Castro.

Lansdale does not seem to have been directly involved in the notoriously wacko assassination plots against Castro (the poisoned cigar and so on), but Boot suggests that he knew of such plans and would not have objected to them. He did come up with a scheme for an American submarine to surface off the Cuban coast and fire explosives into the sky. Rumors, introduced inside Cuba by C.I.A. agents, that Castro was doomed would lead Cubans to interpret the lights in the sky as a sign of divine disapproval of the regime.

In the mid-seventies, in a statement to a congressional committee, Lansdale denied proposing the scheme (Boot says he lied), but it was consistent with his usual strategy, which, in the case of Cuba, was to fund an indigenous opposition movement whose suppression would give the United States an excuse to send in troops. A lot of brainpower was wasted on those anti-Castro schemes. Castro would run Cuba for another forty-five years. The country is now ruled by his brother.

Lansdale was reassigned to Vietnam in 1965, but Diem was dead. He had been deposed in 1963, in a coup d'état to which the American government had given its approval. He and Nhu were assassinated shortly after they surrendered. (Madame Nhu was in Beverly Hills, and escaped retribution.) There were celebrations in the streets of Saigon, but the event marked the beginning of a series of coups and government by generals in South Vietnam. Short of withdrawal, the United States now had no choice but to take over the war.

By 1965, therefore, when Lansdale arrived for his second tour of duty, the American military was fully in charge. It had little interest in the sort of covert operations Lansdale specialized in. The strategy now was "attrition": kill as many of the enemy as possible. "Life is cheap in the Orient," as General William Westmoreland, the commander of American forces, explained to the filmmaker Peter Davis-who, in his documentary "Hearts and Minds" (1974), juxtaposed the remark with scenes of Vietnamese mourning their dead, imagery already familiar from photographs published and broadcast around the world. Lansdale was not able to accomplish much, and he returned to the United States in 1968.

In 1972, he published a memoir, " In the Midst of Wars," in which he was obliged to recirculate a lot of cover stories-which is to say, fabrications-about his career. Reception of the book was not kind.

Lansdale's private life turns out to have been a little sad. From the letters Boot quotes, it is clear that Pat was the love of his life. "I'm just not a whole person away from you," a typical letter to Pat reads, "and cannot understand why God brought us together when I had previous obligations unless He meant us for each other." But Lansdale's wife would not give him a divorce, and he reconciled himself to trying to keep the marriage alive. He suffered for many years from longing and remorse. When Lansdale was with his wife, Pat dated other men. There appear to have been no significant dalliances on his part. Only after his wife died, in 1973, were he and Pat married.

"The Road Not Taken" is not the first book devoted to Edward Lansdale, and it is not quite of the calibre of "A Bright Shining Lie," in part because Boot can't provide the ground-level reporting that Sheehan could. But it is expansive and detailed, it is well written, and it sheds light on a good deal about U.S. covert activities in postwar Southeast Asia.

Boot is a military historian, a columnist, and a foreign-policy adviser who has worked with the Presidential campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Marco Rubio. He has been highly critical of Donald Trump, and describes his social views as liberal, but he has been a proponent of American "leadership," a term that usually connotes interventionism.

One might therefore have expected his book to adopt a revisionist line on Vietnam-to argue, for example, that the antiwar media misrepresented the military situation and made it politically impossible for us to prosecute the war to the fullest of our capabilities. He clearly wants to suggest that the war was winnable, and he believes that Lansdale's approach was the wiser one, but he is cautious in his analysis of what went wrong. It was a war with too many variables for a single strategic choice to have tipped the balance.

Interestingly, and despite some prefatory claims to the contrary, "The Road Not Taken" does not really transform the standard picture of Lansdale. Everyone knew that he was C.I.A., and that he combined an affable and artless personality with a talent for dirty tricks. Boot's Lansdale is not much different from the one FitzGerald sketched in "Fire in the Lake," back in 1972. "Lansdale was in many respects a remarkable man," she wrote:

He had faith in his own good motives. No theorist, he was rather an enthusiast, a man who believed that Communism in Asia would crumble before men of goodwill with some concern for "the little guy" and the proper counterinsurgency skills. He had a great talent for practical politics and for personal involvement in what to most Americans would seem the most distinctly foreign of affairs.

If anything, Boot tries to moderate some of Lansdale's received reputation. Sheehan, in "A Bright Shining Lie," called South Vietnam "the creation of Edward Lansdale." Boot thinks this is an exaggeration, and a lot of his book is committed to restoring a sense of proportion to his subject's image as a political Svengali, or "Lawrence of Asia." So why did he write "The Road Not Taken"? And why should we read it?

In many ways, Lansdale was a throwback. He operated in the spirit of the old O.S.S. He treated all conditions as wartime conditions, and so did not scruple to use whatever means necessary-from bribes and misinformation to black ops-to achieve ends favorable to the interests of the United States. Like the man who created the O.S.S., General William (Wild Bill) Donovan, he was a backslapper who prized informality and was indifferent to such bureaucratic punctilio as "the chain of command." He was a freelancer. He made his own rules.

That is exactly what his C.I.A. masters wanted him to do. And it is why, after the American military took charge in Vietnam and bureaucratic punctilio was back in style, his influence waned and he was put on the shelf. Techno-strategists like Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, had no use for Lansdale. They did not even find him entertaining. They looked on him as a harebrained troglodyte.

Still, McNamara's strategy failed. Did Lansdale know something that McNamara and the rest of Kennedy and Johnson's "best and brightest" did not? Boot thinks he did, and one purpose of his book is to revive Lansdale as a pioneer of counter-insurgency theory.

Lansdale was a proponent of the "hearts and minds" approach. He believed in the use of subterfuge and force, but he rejected "search and destroy" tactics-invading villages and hunting out the enemy, as American forces did repeatedly in South Vietnam. It was a search-and-destroy mission that resulted in the massacre of hundreds of civilians at My Lai, in 1968.

Tactics like this, Lansdale saw, only alienated the population, and he advocated what he called "civic action," which he defined, in an article in Foreign Affairs in 1964, as "an extension of military courtesy, in which the soldier citizen becomes the brotherly protector of the civilian citizen." In other words, soldiers are fighters, but they are also salesmen. They need to sell the benefits of the regime they are fighting for, and to do so by demonstrating, concretely, their commitment to the lives of the people. This is what Lansdale believed that the Vietcong were doing, and what the Philippine rebels, who called themselves the Hukbalahap, had done. They understood the Maoist notion that the people are the water, and the soldiers must live among them as the fish.

As Boot notes, Lansdale was by no means the only person who believed that the way to beat the Vietcong was to play their game by embedding anti-Communist forces, trained by American advisers, in the villages. This happened to be the theme of " The Ugly American," by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, which was published in 1958 and spent an astonishing seventy-eight weeks on the best-seller list. Lederer and Lansdale were friends, and Lansdale appears in the book as a character named Colonel Hillandale, who entertains locals with his harmonica (as Lansdale was known to do).

"The Ugly American" was intended-and was received by many-as a primer on counter-insurgency for battlegrounds like Vietnam. Although the title has come to refer to vulgar American tourists, that was not the intention. In the book, the "ugly American" is the hero, a man who works side by side with the locals to help improve rice production. He just happens to be ugly.

Boot, oddly, doesn't mention it, but the United States was engaged in civic action in South Vietnam from the beginning of the Diem regime. Through the Agency for International Development, we had been providing agricultural, educational, infrastructural, and medical assistance. There was graft, but there were also results. Rice production doubled between 1954 and 1959, and production of livestock tripled. We gave far more in military aid, but that is because our policy was to enable South Vietnam to defend itself.

In the pursuit of civic action, though, there was always the practical question of just how South Vietnamese troops and their American advisers were supposed to insinuate themselves into villages in the countryside. It was universally understood, long before the marines arrived, that in the countryside the night belonged to the Vietcong. No one wanted to be out after sunset away from a fortified position. John Paul Vann was notorious for riding his jeep at night along country roads. People didn't do that.

What was crucially missing for a counter-insurgency program to work, as Lansdale pointed out, was a government to which the population could feel loyalty. Despite all his exertions as the Wizard of Saigon, pulling Diem's strings from behind the curtain, he could not make Diem into a nationalist hero like Ho. As many historians do, Boot believes that the Diem coup was the key event in the war, that it put the United States on a path of intervention from which there was no escape and no return. "How different history might have been," he speculates, "if Lansdale or a Lansdale-like figure had remained close enough to Diem to exercise a benign influence and offset the paranoid counsel of his brother." But Boot also recognizes that events may have been beyond Lansdale's or Diem's control. "Perhaps Lansdale's achievements could not have lasted in any case," he says.

Probably not. Lansdale was writing on water. The Vietnam he imagined was a Western fantasy. Although the best and the brightest in Washington shunned and ignored him, Lansdale shared their world view, the world view that defined the Cold War. He was a liberal internationalist. He believed that if you scratched a Vietnamese or a Filipino you found a James Madison under the skin.

Some Vietnam reporters who were contemporaries of Lansdale's, like Stanley Karnow, who covered the war for a number of news organizations, and the Times correspondent A. J. Langguth, assumed that the artlessness and the harmonica playing were an act, that Lansdale was a deeply canny operative who hid his real nature from everyone. Boot's book suggests the opposite. His Lansdale is a very simple man. Unquestioned faith in his own motives is what allowed him to manipulate others for what he knew would be their own ultimate good. He was not the first American to think that way, and he will not be the last.

The English writer James Fenton was in Saigon, working as a journalist, when Vietcong troops arrived there in 1975. He managed, more or less by accident, to be sitting in the first tank to enter the courtyard of the Presidential Palace. Fenton described the experience in a memorable article, "The Fall of Saigon," published in Granta in 1985.

Like many Westerners of his education and generation, Fenton had hoped for a Vietcong victory, and he was impressed by the soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army when they marched into the city. But he stayed around long enough to see the shape that the postwar era would take. The Vietnamese Communists did what totalitarian regimes do: they took over the schools and universities, they shut down the free press, they pursued programs of enforced relocation and reëducation. Many South Vietnamese disappeared.

Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, and Ho's body, like Lenin's, was installed in a mausoleum for public viewing. Agriculture was collectivized and a five-year plan of modernization was instituted. The results were calamitous. During the next ten years, many hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese fled the country, most of them by launching boats into the South China Sea. Two hundred thousand more are estimated to have died trying. "We had been seduced by Ho," Fenton concluded. What he and his friends had refused to realize, he wrote, was that "the victory of the Vietnamese was a victory for Stalinism." By 1975, though, most Americans and Europeans had stopped caring what happened in Southeast Asia.

Then, around 1986, the screw of history took another turn. Like many other Communist states at the time, Vietnam introduced market reforms. The economy responded, and soon Western powers found a reason to be interested in Southeast Asia all over again: cheap labor. Vietnam is now a major exporter of finished goods. It is a safe bet that somewhere in your house you have a pair of sneakers or a piece of electronic equipment stamped with the words "Made in Vietnam." ♦

An earlier version of this article misidentified Max Boot's role in past Presidential campaigns.

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“the road not taken: edward lansdale an the american tragedy in vietnam”

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The military historian Max Boot takes on the counter-insurgency maven Edward Lansdale.

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This song is traditional for the Vietnamese, and it is also sung in their language.

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"Liberation March" - Vietnamese War Song

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The article explains how the war started, and also how they tried to stop the US from fighting, and attacking but the Us refused too.

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NOTE TO READERS
"Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations" has been retired and is no longer maintained. For more information, please see the full notice.

In late January, 1968, during the lunar new year (or "Tet") holiday, North Vietnamese and communist Viet Cong forces launched a coordinated attack against a number of targets in South Vietnam. The U.S. and South Vietnamese militaries sustained heavy losses before finally repelling the communist assault. The Tet Offensive played an important role in weakening U.S. public support for the war in Vietnam.

U.S. Captain Franklin Eller coordinates with military command during the Tet Offensive

Ho Chi Minh and leaders in Hanoi planned the Tet Offensive in the hopes of achieving a decisive victory that would end the grinding conflict that frustrated military leaders on both sides. A successful attack on major cities might force the United States to negotiate or perhaps even to withdraw. At the very least, the North Vietnamese hoped it would serve to stop the ongoing escalation of guerilla attacks and bombing in the North. Hanoi selected the Tet holiday to strike because it was traditionally a time of truce, and because Vietnamese traveling to spend the festival with their relatives provided cover for the movement of South Vietnamese National Liberation Forces (NLF) who supported the communist forces.

The first phase of the assault began on January 30 and 31, when NLF forces simultaneously attacked a number of targets, mostly populated areas and places with heavy U.S. troop presence. The strikes on the major cities of Huế and Saigon had a strong psychological impact, as they showed that the NLF troops were not as weak as the Johnson Administration had previously claimed. The NLF even managed to breach the outer walls of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Although the first phase of the offensive became the most famous, a second phase also launched simultaneous assaults on smaller cities and towns on May 4 and stretched into June. A third phase began in August and lasted six weeks. In the months that followed, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces retook the towns that the NLF had secured over the course of the offensive, but they incurred heavy military and civilian casualties in the process.

At the end of the Tet Offensive, both sides had endured losses, and both sides claimed victory. The U.S. and South Vietnamese military response almost completely eliminated the NLF forces and regained all of the lost territory. At the same time, the Tet Offensive weakened domestic support for the Johnson Administration as the vivid reporting on the Tet Offensive by the U.S. media made clear to the American public that an overall victory in Vietnam was not imminent.

The aftermath of Tet brought public discussions about de-escalation, but not before U.S. generals asked for additional troops for a wide-scale "accelerated pacification program." Believing that the U.S. was in a position to defeat the North, these military leaders sought to press for a U.S.-South Vietnam offensive. Johnson and others, however, read the situation differently. Johnson announced that the bombing of North Vietnam would cease above the 20th parallel and placed a limit on U.S. troops in South Vietnam. Johnson also attempted to set parameters for peace talks, but it would be several more years before these came to fruition. Within the United States, protests against continued involvement in Vietnam intensified. On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced that he would not seek a second term as president. The job of finding a way out of Vietnam was left to the next U.S. president, Richard Nixon.

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Milestones: 1961-1968 - Office of the Historian

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To me, this picture shows the type of weapons they used in the war

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Saad El Ouazzani - Origins of the Vietnam War

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Saad El Ouazzani - Origins of the Vietnam War

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The article talks about the origins of the Vietnam War, detailing its history from French colonization to Japan's occupation during World War II, the formation of the Viet Minh, and the involvement of the United States leading up to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Additionally, it provides information about the exhibits at the museum, such as "Faces of War: Documenting the Vietnam War from the Front Lines."

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The Vietnam War (1955-1975) traces its roots to the colonization of Vietnam by France in the late 19th Century.&nbsp;

In 1884, all of Vietnam fell under French rule; in 1887, it was fully integrated into French Indochina. France developed a Western system of education throughout its colonies, propagated Roman Catholicism, and developed a plantation economy to promote the export of tobacco, indigo, tea, and coffee. French settlers moved mostly into southern Vietnam and based themselves around the city of Saigon. Independence movements against French rule developed at the start of colonization, but France maintained control of Vietnam until World War II (1941-1945), when Japan occupied the country.

During World War II, a national liberation movement formed under the direction of communist revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh to combat the French and the occupying Japanese forces. The Viet Minh, as they were known, coordinated their efforts with Allied troops fighting in the war's Pacific Theater until the eventual defeat of Japan in 1945. After the war, the Viet Minh moved to the city of Hanoi in northern Vietnam and proclaimed national independence under a provisional government-a move that would lead to the outbreak of the First Indochina War (1946-1954) as France sought to reclaim its colony.

Backed by communist governments in the Soviet Union and the newly formed People's Republic of China, the Viet Minh held their ground. In 1950, the fighting escalated to a Cold War crisis as the Korean War raged to the north. At the Geneva Conference of 1954, an accord was reached with the hope of finding a peaceful resolution, calling for the separation of Vietnam at the 17th parallel with French loyalists moving to the south and communist sympathizers moving to the north. The Geneva Accords stipulated that Vietnam be reunified by a national election in 1956, but as unification efforts stalled and Cold War tensions continued to build, the United States became increasingly involved. In addition to contributing equipment and millions of dollars in financial aid, the U.S. soon deployed a contingent of non-combat personnel with its Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) to train Republic of Vietnam (RVN) forces and to oppose the spread of communism into South Vietnam.

With the Soviet Union similarly supporting its communist allies in North Vietnam-officially called the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV)-and stepping up its Cold War rhetoric with the U.S. government, tensions continued to mount over the next several years. In early August 1964, the controversial Gulf of Tonkin incidents-during which the United States alleged two separate confrontations with the North Vietnamese Navy, including an unprompted attack on USS Maddox by a trio of torpedo boats-gave the impetus for the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution by Congress, enabling President Lyndon Johnson to authorize direct military action without a formal declaration of war.

By February, 1965, the U.S. had begun sustained bombing raids throughout North Vietnam and, after several attacks on air bases, deployed 3,500 United States Marines to Southeast Asia. In spite of this support, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) continued to suffer significant losses, leading U.S. Army General William Westmoreland-then the head of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV)-to advise President Johnson to increase the presence of American ground forces in June.

For most of 1965, American troops were limited to Search and Destroy missions to combat the guerilla warfare tactics used by the DRV, which often relied on ambushes and hit-and-run attacks to surprise their targets-a practice used throughout the war, leading many veterans to question whether the conflict ever had a "front line" at all. Finally, on November 14, the first conventional engagement and major battle of the Vietnam War was waged as members of the United States 1st Air Cavalry Division clashed with DRV units in the Ia Drang Valley of the Central Highlands. Both sides considered the battle a victory.

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The Vietnam War (1955-1975) traces its roots to the colonization of Vietnam by France in the late 19th Century.